Book Review: Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light-years distant. But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few years' duration.
Then a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The ship's deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.

I always enjoy some hard sci-fi, and the Tau Zero premise was right up my alley. While I really enjoyed the book’s scientific aspects, I had a hard time with the characters. There are many, and poorly developed, like it sadly often happens with hard sci-fi authors. Reymont feels especially obnoxious; he is portrayed as a sexual magnet for women and also the glue that keeps everything together and saves the day again and again. There is also plenty of sexism, typical of the era, including gems like this sentence: “Meeting it was like, like seeing a woman one loved become a slut.”

It angers me that we have to swallow so much violence against women to be able to read some great hard sci-fi. These kinds of things bothered me less when I was younger, but I can’t stand them right now.

Story (Plot)
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lomeraniel

My name is Elena. Since I was a little child I loved science fiction and fantasy, and I can’t resist a good novel. In 2015, while wait I started to listen to audiobooks and I discovered the pleasure in being able to read while doing my daily tasks, so there’s always an audiobook playing on my phone. If you see me with my Bluetooth headphones on, please be gentle, I get easily startled.

I live with my boyfriend, which I met during my six-year stay in Belgium, four cockatiels, eight lovebirds, and a hamster in Madrid, Spain; and I like to spend my free time knitting and sewing while listening to audiobooks.