Lords of the Starship

Book Review: Lords of the Starship, Mark S. Geston (1967)

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You see in the World, as it is known, infrastructure is pretty much nonexistent. General Toriman, who dreamed up this idea, brings in Harry Limpkin from a redevelopment agency to spur the plot into motion.

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It works for the most part, but the journey there for the reader is filled with traps and plot holes. The plot will start, the protagonist will get his or her buddies to help out, and then everything will be solved in time for the weekend. Lords of the Starship takes place over the span of an almost indeterminate amount of time.

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Characters who you thought would be a major focus in the story come and go, fight and die. The setting changes from a place ruled by technology to suddenly having characters charging into battle with arcane weapons and fireball shooting staffs. Unlike so many of the fantasy worlds that have a solid, continuous identity this one seems to meander a bit. The story just cuts him out in lieu of a few other characters the reader has little attachment to, but this brings up an interesting and pivotal point in the story. While Trebbly, Rome, Coral, and the other characters are met by the reader the true character is right in front of your eyes the whole time.

In the later half of the book two groups of worshippers of the starship form: The Technos and The People. The class struggle depicted between the two of them culminates is a bloody battle that consumes the two groups, but they both worship the Victory. Imagine that structure with almost ten more stacked on top of it.

The world of Lords of the Starship converges on the Victory and its vision. It becomes a kind of hope for the future, but it also signals to the rest of the world that The Caroline are ready to be put down a peg. Lords of the Starship is a science fiction novel by American author Mark S.

His debut work, it was written while he was a sophomore at Kenyon College.

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Gregg Press published an archival edition in a facsimile of the Michael Joseph edition ; and Baen Books included it in its omnibus of Geston's early novels, The Books of the Wars. The novel takes a darkly cynical view of human nature ; some critics have called it a very black comedy. In the far future, on an Earth devastated by millennia of war, the Caroline Republic is hostile towards its neighbors although sharing their dire economic straits.

Outside the declining remains of civilization lie ruins and wastelands populated by mutants and monsters.

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It is generally felt that humanity lost its vitality long ago. To a leading politician of the Caroline the aged veteran General Toriman proposes a centuries-long scheme to build the nation by taking control of an ancient shipyard hundreds of miles away which was apparently designed to build spacecraft. Ostensibly, the purpose of the project will be the construction of a spaceship seven miles long called the "Victory" to carry the population of the despairing world to a paradise planet called "Home".

In fact, the ship will never be completed, but the effort will revitalize the nation's economy and perhaps restore mankind's missing quality. General Toriman dies and the cynical politicians of the Republic rouse the population to begin the project. The River Road from the Caroline homeland to the Yards is forced with a bloody battle between a Caroline military force and mutants, during which the ghost of the ancient hero Miolnor IV appears to save the day.

Work begins on constructing the ship.

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Despite their antiquity, the Yards' machinery and buildings seem to have been perfectly preserved and materials for the construction of the ship are discovered. Be the first to ask a question about Lords Of The Starship. Lists with This Book. Aug 12, John Walsh rated it really liked it.

I like to find 'lost classics'--those books, usually published as disposable genre quickies, that really have an impact on people yet are never on the ' Best' lists. This one has poked its head up from time to time and I finally read it. It's the story of a devastated future, where humanity seems to be on its last legs.

A leader of a country that knows both machine guns and horse-drawn carriages reveals that there is a distant place called the yards where not only the plans, but the components I like to find 'lost classics'--those books, usually published as disposable genre quickies, that really have an impact on people yet are never on the ' Best' lists. A leader of a country that knows both machine guns and horse-drawn carriages reveals that there is a distant place called the yards where not only the plans, but the components of a seven-mile-long starship are hidden, from the forgotten past.

The leader's idea is to use the building of this ship as a rallying-point for the rebuilding of the nation. Written in the 60's, this could easily be read as a distorted view of the space program as a diversion from other issues, or as how such an inspirational idea as going into space really can pull a nation together. Instead of one Heinelin-esque hero being the center of the story, we see a series of characters move across the stage of history as the building of the starship leads to political infighting, sacrificial battles waged for propaganda purposes, and foreign fears of what the starship's completion might mean for others.

A character who we've been following for pages may suddenly be dead off-stage as we leap years or decades ahead, with the starship being the main 'character. If so, what happens then? I flew through this book because it is an original, an epic told in a chamber-group style.

The descriptions are succinct yet vivid a tower in the yards is briefly described in a way that made me a little woozy. This is not for those who like their epics at phone book-length, but for those who like a story with a point, a message, well-told. I have only one real complaint about the book, which is that there are some logic issues and the ultimate 'big picture' we see at the very end.

But these are indeed minor issues.

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This was just an absorbing, fun and thought-provoking read--that's what I expect from a book and this one gave me all that plus a simple but evocative John Schoenherr cover. This was reprinted a few years ago but it still seems to have been lost in the tangle of SF adventures. I look forward to reading Geston's other books, and hope others will pick up on this one--it deserves to be better-known.

A really short novel that nonetheless manages to tell a story that is epic in scope and spans multiple generations of characters. Part of the way it does this is by using a really impersonal narrative technique, having no single viewpoint character and following each character for only a short time, as long as their part in the central narrative lasts. It begins with a civil servant named Henry Limpkin going to visit a retired general named Toriman, who is famous for his heroics in some long-ago w A really short novel that nonetheless manages to tell a story that is epic in scope and spans multiple generations of characters.

