The Ragged Astronauts

Bob Shaw is on of the greates SF writers and is sorely missed. This novel is the first in a trilogy that represents some of his best work.

This is a wonderful novel about twin worlds that share an atmosphere and what happens when the inhabitants of one world have to abandon it for the other via hot air balloon!! It contains suprising charactarizations and a very cool ecology all wrapped up in a fairly believable page-turning plot. What more could you ask for from SF? This is the first book i've read by Shaw and I now consider him to be one of the better SF/Fantasy authors. His sentence by sentence prose is tight and scans easy. He knows how to describe a scene or scenes well without glutting the reader with oceans of words. He does fairly well with characters and although the protagonist is a bit of a Conan/type, we like him and find him fairly interesting. I found myself remembering scenes days after I put the book down, and that's pretty damn rare. Check it out, if you can find it.

Bob Shaw was one of the greatest authors who ever lived, and thank god he chose to write science fiction or I may never have come across him. This is probably also the reason he remains largely unknown by the " mainstream". As far as telling a tale you can't put down, and for creating character interaction and character conflict, he is hard to match. His concepts are brilliant, and his idea of "pterthacosis" in this book clearly shows he has researched medical conditions, as his knowledge is excellent. In short, Bob Shaw never wrote a bad book, and this particular series was probably his best. Please read all three books. You won't be sorry.

Tension and suspense are plentiful. Descriptions throughout the book are vivid and fascinating. We hope for a clash between the hero and the "bad guy". The ending does not disappoint, and the confrontation is more exciting than hoped for. The passages containing the flight of the balloon ships are among the most fascinating I have read. This book is outstanding from start to finish, and rates among my favorites.

I have read and re-read all three books in this series. Shaw plays fast and loose with physics in an alternate universe to create a fantastic tale of people fleeing a biological menace of their own creation. The problem is their homeworld has not enough metal to build spaceships from! The third book, "The Fugitive Worlds", has a great cliffhanger ending, unfortunately we will never read more of these six-fingered "humans" and their Wooden Spaceships. :-(