Tau Zero

Expanded from the novella "To Outlive Eternity".

Hugo Award: Best Novel nominee (1971).

The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light-years distant. For those on board, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few years' duration.

But a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The ship's deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon, remorselessly, she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.

Enormously exhilarating, gripping and enjoyable, Tau Zero is the ultimate sense-of-wonder story. Fuelled by daring scientific speculation and tense human drama, it underlines Poul Anderson's place as one of the foremost SF writers.

"The ultimate hard science fiction novel." – James Blish