The Outcasts of Heaven Belt by Joan D. Vinge - Science Fiction Book Review

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I've just finished reading this 1978 science fiction novel by an author that I'm not otherwise familiar with. I don't think I've read anything by Joan D. Vinge before. Based on this book though, I'd definitely give any of her other stories a go if they came my way. This novel isn't a classic, but it's a well-written hard science fiction post-apocalyptic space adventure. You're probably thinking that post-apocalyptic fiction and space adventures are two different genres, but not in this case. The story is set in some indeterminate time in the future - centuries previously, people from Earth managed to establish colonies in other planetary systems, which have gone on to develop their own cultures, independently of Earth. One such ex-colony is Morningside, a planet which is tidally-locked to its parent star - this means that one side always faces the sun (making it too hot) and the other side always faces away from the sun (making it too cold). The population mostly live in the twilight zone between the hot and frozen hemispheres. This lack of usable land makes it hard to make a living, hampered even further by the fact that their sun is slightly variable, leading to some drastic climate changes from time to time. One of the things that keeps civilisation on Morningside going is that it's part of a trading association with planets orbiting several nearby stars, all settled by humans. These planets are also marginal places to live, but being able to trade with each other - and send aid when trouble arises - helps to keep them all going. So Morningside and its trading partners are getting by, buty they're not getting ahead. But they also know from their history of the Heaven system, slightly further out than the other systems in the trade association, but still within range of the Bussard ramjet starships that they use. Heaven is a system with no Earthlike planets at all - but what it does have is a huge asteroid belt and a gas giant (Discus) with an extensive ring system and ice-covered moons - which means that there a lot of frozen volatiles and metals easily accessible to a spacefaring society. This made Heaven system an extremely rich place a century or so before the start of the book. Morningside has not been in communication with Heaven for quite some time, but the assumption is that Heaven is still doing well - there's no reason to think otherwise. Seeing how access to Heaven's enormous mineral wealth could help them to develop their own economy, the government of Morningside dispatches the starship Ranger to Heaven to try to negotiate a trade agreement. The crew consists of seven people, all of whom are married to each other in one big group marriage. The harsh environment on Morningside has led to the development of a system of mutual support through group marriages and a clan system, which sound like a believable development to me. Arriving at Heaven after a four year journey (there's no faster than light travel in this story), the Ranger passes by the gas giant Discus on its way to the asteroid Lansing, which is in their records as the capital of the Heaven system. They're not in trouble, so they're surprised when an unknow flotilla of ships approaches them and challenges them over the radio, accusing them of being "pirates" and "Demarchists" and threatening to board the ship. When they refuse to be boarded, the Ranger is fired on and part of the pressurised section is destroyed - along with five of the crew. The Ranger gets away from the attacking ships and proceeds towards Lansing, with just two surviving crew members - Captain Betha Torgussen (an engineer in her 30s) and the much older navigator Clewell Welkin (Betha's only surviving husband). Coping with the natural mixture of grief, fear, anger and confusion, the two decide to proceed to Lansing, although they don't know what to expect there. They do know that they can't leave the Heaven system till they've refueled with Hydrogen, since they need that to get up to the ramjet's operating speed. While they're approaching Lansing, the Ranger is itself approached by a small, barely-operational spaceship. The two person crew board the Ranger and are surprised to find Betha and Clewell, since they'd assumed the Ranger was a derelict. These are Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn, a pair of teenagers who have been sent out from Lansing to salvage any useful technology they can find. From this pair, the Ranger crew learn the true situation in Heaven, which is in a much worse situation than Morningside. A few generations previously, the Heaven System had been torn apart by a civil war. During the course of the war, most of the industrial infrastructure necessary to keep a space-based civilisation going was destroyed. Central authority no longer exists and what's left of Heaven is now divided between three political entities - the asteroid Lansing, which still claims authority over the whole of Heaven Belt, but is actually struggling to keep its own population alive. Discus is the centre of the Grand Harmony, a socialist dictatorship whose navy is the one that attacked Ranger. The third independent nation is the Demarchy, which is based in a group of asteroids at a Trojan point a bit ahead fo Discus in its orbit. Lansing is the poorest of these three nations. It's an asteroid that has been surrounded by a plastic tent that enclose an atmosphere so they can fun farms on the surface. They have nothing left to trade for the volatiles they need to keep their farms and water supply going and will soon be dead if nothing is done. They've lately been reduced to stealing ice from the Grand Harmony to survive, but now lo longer have any spacecraft with the range to do even that. The Grand Harmony is