Rating: 
Summary: Better than the movie could ever hope to be
Review: Once a luxury interplanetary cruise ship with a crew of hundreds catering to dozens of wealthy passengers, the venerable River of Stars is now a decrepit tramp freighter, her magnetic sails furled and long since replaced by more modern fusion drives. When a freak accident disables two of the four engines, her crew of 15 and one passenger must decide whether to repair the engines, refurbish the ancient sails, or attempt both. Each character conforms to one of the 16 Meyers-Briggs personality types, a widely used set of categorization--based on the theories of Jung--that modulate their interactions. And interact, they do, in every conceivable way, to save the doomed ship while each advancing his or her own agenda. The result is a riveting space opera, well grounded in near-future technology, that could just as easily have been set in the near past at the time when steam supplanted sail on the high seas.
Rating:
Summary: The best hard-SF tragic novel of character yet written.
Review: The MSS "River of Stars", the grandest of the great magsail liners, was launched in 2051. But the new Farnsworth fusion thrusters rang the death-knell for the magsails, and the now-obsolete liner was converted to fusion power in 2084. Two decades later, she has become a tramp freighter, bound for Dinwoody Poke, Jupiter space, on what will be her final voyage....The Middle System -- Mars, the Belt, Jupiter space -- has not developed tidily, and the crew is made up of casualties of the great 21st-century space boom. RIVER is their story. RIVER is a tour de force of character developement. We watch, riveted, as these motley misfits squabble, beef and try to cope, in the hermetic isolation of a ship becalmed in space -- two of the four Farnsworth engines have been ruined in a freak accident. The ship has 19 days to rebuild the engines, or she will pass the balk line, the point of no return, and drift endlessly away from settled space. The repairs go slowly, but the ship's Engineer is a master of improvisation, and no one doubts he will fix the engines in time. No one, that is, but the oldest magsailors, who remember that the RIVER still has her old sails, unused for decades. They decide to fix them up, just in case. No one likes, or trusts, the acting captain, so they don't tell him (or the Engineer) their plan -- which has a large share of nostalgia for the lost Age of Sail. And there isn't enough superconducting hobartium on board to repair both engines and sails.... RIVER is a classical tragedy. Hubris, small mistakes, misunderstandings, mishaps and personal conflicts collide, echo and feed back in a downward spiral that will ultimately wreck the great ship. It wouldn't be fair to reveal the ending, but it's not a happy one. There are no real villains here, just flawed people trying to cope, at times heroically. But the Fates are not on their side. Flynn tells his story in the third-person omniscient, with dry asides as he develops his characters. The omniscient narrator is the Greek chorus to the inevitable tragedy, which develops with an awful majesty. Flynn's writing is masterful. His pacing is grave, controlled, ironic. His characters will break your heart as they work, love, fight, grow, grieve and die. This is a wonderful book, easily Flynn's best. RIVER is set in the future of Flynn's popular near-future "Star" tetrology (also recommended), but is a standalone novel. This is the best hard-SF tragic novel of character yet written (though this is an uncrowded niche). And the cover art, by Stephan Martiniere, is just flat gorgeous. Highly recommended. Review copyright 2003 by Peter D. Tillman
Rating: 
Summary: Nice plot, good characters, writing not so good
Review: The plot is arbitrary but not unreasonable (think of a lesser version of Alistair McLean's HMS Ulysses, if you like). The characters are perhaps a bit overly dramatic at times, but that fits with the somewhat purple prose. But there's an ancient writer's dictum that says, "Show, don't tell." and here Flynn fails dismally. No event takes place without at least a sentence or two explaining its significance. He's also quite fond of discoursing on the internal state of characters - not revealing their thoughts, but giving us armchair psychoanalysis. I wish he'd trusted us to pick up on events without bludgeoning us over the head with them. For instance:
"That was it. That was what would have done it. A kind word leading on to mutual pleasure, but a pleasure which would, upon its evaporation, reveal the pity that drove it - and that woud have destryed her. Fife, for all his faults, had not slept with her from pity, and so had inoculated her, a little, against her awful need to be loved." A little of that would be fine, but it's ubiquitous.
Rating:
Summary: Nice plot, good characters, writing not so good
Review: The plot is arbitrary but not unreasonable (think of a lesser version of Alistair McLean's HMS Ulysses, if you like). The characters are perhaps a bit overly dramatic at times, but that fits with the somewhat purple prose. But there's an ancient writer's dictum that says, "Show, don't tell." and here Flynn fails dismally. No event takes place without at least a sentence or two explaining its significance. He's also quite fond of discoursing on the internal state of characters - not revealing their thoughts, but giving us armchair psychoanalysis. I wish he'd trusted us to pick up on events without bludgeoning us over the head with them. For instance:
"That was it. That was what would have done it. A kind word leading on to mutual pleasure, but a pleasure which would, upon its evaporation, reveal the pity that drove it - and that woud have destryed her. Fife, for all his faults, had not slept with her from pity, and so had inoculated her, a little, against her awful need to be loved." A little of that would be fine, but it's ubiquitous.
