Enemy Star

Southern Cross Dark Star investigation. Expanding into space, a human vessel undertakes an exploratory and investigative mission where no-one has gone before. So, things go wrong, and when you have unpredictable stellar objects around, you have some desperate engineering work to do to get a message ouf o there, let alone get out of there yourselves. A surprise awaits, as well. Pretty reasonable, for a 50s effort. 3.5 out of 5

"The Enemy Stars" by Poul Anderson, © 1958, new material © 1979. This is a sad story of four men who try to study the stars from up close. They are recruited and sent, by way of matter transfer, to a ship near the star. They make some choices and have to adapt and persevere because the choices put them in danger. The fellows are a disparate lot, one rich, one poor, but educated, one ornery and mad, and one sad and reconciled to his fate. These four come together and find out how to live and work together, which is just the first challenge they have. They try to approach the dead star they are studying and it damages the ship. They try to fix it and lose the first man. They try something else that sort of works and crash land on a planet, losing the second person. The one fellow says the sea does not forgive mistakes and it is the same out here. This could be a simile for life in general.

Poul Anderson, who passed away in 2001, was one of the true super luminaries in the field of science fiction, and it is unfortunate indeed that much of his writing, amounting to more than one hundred books, is hard to find and thus eroding from collective science fiction memory. The Enemy Stars is one of his earlier novels and serves as a wonderful way for readers to introduce or reintroduce themselves to this science fiction legend. This rather short novel first appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction with the title We Have Fed Our Seas in August and September 1958. The title was changed, for reasons I certainly don't understand, to The Enemy Stars, and the book was nominated for a Hugo award for best science fiction novel of 1959. In 1979, Anderson went back and slightly revised the novel, principally updating the hard science fiction aspects of the tale based on the knowledge gained over the course of the twenty years since the book was written. I can't say I was blown away by this novel, although it is certainly a good read. In my opinion, it is too short; it took me a while to get really acquainted with each of the characters, and by that time there was too little insight left to share before the rapidly approaching ending. There are some wonderful ideas wrapped into this narrative, but I didn't feel as if enough of them were given the time and care to make them truly flourish. The historical context of the drama also wasn't exploited as much as I would have liked. Basically, at some time in the future, Earth and its colonial satellites and planets maintain a tough alliance, with suspicion and dislike seemingly bred into the respective settlers. The government is some type of one-world entity called the Protectorate, but we don't learn much about the system beyond the fact that many men oppose it both philosophically and practically. In this world, a spaceship exists far out in space, a ship launched by a country that no longer exists. Scientists can effectively "beam up" to the ship across vast distances in space, and four very different men do so in order to study a newly discovered dark star. Naturally, something goes wrong, and the foursome must look death in the face and work together in order to survive. Any truths we learn from the novel come out over the course of this life and death drama in space. The Enemy Stars didn't really provide the level of philosophical revelation I half expected at the end, and certain parts of the story (especially that concerning Earth's government) never got the attention they seemed to deserve, yet this was still an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. The science is definitely of the hard science fiction variety, yet the human element takes its rightful place at the core of the novel. Man's infinite search for truth, for a reason for being, is what Anderson approaches via The Enemy Stars, and while he might not have put a spotlight on the true answer of existence, he does

The Enemy Stars is Poul Anderson at his best except for the title. When it first appeared in Astounding Magazine, the title was We Have Fed Our Seas. It's a quote from Kipling that will make your hair stand on end when you read it in the context of the story. I can't explain it here without spoiling the plot for the quote gives the theme. Briefly, the story begins by introducing four men from utterly different backgrounds who are going to spend a few weeks doing research manning a space ship. The idea here is utterly fascinating. The space ship carries a matter transmitter that lets people move easily into space. People come and go routinely--and then something goes horribly wrong. The rest of the novel is the four men struggling to cope and find a way out of a hopeless situation.