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A while ago, CUSFS had a discussion about what constitutes hard sf. Though there was some variation, we formed a consensus that hard sf is where everything works: all the physics, though often a little fantastic, is mathematically sound and well thought-out. The mechanics of space travel, or biotechnology, or teleportation, or whatever the book is based on, have been considered by the author in great detail, and there is often an appendix, an in-universe technical manual, or an “as you already know” monologue explaining how it all works. (It is usually books, by the way. There are very few hard sf films or TV shows, by this definition, but I suppose ‘Journey into Space’ would be a dated example on radio.) One might say that the very name suggests this: the science comes first and the fiction comes afterwards. If you have it the other way around, writing the fiction first and then coming up with technobabble, you end up with fictional science. This is not to say that soft sf cannot be good, it's just not the same.

Poul Anderson's ‘Tau Zero’ seems to be widely regarded as one of the great works of hard sf. So I read it with the expectation of having my mind blown. I was therefore disappointed to get a modest but enjoyable space opera.

The problem with interstellar exploration and colonisation is that it's really slow. Stars are a long way apart, and this pesky special relativity business means you can only go so fast. Apart from having a fixed speed limit, there is time dilation to consider: as you approach the speed of light, time outside seems to go slower. If you do go back home, you find the people there have aged much faster than you: after a reasonably long journey, your only family might be your grandchildren.

But time dilation goes both ways: time on Earth seems to go faster as measured by the ship, but time on board ship goes slower as measured by the cosmos. Even if it does take centuries to reach your destination, by going at a great enough fraction of the speed of light you can make sure the journey only takes a few weeks or months for those on board. If you keep pushing backwards with a constant force, your rate of acceleration will decrease as the cosmos sees it, but because your time dilation increases, you can keep accelerating as much as you like from the point of view of the crew.

This is the situation Anderson places his crew in, a crew of scientists and engineers on a nine-year mission as they measure time, to reach the new world that they will then call home. But something goes wrong. The grandiose and towering descriptions become increasingly epic as the ship's inverse tau — it's time dilation factor as seen from inside — asymptotes towards zero as they get further and further from the Earth they left behind. This really is hard sf at its hardest: the simple mathematical outcomes of relativity form the foundation of an elegant, intergalactic backdrop. But a backdrop for what?

There are fifty colonists: twenty-five men, and twenty-five women, all ready and able to breed a new race to inhabit their new planet. They're cooped up together in a small ship with a distant captain, a female first officer who is more than willing to boost her male colleagues' morale, an authoritarian, inflexible constable, and a whole library of clichés. Thus it is that the maybe two-thirds of the book not consisting of hard sf is, in more than one way, Heinleinesque. In fact, that's putting it mildly. The book reads like a syncopated gossip column punctuated with a philosophy of social engineering that even Anderson has one of his characters describe as Machiavellian.

I'm afraid that despite all the hype, I couldn't recommend this book. The author's choice of words is impeccable, and his descriptions of every detail, from the scale of the cosmos to the light fittings, are at once precise and evocative. But reading them entails also sitting through the superficiality of his attempt at human interest.