The Voyage of the Star Wolf
Read The Voyage of the Star Wolf Online
Authors: David Gerrold
Praise for David Gerrold
and The Star Wolf Series
“David Gerrold knows
Star Trek
better than anyone, and here's his take at how it really should have been; the
Star Wolf
series is
Star Trek
done rightâmoral conundrums, fascinating characters, and pulse-pounding action. Highly recommended.”
âR
OBERT
J. S
AWYER
, author of
Hominids
“. . . story moves along at the speed of light.”
â
Publisher's Weekly
“the adventure's there, the action moves along nicely, and the villain is as nasty as anyone could wish.”
â
Analog
“David Gerrold proves that he can do all the things that made us love Heinlein's storytellingâand often better.”
âO
RSON
S
COTT
C
ARD
“Gerrold elevates his story line above standard battle-driven fare by focusing on the intense war of wits between the Star Wolf's fully dimensional human crew and its unique alien adversary. He produces intelligent and entertaining hard SF that remains blessedly free of the militaristic stereotypes rampant in other examples of the subgenre.”
â
Booklist
“Halfway into the story, we'll already know more about poor Commander Korie, and his whole accursed crew, and every compartment in their jinxed ship, than we ever learned about Kirk and the Enterprise in three seasons and several feature films. Equally important, that ship and those people will go somewhere, and be changed profoundly by what happens to them along the way.”
âS
PIDER
R
OBINSON
THE
V
OYAGE
OF THE
S
TAR
W
OLF
ALSO BY DAVID GERROLD
â FICTION â
The Star Wolf series
The Voyage of the Star Wolf
The Middle of Nowhere
Blood and Fire
(January 2004)
The War Against the Chtorr series
The Dingilliad trilogy
The Man Who Folded Himself
The Flying Sorcerers
(with Larry Niven)
When HARLIE Was One
Moonstar Odyssey
The Martian Child
â NONFICTION â
The World of Star Trek
The Trouble With Tribbles
Worlds of Wonder
DAVID GERROLD
THE
V
OYAGE
OF THE
S
TAR
W
OLF
B
EN
B
ELLA
B
OOKS
Dallas, Texas
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
BenBella Books Edition
Copyright © 1990 by David Gerrold
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books
10300 N. Central Expressway, Suite 400, Dallas, Texas 75231
eISBN: 9781935251514
Send feedback to
[email protected]
www.benbellabooks.com
First BenBella Printing: January 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gerrold, David, 1944â
The voyage of the Star Wolf / written by David Gerrold.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-9352-5151-4
1. Space shipsâFiction. I. Title.
PS3557.E69V695 2003
823'.914âdc22
2003015764
Cover illustration by Bob Eggleton
Cover design by Melody Cadungog
Interior designed and composed by John Reinhardt Book Design
Distributed by Independent Publishers Group
To order call (800) 888-4741
www.ipgbook.com
For Amy Stout,
with love
Introduction
Jerry Pournelle
If you didn't know David Gerrold began his writing career as a script writer, you'll know that before you finish
The Voyage of the Star Wolf
. Now, usually when a critic says that a book reads like a screen play that's bad news, but not always, and not this time. What I mean is that this is a very visual book, with lots of images, and that's all to the good. Space is a colorful place, but not many have been there, and even fewer have ever seen a space warship. You'll know what David Gerrold's spaceships look like well before you finish this book.
This is an action adventure space novelâwhat's called in the trade “space opera” for reasons that have never been clear to me. They don't call the C. S. Forester novels about the Napoleonic era age of sail “sea operas,” but this book and many other “space operas” draw heavily on that tradition. Space war is like naval war, so this is hardly surprising: many of the problems of modern warship commanders are not all that different from those faced by Horatio Hornblower, and most of us who think about warfare in the future suspect that future ship commanders will have more of the same problems. A ship is no better than its crew, and a crew is no better than its leadership.
There are two ways to write a “space opera.” One way is to just write it, and if you get into too deep a hole, go back and change the assumptions, play with the plot line, exercise author control, and with a mighty leap your hero gets past the trouble. That never makes for a very good story, and may explain where the term “space opera” comes from, and just why it's such a term of derision. Alas, there were a lot of such stories written over the years.
The other way to write a space action adventure story is to take it seriously, with a full development of the background: physics, weapons, social structure, history, visualizations of the shipboard environment, and all the rest. Once you have that backstory, write your adventure in that world, and if you come to a problem, solve it without changing the rules. That's the way Larry Niven and I did
The Mote in God's Eye
âarguably the book that revived the space opera after a long period in the
doldrumsâand that's what David has done with
Voyage of the Star Wolf
. He took his subject seriously, and as a result he's done a book that's very readable. When I told my son Alex I was doing an introduction to this book, he said “Good choice. I'd rather read that again than another of the XXX YYY series.” [Story names of a popular series omitted for obvious reasons.] And of course Alex was right.
Voyage of the Star Wolf
reads fast enough that you'll miss some details. The details are in there and they're interesting too; which makes this a book you can read more than once, something I can't say about a lot of space opera.