Jack Williamson was born in 1908. His first SF appeared in 1928.The Black Sun appeared nearly 70 years later in 1997! Flawed though it is, I found more energy in this novel than in any of the late-life works from the Golden Age writers he predates by a decade or more.

This is a surprisingly dark and gloomy work, and not just because it is set on a frozen planet circling a dead sun. It begins on an Earth so broken by humans that people are willing to leave on ships launched blindly into space, stopping when they randomly come near a major gravitational field. No one knows where they end up. Even that dismal project is doomed by corruption though we don't know what happens next since the story goes with the last ship. That ship has the bad luck to enter the gravitational field of the titular black sun. Things only get worse because the captain was replaced by the crook who ran the project into the ground. While he and his thugs take control of the ship, something on the planet begins luring people to frozen death.

For all his decades of writing and teaching, Williamson could not escape the gravitational field of the pulps. While the characters are racially diverse, there is just one woman of note, and she is there primarily as distraught mother and unrequited love interest. The SF ideas take a backseat for quite a while to the good guys vs bad guys plot line. The denouement is rushed and unconvincingly upbeat, especially after a long narrative that owes more to The Night Land than to space opera.

While I can't recommend this for the general reader, it is a fascinating late-life experiment by one of SF's founding fathers. ( )

The style is embarrassingly puerile from the start, and by page five I was wondering why in the world this made it on a science fiction rec list. This is crap. The whole premise is screwy. Humans are going to go to the expense (and people are going to volunteer) for a one-way "seedship" to some random star where there may not even be an inhabitable planet?

In the first chapter we get cringe-worthy Hispanic stereotypes and utter implausibility as a just-arrived illegal immigrant from Mexico finds a way aboard by buying some overalls and a badge.

"Es possible? His ingles came slowly, because he still thought in Spanish. "Could one get aboard?"
"Stow away?"
"Is that possible?"
She laughed again, but a man in blue overalls turned to study him.
"Why not?" Eyes narrowed, the man looked at the girl. "A man might try. With guts enough and luck enough. And a little money."
He could pray for the el machismo y la suerte, the guts and the luck.

In the second chapter I found Williamson's perfectly capable of serving up cringe-worthy stereotypes of Texans, too:

"Down on your knees!" The preacher unbuckled his belt. "And beg the Lord's forgiveness--"
"I don't need to pray." He shook his head grinning. "I know a better way. When I get ready for heaven, I'll go to New Mexico and ride up to it on one of them quantum ships."

In general, I've tried to be generous and give the books recommended to me 100 pages to see if I could click with them and at times that's paid off. With this book, I barely forced myself to read 50 pages, and god, it was painful.

I love me good space opera. But for the love of all that's holy, go to Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Lois Bujold, F.M. Busby, David Weber, H. Beam Piper or Elizabeth Moon if you're looking for the good stuff.

Oh, and if you think the problem is this is one of those pulp classics from the 30s--think again. The copyright on the first edition is 1997. ( )

The last of the StarSeed ships will soon be leaving Earth, taking its crew through a faster-than-light quantum-wave jump to wherever in the universe a large enough gravitational field exists to pull them out. Originally designed to seed the universe with humans, the StarSeed organization has been run into the ground by the drunken megalomaniac Herman Stecker and his sleazy aide Mr. Hinch. Outside the launch area a group of militant environmentalists called Fairshare will do anything to block the launch. They employ an ex-con in charge of launch security, Jonas Roak, to plant a bomb on the ship.
The Black Sun is certainly a good suspenseful read with plenty of adventure. Williamson has used many of the devices of scientifiction (the English language pulp science fiction of circa 1925-1935) and updated them somewhat. In so doing he has produced a novel which, unlike much of the cynical and pessimistic science fiction of today, has high adventure and a sense of wonder about space and space exploration.

I've heard a lot of longtime fans speak fondly of the works of Jack Williamson; I've meant to read something by him for ages. This week I found _The Black Sun_ in a used bookstore and brought it home, eager for some hard SF after a few weeks of gentle novels of village life. The blurbs on the book got my hopes up.

Like "wildness", I didn't finish the book, though I gave it a much fairer shake. I disagree that it reads like something from the heyday of the pulps; it is perfectly respectable fiction, but that's all it is. I was wanting a sense of wonder, but instead I was ploughing through pages of predictable plotting and superficial characterization. Mostly. Carlos was better developed, and I liked him and some of the other characters, but the gosh wow stuff was taking so long that I abandoned the book for something more suitable to my current mood.

At another time I will search out one of Williamson's earlier, well loved books. Perhaps _The Legion of Space_, or some other true pulp gem, such as one of the _Seetee_ series of books. ( )