Subject: John Brunner: A Maze of Stars

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sun, 02 Aug 92 02:55:57 GMT

"A Maze of Stars" isn't a novel; it's a collection of vignettes.  Centuries
after it seeded a region with over six hundred colonies, the self-aware
colony ship is revisiting those colonies and observing what humanity has
made of itself on many alien and often-hostile planets.  For some colonies
a two-page exposition suffices, at others we follow the doings of some of
one or more of its inhabitants for a dozen pages or more.

The framing matrix -- 'story' would be incorrect -- which binds these
vignettes is the dilemma of the ship, which finds its programming to be
constricting and possibly error-prone.  But the solution to this dilemma,
which is revealed at the end, has little or nothing to do with the rest
of the book.  Any solution could have been revealed here, and been just
as useful and just as plausible.

This isn't to say that the book isn't worth reading.  It's a well-crafted
travelogue.  (It's not easy to write a three-hundred-page travelogue 
covering dozens of worlds without boring the reader.)  And there is some
meat in the unifying question of what 'humanity' means.  But in the end,
this book is unsatisfying.  The main thing it has going for it is that it
collects a large number of good but undeveloped ideas -- and good but
undeveloped ideas are the most common commodity in science fiction.

Not a bad book.  Just not a good book.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope