Cave of Stars

I'm going to swim against the tide of earlier reviews here. I found Zebrowski's CAVE OF STARS engaging, and I enjoyed it for some of the very reasons the reviewers below disliked it.I don't feel Zebrowski has constructed a polemic against the Catholic Church, or even against religion in general. Rather, he is exploring ways in which humanity defines, and sometimes perilously over-defines, what it calls "reality." Both cultures in this book, the primitive and the advanced, have lost themselves within fantasy constructs. That these faux-realities come into such violent conflict is intriguing; that they should so inevitably ensure one another's destruction, both physically and psychologically, held my attention from page Alpha to page Omega. Zebrowski dangled tidbits of hopes for survival throughout; then he gracefully snatched each away, to make his point and to make readers' hearts sink. His story does rush forward at the end ... showing the surviving humans rushing on toward new hopes, and toward one more round of fantasy construction. The conclusion leaves the reader (well, me at least) with the question: Is it our foolish, unceasing hopes for creating Reality in our own image and likeness that make us, as a race, so pathetically hopeless?Zebrowski's writing rests firmly within the tradition of SF as a Literature of Ideas. That approach always runs the risk of subordinating character development to plot flow, but in this story ... in which faux-realities battle for the hearts and minds of the characters ... Zebrowski plays his pawns masterfully.