Tau Zero

Tau Zero has been hailed as the quintessential hard SF novel, and it's a well-deserved accolade. It shares some of the weaknesses of the genre, sure; but in its strengths it shines as an exceptional story, grounded in proper science, and brimming with mind-boggling ideas, hard science, and a scale rarely matched in SF.

Let's get the weaknesses out of the way, first. Yes, the character development is flimsy. And as with many other SF classics, it's hard not to get irritated by its portrayal of women as fragile, irrational creatures. Most of the characters are interchangeable and forgettable, with the exception of Reymont, who turns into quite an interesting and complex character. The level of prose and character emotion can be summed up by the following two excerpts: the first, almost sensual, is a description of two space modules docking. The second describes a beautiful woman.

[The ship's] robots—sensor-computer-effector units—directing the terminal maneuvers caused airlocks to join in an exact kiss. More than that would be demanded of them later. Both chambers being exhausted, their outer valves swung back, enabling a plastic tube to make an airtight seal.

Physically she was a big brunette, her features ordinary but the rest of her shown to high avantage by shorts and tee shirt.

Oh, hard SF...

But anyway. Who reads hard SF for the character development and the prose? It's all about the fascinating scientific concepts, and this novel has them in spades.

I wish I had stumbled upon this book at the end of highschool, when I first began learning about Special Relativity and the concept of time dilation at relativistic speed. (Yes, I read Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory in highschool; I was a nerd.) Reading it years later, as a Physics graduate, I still found the ideas exciting and original. Poul Anderson explains the concept of time dilation and the Lorentz contraction, represented here as tau, in very simple and clear terms, and then bases an entire book on it. It even works as a Gedankenexperiment on relativistic speeds.

What the novel does really well is take this scientific concept, and push it to its extreme limit. And believe me, Mr. Anderson did take it to the absolute limit, in a grandiose piece of hard SF that plays on a scale I've rarely seen in SF, hard or otherwise. When all was said and done, though, I had a hard time finding much of what happens believable. We're asked to believe that a ship, designed to travel 25 light-years, can sustain travel at speeds so close to the speed of light that they cross galaxies in seconds of subjective time. I was happy to overlook this given how exciting the events turned out to be, but it was a stretch of my ability to disbelieve, especially in a novel touted as the epitome of science-based fiction.

Ah, but we must get back to the humans again. The bulk of the novel concerns itself with the crew of the ship hurling through space and time, and even though the novel is pretty short, it does preoccupy itself with them an inordinate amount. The first third of the book sees the men and women who crew the Leonora Christine trying to pair off, and they do so with the social grace of speed-dating engineers. They talk about their background with the passion of a resume bulletpoint list, and express their emotions like machines self-reporting deviations from the norm.

Ultimately, the characters occupied enough space that they took down the book a notch for me. I understand that the cosmic events depicted in Tau Zero would be meaningless without a human canvas, but I just didn't think said humans were that interesting, except when plunged in the crucible of tragic events.

In a way, good hard SF is not very different from mythology. It simply replaces the implacable will of the gods with physics theory, such as in this case the Lorentz dilation. The mortals in the story rage against the will of the gods, or the inevitability of natural laws, but they matter less than the cosmic struggle of forces beyond their ken. They serve mostly to illustrate these forces, and give them meaning.