Neverness

Really interesting world building. In fact, some of the most intriguing world building I've read since probably Hyperion. I do think some of the world building devolves into listing things a bit too often. Things that don't every really get explained and are just there to make you think the world is complex. Like he will list 14 names of pilots that did important stuff but you only learn about one of them. Or will list 10 different castes/classes/jobs (whatever they are called in universe) with no explanation of what 8 of them are. Some amount of this can be very effective. It adds mystery. But the author overdoes it a bit. Even late in the book you will see lists of heretofore unmentioned things with little bearing on the storing. I really liked the piloting parts. Really unique idea. The main character is often annoying and arrogant, but intentionally so. We are supposed to be frustrated by him. The caveman part was OK, but was a bit too long. Overall, very enjoyable but could do with some editing and maybe 100 fewer pages.

I found my copy of Neverness at a church bring-and-buy sale around 1993. I don't remember if it was the cover that caught my eye or if the person selling their books (for mere pennies towards the church roof) persuaded me to buy it. What I do remember it that I LOVED it, I read it and reread it from the age of 15 till the end of my teens. I remember pleading with my friends to read it but they never managed to make it through the 600+ pages. They didn't get the beauty of mathematics and become obsessed with the poetry of Blake. In my whole lifetime I have met only one other who has read and loved this book.
At 16 I wrote a letter to David Zindell (never sent and now lost) crying out my praises. I wrote my own sci-fi stories (terrible, plagiarised and thankfully also lost) inspired by his words and worlds. This was my favourite book, of then but of all time?
It's been over 20 years since I last read Neverness and nearly 25 years since I first read it. I was wary to pick up the old pages and return there, would I still feel as much as I did then (for, like many a teen-ager, I felt too much)? Had I changed too much to fall through the stars with Mallory and return to the Devaki?
I need not have feared. This is still my favourite book. Perhaps I have become cruel and callous as in the past the pages had choked me to tears but over these few days I barely sniffed. But I still felt, I was there among them all yet again, careening across the ice or floating in the belly of their lightships. I understood so much more, words that I had assumed were alien invention suddenly had new meaning when I saw their roots (although I had a dictionary by my bed when I read as a teen it was puny in comparison to Zindell's vocabulary and there was no Google to quickly check a word or fact).
I cannot describe this book, what it meant to me or why I still love it. All I can do is implore you to read it, to give yourselves up to it and let it open your mind to the universe.

“What good is a warrior without a war, a poet without a poem”.