Download The Wreck of The River of Stars AudioBook Free
Michael Flynn has written the best SF in the custom of Robert A. Heinlein of the previous ten years. His major work was the Firestar sequence, a four-book future record. "As Robert A. Heinlein do and all too few did since, Michael Flynn writes about the longer term as though he'd been there and was providing back accounts of what he'd seen," said Harry Turtledove. Now, in this sweeping standalone epic of the spaceways, Flynn expands again in stature, with an SF book worthy of the professional himself. Indeed, if Heinlein's famous figure, the space-faring poet Rhysling, possessed ever written a book, this would whether it is. This is a tale of the glory that was. In the times of the fantastic sailing ships in the mid-21st century, when magnetic sails drew cargo and individuals as well to every corner of the Solar System, sailors possessed the highest status of all spacemen, and the team of the luxury liner The River of Personalities, the best among all sailors. But development of the Farnsworth fusion drive doomed the sailing ships and today The River of Personalities is the previous of its kind, retrofitted with machines, her mast vestigial, her sails unraised for years. An ungainly crossbreed, she operates in the later many years of the century as only tramp freighter on the list of outside planets, and her team is a motley group of misfits. Stepan Gorgas is the escapist executive official who becomes captain. Ramakrishnan Bhatterji is the principle engineer who disdains him. Eugenie Satterwaithe, once a captain herself, is third official and, for form's sake, cruising professional. When an unlikely and catastrophic engine unit failure attacks The River, Bhatterji is self-assured he can result maintenance with heroic anatomist, but Satterwaithe and the other sailors on the list of crew plot to save lots of her with a glorious previous gasp for the old ways, mesmerized with a vision of coming to Jupiter proudly under sail. The story of their doom gets the electric power, the poetry, and the inevitability of the Greek tragedy. That is a great research fiction book, Flynn's best yet.
