The Black Star Passes

John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Black Star Passes Cover

The Black Star Passes

dustydigger
3/11/2015
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In 1953 Campbell produced this fix-up novel of three adventures of some young, brilliant and adventurous scientists, but the original stories had been writtenback in 1930 when he was a 19 year old MIT engineering student, and he specifically wrote for highschool maths and science students the geeks! The book is full of interminable indigestible (to me, anyway, without a science background) chunks of scientific explanations, the characters are interchangeable, only differentiated by their names, the dialogue is very dull, and all in all the book would not be worth bothering with except for the descriptions of the aliens, which are interesting in that Campbell at least makes the effort to show how their appearnces were influenced by their environments. Apart from these gleams of interest the book was dull, stodgy and almost unreadable. I read it for the 1950s Defining Books challenge, and I am afraid that this is one that is only surviving because of Campbell's illustrious and influential editorial career, otherwise it is very slight.