The Compleat McAndrew

This was one of the best books I have ever read! It's about the best physicist, his expeditions in space, and the captain of a spaceship who has to follow him all over the universe. In the time period in which this is set, a mechanism has been invented that allows you to travel at faster-than-light speeds. The physicist, McAndrew, improves this mechanism by 100 percent. The spaceship captain, Jeanie Roker, has become his friend, and tries hard to make sure he doesn't get into trouble. However, together they face the "Headmistress" (I would call her that, based on her personality) of a slower-than-light spaceship with weird customs, a serial-killer, and many other people and machines that wish to kill them. Most of the time they don't deserve it, though, and they are always able to solve the problem.

I was glad to see that all of the McAndrew stories are available in a single volume. If you like hard science fiction, well, these stories definitely put the "science" in science fiction. Certainly character development is not a major consideration in any particular story, but by the end of the book we have a pretty good idea of what McAndrew and Jeanie are like.One or two of the stories suffer in comparison to the others, but the overall quality is pretty high. I loved this book, but if you are not a fan of hard SF, this may not be the book for you.

This is an excellent collection of short stories. Each story explores one or more areas of Science and takes them to a future extreme. As noted in other reviews the characters are there simply to help explain the science by using the science.The stories also get into a little humor and politics with budget problems and people mischaracterizing discoveries which adds a certain realism to the stories.

I think these are great stories, as long as you know what you're getting for your entertainment dollar. This is hard as a rock SF with a minimum of character development. The stories act as dressing for some very cool SF ideas, and the two main characters, McAndrew and Jeanne Roker, are there mainly to move the plot along. You never get the feeling that you know these people really well. But actually, that's OK, because the ideas in the stories are of the way-out-there cool physics genre. The ideas are usually sufficiently interesting to overcome the lackluster characterization. I'm glad that I finally have all of these stories in one volume.

This is a good book for ideas, and some of the hardest of hard science fiction. Sheffield always ties each story to some neat idea or scientific concept, and then rides it all the way to its logical consequences. Every story in this book has some really neat (no pun intended) kernel, and we get to see how scientific thinking copes with the universe. Only one story in this volume (Out of Focus) is weak from that standpoint, since there is no real explanation given for either the AI's capabilities or actions. I don't recommend the book for characterization, either, since neither the narrator character, nor McAndrew, come across as particularly deep. But I give this book four stars for bringing alive a sense of what a truly *surprising* playground G_d has given us. For that alone, this book is well worth the time.