As you should be able to tell from the (frankly amazing) cover, Rogue Star by Friederik Pohl and Jack "The Thunder" Williamson is hella pulp. This thing is old, and wild. Rogue Star has trippy aliens, a damsel in distress, and a love-conquering-all ending.
Unfortunately I'm kind of over selling it.
The book follows creation and growth of an artificial solar intelligence. In the far flung future mankind has joined an interstellar community of billions, including sentient stars. The science here is sketchy at best- and not really the point. The point of Rogue Star seems to be just luxuriating in an unfathomable future and delivering the goods on its fun premise. The main plot, the menacing ascension of the infant rogue star, is the high point of the book. The rogue is kind of like a superpowered ghost. Through manipulating the invisible forces of physics the rogue can consume energy/mass and thus possess machines, animals, and eventually planets. It is confused and animalistic, but its mighty alien intellect grows exponentially in the space between picoseconds.
The story wrapped around the rogue star's is less exciting. The book follows a clutch of characters drawn into the growing disaster. The problem is twofold. The characters are not terribly compelling. The hero, Andy Quam, is supposed to be a quiet nice guy. But he comes off as kind of insane. His obsession with his old ex-girlfriend overrules everything for him. And when I say everything, I mean he doesn't particularly care about the fate of Earth and billions of lives when weighed against his goal of seeing his ex again. The ex-girlfriend, Molly, may be super nice and really fun to be around- but we'll never know since literally every one of her scenes in the book is her being blown up, knocked out, passing out from smoke inhalation, being terrorized by Sleeths, being terrorized by sentient stars, being exposed to the vacuum of space, radiation poisoning, headaches, paper cuts, etc. The cover of the book promises a nubile young woman being menaced by a strange alien. Well Rogue Star fucking delivers. But it never really introduces us to who Molly is.
The other issue with Rogue Star is that, just as Andy seems 'off' in his actions and reactions, the entire universe feels off-kilter and hard to understand/empathize with. It just didn't click with me. The half abandoned Earth, the zombiefied citizens, the maddening bureaucracy encountered at every turn- it feels like Pohl and Williamson were trying to say something or make some kind of point. But what is more likely is that it simply isn't very well crafted.
So where does all this leave Rogue Star? Read it for the evil sentient stars. But don't expect to be too impressed by anything else. Rogue Star receives six of ten stars.
