The City Among the Stars, by Francis Carsac

(I know there could be some mistakes in this review. I’m trying to improve my English, thanks)

A classic of science fiction? Good! An unknown science fiction author, and French? Very good! I admit that before I downloaded it I looked for the original French edition -Pour patrie, l’espace-, but I did not find it (at least in ebook), so there is my honest review from the forthcoming English edition, for which I must thank both Netgalley and Flame Tree Press.

As the cover points out, this is the first edition in English of the classic French science fiction novel published in 1962. However, Francis Carsac’s novels were very popular in the USSR, and he has also two translated into Spanish. Francis Carsac was the pseudonym of François Bordes (1919-1981), known as a prestigious prehistorian, with numerously bibliography for his Paleolithic studies.

At first it surprises me that this novel is a happy precedent of Culture starships by the missed Iain M. Banks. There are people who want to live in space, in enormous city-state spaceships and not with the contemptuously called planetaries. There is also a decadent Terran empire, in the form of a dictatorial aristocracy vs. a sort of space technological anarchism. About the latter, apparently an utopia then, but soon we will realize that there is no perfect human society. But I will not talk about the plot, if you want you can read the synopsis provided by the publisher.

Of course, for a novel written in 1962 some issues are expected. The style of writing science fiction from nearly sixty years ago has changed, for example the pace is slower. Also some didactic and a bit silly explanations, mixed with the author own philosophical ideas (Confess, reader!, if you were a writer, will you resist the temptation to explain your own ideas in your novel?).

On the other hand, habitually we must accept the way that the women are disregarded in classic science fiction. If not, we would not read none of them. This book is not a exception, but the women have a curious role: in some way they are important for the story, but mostly as a sentimental counterparts of the hero. In this utopian spatial society they are imagined as independent and capable, for example as technicians or soldiers (In France times were changing, six years before May 68) but her role in the story is mainly as partners of the protagonist. So there is plenty of flirting issues in this novel between the hero and... three women!, and it includes a ridiculous catfight. I must add also that the protagonist warrior ego is a bit tiresome.

For all this I get the impression that the author facet as a science fiction writer is mostly due to entertainment. The novel contains spaceships, intersolar empires, space battles, terrific aliens, adventure and a lot of flirting… In other words, this is pure space opera! It is difficult to translate the French title, but it means something like My Country, the Space. Does it remind you of another very influential novel, written a few years before?

I must add that the novel has some minor plot nonsenses -even for being a space opera-, and also some illogical style problems, but I have to keep in mind that this is an evaluation copy and that it needs a final correction before its publication on May 21. In the marketing aspect, in my opinion the cover is more than right, it shows the beginning of the story with the hero marooned in space.

Finally, can I recommend this novel? Of course if you love classics like I do. By classics I mean pre-cyberpunk or better, pre-New Wave literature. Also to space opera lovers, the book has an interesting and different -or eccentric- way to tell a science fiction story.