Search the Sky
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2023
Language: eng
Subjects: Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction; Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science Fiction
Description: <p>After noticing that interstellar spaceships are bypassing their destination planets because they’re not able to contact the inhabitants on arrival, a man is sent out to investigate what is happening to humanity. Traveling faster than light, he visits several worlds in his attempt to find the answer, including a world where age determines rank, a world where women are dominant and men are jailed for life for even suggesting the genders should be equal, a world where everyone has converted to a cult dedicated to the world’s original settler, and Earth itself.</p> <p>Originally published in 1954, <i>Search the Sky</i> is the second collaboration between <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/frederik-pohl_c-m-kornbluth">Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth</a>. The story is a satirical cautionary tale, exaggerating trends the authors saw in our own world. The pair would ultimately publish six novels and several short stories before Kornbluth’s death in 1958.</p> <p>Contemporary critics gave the book a positive reception, though they generally found the pair’s first collaboration, <i>The Space Merchants</i>, to be the stronger book. <i>Search the Sky</i> was reprinted in 1977, at which point Spider Robinson, writing in <i>Galaxy</i> magazine in September 1977, credited Pohl and Kornbluth with inspiring an “explosion” of satirical science fiction, adding that Pohl and Kornbluth “didn’t invent the notion of extrapolating-<em>beyond</em>-the-point-of-absurdity—but they gave it a quantum jump in sophistication, in relevance, hooked it into an enormously more subtle social consciousness—and gave it a bite like an angry chainsaw.”</p>