Afbeelding van de auteur.

Richard C. Meredith (1937–1979)

Auteur van At The Narrow Passage

10+ Werken 590 Leden 10 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Fotografie: Richard C. Meredith [credit: Joy C. Meredith]

Reeksen

Werken van Richard C. Meredith

At The Narrow Passage (1973) 121 exemplaren
We All Died at Breakaway Station (1969) 111 exemplaren
The Sky Is Filled with Ships (1969) 93 exemplaren
No Brother, No Friend (1976) 78 exemplaren
Vestiges of Time (1978) 73 exemplaren
Run, Come See Jerusalem (1976) 71 exemplaren
The Timeliner Trilogy (1973) 40 exemplaren
The awakening (1979) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

Body Armor/2000 (1986) — Auteur — 142 exemplaren
The Future is Now (1970) — Medewerker — 29 exemplaren
Spaceworlds: Stories of Life in the Void (2021) — Medewerker — 18 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Leden

Besprekingen

Jumps around a lot to showcase a large number of characters for it's length. I realized after a couple of head-whip scene changes that this was just an excuse to introduce yet another paper thin character slowly unbuttoning her blouse. The micro stories are stupid and the macro story is boring. I only read to the end because I couldn't find a summary online and I wanted to see if the author was just slow rolling an interesting point near the end. The author is not doing that.
 
Gemarkeerd
sarcher | 6 andere besprekingen | Feb 23, 2023 |
Classic space-opera is a hard sell, often being rather clumsy, outdated and downright uncool, but Richard C. Meredith's We All Died at Breakaway Station has aged better than most. It has one of the best titles (and prologues) I've ever come across, and its story is compelling. A ragtag collection of resurrected battlefield soldiers must defend, Thermopylae-like, a lonely outpost in space which has been threatened by a fleet of alien warships. The story can sometimes be rather slouchy; shallow in its characterisation and less than clear in the finer details of its plot, but like its soldier protagonists it manages to hold it together. Against all odds, this is a respectable showing.… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
MikeFutcher | 6 andere besprekingen | Dec 31, 2019 |
(Original Review, 1980-09-13)

"We All Died at Breakaway Station" was written by Richard C. Meredith.

As Dewey Henize mentioned, [V2 #74] one of the main characters was a disembodied brain, or rather a person who had lost his human body in warfare, and was re-fitted with a spaceship or space station to control. Extensive use was made throughout the story of highly developed prosthetic and electronic implant technology, as well as "cold sleep" (hibernation) for transporting injured people. The technology was not really a main focus of the story, however. The narrative describes a group of people in a supporting role in a rather desperate survival-type interstellar war between humans and an alien species. "Breakaway Station" is a medical, communications, and supply facility which accidentally achieves an important role.

Warning: "Breakaway Station" is a strong and vivid book about people at the limits of stress, and as such, can be quite stressful to read.

*----------------*

Side Issue, intended to provoke further discussion:

I remember a lot of the plot of "Breakaway Station" which vitally/ depended/ on the medical or spaceflight technology for motivation of the personal interactions of the people portrayed. (Okay, so the disembodied starship pilot is an extreme case...) It seems to me that the same general situation could have been set up under other, non-SF, circumstances, such as an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific during WW-2. Many of the same conditions of technological warfare: bodily damage, difficult (long-range) communications and logistics, etc. would apply, and the psychological reactions could be similar, although occurring in a different cultural setting. It seems to me that "What If"s in the medical and interstellar technologies were in a separate layer of the novel from the issues of warfare and personal interaction while under stress.

The issue I want to raise is:

What themes can be dealt with in SF, that are not mappable to historical fiction, fairy tales, "westerns", "war stories", etc. The mapping consists of being able to imagine a similar story where similar characters and actions would be motivated by circumstances acceptable to the particular genre.

Several possibilities come to mind:

- "rivets" stories where the primary topic is a hypothetical engineering or technological idea which can only be developed in a future setting requiring extensions of our present technology, and where the people in the story are not strongly characterized and exist to operate and explain the technological goings-on to each other while we (the readers) listen.

- "soft rivets" stories which are primarily concerned with the "What Ifs of people’s lives in an environment based on a different technology, such as space colonies.
- "time travel/paradox" stories. (Some overlap with fairy tales, fantasy.)

- "alien culture" stories, which explore the limits of what it is to live a life truly different from ours (not just green skin), or of interactions of a culture similar to ours with an alien one.

Involved are issues of what gives a life meaning and what gives a culture stable existence. I keep having the feeling that if a writer managed to space out far enough to imagine a culture truly/ different from ours and novelize it, the story would be totally incomprehensible to us. (Seemingly random actions.)

WE ALL DIED AT BREAKAWAY STATION was by Richard Meredith, the late, lamented, intelligent libertarian who also wrote THE SKY IS FULL OF SHIPS; RUN, COME SEE JERUSALEM; AT THE NARROW PASSAGE; NO BROTHER, NO FRIEND; and others. Not one of the best writers, but consistently capable and occasionally thought-provoking; generally very pessimistic in tone.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
antao | 6 andere besprekingen | Nov 11, 2018 |
Book 2 of the Timeliner Trilogy. (See At the Narrow Passage also). Library journal called it "Swashbuckling adventure" but I don't remember it too well.
½
 
Gemarkeerd
gypsysmom | Aug 17, 2017 |

Lijsten

Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk

Gerelateerde auteurs

Statistieken

Werken
10
Ook door
4
Leden
590
Populariteit
#42,530
Waardering
½ 3.3
Besprekingen
10
ISBNs
16

Tabellen & Grafieken