“In every reader’s life there are books which leave the world a different place because you have read them. Starhiker is one of them. It will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading. It is a superb book…” (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
Starhiker is ostensible a straight-forward adventure story, but what begins as external action from the floating city of The Fragrant Could to the land of the Tfeligen becomes an internal landscape in which Bo, a wandering minstrel from earth, must travel.
The time is thousands of years in the future when the earth is a backwater planet ruled by a race of benevolent despots called the Hrau. Our solar system is only a minor interstellar relay stop controlled by the Hrau. However, Bo’s vivid imagination is a powerful weapon against the Hrau’s restrictions as he secretly roams from colony to colony seeking truth and the company of kindred spirits. The blind pursuit of an impossible destiny leads him just to the other side of his dreams.
Starhiker depicts the wrenching strangeness of real contact with the unfamiliar–it comes to grips with what it might feel like to contact truly alien peoples and be involved in unfamiliar situations.
Starhiker: A Novel. New York, Hagerstown: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977, 164 p., cloth. Cover design by Eve Callahan. [novel] [ISBN: 0-672-52069-9]
as: Welten-Vagabund. München, Zürich: Droemer Knaur, 1979, 143 p., paper. [German]