Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I was excited by the privately developed spaceship that I wrote about yesterday for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is my lifelong fascination with and belief in the inevitability and desirability of spaceflight. The other reason, though, was some nifty timing: just a couple of days before, I finished reading Rogue Star by Michael Flynn.

This is the second volume in Flynn's near-future tetralogy (the first volume of which, Firestar, I reviewed last fall). Where the first volume was roughly contemporary with where we are right now -- with some unfortunate differences that Flynn obviously couldn't have known about back in 1996 -- Rogue Star is set in 2009. Where the focus in the first book was on billionaire industrialist Mariesa van Huyten's efforts to develop the next generation of reusable spacecraft, the focus here is now on the construction of a permanent space station. Flynn is assuming that even in 2009 we will still be using the space shuttle, because the shuttle's external fuel tank -- usually jettisoned and allowed to burn up upon the shuttle's detachment -- is here recovered by Mariesa's construction crews and used as the actual infrastructure of the new station. These parts of the book, I felt, were the least successful; it got very technical and a bit hard to follow. I suspect a person of a more engineerist background might enjoy those chapters more than I did.

But as was the case with Firestar, Rogue Star is much bigger than that. As in the earlier volume, the focus is as much on the political and personal backgrounds of this new space colonization effort as it is on the mechanics of colonization itself. The conflicts of this novel follow up on those created in the first novel -- industrialist versus environmentalist, capitalist versus government -- with some surprising results, although some of the results seem a bit too "pat" here. I felt that Flynn was a bit too gung-ho about benevolent capitalism in the first volume, but in Rogue Star he appears much more aware that people tend to make a mess of things whether they work for the government or for private interests. The characterization is much stronger this time around, and I look forward to seeing what happens in the next two books.

Flynn also manages to get in a bit of "sense of wonder" here, as interwoven throughout the book is the story of a manned expedition to a particularly large asteroid. It turns out that asteroids are to play a large part in Flynn's story, which follows logically from seeds sown in Firestar. But there were still some surprises, and I look forward to seeing how one particular discovery plays out. There is an angle to the space exploration stuff in Rogue Star that I didn't expect to find here, and it opens some interesting possibilities for the remainder of the series.