The second Starfarers novel is a step up from the first. As before, there's a lot of talking and debating. Transition, like the Walton's Thessaly cycle, and Le Guin's novels, especially The Dispossessed, is about more than space travel and finding aliens. It's about establishing an alternative decentralized non-hierarchical society. This comes into focus best in the final chapters, where (no spoilers) one character admits that the members of the starship had never even thought about what to do if, for example, one person punched another. This nature of this debate and how humanity behaves not surprisingly becomes relevant to whether humanity is ready to join more civilized societies, though where those societies might be is left nicely up in the air. The presentation of sexual relationships is pretty advanced for when the book was first published, though there's no intimation of gender fluidity.

The downside for me is that most of the talking that slows down the story is not about the above ideas , but rather interpersonal disagreements and jealousies, or cliched arguments between the authoritarian bad guys and our heroes. There's also some critical events in cyberspace that are lack suspense or clarity, because cyberspace is just metaphorical dreamscape with no constraint on what can happen.

Recommended. ( )

Three and a half stars. Definitely interested in the sequel & perhaps the prequel (which I might have read once but forgotten).

Really liked the fact that there were so many women who were defined first of all by their professional roles on the ship, including the first two characters we meet. ( )

Really well executed social, some lovely ideas, and overall solid writing. ( )

The followup to Starfarers sees our researchers, in their sort-of-stolen ship, arrive at the Tau Ceti system. Unfortunately, they bring along with them a nuclear warhead which had been fired at them from Earth. When the bomb explodes, the ship makes a narrow escape, but is damaged...
And a saboteur may also be on board.
Tau Ceti shows thrilling signs of alien civilisation - but has 'Starfarer''s disorganized and violent arrival destroyed their hopes of peaceful contact? ( )