Rating:
Summary: Very talented author, supremely uninspiring book
Review: The talent of the author is obvious throughout the book. Characters are developed toward richness, but there are some obvious mistakes. Several of the very young teen characters who are described as unschooled come out with erudite lines that could only spring from the brain of a much older and well read adult. It also sets up expectations by stating things like that the passenger would learn what it was to die alone, but then that just doesn't happen, with no explanation.
Similarly, I found it very hard to swallow the idea that a kid who goes on the lam at 7 learns enough sophisticated spaceship engineering by the age of 12 from crawling around in ventilation ducts on a planetoid to get hired on? Come on. A little bit of work it might take to learn differential equations maybe?
I kept reading it though, because of the obvious talent of the writer whom I had never read before. Hoped it would get better, but it didn't quite step up.
The story is basically a downhill run of slow motion disaster. Supremely uninspiring, just goes downhill and goes downhill. It gets inside the heads of a group of people who are so self centered and incapable of human communication as to be stunning. At the same time, quite a number of them are performing jobs requiring a semblance of genius.
I didn't see what the point was, exactly. That was how I felt at the end. OK. And?
Rating: 
Summary: Read "Please Understand Me II"
Review: This book is completely overhyped. Although the author is a great wordsmith, this book is dry, uninspired, and artificial. It is the fictional version of Please Understand Me and an attempt to show all possible interactions between the sixteen personality types at an excruciating level of detail.
This book is a fine example of the situation where research has replaced creativity and inspiration. Unfortunately, even the research was restricted to a single book while the whole situation can easily be transposed to any historical setting that involves ships and the sea.
Truly a work of mechanistic extrapolation, The Wreck of the River of Stars is simply tedious.
Rating:
Summary: deep powerful look at varying technological changes
Review: Today's technology is tomorrow's junk. For instance, The River of Stars was a luxurious passenger liner that used immense magnetic sails to catch the solar wind. However, the invention of the Farnsworth fusion drive turned the sailing ships obsolete. The River of Stars is the last one still operating as it hauls cargo between Jupiter and the asteroid belt. However, its sails are never used, as they are symbols of the past. When Captain Hand dies from an illness, Gorgas becomes in charge when an emergency occurs. A small meteor hits the ship destroying two engines and crippling the deceleration process making a safe landing impossible. The only hope to walk away resides in the sails, but navigator Corrigan and sailmaster Satterwaithe know Gorgas and Engineer Bhatterji would never listen especially since the latter insists he can fix the malfunctioning engines. Turning to ancient philosophy of not putting all your eggs in one basket Corrigan and Satterwaithe serendipitously work with the crew of misfits to merge the old with the new in a desperate attempt to survive. This is science fiction at its best as the audience sees the impact of a radical change in technology on people and industries as has happened throughout history especially the twentieth century (horse driven coaches to cars, etc.). The story line conveys a deep powerful look at varying technological changes on a crew without slowing down the plot. On top of an action-packed yet cerebral thriller, the cast is fully developed so readers understand the crisis and how everyone will react to it. Flynn has written a winner. Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: Requires HUGE Patience but Rewards
Review: WHY YOU SHOULD READ:
Readers who delight working out puzzles involving people, this is an excellent book. As a study of group dynamics and clashing personality types within a disaster setting there really is nothing else like it in the genre. A good segment of the reading public would be those people who enjoy reading mysteries not so much for the dénouement but rather for how the various parties think and act would adore River. Also, those readers steeped in religion will find the allegorical implications of people operating in the absence of God profoundly affected by the ending of this tale.
WHY YOU SHOULD PASS:
This book requires an incredible amount of patience. There will be times that even these most patient readers will be tempted to give up and move on. The detailed examination of each and every crewmember plus their motivations and desires is so exhaustive and so unrelenting that you've really got to be into this kind of thing to even venture into the River. The plot moves at about the same pace as the stars wheel in the sky. For those readers who have blazed through English Lit courses in college, River reads, for good or ill, very much like a Henry James novel--horribly trying but with immense rewards. If you are the sort of reader who looks for immediate payoff--and that, without being insulting, is certainly a large body of the speculative fiction reading public--then you should look for something else.
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