From: Mats Ohrman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 May 89 00:35:35 +0200

Path: liuida!sunic!kth!mcvax!uunet!lll-winken!ames!hc!pprg.unm.edu!unmvax!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!rutgers!bourbaki.mit.edu!nazgul
From: [email-masked]
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
Subject: Sheffield is back!
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 May 89 13:54:08 GMT
Sender: [email-masked]
Lines: 36

  Those of you who, like me, were disappointed by "Trader's World"
and only mildly entertained by "The Nimrod Hunt", will be glad to
hear that with "Proteus Unbound" Charles Sheffield has returned to
the solid hard-sf areas that are his greatest strengths.  Though
Behrooz Wolf is the main character, the book is not really a sequel
to "Sight of Proteus"---it actually has much stronger ties to
"The McAndrew Chronicles".  The time is years or decades after "Sight
of Proteus", which may be one or two centuries after McAndrew.
Most of the action takes place out beyond the Halo, in what we would
call the Oort Cloud.  Ships using the McAndrew inertialess :-) drive
permit transit times to be measured in weeks instead of years, but
there is as yet no significant contact with other star systems.
Kernels and physics figure more promenently than form change, which
is why I place this book closer to McAndrew than to "Sight of Proteus".

  If you have read this far without being a Sheffield fan, you are
probably wondering if this guy is for you.  If you enjoy hard sf
for the sake of the science, the answer is yes.  Sheffield is one of
the few authors I know of who creates future societies which do not
simply consist of 20th century people using a few neat gadgets.
He permits his characters' attitudes and physical forms to be altered
by the technology and environments they live with---somewhat like
Varley's Occupied Earth stories, but with more emphasis on science and
a bit less writing skill.  (Don't get me wrong, the writing's not
horrible; he's certainly much better at it than Forward, for instance.)
His plots tend to be a bit scattered, with occasional digressions to show
off some new idea or gadget.  For a good introduction try "The McAndrew
Chronicles", which is a set of connected short stories.  These have links
to the "Proteus" books and several of his other stories.  Also excellent
are "The Web Between the Worlds" and "Between the Strokes of Night", which
are not connected to the same future history.

Louis
[email-masked]