Reviews for Port Eternity

The average rating for Port Eternity based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-11 00:00:00 Richard Carey The Lady Dela Kirn is a fabulously wealthy citizen within the future world where humans have spread to the stars using FTL drives. She owns a magnificent star ship, the Maid of Astolat beautiful and anachronistic. Because the lady Delas liked ancient fiction, and the terrific, sad romances of the Kind Arthur type were her favourites. The Main of Astolat is decked out in swords and banners and has a feast hall. Lady Dela went further than naming just the ship; most of her servants, pilots and waiting staff are not 'born men' they are manufactured and Lady Dela has given them names from the romances she loves. Thus we have our narrator Elaine, who is Lady Dela's maid, we have Lancelot and Vivian, Modred and Percival all of them conditioned to know only what they needed to serve Dela. None of them knowing anything about the source of their names, except Elaine who has a habit of sneaking total immersion tapes from the library and knows the Arthurian tales. Now, Dela has taken a new lover, Griffin, and they are off for a star cruise, but a wandering instability sucks them through, they are trapped unable to return to their own space, forced to rest against a wreckage of earlier ships sucked through, and something is trying to get in... In this tense scenario, the tape that Elaine knows and which led to a massive crisis of identity for her, is accidentally used by all the other 'made-men' on board. Will they stay true to their programmed natures or will they lapse into the roles that their namesakes in the old drama played out? This classic science fiction by an author I always loved was one of the most beloved of my sci-fi books as a teenager. Sadly, which the characters and the cover art were embedded in my mind, I could never remember the title, so it has taken me many long years to find it again. I love it as much on re-reading, decades later, as I did as an 11 year old. PS. I know many people would argue this is not science fiction, that it is 'space-opera'. I do not disagree with them, they are probably quite correct, there is not a lot of hard science, it is mostly character based fiction and social commentary. Still. I am option out of the salami slicing that is the sci-fi VS space-opera VS Fiction debate. I am done, I just don't care. If it was published as sci-fi (back in 1982) and I rist read it as sci-fi (around the same time it was published) then I am calling it sci-fi because going back and rewriting history is just too tedious for me. End rant.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-24 00:00:00 Sandy Page This book is right on the edge of greatness. At it's heart, it's a bunch of partial characters - a rich woman with an overwrought fantasy life, her clone servants and their programmed personalities, and the enigmatic new lover - trapped in a maddening pocket dimension. There are parts where the characters start to break apart, slowly going insane, and you realize they weren't whole to begin with, and maybe the narrator is unreliable. Those parts are cool. Parts of it, where it's a simple retelling of Arthurian myths in space, are less compelling. Unfortunately, it ends on the latter note. It very much feels like a missed opportunity.