After a suspicious accident on the unfamiliar planet, you again find yourself waking in unfamiliar surroundings. You are Sparrow, they tell you. Your accident left you with a bad case of amnesia, they tell you. Slowly, you begin to gather facts about your life: you are seventeen years old; you live on a generational starship, the Astronomical; you work as a tech assistant in the Exploration department. The crew of the Astron are explorers, and you are part of the hundredth generation of those who wander the galaxy searching for evidence of life. Something doesn't add up. Something about the events on the planet seems naggingly suspicious to you and the strange behaviour of some of the crewmembers only adds to your sense of unease. Soon, you discover that the ship and your surroundings are not quite what they seem. You begin to wonder if you really are who they say you are. Meanwhile, inexplicably, it appears as though someone is trying to kill you. That is a brief summary of the intriguing and deliberately confusing opening of Frank M. Robinson's The Dark Beyond the Stars. Winner of the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Science Fiction, The Dark Beyond the Stars tells the engrossing tale of a generational ship sent out in search of life by a human race which longs to know that it is not alone in the cosmos. The story is propelled along by two main forces. First is the mounting tension between the immortal captain and his hundredth-generation crew. His drive to seek out extraterrestrial life is a pre-programmed psychological imperative, but his crew has developed a nearly mutinous lack of faith in the mission. Equally important is Sparrow's quest to discover the truth behind the suspicious circumstances surrounding his loss of identity. Along the way, Robinson weaves a plot of intrigues, which will take the reader on a captivating hard sci-fi journey through the two thousand year voyage of the Astron.
The Dark Beyond the Stars has much to recommend it, including a significant, but underdeveloped, dose of queer content. From a queer perspective, the book's main strengths are its portrayal of a completely bisexual society and its comfortably open discussion of the same-sex relationships amongst the crew. Sexual mores on the Astron are unlike our own, in part due to the strict reproductive controls necessary on a resource-limited generational ship and, probably in greater part, by Robinson's whims. At times, the crew’s approach to sex is pleasantly enlightened, accepting of a wide diversity of sexual experience. At other times, their sexual practices are shockingly barbaric. Their highly ritualized reproductive ceremony, for example, basically reduces to serial rape. Custom on the Astron is that no one ever refuses another crewmember's first invitation for sex, regardless of gender (or other considerations, such as age, or the mutuality of the attraction).
Most queer readers will, appreciate Robinson's easy and skillful avoidance of heterosexist language. He creates a vocabulary all his own to handle the various types of coupling between genders, referring to "love partners" instead of boyfriends or girlfriends, for example, when the gender of a person's lover is unspecified.
Disappointingly, however, after having worked to eliminate all sorts of sexual bias in his imagined world, Robinson seems curiously reluctant to draw as strongly as he might have on queer characters and themes, even where the opportunities present themselves. His treatment of homosexual relationships is disappointingly uneven. While the protagonist, Sparrow, shows obvious interest in members of both sexes--a same-sex relationship of his figures prominently in the plot--his attraction to men appears to dissipate over the course of the book until, at the end, Sparrow is almost indistinguishably heterosexual. Further, though same-sex relationships are common among the crew, they are characteristically short-term, quite in contrast to the many long-term heterosexual pairings that develop. The impression is that, even in a fundamentally bisexual society, people naturally settle into heterosexual relationships as they mature. Further, even though the rest of the crew-members seem entirely comfortable with homosexual relationships and/or sex, Sparrow himself struggles briefly with internalized homophobia. The reader is tempted to conclude that Sparrow, amnesiac and experiencing everything onboard the Astron anew, experiences a natural, if temporary, revulsion toward his homosexual yearnings.
I would have preferred to see a more positive light cast on the same-sex aspects of the widely bisexual mores of the Astron's crew. That said, I appreciated the overall open treatment of queer sexuality in The Dark Beyond the Stars.
While the book may not recommend itself on queer content alone, it does possess other more appealing qualities. The story has a certain gripping but unsettling plausibility to it and the characterization is sufficiently well done to keep the reader interested in the lives of the characters, and their intrigues. Several other issues are dealt with credibly and creatively, notably the issue of immortality, which is a consistent theme in the book, and the one that drew me most strongly, though it develops slowly. Overall, a worthwhile and often exciting read.