Orbitsville

© 1975 by Bob Shaw

Orbitsville might be the most pleasant SF read I’ve had in a while. And by “pleasant,” I mean “excellent.”

What I realized mid-way through the mid-sized novel is that the best way to characterize the work is balance. Everything’s there, in adequate measure. While not enough to boost it into the ranks of Heinleinian, Clarkian, or Asimovian classic, having “it” all there in adequate measure makes it a great read.

I’m trying to wear two hats when I do these reviews. Sometimes both hats fail to stay on my lumpy and misshapen head; sometimes one completely dominates the other, something like putting a dunce cap over a propeller beanie. One hat says SF FAN in black and blue reminiscent of some cold and unforgiving blade of some futuristic alloy. The other hat says LITERARY AFICIONADO in flowery, gold-and-read flowerets.

(Yeah, these are the two hats I wear. Grrr. Ya wanna start something?)

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of stating that Orbitsville had a lot of great SF elements infused in a story well-told from a literary point-of-view. What more could you ask for, I ask?

First, the science.

You know what a Dyson Sphere is?

Imagine how technologically advanced our society may become in ten thousand years if we keep up the learning curve of the last century. Now think of energy. Ultimately, all the forms of energy we use can be reduced to one starting point: the Sun. Think about the teeny tiny ball of Earth, circling the Sun, capturing all that solar radiation for heat and light and whatnot. The Sun radiates outwards at all points, in all directions. We can only catch it on a teeny tiny planet that spins around this star at 18 miles a second. When you think about it like that, a lot of solar energy seems wasted.

But a culture sufficiently advanced, like ours in a hundred centuries, might be able to construct a sphere around a star at about twice the Earth-Sun distance, and capture every erg of radiated solar energy. Not only that, but you could make the interior of this sphere habitable. The surface area of such a sphere would be something around four hundred million times the surface area of the Earth (or four hundred billion times, I forget which). You could even rig a closer sphere around the entrapped star with gaps and holes of varying widths to account for night and day and the seasons.

Orbitsville is a Dyson Sphere, and all this, and more, is explained painlessly during the adventures of our heroes and heroines in the book.

There’s more than just that, though Orbitsville itself is a major character in the novel. It’s a bit of a hard SF novel without being remote and distant like a Hal Clement hard SF novel might be. Everything’s explained plausibly and in an interesting manner between thrown fists and exploding spaceships. One thing I like about these futuristic men and women is the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-do-it-ness about them. Your flickerwing deep space scouting vessel has crash landed inside Orbitsville? No problem. Scavenge it and build a fleet of 20th-century combustion engine aircraft to get back to base.

Now, I’ve read some really neat hard SF books, idea books, that were boring as all heck. But Shaw avoids this pitfall – and dammit, this is a suspenseful book from the very first chapter! Not gonna reveal what happens, but something puts our hero’s life in jeopardy – and the innocent lives of his wife and young son – and he goes on the run. But since the stakes are high, so are this man’s actions. I mean, what he does takes cojones, and I found myself wondering, without a trace of self-conscious silliness, if I had what it takes to do what he had to do to save his and his family’s skin.

The characters are real and interesting and face some undeniable, life-altering dilemmas. Even the cartoonish characters come across with verve and pizzazz. Shaw manages to maintain a good handle on a tale that has some very, very focused, sharp details – does Vance keep his family alive? – and must necessarily telescope out to epic proportions – the discovery and exploration of the alien Dyson Sphere christened Orbitsville.

It was a fast read, too, always a plus. I put it away in about five or six hours, but during the first fifty pages and the last fifty pages I literally did not – could not – put the thing down. Two later sequels followed, eight and fifteen years apart, and I’ll put them on the Acquisitions List, because while the original ends at a most satisfying climax, there’s so much potential here that I don’t feel Shaw would be squeezing water from a stone.

Grade: A-minus.