It begins with a civil servant named Henry Limpkin going to visit a retired general named Toriman, who is famous for his heroics in some long-ago war and who now lives a luxurious life in a castle where he apparently spends his time pondering the future of humanity. This Toriman proposes an unfathomably ambitious idea to Limpkin: At first this should be done in secret, but once enough headway has been made the project should be made public, with every citizen invited to help build The Ship, which Toriman intends to be a symbol of the national pride and ambition he hopes to reawaken through this unimaginably large-scale public works project.

At first Limpkin is skeptical, but he does not dismiss the idea outright because he has also observed the thing Toriman hopes to overcome through the Ship-building project: He describes a sense that the World is too old, that the memory of all the civilizations that have ever existed, and the knowledge that all of them have ultimately fallen, that works against any present-day efforts to build anything that lasts.

This is his real objective: The Ship, he explains, will never actually blast off he is not sure it will even be spaceworthy , but will serve solely as a morale-building exercise, and as soon as it looks like the people are beginning to take heart, he intends to divert their labor and materiel towards rebuilding the country's terrestrial infrastructure, which is in a long-standing state of decrepitude. The rest of the book follows a rotating cast of characters through the various stages of the Ship's construction, which takes place at a suitably inspiring, though hard-to-reach, locale: Getting to the Yards is difficult and dangerous, requiring the workers and their military escort to cross a large expanse of territory that belongs to no nation because it's full of wild and aggressive mutants, who attack any stranger they see.

The mutants are a fantastical array of human-animal hybrids and other posthuman monsters; they include fliers with big bat wings, lizard-men with scales and claws, people with compound eyes and chitinous body plating, people with more than two arms, and hooded and cloaked warlocks who can conjure fireballs out of thin air and shoot them like projectiles at the intruding riverboats.

A great battle is fought between the would-be Ship builders and these mutants, the Battle of the Bloody Ford, which we witness through the eyes of a young civil engineer named Philip Rome. Rome is terrified out of his wits by the horrible appearance of the mutants, and by the devastation they wreak with their fireballs, and he's certain his expedition is going to be overwhelmed and that he, and his entire escort, is going to die when a mysterious figure appears to rescue them and lead them to victory.

He disappears as soon as the battle is over, and later when stories are told of this battle people decide the mysterious person must have been the ghost of Miolnor IV, the commander responsible for the last human victory over the mutants, which left the mutants' homeland in its desolate state it had been a lush jungle. Anyway, people take this fortuitous apparition as an auspicious omen of the Ship project's success, and they begin to take heart, just like Toriman predicted.

More and more people flock to the Yards, and a big, bustling, prosperous city is built to house them. And year after year, generation after generation, the Ship takes shape. All is not exactly well with the project, though; instead of unifying everyone, the Ship project has given rise to a hierarchy: What's more, not all of the Technos are on the same page with each other about what the real purpose of the Ship is! There is tension between the Technos who want to keep their resources and efforts focused on their own city-state at the Yards if not on the Ship itself and the Admiralty bureaucrats back home who want some return on their investment in the form of some repair and rebuilding of their own aging infrastructure which was what they understood the ultimate purpose of the Ship to be -- a catalyst to reanimate the people's will to build, which once awakened would be turned back homeward.

A cold war arises between these factions, complete with espionage, sabotage and the occasional assassination.

At the same time, a demagogue is arising among the People, urging them not to trust the Technos and to seize the Ship for themselves. I'm going to stop summarizing the plot now to avoid spoilers, but this conflict is very important and the ultimate fate of the Ship is wrapped up in it. I was a child the first time I read this book, so I was excited to revisit it again after all these years. I found I had quite a few questions that didn't occur to me the first time I read it -- mostly worldbuilding questions, like how to reconcile the opulence of Toriman's castle with what we are later told about general conditions of scarcity, and about the shoddy construction and poor maintenance of the built environment, or where the mutants come from and why their numbers keep growing, or why, in a world with such a long history that spacefaring civilizations existed in what the characters think of as the ancient past, there are still nation-states at all, much less nation-states governed by aristocracy or monarchy!

I was also hunting furiously for any indication that The World might be a future Earth: I didn't find any, but that doesn't mean it's not Earth -- with the kind of timescales Geston is working with, and the cataclysmic nature of some of the past events he alludes to, it's entirely believable that none of the geography, place names or national borders would be recognizable.

Unfortunately, this also makes it all the more jarring when some aspect of 19th- or 20th-century Western culture -- like the nation-state, or the military and civil-service bureaucracies, or horse-drawn carriages driven by servants wearing livery, or That discrepancy between how alien this setting should be and how familiar it is never stopped troubling me. I won't go so far as to say it ruined the book for me, but it did mean I wasn't transported in wonder by it this time, as I remember being when I read it the first time, long ago.

I also kept wanting to know more about the mutants. Not just logistical questions like how are they supporting such a huge population in what's described as a blasted waste of an environment, or where they come from, but also things like what they want, what the source of their animus towards the rest of the World's people is, and whether and how they all communicate with one another.

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