Ouch, this book stinks: even though it has everything it takes to shine, in the end «Starfinder» by Robert F. Young (1980) wastes it all to tell a pointless story of ill-used time travel, suspiciously morbid love and all the other small things that nobody really cares about.
So, you have a space whale: that is, a sentient asteroid of gargantuan size that can travel back in time. You have this wonder completely outfitted for deep space flight. And you have it faithfully bound to you for your exclusive service. In other words, you are a step short of the greatest space opera of all time, as this setup screams for endless exploration and countless adventures.
But actually, no, you don’t. You waste all of this for the pitiful story of a madman who’s fallen in love with a corpse (not a joke) after taking to the stars with no goal of his own. And who discovers his lot in life after begging a twelve-year old girl whos’s been in control from the start to set his space whale – on which her space eel is currently feeding – free.
Nothing else happens for the whole novel. Nothing worth reading, that is. And yet I kept reading this book till the end in the misplaced hope something would happen: it didn’t.
So learn from my mistakes: leave this book alone. You’ll thank me.
A small step back
Although the bulk of this novel was published between 1979 and 1980, its concept plunges several years earlier, when Young published «Jonathan and the Space Whale» in 1962 (here’s the review I wrote in Italian some time ago). This standalone story already introduces the basic ideas that the author would later incorporate into another batch of stories – namely «The Man in the Moon» (1969), «The Spacewhale Graveyard» (formerly «Starscape with Frieze of Dreams», 1970) and «Areopagus» (formerly «Abyss of Tartarus», 1971) – which stand as the groundworks for the novel under review: unbeknownst to us, there’s a race of gigantic but peaceful space whales that roam the galaxies; and after being «eaten» by one of them, the protagonist develops a tight relationship with his telepathic host.
Although a bad story, «Jonathan and the Space Whale» is only half as bad as «Starfinder»: inside this small-moon-sized object the eponymous Jonathan finds a miniature earth with real humans as inhabitants, the descendants of the settlers whose rocket the space whale absorbed centuries ago out of curiosity. In order to survive, they are exploiting its resources faster than it can replenish them, hence condemning the whale to a slow death: but Jonathan, now turned into a messianic figure, leads the people in its exodus to a new unsettled planet with the help of the space whale, that now, finally unexploited, can come back to life and join its own kin.
The plot reads like an excuse to raise awareness on the rising ideology of ecologism and show how deep an imprint humanity is said to leave on the environment by simply existing. Wokeness aside, this story was pretty creative for introducing the space whales concept: gargantuan celestial bodies as wide as a thousand miles that live for tens of thousands of years out of cosmic dust and asteroids and can even jump between galaxies.
The similarities between this story and the novel end here but there’s already plenty of stuff to build upon.
Space whales, the next generation
Young must have realized immediately how appealing this concept is, so in 1969/1970 he came back to the subject with a brand new setup: now the space whales are a known species – smaller but still pretty titanic – and humanity, that has spread through the galaxy for centuries or even millennia, hunts for them, as their organic-metallic bodies make for great starship hulls. But they have to be carefully «deganglioned» in advance: that is, their big rose-like brain must be blown up before they can be converted into starships, as they emit deadly 2omicron-vii radiations that kill humans on the spot.
And the new protagonist, John Starfinder, who used to be a cabin boy on a whaleship, lost his sight in the same radiation incident that killed thirty spacers due to a badly deganglioned whale: his blindness lasted over two years, until he found a medic who could implant him with artificial retinas. And he still bears a star-shaped burn on his cheek as an everlasting scar from this accident.
Unlike their kin of the 1962 story, the whales are now able to travel through time too: time is compared to an ocean (it’s called «the Sea of Time» for a reason) whose surface is the present and its depths are the past, the deeper the farther from now. When they die in the past, the whales simply float back to the surface, no matter how deep in time they were.
And they are also smaller: no measures are given but they are still big enough to make very large starships. For a comparison, star eels are said to be way smaller than whales and the only one we see, the one that feeds on Starfinder’s whale, has been converted into a cruise ship for a thousand passengers.
