A review by outcolder
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl

3.0

I love the space opera stuff but the heavy breathing sexuality wore on me pretty quickly. That everyone is so horny might be a welcome change after the celibate golden age but I felt like it was slowing the space adventure stuff down. Also, some stuff that was probably progressive in 1980 seems a bit not P.C. now, maybe. Other 1980-isms, like 'bubble memory' and videotape and the idea that by now-ish the rich would live in reasonably good health for an absurdly long time, are fun. I love expired science fiction and it is always interesting to me when a story has, like this one, holographic, anthropomorphic AIs that can speculate but cameras still store video on tape. It is more challenging to write SF that takes place in the next half-century or so than far future or low-tech dystopia because you don't have to try to get the science "right." One of the cool things about Pohl is that he takes a page or two to explain how the alien FTL ships work. If you leave that stuff unexplained or make up some mumbojumbo one sentence excuse, that's cool, but Pohl belongs to what the nerds call "hard-SF" which means that you can read it and pretend that it really was scientific. So that's also fun, if you are into that sort of thing.