Bob Shaw SF Gateway Omnibus, page 1
Orbitsville
Racing from the certain vengeance of Earth’s tyrant ruler, space captain Vance Garamond flees the Solar System. And discovers the almost un-imaginably vast spherical structure soon to become famous as ‘Orbitsville’ – a new home for Earth’s huddled masses.
A Wreath of Stars
Thornton’s Planet is an anti-neutrino planet detected on its approach to Earth. It can be seen only through the newly developed magniluct lenses and its arrival causes a wave of panic. When its course carries it past the Earth, interest in Thornton’s Planet wanes. But the visit of Thornton’s Planet has had effects on Earth further-ranging than anyone could have imagined.
The Ragged Astronauts
Land and Overland – twin worlds a few thousand miles apart. On Land, humanity faces a threat to its very survival – an airborne species, the ptertha, has declared war on humankind, and is actively hunting for victims. The only hope lies in migration. Through space to Overland. By balloon.
Also by Bob Shaw
Orbitsville
Orbitsville (1975)
Orbitsville Departure (1983)
Orbitsville Judgement (1990)
Warren Peace
Who Goes Here? (1977)
Warren Peace: Dimensions (1993)
Land and Overland
The Ragged Astronauts (1986)
The Wooden Spaceships (1987)
The Fugitive Worlds (1989)
Land and Overland
The Ragged Astronauts (1986)
The Wooden Spaceships (1987)
The Fugitive Worlds (1989)
Other Novels
Night Walk (1967)
The Two-Timers (1968)
The Palace Of Eternity (1969)
One Million Tomorrows (1970)
The Shadow of Heaven (1970, rev 1991))
The Peace Machine (aka Ground Zero Man) (1971)
Other Days, Other Eyes (1972)
A Wreath of Stars (1976)
Medusa’s Children (1977)
Ship of Strangers (1978)
Vertigo (aka Terminal Velocity) (1978)
Dagger of the Mind (1979)
The Ceres Solution (1981)
Fire Pattern (1984)
Killer Planet (1989)
Collections
Tomorrow Lies In Ambush (1973)
Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976)
A Better Mantrap (1982)
Bob Shaw
SF GATEWAY OMNIBUS
ORBITSVILLE
A WREATH OF STARS
THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Bob Shaw
Title Page
Introduction from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Orbitsville
A Wreath of Stars
The Ragged Astronauts
About the Author
Copyright
ENTER THE SF GATEWAY …
Towards the end of 2011, in conjunction with the celebration of fifty years of coherent, continuous science fiction and fantasy publishing, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway.
Over a decade after launching the landmark SF Masterworks series, we realised that the realities of commercial publishing are such that even the Masterworks could only ever scratch the surface of an author’s career. Vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy were almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of those books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing changed that paradigm for ever.
Embracing the future even as we honour the past, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway with a view to utilising the technology that now exists to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan, at its simplest, was – and still is! – to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
The SF Gateway was designed to be the new home of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy – the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled. The programme has been extremely well received and we’ve been very happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we’ve decided to complete the circle and return a selection of our titles to print, in these omnibus editions.
We hope you enjoy this selection. And we hope that you’ll want to explore more of the classic SF and fantasy we have available. These are wonderful books you’re holding in your hand, but you’ll find much, much more … through the SF Gateway.
www.sfgateway.com
INTRODUCTION
from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Bob Shaw was the working name of Northern Irish writer Robert Shaw (1931–1996). He worked in structural engineering until the age of twenty-seven, then aircraft design, then industrial public relations and journalism, becoming a full-time author in 1975. Shaw was early involved in sf FANDOM, his first book being The Enchanted Duplicator (1954) with Walt WILLIS, an allegory of fan and FANZINE activities, and he received HUGOS in 1979 and 1980 for his fan writing. Shaw published his first professional story, ‘Aspect’, with NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION in August 1954; during the mid-1950s he contributed several more stories to that magazine and one to AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION before ceasing to write for some years. After a strong ‘come-back’ tale – ‘… And Isles Where Good Men Lie’ (1965 NEW WORLDS) – he published ‘Light of Other Days’ (1966 ANALOG), which established his reputation as a writer of remarkable ingenuity. Built around the intriguing concept of SLOW GLASS, a kind of TIME VIEWER through which light can take years to travel – thus allowing people to view scenes from the past – this story remains his best known. He later incorporated it, together with two thematically-related examinations of the theme, into Other Days, Other Eyes (1974).
Shaw’s first novel was Night Walk (1967), a fast-moving chase story. A man who has been blinded and condemned to a penal colony on a far planet invents a device that enables him to see through other people’s and even animals’ eyes, and thus manages to escape. The Two-Timers (1968), a well written tale of PARALLEL WORLDS, DOPPELGANGERS and murder, demonstrates Shaw’s ability to handle characterization and, in particular, his talent for realistic dialogue. In The Palace of Eternity (1969) he still more impressively controls a wide canvas featuring interstellar warfare, the environmental degradation of an Edenic planet, and human TRANSCENDENCE; the central section of the novel, where the hero finds himself reincarnated as an ‘Egon’ or soul-like entity, displeased some critics, though it is in fact an effective handling of a traditional sf displacement of ideas from METAPHYSICS or RELIGION. This intelligent reworking of well worn sf topoi was from the first Shaw’s forte, as was demonstrated in his next novel, One Million Tomorrows (1970), an IMMORTALITY tale whose twist lies in the fact that the option of eternal youth entails sexual impotence.
