The Star Web

by George Zebrowski

A UN research team has been sent to the Antarctic to investigate strangely patterned radio signals. Expecting a buried transmitter, the team is awestruck by what they discover hidden beneath the polar ice. But it doesn't remain hidden for long! The team is soon hurtling through space on an adventure that is as incredible as it is frightening. George Zebrowski, author of The Star Web, is a Nebula Award Finalist. His first novel, Omega Point, published in 1972, has already been translated into six languages.

Cover Artist Kelly Freas

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

George Zebrowski was an American science fiction writer and editor who wrote and edited a number of books, and was a former editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lived with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he co-wrote a number of novels, including Star Trek novels.
Zebrowski won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits. Three of his short stories, "Heathen God," "The Eichmann Variations," and "Wound the Wind," were nominated for the Nebula Award, and "The Idea Trap" was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Star Web was Zebrowski's second novel and was the fifteenth novel in the Roger Elwood-edited Laser line. It has a very cool, very '70s Kelly Freas cover. I remember enjoying it and thinking it was one of the best Lasers I'd read. It's a fun adventure with something of a YA flavor about a team of scientists who are sent to the Antarctic to investigate some odd radio signals. They get a whole lot more than they bargained for... I remember hoping for a sequel, but there never was one.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hoped against all hope that this would a riveting hard-science-fiction read and was all-too-willing to turn a blind eye towards the fact that this is only Zebrowski's second novel and that it's part of Laser Books, a cheap science-fiction line by romance publisher Harlequin's attempt to cash in on the pulpy literary trends of the 1970s (that being said, the cool Laser Books format did lure me in while in a deluge of high-quality SF paperbacks in my favorite used bookshop in Nashville). In the book's defense, this was my last read of 2023 and was part of a relay race with a very bizarre book of very high quality, so I might be too liable to be too harsh on this book, and I must be careful to only judge *The Star Web* on its own merits and not its lack of the other book's bountiful ones; in that interest, let's take a closer look at this book's plot and science fictional conceits.

This book starts rather abruptly with four scientists searching Antarctica for the source of mass amounts of very strange energy readings coming from the icy plains. They're under the direction of a government official, and they soon find the high-tech artifact generating the energy by... well... falling into it. Holes just conveniently open up on the object's surface and allow the four scientists to just walk into it. The physical framing of the action is strange and somewhat off-putting, but we'll get to that in a minute; for now, let's talk about that artifact: it seems to be a giant sphere (at least, that's what it looks like on the cover) made by an advanced race that breaks through the ice and sails into space once the four humans are aboard. Its interior corridors are lined with portals that appear in the walls out of nowhere and lead to different rooms of inexplicable purpose. Eventually they figure out that one room will holographically display the ship's whereabouts and actions, while another has a bunch of inlays which can be used to replicate things; our characters use them to duplicate their limited food supplies. Soon the ship is searching the stars for alien-built repowering facilities built around/within certain stars, but doesn't have much luck finding them; at somepoint, ghostly remnants of the ship's builders (or different aliens who took their technology after they'd passed on) possess the humans, but soon they leave their minds once the crew make it to the aliens' homeworld where they're randomly pursued by crystalline insects and eventually figure out that during the dusk of their civilization, the aliens moved from using sun-charging spaceships to instantaneous teleportation that gets the crew back home to the contemporary Amazon even though everyone was worrying about relativity and time dilation when they started flying through space...

Before I start complaining about the book, let me set the scene for all of you: I'm a completion-goal-obsessed person and I wake up on December 27th needing to read two more books in 2023 to complete my yearly goal. I start reading *Empty Space: A Haunting* by M. John Harrison, but it's a dense book and I fear it'll be lost on me if I read it straight through in three days. So I set it down after a couple chapters and pick up my other book for the rest of the year: *The Star Web*. My already-foggy brain is swimming from Harrison, and then I pick up this book and read an Antarctic-scouring first chapter about random portals opening up in the ground. That's weird enough, but it's not made any better by the fact that Zebrowski doesn't describe the scenes' setting very well. There's not a lot of descriptive language and your interpretation of what is physically happening and how it's all set up is left to you, the reader, which did not work with his blockier style of prose or my personal sense of mental floatiness when I started the book. But even later on when reading in a better headspace, things still felt poorly laid out and I didn't like following the flow of this book.

That lack of flow is kind of carried through to the book's concepts, which all revolve around the transfer of matter, whether it's through recharging your spaceship with the power of a sun or matter replication or transportation copying matter across the galaxies, if it's really copying. Basically, everything in the book can be boiled down a few humans wandering around technology made by a race that could manipulate and "create" matter (i.e. molecules) with ease. That race, which seems to be long gone, is mildly interesting and sparks a lot of debate among the crew as to where they went, how they got there, if that destination was the galactic grave, and if humanity was born of the survivors from the Earth-locked ship, but Zebrowski never really does anything with these questions. A lot is left unanswered at the end of this book, and while that can work with some science fiction (like Arthur C. Clarke's classic *Rendezvous with Rama*), *The Star Web* lacks the compelling characters, thought-provoking themes beyond thinly discussing SF tropes which can be seen in dozens of other stories, and even the sense of wonder that makes the ambiguous approach work.

The best, most awe-inspiring concept is probably the starcrossers' building of a network of starside powering stations to string their empire together, which actually did inspire a short story of my own; it's just that, as I'm probably repeating to death, Zebrowski never does anything *cool* with it. There are some interesting ramblings on the nature of viewable light at different speeds and how they relate to relativity that the characters debate in the first half of the book that I would've liked more of, but their significance seemed to be forgotten of by the end of the book, so I can't really chalk that up to a win...

In my quest to find redeeming qualities about the book, I asked myself if the characters were any good; I really couldn't say that they were. They were generic scientists with stereotypical roles like "the cynical Russian woman" and "the leader who lays too much on his own shoulders." The four of them were.... there. That would be fine for other books (remember *Rendezvous with Rama*), but that didn't work here, and I think it has something to do with the ethereal nature of the Spirited-Away plot and everything else I've complained about. These kinds of narratives aren't my favorite anyways (I find them hard to connect with), but I find it possible that we may not be able to put all of the blame on Mr. Zebrowski; in my readings I've found that several authors of the heights of Tim Powers, Piers Anthony, and Jerry Pournelle had issues with the Harlequin edits "mangling" their books, and a negative editorial influence would explain why this book's plot is as choppy as it is. Regardless, this was only Zebrowski's second novel, so I'll definitely give more of his a try (especially *The Killing Star* and *Cave of Stars*) when I run across them.

At the end of the day, some glimpses of a cool interstellar transportation system and some admittedly nice turn of phrase every few pages isn't enough to save this book from my "Worst of 2023 Reads" list; what a way to end it all... still, I'm glad I read this (if not when I did) even if it only gets a 5/10 from me. Hopefully Harlequin's editors and my weird facilitation of a literary relay race, which I don't normally do, can take on some of the blame. Thanks for reading the longest review of this work on the Internet, and here's wishing you better luck if you decide to follow my steps into the starcrossers' star-crossing web...

[Lonnie Veal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated-- but good adventure. A bunch of scientists discover an ancient installation buried under the Antarctic ice, except it's a ship-- which wakes up and launches back into the old network of stars.

. . .Except that too much time has passed and the ancient destinations have gone strange.

In a way-- this can be considered a riff on Andre Norton's 'Galactic Derelict', but this one has a nicely different flavor and straightforward writing. Still, adventure and mystery and Men confronted with the Unknown

[Bex · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gentle mystery of space, this raises more questions than answers. I really enjoyed it and hope I can find a sequel.