This is an adventure SF novel from the late 60s.
The book contains some nice ideas, some good characters, and if you can overlook some clunky plotting, it’s potentially quite dramatic. What I mean is, the plot hinges on some military tactical decisions that seem unlikely at best. The portrayal of women is … interesting. The novel includes plenty of women who affect the outcome, plenty in positions of authority, plenty who are strong; and yet there’s often a sense of women as objects and still looking to men when it comes to the crunch. It’s odd.
The strength of the book is really in the desperation of the central characters. Earth is at war with the incomprehensible Jillies, who are known to have cut up live humans and who seem set on destroying humans despite there being plenty of room in the galaxy. So advanced is technology, that people who have died can be reassembled — as long as they are got into cold sleep soon enough.
So we have 3 starships, crewed by resurrected people who have been temporarily repaired, with mechanical parts replacing faces, legs, guts, whatever it was that killed them. All remember being killed, and want nothing more than to get back to Earth and get fixed up properly and forget. But then Breakaway Station is threatened. The station is a link in a communications chain that can deliver information to Earth — information about the Jillies’ home world — that might turn the war around. And the Jillies are coming for it, and there’s nobody to defend it but the 3 battered ships, crewed by the resurrected, haunted dead.
The stakes are high, the people are desperate, the odds are against them … despite its flaws, this is an entertaining book, and better-than-average space opera. (And not as dated as some books of its age.) Meredith’s career was cut short. He was still evolving as a writer at the time, and this is not a great book, but he might well have had a couple in him.
He wrote some short fiction, but to my knowledge it has never been collected. There’s a good task for some specialist publisher who can get hold of those old SF magazines!
Recommended if adventure SF is your thing
DSPACE 