Slow Train to Arcturus by Eric Flint and Dave Freer

Nearing the end of Slow Train to Arcturus by Flint & Dave Freer. With Paul Chafe's disappointing Genesis still in memory I was apprehensive, but the Baen stable delivered a thoughtful piece exploring, as science fiction often does, a variety of technical and societal What Ifs. In this book the sublight colony ship is a string of ships, with the "locomotive" cruising at .3c and dropping "cars" around likely-looking suns - the train never slows, thus conserving fuel and reaching more stars in less time. Each habitat has its own society, some of which have degenerated as in the archetypal slowboat story, Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky (which I suppose I'll have to re-read now), and some of which have not. Communication between habitats was supposed to be forbidden by the designers and Social Planners but Flint & Freer's message (every book has a message!) is that spoken eloquently by David Scott of Apollo XV: "...there's a fundamental truth to our nature: Man must explore." Good read, and better than I feared it would be when I started it.

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