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Star Tower by Joe Vadalma
01/12/2006 . Source: Rod MacDonald 
pub: Renaissance. 149 page e-book. Price: $ 4.95 (US). ISBN: 1-58873-585-0. Buy Star Tower in the USA - or Buy Star Tower in the UK  check out website: www.renebooks.com
This is a relatively new offering from Renaissance Books. I don't know much about the author but, according to research, he is a retired technical writer from Chicago and also a great-grandfather. Though he has written a fantasy series, as far as I can discern, this is his first published Science Fiction novel.
A tale about a space generation ark ship it is, but as with such modes of transport, we are a long time getting there. Vadalma sets the scene with a colonised solar system ruled by a despot dictator whose maxim is that it's truly cruel to be kind. (There's been plenty of them in history.) Of course, this annoys the planetary colonists and a six-year war commences.
John Huck is a straight sort of guy if perhaps not overly intelligent. Dishonourably discharged from the Earth space forces, he returns from the war and ends up as a drunken bum on an Earth which resembles 'Blade Runner' on a bad day. The rulers are stupid. They don't know what the Romans knew, which is that if you give them bread and circuses, you don't get any trouble. This future Earth gives them nothing and it's not long before our hero joins a resistance movement similar to al-Qaeda with the sole objective of blowing things up, causing destruction and mayhem to make the planet a better place to live.
Eventually caught and sentenced to death, Huck's dilemma is even worse because he believes his girl-friend was responsible for turning him in. As you would expect so early in the novel, he escapes the death sentence and is transferred to a secret new project for travelling to stars. Only thing is, most of the thousands of people engaged in this project are nothing more than slave labour kept ignorant of the fact that they will be in space for almost 50 years.
Back-breaking work on one of the many farms within the colony ship is the only leisure activity open to them. A few years into the journey to the star Delta Pavonis, dissent is so great amongst the workers that a mutiny is on the cards. Meanwhile, Huck has been transferred to the crew servicing the starship and after many dangerous missions maintaining the operating systems, he comes to the conclusion that the ship is falling apart.
Perhaps this was a logical conclusion. This was a very expensive mission, the results of which would not be seen by almost anyone alive at the time of launch. Companies with contracts for constructing the ship would no doubt cut corners or do shoddy work, safe in the knowledge that they would never be held accountable for their actions.
The mutiny is unsuccessful but this is not the worst thing happening to the mission. The captain goes mad, hundreds die in mishaps and the fuel gathering system threatens to break the ship apart. Huck becomes a hero though the ship is lost in space and all contact with Earth has vanished. They settle down for a journey which could be endless.
Vadalma's story has pace and space. With the characters and events interacting, it certainly isn't tedious. There is always something happening and you won't be bored! You'll even want to go from one chapter to the next to see what happens. While he depicts orbital mechanics of spaceships within the solar system accurately, I'm not sure about some of his ideas on the effects of relativity of a ship travelling at half the speed of light. This is only a minor criticism and it isn't important to the story.
In some ways, this appears to be an old-fashioned tale written in the 1950s but it was issued just recently. I think the author contrived to make it so because his aim in writing it was to provide a prequel to the space colony stories so numerous in the past. However, having set us upon this journey, I hope at some time in the future he will give us another offering to conclude this particular mission.
Rod MacDonald
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