A voyage-to-another-star novel that embraces the distances travelled, and all that entails. A set of missions are sent out that will take generations to reach their destinations and return. On the way their society evolves in ways that the original missions planners both expect and don’t.

This is a book focused on the evolution of human groups and the ways that space travel and dislocation would affect them – and indeed would affect the society left behind. There are unmistakable echoes of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s short story The Climbing Wave in how the stay-athomes forget (and refuse to be impressed by) returning space travellers; and of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War in how those travellers would be left behind by technological progress, cementing their perceived irrelevance.

4/5. Finished Friday 21 December, 2018.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)