Hellstar by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry
Earth's first colony ship to the stars is going fine, several decades into its trip to a distant habitable planet. The 8000 inhabitants are healthy and happy in their metal torus. But slowly things start going wrong - mechanical failures and strange physical phenomena manifest themselves with increasing frequency, and soon the population starts showing the strain. A serial killer and a dangerous recreational drug don't help things either.
Hellstar, despite the terrible title, is actually not a bad hard scifi (with a few mystical overtones) thriller. By no stretch of the imagination is it a good book, but it is well-paced and its only real major crime was being written in 1986.
It's time to bring out The Eighties Scifi Paperback Checklist:
- Motorcycles - magnetic rollerblades don't count
- Post-apocalyptic - nope
- Airbrushed art work on cover - check
- Telepathy - check
- Female Nudity - check
- Male Nudity - check
- Mixed race characters - check
- Japan as superpower - mentioned in passing
- Class-based angst - a little
- Dancing - oodles
- Primitives - nope
- Magic realism - nope
- Uplifted animals - dolphins
- Colonization Allegory - nope
- Jesus symbolism - nope
- Buddhism - check
- Split personality - nope
- Overcrowding - nope
- Martial Arts - hell yes
- Heterosexual pairing - lots
- Old man/young woman pairing - surprisingly not, 80yo/60yo doesn't count
- Homosexual pairing - nope
- Interspecies pairing - attempted
- Drugs - yep
- Crime/Social Breakdown - both
- Hacking - nope
- Virtual Reality - nope
- Politics - check
- Future Sport - recreational zero-g flight
Final Verdict: mid-eighties, quick, brainless summer reading.