doing better than Lansing, but is still leading a very austere life - they survive by trading with the Demarchy, but both governments are suspicious of each other in a situation reminiscent of the Cold War. This causes them to waste diminishing resources on military assets, accelerating their decline. The Demarchy is the most prosperous of the three surviving nations,but it seems to be quite a decadent sort of place. It's an extreme democracy, with a small, limited government. All major decisions are settle via popular vote. They richer than Lansing and the Grand Harmony, but they're still in a state of decline. Nobody in the Heaven system has the capacity to manafacture the parts they need to repair old equipment anymore, let alone to make anything new. So the whole economy is based on making do and mending, fixing what can be fixed and salvaging old gear from dereleict spaceships and dead asteroid habitats. It can't be more than a few generations until the last power generator or life support system breaks down and can't be repaired - and then Heaven Belt will be totally dead. Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn are themselves outcasts of a kind - the shield that protected it from radiation having broken down at some point in the past, the population of Lansing are experiencing a lot of birth deformities. Babies that are born hopelessly deformed and not likely to survive are euthanised. Those who have less seriousl deformities are exiled to the surface to work in the farms, which is Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn's background. Shadow Jack has odd coloured eyes and Bird Alyn has a deformed hand - these defects are enough to make them effectively second-class citizens, and expendable to the point where they're made the crew of a salvage ship with a failing life support system and radiaton leakage. Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn are in love with each other, but their society has a strong bias agains people with birth defects having physical relations - and in any case Shadow Jack is terrified of getting Bird Alyn pregnant. They both suffer from self-esteem issues, but start to come out of their shells as the story develops. Since Lansing needs hydrogen to make water, and the Ranger needs hydrogen for fueld, Betha and the young couple agree to combine forces - Shadow Jack and Bird Alyn join the Ranger crew and agree to supply whatever information and advice is needed from their local knowledge, in return for Lansing being supplied with a share of the hydrogen that they set out to maintain. Betha's first though is to trade for the hydrogen, so she and Shadow Jack travel to Mecca, an asteroid belong to the Demarchy, which has hydrogen refineries. An attempt to is made trade the ship's cat to a wealthy family business for the necesssary hydrogen - hardly anyone in the Heaven system has pets anymore, and no-one has seen a cat in living memory, and the decadent brother-sister team who run the company think it would make a great present for their father. Things go wrong, and the Ranger crew are back on the run, with a Demarchy negotiator called Wadie Abdhiamal as an accidental prisoner. Wadie had been sent by the head of his government to Mecca in case the Ranger crew went there, with the intention of negotiating for the use of the ship - or at least stalling the crew until the Demarchy can sieze the ship. Both the Demarchy and the Harmony want to capture the Ranger if possible, reasoning that it's powerful fusion generator and other advanced equipment might be enough to get their industries going again. But they also don't want the other side to get it, because a starship with a nuclear rocket drive capable of accelerating to relativistic velociites could be used as a powerful weapon. So the imperative for both governments is to either capture of destroy the Ranger. Wadie sees the bigger picture, and undertands that for either side to capture the Ranger would destabilise the situation further and accelerate the general decline, which he sees as inevitable. A mutual attraction also starts to develop between Wadie and Betha although Wadie is prejudiced against a women being captain (women are kept at home and out of danger in the Demarchy), and really struggles to understand how a joint marriage works. He does eventually become a useful ally to the Ranger crew though. The attempt to trade for the fuel having failed, the Ranger crew resort to a spot of piracy to obtain it. This leads to a final confrontation as a taskforce from the Grand Harmony invades Lansing and sets a trap for the Ranger, and another taskforce from the Demarchy arrives and makes their demands. The Demarchy and the Grand Harmony have mutually contradictory demands. One or the other is going to destroy the Ranger unless a solution can be found. But what's the solution? This is a decent read. It wouldn't appear on anyone's list of classics, but I found the characters engaging. World-building's basic but the author gives the reader enough information to follow what's going on. The various societies featured or mentioned in the book seem to have evolved naturally in line with the situation they're in, and the book makes a good point that you can't ignore the laws of economics, and that trading and mutual cooperation are nearly always more viable survival strategies than violence and coercion. The characters are sketched out economically, and it's easy to understand their motivations. With a couple of exceptions there aren't any people in it that I would really consider bad guys - just desparate people in an apparently impossible situation. It left me wanting to read more about the characters and the world they live in. I think the author wrote one more story set in Heaven Belt, which I'll have to look our for. All in all, I would call this novel a pretty decent read.