David Gerrold’s 1972 Space Skimmer is a touchy-feely space opera.

Dissatisfied with his home world, Streinveldt, for reasons he does not care to articulate, Mass sets out to find the answer to a question: whatever happened to the empire1?

The current year is 1389 H. C. The last contact Streinveldt had with the empire was in 975 H.C. From Streinveldt’s perspective, the empire simply went silent. Surely there had to be more to the story than that.

The empire is gone but its data stores are surprisingly durable. In one such store, Mass finds an intriguing reference to ultimate starships, the so-called skimmers. Because he lacks sufficient clearance, the library will not tell Mass much about the skimmers… but it does provide one skimmer’s itinerary. That’s enough info for Mass to track down the craft.

The crewless Skimmer allows Mass to commandeer it. However, while Mass can give the starship verbal commands, he cannot use the starship’s controls. It’s not just a matter of ignorance, although Mass is fairly ignorant. It’s a matter of basic anatomy. Mass needs a construct to pilot the Skimmer for him.

Next stop: Manolka. It’s a planet of constructs. The planetary hivemind provides Mass with Ike, then carefully erases all knowledge of such horrifying concepts as individuality. Poor Ike is exiled forever, because Ike’s return would remind Manolka of that which the hivemind is determined to remain innocent.

The next recruit is an accidental one. Ike and Mass set down at a former imperial base, only to find four centuries of accumulated mail waiting for an imperial starship to deliver it. Among the undelivered parcels, a stasis pod containing Tapper, Prince of Concourse. As the Skimmer is the closest thing to an imperial ship the planet has seen in centuries, Mass and Ike are presented with Tapper.

Tapper has a more pressing problem than the question of the empire’s fate. He has a terminal disease that can only be cured on Liadne (or it could, four hundred years earlier). Delivering Tapper to Liadne is easily done. But of course, as Edelith of Liadne explains, there will be a price to pay. But first, a cure for Tapper, which involves acquiring an empath. Enter Aura! Poor doomed Aura.

Where did the empire go? The answer is all around Mass, Ike, Tapper, Edelith, and poor doomed Aura. The culprit is the skimmer itself2.

_oOo

I am intrigued that various booksellers refer to this as ​“Space Skimmer: Book One”. As far as I know, there has never been a Space Skimmer: Book Two. More importantly, I have no idea what Book Two would be about. All the important issues are resolved by the end of this novel.

This is a very, very early Gerrold novel, his second according to ISFDB. I’m going to rip the band-aid off here: this is not a very good book. The prose is unimpressive, the plot is very linear (each new recruit compels the ship to go collect another plot token), and the ending is astonishingly abrupt. Oh, well. It’s best if the not-very-good books come at the beginning of a career and not towards the end.

Fortunately, I enjoy looking at setting as much as I enjoy the characters in a tale. There are some interesting bits here.

Firstly, Gerrold thanks his friend and sometime co-author Larry Niven.

The author would like to thank Larry Niven for allowing me to ​“borrow” an idea.

I am not completely sure what idea Gerrold meant, because this book uses a number of elements seen earlier in Niven stories: stasis fields, FTL drives that are limited to one light year per three days, newer FTL drives that are much much faster, squat heavy-worlders, and luck as a psychic power. I think Gerrold meant the last notion.

The book also led me to contemplate a question about social organization: what are empires for? What good do they do? Who do they do it for? There’s probably an essay in that. In this setting, the empire provided mail services, along with the propaganda that could convince people that a very large and poorly networked collection of functionally independent worlds was a single culture. Various hints in the book (particularly the frequent use of purpose-built people, to the detriment of those people), suggest that this imperial culture wasn’t all that kind.

What really struck me is the book’s SFnal expression of the curious Disco-era fascination with self-improvement via various forms of therapy. It is probably no coincidence that Space Skimmer was published near the heyday of Erhard Seminars Training—remember EST? — because they’re both part of the same cultural phenomenon, dubbed the Human Potential Movement.

Most of the characters in this book have some sort of deep-seated emotional issue. At least the men do3. Edelith’s main problem is that she has to deal with the doctrinaire android, the surly cosmic-bear, and the vapid space-twink who control a unique resource, while poor doomed Aura clearly has a fridge in her near future4.

What’s astonishing about the book isn’t that the obvious solution is for everyone to process their feelings through frank and only moderately dangerous therapy. What’s astonishing is they actually do in fact embrace therapy rather than opting for some irrelevant distraction like looking for the reason the empire collapsed. Granted, they only did this once it became clear that the alternative to talking about feeeeeeeeeelings was a horrible death, but I assure you there are people who would literally rather fly into the heart of a star than suffer through an encounter group.

So, not a great book but an interesting artifact, at least for me.

Space Skimmer is available here (BenBella), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

I did find Space Skimmer listed at Words Worth Books but only editions that cannot be ordered. Still, one up on Bookshop UK, which did not have it at all.

1: USA delenda est.

2: Minor spoiler, because the fate of the empire is only the pretext for the plot: skimmers killed the empire by suddenly disrupting the basic economics of space travel. Generally speaking, SF authors like to reference the fall of Rome and I am sure Gerrold had that in mind. However, the causes and extent of the implosion seem more akin to the Bronze Age Collapse.

Cramming another world building detail into the footnotes so as to avoid annoying my editor: the economics of Gerrold’s star trade are unusual. First, to support trade, a planet has to have enough people that it doesn’t really need trade. Second, even when there had been trade, there was so little contact between worlds that genetic divergence was accepted as inevitable.

3: This is a very guy SF novel. The default term for human is ​“man” and until Edelith showed up, I forgot that there were any women in this novel at all.

4: Unfortunately for poor doomed Aura, the accepted treatment for her condition is to accept that her kind of empath does not live all that long, rather than, I don’t know, applying the techniques of the galaxy’s most advanced medical world to mitigate her health issues. Mind you, she’s not alone in this setting: nobody seems to care that Streinveldter humans don’t live as long as base model humans.