Rocheworld

Robert L. Forward

Read March 5- June 1998

Reviewed July 21 and 30, 1998

ISBN 0-671-69869-9

I started this book while on Jury Duty. I had two others going, a text on Celestial Mechanics, which I later abandoned, and a history of the Soviet space program, autobiographical accounts translated from the Russian. Both were too heavy for the busy juror waiting room and constantly interrupted juror duties. This seemed like just the right science fiction light flick to keep going in despite the distractions. It kind of worked, but it took a long time to finish anyway and even a longer time to review.

I learned of Robert L. Forward at a talk that he gave at JPL about the possibilities of interstellar travel. He expounds laser-light sails and held that such travel is no longer impossible, just highly difficult. It would take most of the Gross World Product to scale existing technology up to the appropriate scale and pull it off, but it could be done with techniques that we know how to do today.

Just last night (7/29/98) Forward was member of a panel at Ramo Auditorium at Caltech (with Louis Friedman and the program manager at JPL for such things) on the same topic.

The first two thirds of the book is pretty dry to one whose tastes have been whetted by the likes of Asimov and Kim Stanley Robinson. The characters seem pat and matter-of-fact despite the trouble he goes to in their development. The book is clearly a vehicle for Forward's futuristic technologies, which he (as a practicing physicist) has worked out quite accurately. The last third gets interesting, containing some drama of the type that makes a book keep going, and some clever "aliens," that is, "flouwen" who are discovered on the Eau (wet) lobe of Rocheworld.

The book is all about the light sail journey of a small apartment building sized spacecraft with 20 specialized people in it traveling the 6.2 light years to Barnard's star, what they find there and how they explore. The morals are modern, as must be expected with such works. It was time barely well enough spent to have read this one in order to acquaint myself with the author and his ideas. Having read the technical appendix (presented as testimony before Congress sometime late next century) might have been about enough, and this is something I could have done in a bookstore or library in a sitting without having spent any money with amazon.com. I do not intend to crave any more books in this series, but I now know the author as my contemporary proponent of interstellar travel ideas, and a publishable if not great sci-fi writer.

Despite the near-term (2060-ish) setting of this action (and that of the Red Mars trilogy as well) I tend to agree with Friedman, the nay-sayer panel member last evening. This stuff is about as close to us as Da Vinci was to actual implemented flight, probably 400 years away. Forward is a futurist. One of my little goals was to write several volumes of a tome in the style of Stanley on the ideas of Dyson, a "future" as it were. So there are others doing this, I'll have to consider more carefully my market. Still, if inspiration is needed, that might be the good way.