A Different Light, by Elizabeth Lynn

[rachelmanija]

In a future world, cancer has been all but eradicated. Jimson Alleca can live another 20 years with drugs and a peaceful lifestyle -- if he stays in space-normal. But he's willing to risk it all to make the jump into the Hype, the shimmering "not space" for one year among the stars.I have a huge thing for choosing a short time of glory over a long

Comments

[nojay]

The Japanese manga "Planetes" has the idea that space will kill you if you live there and work there long enough. Accidents are common, the environment is unforgiving and radiation-induced cancer is a regular killer of people in middle-age, never mind the psychopathic von-Braun analogue character who is quite willing to murder thousands of people to take one step further out. People still leave safe benign Earth to take that step.

Going a lot further back there's manned space travel in Heinlein's "Green Hills of Earth" which in its early days is fraught with danger but has no lack of people willing to accept the risks.

"Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the two hundredth floor of Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing."

[sovay]

Does anyone know of any more books with that premise? Especially if they actually write it the way it sounds like.

I feel as though I have encountered some, but I'm only coming up with not-quites.

Outer space is dangerous to lethal in several of Cordwainer Smith's short stories, but I don't recall a full death-or-glory tradeoff in any of them; "Scanners Live in Vain" presumes voluntary body modification to the point of inhumanity in order to allow pilots and their supervisors to withstand "the Great Pain of Space" without the insulation of cryosleep and the solar sailing of "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" requires similar far-future modification, although for different in-story reasons. (The latter story also contains a weird anti-feminist caricature in the same narrative as a heroic woman doing something-out of choice and interest, not duty or necessity-that no woman has ever done before. I'm not sure what happened there.)

In the Demarchy of Joan D. Vinge's Heaven Chronicles-Legacy (1980) and The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978)-

[cat_i_th_adage]

I still liked Light for the way it kept coming back to art, to the creation of art, to the choices one might make in the creation of art.

But yes, Russ was a bag of dicks.