All Shaw’s early books – which include also Shadow of Heaven (1969), involving ANTIGRAVITY, and Ground Zero Man (1971; revised as The Peace Machine 1985) – were published first (and sometimes solely) in the USA; and their efficient anonymity of venue may result from a highly competent attempt to appeal to a transatlantic audience. Only slowly did Shaw come to write tales whose placement and protagonists were distinctly UK in feel; and it could be argued, sadly, that his best work was his most impersonal. The fine first volume of the Orbitsville sequence – comprising Orbitsville (1975), Orbitsville Departure (1983) and Orbitsville Judgement (1990) – can almost certainly stand, after Other Days, Other Eyes, as his finest inspiration. Like Larry NIVEN’S Ringworld (1970) and Arthur C. CLARKE’S Rendezvous with Rama (1973), the Orbitsville books centre on the discovery of – and later developments within – a vast alien artefact in space, in this case a DYSON SPHERE. Within the living-space provided by the inner surface of this artificial shell – billions of times the surface area of the Earth – Shaw spins an exciting story of political intrigue and exploration, which in later volumes develops, perhaps revealing an undue impatience with the venue he had invented, into a heavily plotted move into another universe entirely. Orbitsville gained a 1976 BSFA AWARD.
A Wreath of Stars (1976) may be Shaw’s most original, and perhaps his finest, singleton. A rogue planet, composed entirely of antineutrino matter approaches the Earth. It passes nearby with no immediately discernible effect. However, it is soon discovered that an antineutrino ‘Earth’ exists within our planet whose orbit has been seriously perturbed by the passage of the interloper. This is an ingenious, almost a poetic, idea, to which the plot only just fails to do full justice. Other books followed quickly: the overcomplicated Medusa’s Children (1977); the Warren Peace sequence – comprising the successfully comic Who Goes Here? (1977) and its disappointing sequel Warren Peace (1993) – both being jeux d’esprit akin to Harry HARRISON’S Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), and suffering, as did Harrison’s sequence, from rapidly diminishing inspiration; Ship of Strangers (1978), an homage to A. E. VAN VOGT in which the crew of the Stellar Survey Ship Sarafand, after some routine adventures, confront a striking COSMOLOGICAL issue; Vertigo (1978), an effective policier set in a world transformed by ANTIGRAVITY devices allowing personal flight; plus Dagger of the Mind (1979) and The Ceres Solution (1981), in both of which Shaw’s ingenuity declined, for a period, into something close to jumble. He had meanwhile been writing short stories – his collections include Tomorrow Lies in Ambush (19 73), Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976), A Better Mantrap (1982), Between Two Worlds (1986) and Dark Night in Toyland (1989) – which again demonstrate his professional skills but tend to lack a sense of commitment, to the point that some later stories seemed strained, frivolous, anecdotal.
However, with the Ragged Astronauts sequence – The Ragged Astronauts (1986), The Wooden Spaceships (1988) and The Fugitive Worlds (1989) – Shaw returned to his very best and most inventive form, creating an ALTERNATE COSMOS which allowed him to describe with joyful exactness the sensation of emigrating, via hot-air Balloon, up the hourglass funnel of atmosphere that connects two planets which orbit each other. After his pattern, later volumes lose some of the freshness and elation of the first, but the series as a whole emphasizes Shaw’s genuine stature in the genre as an entertainer who rarely failed to thrill the mind’s eye with a new prospect. At his best, Shaw was an ingenious fabricator and lover of the worlds of sf.
For a more detailed version of the above, see Bob Shaw’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shaw_bob
Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
ORBITSVILLE
CHAPTER ONE
The President was called Elizabeth, and it was thought by some that the mere coincidence of name had had a profound influence on her life-style. Certainly, she had – since the death of her father – made Starflight House into something which more resembled an historic royal court than the headquarters of a business enterprise. There was a suggestion of neo-Elizabethan ritual, of palace intrigue, of privilege and precedence about the way she ran her trillion-dollar empire. And the touch of antiquity which annoyed Garamond the most – although probably only because it was the one which affected him most – was her insistence on personal interviews with ship commanders before their exploratory missions.
He leaned on a carved stone balustrade and stared, with non-committal grey eyes, at the tiers of descending heated gardens which reached to the Atlantic Ocean four kilometres away. Starflight House capped what had once been a moderate-sized Icelandic hill; now the original contours were completely hidden under a frosting of loggias, terraces and pavilions. From the air it reminded Garamond of a gigantic, vulgar cake. He had been waiting almost two hours, time he would have preferred to spend with his wife and child, and there had been nothing to do but sip pale green drinks and fight to control his dangerous impatience with Elizabeth.
