To the Stars is a 1950 scifi novel by L. Ron Hubbard about deep space travel and the social and emotional effects of time dilation. 

The novel follows Alan Corday, an engineer who is forcibly recruited onto the Hound of Heaven, a faster-than-light spaceship. Jocelyn, a man deeply aware of the sacrifices inherent in lightspeed space travel, is the captain and the one who forces Alan on to the ship. The novel’s central conflict is not just an adventure story about  Corday’s space-age impressment, but his realization that his travel at lightspeed results in time passing differently for those on board than those left behind.

I recently read Void, by Veronica Roth, in the Far Reaches collection,  a short scifi story, which also deals with this concept. In that one, the staff working a luxury spaceship age differently than their wealthy passengers and their families left behind. There’s the same sense of time-travel, especially time-travel leading to loneliness and exile. And there’s a similar class structure, as the long-haul workers are separated from their original home lives, as society goes on without them, and they remain relatively unaged. 

The novel has a sense of tragedy, first as Alan is separated from his home, his girlfriend, and his whole society, and then as Alan becomes part of the system that did this to him.  There’s resigned acceptance as he realizes that decades have passed without him, and even if he’s free to return to Earth, his friends are gone and his home is completely different.  It’s a bleaker, darker look at the time distortion at the end of Arthur C Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, too, with Loren leaving his future child in  a different time scale. That felt like a hopeful ending, though.  Hubbard’s depiction of time dilation was still fascinating for readers, even if sad for Alan and his crewmates (and his forgotten girlfriend…).

Some aspects of To The Stars haven’t aged very well, particularly its treatment of female characters and gender roles, which constantly remind readers that this was published in the 1950s. Georges T Dodds at SF Site notes, “While the gender roles and some of the expressions used in the dialogues are clearly of the 50s vintage, overall To the Stars has aged well.” I would agree — the questions about lightspeed time-travel are still intriguing today.  It’s always funny to be when retro scifi writers come up with wild future societies and amazing future tech, and then write flat and one-note female characters. 

Adventures in Lit points out that To the Stars “combines the intimate struggles of its characters with the vast, awe-inspiring scale of interstellar exploration,” and that really highlights what works for me in good scifi. That blend of individual characters (ideally with women characters, but then again, this was published in the 1950s for a pulp magazine first) with wild tech and distant worlds is often what appeals to me when I read scifi. To the Stars also has that epic feeling because the distances are so huge and lightspeed travel is so wild.  

I received a copy of To The Stars from Galaxy Press. Opinions on my blog are my own, as always.