Dancing With Eternity

An antifeminist polemic not cunningly enough disguised as a space opera, the novel is set in a distant future where humanity has been granted telepathic abilities by way of the net and immortality via re-boots, yet its real preoccupations are downright traditional. Our hero, Mo, is down on his luck and drinking in a dive bar when a beautiful stranger, Steel, offers him a job as a crewman on her starship. He joins Steel's team and immediately becomes involved in her mission to solve a mysterious problem by exploring the deadly Brainard's Planet, despite the increasingly painful cost. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that allegedly-obsolete nuclear family relationships have been front and center all along. Complex emotional ties and the way they make the ostensible bad guys sympathetic are this novel's strongest aspect; unfortunately, they are too often weighed down with exposition and simplistic, heavy-handed politics. (Apr.)