Redshift Rendezvous

This is a book that I first read over ten years ago. The story and the physics intrigued me and I've never forgotten it. Recently I decided to reread it and discovered that I'd given my copy to someone. I bought this copy and was pleased to see how well the story has held up. Not your typical space opera. A good read.

I finished reading Redshift Rendezvous, by John E. Stith, last night. I needed a little light reading filler, and this book provided that. I first read this book back in the summer of 1992, when I was living and working in Ottawa as a co-op student. John E. Stith's science fiction writing style is pretty good, with engaging characters, and thoughtful science fiction themes and concepts. This novel is a sci-fi/action/mystery story, set mostly in space aboard a spacecraft traveling through hpyerspace. Reading this book left me wondering, is John E. Stith still with us? After this novel, Stith penned a few others, including the wonderful Manhattan Transfer. Then, he seemed to just stop. I did a little digging, and it seems like he's still with us. So, either he's stopped writing, or his publishers have dropped him. Either way, it's our loss.

Many of today's so called Sci-Fi authors don't really write Sci-Fi, they write Fantasy. When you go to your book store's Science Fiction section you see a lot of Unicorns and Barbarians, but few hard science fiction works. For those of you who grew up on 50's classics, and Analog magazine in the sixties and seventies, John Stith delivers the right stuff. And ex NORAD scientist, his works feature a solid but speculative physics. The emphasis is in reality, not the melodrama of the predominant Sci-Fi you find. And Stith is a funny guy, if his characters aren't having hilarious exchanges with intelligent appliances or aliens, there is a dry humor at work in the events.REDSHIFT RENSEZVOUS is an intense story with wondrous technology and it's implications. I've read another review here saying that this book is similar to Alistair MacLeans "Golden Rendezvous." This is like saying that because two works share genre conventions, that it is the same. All fiction uses elements from other works, it is the execution of those conventions and devices that make the work new.Final word: IF YOU LIKE GOOD'OL SCIENCE FICTION, TIGHT PLOTS, INTERESTING PREMISES, BUY JOHN STITH. Another of his books MANHATTAN TRANSFER is soon to be made into a blockbuster movie.

As usual, for Stith, there is a strong plot - save the universe type, that makes the fairly hard physics go down quite smoothly. As an amateur physicist, I found his treatment of the G(eneral) R(elativity) effects cause by an extremely dense core for his starship quite interesting. I found no real flaws with the physics, although I may not be qualified to criticise, and found the presentation not only easy to understand, but well integrated with the story line. There is a bit of a problem in my mind that Stith never addressed, with the physics behind the extremely dense core, but I didn't let that interfere with my enjoyment of either the writing or the exposition of GR

John Stith takes an interesting look at relativity by creating a universe in which light travels s-l-o-w-l-y. Then he sets a murder mystery coupled with a jewel heist onboard a starship in this universe. This is one hard science fiction novel that I would suggest to just about anyone. Even if the physics must be taken with a grain of salt, the storyline will keep people interested. Stith even supplies an appendix full of explainations of how his alternate physics works.