The lack of interesting things
Despite this new exciting setting, «Starfinder» struggles to find anything interesting for the reader: after the first two chapters – «The Man in the Moon» and «The Spacewhale Graveyard», the earlier stories of 1969/1970 that stand as an introduction of sort and make for the best part of the whole novel – the story jumps idly from something boring to something pointless to something annoying, all of which requires some form of time travel. Which isn’t even employed to its full potential, as the plot requires a little drama that couldn’t be made up well had time travel been used as intended.
This drama is the love story that works as a framework for tying the whole story together: soon enough Starfinder (the character) falls in love with the corpse of a young woman he didn’t even know, into whose body he stumbles as he explores the wreckage of an ancient space vessel from our age. Step by step the novel shows there’s a link that connects them but even Starfinder was unaware of this connection when he grabbed that corpse, brought it aboard and dedicated a shrine to it in a remote vault of the space whale.
Through a series of seemingly unrelated scenes that go backwards in time as the story progresses – each scene is set some time before the previous one – the novel pieces the story together until the big turn of events is revealed: which, although railroaded, at least turns the love story from the morbid kind into just a corny one but still doesn’t completely dispel that feeling of weirdness hovering around the setup.
How to misuse time travel
But wait, there is more.
Now, I can’t say I’m a fan of time travels, quite the contrary; but even I can understand how badly time travel is handled in this novel: a couple of times this device isn’t even used to its full potential because, had it been, it would have dispelled all the drama, and made the love story even weirder – or more disturbing – than it actually is.
To articulate better on the issue, at one point, soon enough, Starfinder has to deal with the Furies themselves, as he realizes that time travel is the backdoor to the Abyss of ancient myths and the cellar of hell (as the title suggests, this was the stuff of the third story of the original batch). But after this first encounter, which he escapes unscathed quite easily by just emerging back to the surface of time – the present, that is – he isn’t bothered anymore by any other nasty creature living in the past or Abyss, not even once, even though he spends weeks or maybe months plunging deep in time to watch historical events live from the space whale’s control room, kind of like documentaries on a giant screen.
For a man born on a faraway planet in a distant future, Starfinder is quite obsessed with Earth’s recent history, so he keeps zapping from a minor event to another until it dawns on him to search for Jesus (to no avail: despite his puritanical Neo-Essenian background he cannot help to think it was «a fairy tale») and then to go as deep as the dawn of time, only to refute the Big Bang theory as well.
But the worst offender in this misuse of time travel is the key event that explains all the story, which is spawned by a sudden bad synchronization of the on-board calendar: nonetheless, this mistake – when found – could have been corrected easily by simply jumping again in time, in order to adjust the variance. And yet this idea never comes into play, so that the plot can follow the corny path it is set upon.
So, I wonder, what use is time travel if you cannot even use it properly?
A novel about Man
As you read «Starfinder» you realize it isn’t about adventure or exploration as you’re led to believe at first; and it isn’t even about time travel, or space: it’s about Man. It’s a philosophical musing on the human nature, on the irrational things often humans do just because it makes them feel better, whole in a sense: it shows hate that turns into affection, a madness that is cured by love, a partnership made by chance that becomes an unbreakable friendship, and bound to last forever.
But of those things you were expecting…well, there’s no trace of them: you’ll have to make do with what the story gives you instead.
The novel proceeds at a slow pace, seemingly plotless for almost half story: then apparently it finds the trail it was looking for, and follows it bouncingly. Accidentally this trail transits through time into the past but the huge mess the novel makes of it shows that time travel is just a narrative device, not its main focus: and a science fiction novel that deals with time travel and misuses it is a novel with no future.
Such is the whimsical nature of a book that has an identity issue: it builds up a setting that screams for space opera but only exploits its smallest and most mundane splinters to look for man and man’s intimate soul instead.
Which is cool: but definitely not what the reader was expecting.
This Article was mentioned on libripulp.it