Neverness

After acclaim in recent years for his short fiction (""Shanidar''), Zindell delivers a typical first novel: talented, ambitious, wildly uneven and desperately in need of more editing. This is the story of Mallory Ringess, starting with his induction as a pilot in the Order of Mystic Mathematicians. Seeking nothing less than the secret of life, Mallory flies to the Solid State Entity, a computer goddess whose mental space is a treacherous interstellar region. Navigation and survival depend on the pilot's solving the intellectual tests put before him. Following this lively rite-of-passage opener, however, is a melodramatic multi-page sequence of primitive life among an Eskimo-like people. Several hundred more pages are devoted to the city of Neverness, and to Mallory's rebellion against his father, the Lord Pilot. Cliches and fortune-cookie profundities are unfortunately interspersed amid thoughtful philosophic concepts and challenging writing, recalling early John Barth, particularly Giles Goat-Boy. (March)