Author:	Frederic Pohl
Copyright:	1982
Date Reviewed:	12/7/86
Rating:	7.0

Synopsis: While civil strife and rioting rips apart the United States of America and most other countries, one man gets a chance to implement his dream. He is Dr. Dieter Knefhausen and his job is to send four couples on a 10 year journey to colonize a new planet orbiting Alpha Centauri designated Alpha-Aleph. The four couples are the cream of their generation. They all have extremely high IQ's and are very dedicated. The mission goes smoothly at first but then, as expected, boredom sets in. In order to fight the monotony, it is suggested that the crew work on mathematical problems that have never been solved or proved. One by one the hardest problems are solved.

Then the truth is revealed. Back on Earth, a Russian scientist proves that no planet orbits Alpha Centauri. Knefhausen tries to hide the truth but eventually it all comes out. The experiment was not to see if people could travel to another star, but what wonders their minds could unfold after 10 year in intense thinking. It is the trip, not the destination, that is important. In the beginning only Knefhausen, the president and the man who faked the pictures from Alpha Centauri, know about the conspiracy. The president tells more and more high level people about it until everyone knows. The story becomes public when the astronomer who faked the pictures defects to Russia.

The crew also soon find out that they have been deceived, not from news from Earth but from their own astronomical observations. Even before the revelation, their mental powers have increased dramatically. Two engineers where able to increase the efficiency of the power plant by redesigning it. One astronaut was killed but so advanced was his mind that his soul remained on the ship. The petty bickering that caused the crew to fight before they knew they had no destination erupted into psychotic hostilities.

Meanwhile, Knefhausen was having his own problems. Treated worse and worse by the president and his staff, he is finally put in jail for many years. He is let out once to interpret a message from the Constitution, which warned of a retaliatory attack by two crew members on Dieter and his world for having sent them into oblivion. The attack was in the form of a kaon spray which caused all nuclear materials to leak their energy as heat. Not only did this destroy all nuclear power plants, but it heated the Earth's temperature a few degrees which melted the ice caps and flooded the coastal areas. The known governments fell apart after that.

On the Constitution, the original crew began to breed children at a furious rate. At first it was done naturally but then, using genetic engineering techniques, the children were born from cabbage patches. These children were engineered as intelligent or more so than their parents. They began talking at 6 months and could pilot a ship at 2 years. By the time they reached their destination, they had advanced enough so that the lack of a planet didn't mean much. They could create their own O'Niel structure. One woman, transcended this world to live in deep space where she began a project to create a planet around her.

Soon a delegation consisting of one adult (the dumbest), six children and Uncle Ghost is sent back to Earth for trade and supplies. After some problems with the local president, a near idiot, and a more advanced community, some decide to stay on and try to help the world and their crippled brethren.

Review: "Starburst" began with a lot of promise and then fizzled out. It was great reading for the first 80 pages or so as the crew are sent out on a real mission, then learn that it was faked, then learn badly how to cope with it. I really could not put the book down. I kept on reading just one more chapter as the minutes ticked away on a week night. The story was told mostly in the third person and occasionally in the first person by different people with different perspectives. I liked the way they grew in mental powers from solving difficult mathematical problems to learning new forms of communications.

Then the author went off the deep end. Food that grows already cooked, children born in a cabbage patch, rebuilding the ship and building a new planet are a few of the many examples. The crew had a right to be angry at what was done to them but by the time they reached Alpha Centauri they should have seen it was a good experiment. There was no longer any reason to hold a grudge. In the beginning, the author tried to develop each character but after a while even that no longer mattered. We found out a lot about Eve, the dumbest member of the crew, but not those who had already advanced to be more than human. Also, I don't quite understand how a ship built for eight adults could hold so many children. There were many inconsistencies in this book the science fiction was bad. It is interesting though that this story resembled the last few I read as part of Volume IIA of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson, "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon and "The Humanoids" by Jack Williamson dealt extensively with the evolution of man and parapsychological abilities.