enwald Legroeder is a star rigger by profession, one of the talented pilots able to mentally navigate the Flux, that mysterious dimension through which all starcraft must travel. Legroeder, who has been held captive by Golen space pirates for seven years, seizes a rare chance one day and engineers a hasty escape for himself and a fellow captive, a woman named Maris. Expertly outrunning pursuit, they eventually seek refuge on the nearby world of Faber Eridani. There, a shocked and innocent Legroeder finds himself inexplicably accused of treason in connection with the capture of his original ship. Legroeder comes to realize, thanks to the aid of a lawyer named Harriet Mahoney and a visit to a recluse named McGinnis, that clearing his name involves tracking down the legend of the Impris, a Flying Dutchman of a spaceship gone missing over a century before in the Flux.
Travelling offworld with Harriet to meet an alien historian, the Narseil named El'ken, Legroeder discovers that only by participating in a mad Narseil scheme will he get his answers. He must agree to accept cybernetic implants, change his appearance and join the crew of a decoy vessel that will attempt to storm a pirate base. Legroeder complies, while Harriet returns to Faber Eridani to pursue leads there.
Eventually making contact with the Free Kyber pirates--a distinct branch from his old captors--Legroeder finds his worldview overturned. These space raiders are not bad guys, but the flamekeepers of human aspiration. Legroeder falls in love with their leader, Tracy-Ace/Alfa, and soon a mixed Kyber-Narseil ship plunges into the depths of the Flux, where they do indeed encounter the ghostly ship, rescue it and in the process discover the true underpinnings of the cosmos--a revelation that will influence future star exploration. A return to Faber Eridani results in the undoing of the real villains, the Centrists, and sets the stage for a new era.
Rigging the stars for 25 years
Jeffrey Carver began exploring his "Star Rigger" universe in 1976 with his first book, Seas of Ernathe. Twenty-five years later, Carver is a much more accomplished and ambitious writer, and his latest entry in the series boasts all the alluring hallmarks of modern space opera, circa early Larry Niven. But although the publicity sheet accompanying this novel compares Carver to Greg Bear, the fact of the matter is that Carver simply does not belong among such postmodernists as Bear, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds. Metaphysical, cosmological or biological avant-gardism is missing from Carver's oeuvre.
Emerging from hibernation, an SF reader raised on the galactic adventures of Cordwainer Smith, Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson would not stumble a minute over any of Carver's tropes, hardware or situations. Carver is determinedly old-fashioned, with all the virtues and limits that description invokes. Only in such a milieu, where the genuine speculations are generously supplemented with off-the-shelf apparatus, can the miraculous antigravity units on a flyer "wheeze" during malfunctioning.
That said, Eternity's End is narratively engrossing, offering plenty of matter for pleasure and rumination. The pyrotechnical descriptions associated with handling the Flux are vivid. The love affair between Legroeder and Free Kyber leader Tracy-Ace is intriguingly developed. (And Chapter 24's grabbingly bizarre scene detailing the augmentation-enchanced lovemaking between the two characters illustrates by its weirdness just what's missing from the rest of the book.) The supporting characters hold their own--though a comic bit involving a private eye scared of dogs is a bit labored, and the last-minute focus on the heretofore comatose Maris seems tacked on. The backstory and foreshadowing are catchy, but the book's ending after so many pages without any clear resolution of the central conflict (will mankind expand into the region known as the Cluster of a Thousand Suns or not) frustrates.