As a successful flickerwing captain he had been in her presence several times, and so his distaste for her was personified, physical. It influenced his attitude more pervasively than did his intellectual unease over the fact that she was the richest person who had ever lived, and so far above the law that she had been known to kill out of sheer petulance. Was it, he had often wondered, because she had the mind of a man that she chose to be an unattractive woman in an age when cosmetic surgery could correct all but the most gross physical defects? Were her splayed, imperfect teeth and pallid skin the insignia of total authority?
And as he watched the coloured fountains glitter in the stepped perspectives below, Garamond remembered his first visit to Starflight House. He had been about to undertake his third mission command and was still young enough to be self-conscious about the theatrical black uniform. The knowledge that he was entering the special relationship reputed to exist between President Lindstrom and her captains had made him taut and apprehensive, keyed up to meet any demand on his resourcefulness. But nobody in Fleet Command, nor in Admincom, had warned him in advance that Elizabeth gave off a sweet, soupy odour which closed the throat when one was most anxious to speak clearly.
None of his advisers on Starflight House protocol had given him a single clue which would have helped a young man, who had never seen anything but perfection in a female, to conceal his natural reaction to the President. Among his confused impressions, the predominant one had been of an abnormally curved spine at the lower end of which was slung a round, puffy abdomen like that of an insect. Garamond, frozen to attention, had avoided her eyes when she nuzzled the satin cushion of gut against his knuckles during her prolonged formal inspection of his appearance.
As he leaned on the artificially weathered balustrade, he could recall emerging from that first interview with a cool resentment towards the older captains who had told him none of the things which really mattered in personal dealings with the President; and yet – when his own turn came – he had allowed other raw Starflight commanders to go unprepared to the same inauguration. It had been easy to justify his inaction when he considered the possible consequences of explaining to a new captain that the coveted special relationship would involve him in exchanging looks of secret appreciation with Liz Lindstrom when – in the middle of a crowded Admincom flight briefing – she handed him a scrap of paper upon which she, the richest and most powerful human being in the universe, had printed a childish dirty joke. If the time for suicide ever came, Garamond decided, he would choose an easier and pleasanter way …
‘Captain Garamond,’ a man’s voice said from close behind him. ‘The President sends her compliments.’
Garamond turned and saw the tall, stooped figure of Vice-President Humboldt crossing the terrace towards him. Holding Humboldt’s hand was a child of about nine, a sturdy silver-haired boy dressed in pearlized cords. Garamond recognized him as the President’s son, Harald, and he nodded silently. The boy nodded in return, his eyes flickering over Garamond’s badges and service ribbons.
‘I’m sorry you have been kept waiting so long, Captain.’ Humboldt cleared his throat delicately to indicate that this was as far as he could go towards expressing views which were not those of Elizabeth. ‘Unfortunately, the President cannot disengage from her present commitment for another two hours. She requests you to wait.’
‘Then I’ll have to wait.’ Garamond shrugged and smiled to mask his impatience, even though the tachyonic reports from the weather stations beyond Pluto had predicted that the favourable, ion-rich tide which was sweeping through the Solar System would shortly ebb. He had planned to sail on that tide and boost his ship to lightspeed in the shortest possible time. Now it looked as though he would have to labour up the long gravity slope from Sol with his ship’s electromagnetic wings sweeping the vacuum for a meagre harvest of reaction mass. ‘Yes.
You’ll have to wait.’
‘Of course, I could always leave – and see the President when I get back.’
Humboldt smiled faintly in appreciation of the joke and glanced down at Harald, making sure the boy’s attention was elsewhere before he replied. ‘That would never do. I am sure Liz would be so disappointed that she would send a fast ship to bring you back for a special interview.’
‘Then I won’t put her to that inconvenience,’ Garamond said. He knew they had both been referring to a certain Captain Witsch, a headstrong youngster who had grown restless after waiting two days in Starflight House and had taken off quietly at night without Elizabeth’s blessing. He had been brought back in a high-speed interceptor, and his interview with the President must have been a very special one, because no trace of his body had ever been found. Garamond had no way of knowing how apocryphal the story might be – the Starflight fleet which siphoned off Earth’s excess population was so huge that one captain could never know all the others – but it was illustrative of certain realities.
‘There is a compensation for you, Captain.’ Humboldt placed one of his pink-scrubbed hands on Harald’s silver head. ‘Harald has been showing a renewed interest in the flickerwing fleet lately and has been asking questions on subjects which loosely come under the heading of spaceflight theory and practice. Liz wants you to talk to him about it.’
Garamond looked doubtfully at the boy whose attention seemed absorbed by a group of metal statues further along the terrace. ‘Has he any flair for mathematics?’
‘He isn’t expected to qualify for a master’s papers this afternoon.’ Humboldt laughed drily. ‘Simply encourage his interest, Captain. I know admirals who would give their right arms for such a public token of the President’s trust. Now I must return to the board-room.’
