Teaser

When a tragic accident forces Vance Garamond to flee Earth, his only thought is to get his family to safety. Yet his desperate flight will lead humanity to a new world of staggering proportions, and change history forever . . .

Review

Orbitsville is one of those books I’ve known for a while by reputation, even if it hasn’t been a priority to track down. It sits alongside classics like Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke) and Ringworld (Larry Niven) in the SF hall of fame, specifically in that corner of the hall dedicated to megastructures. You see, Orbitsville is one of the definitive Dyson Sphere novels. That’s right, this is a book that takes place on a space station that can contain an entire star.

I want to state for the record that the opening of this book is unintentionally hilarious. Garamond is left in charge of his ruler’s child, and in the space of about three pages, that child has died in a tragic accident. It is such an abrupt incident that I couldn’t help but laugh. Clearly, this inciting incident exists only to get Garamond off-planet as quickly as possible, and I fully acknowledge that laughing at the death of a child, even a fictional one, is not the intended response. Nevertheless, I had a chuckle of disbelief that it was this of all things that Shaw chose to use to get his story off the ground.

From there on out, we’re right into an awe-inspiring sense of wonder. The kind that all the best science fiction delivers. The Dyson Sphere that comes to be known as Orbitsville is staggeringly vast. Mindbogglingly so. Yet in under two hundred pages Shaw delivers on the potential of the idea. Like other megastructure novels, the focus of the plot is on exploring the strangeness of the giant object. What sets Orbitsville part from others of its kind is in the scale. Yes, we follow Garamond as he and a small band of explorers trek across a vast expanse of the structure’s interior – a journey that takes them months, and fully dries home the sheer vastness of a Dyson Sphere. But beyond that we get to see a larger-scale endeavour to colonise the Sphere. I enjoy short books, but Orbitsville could easily have been twice the length and lost none of its sense of wonder. There are sequels, and I know I’ll be keeping an eye out for them when I next go book crawling.

Another thing that Orbitsville does well is hint at the purpose of the titular structure. It’s not in the foreground, but there’s an idea running through the book that this Sphere has been built for a reason. It’s a suitable habitat for countless billions of living beings, human and otherwise, where numerous civilisations could live without ever encroaching on one another’s territory. Is it a zoo? A meeting place? Or something else altogether? The answers slowly become apparent as the novel progresses, and they are answers that hint at something grander to come in the sequels.

Yes, this is a book that gives its ideas room to breathe, and one that leaves you thinking. But it’s delivered via a fast-paced and action-packed narrative about death, danger, and familial duty. This is the thinnest sliver of a novel, but it succeeds on all fronts. I might have started my read with some unintended laughter, but I ended it deep in thought about humanity, space, and everything in between.

Book Stats

• Orbitsville #1
• First Published 1975
• 187 Pages