The Shadow of the Ship

By Robert Wilfred Franson

Del Rey / Ballantine, 1983. Paperback original novel, first edition. Nominated for the Prometheus Award (Best Libertarian SF Novel). This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345306880
• ISBN13: 9780345306883
• Release Date: April 1983
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of the Best SF Novels I Have Ever Read

Like other reviewers here this has become one of the few SF novels that I have read repeatedly and hope to do so again. Also like other reviewers I have looked for years for anything else by Robert Franson and come up completely empty. How could someone write a novel this supurb but nothing else. The backstory seems to suggest that this is a sequal to the tale of the protagonist and catlike companion's stranding in this (to them) much more primitive region of subspace yet if there was ever even a short story I've not been able to find it. If Franson is no longer then I wish one or more of our current authors would acquire the rights to this "universe" and write more stories of it. There is so much material in this one novel that cries out for this so much!

Original and Awesome

Agree with the other reviewer. This was an awesome effort, and I too have looked in vain for other work by this author

Haunting and totally original and yet totally "hard" SF

I've re-read this novel several times over the years. The prose is dense yet beautifully written - I seem to uncover something new each time I read it. It's true Science Fiction - you get glimpses of a future world that's better and very different from our own and not simply populated with 1980s technology and 1990s characters wearing jackets with no collars like most of the current generation of TV crap.. For years I've routinely checked the "F" sections of bookstores to see if Franson has written anything else, with no luck. Now courtesy of the internet, I know he hasn't. I wonder what happened to him. His author credits indicate he was a software consultant, but an internet search turns up nothing