Vinge is at her best evoking the decadent world of Heaven Belt but her attempts to create convincing characters/motivations/tension is less sophisticated. Instead, this conflict provides a suitable world-building backdrop for a traditional space opera - a bedraggled but technologically sophisticated spaceship beset by numerous factions which wish to take it by force. Although the often less than amicable conflict between the egalitarian society with powerful women and the male-focused pioneer cultures could be the focus of the novel, Vinge is less interested in exploring the social ramifications (à la Le Guin and other works of the previous decade - the 1960s). Vinge creates a resourceful female captain of a powerful but weaponless spaceship who finds herself beset–with only a depleted crew–by a series of challenges in the decadent, grasping, and fractured pioneer societies of Heaven Belt. He is famous for his depictions of resourceful women in California pioneer settlements. Vinge’s first novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978), is an homage to The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869) by the turn of the century western writer and poet Bret Harte. (Vincent Di Fate’s cover for the 1978 edition)
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