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''Tau Zero'' is a hard science fiction novel by Poul Anderson. The novel was based upon the short story "To Outlive Eternity" appearing in ''Galaxy Science Fiction'' in 1967. It was first published in book form in 1970. The book is regarded as a quintessential example of "hard sci-fi", as its plot is guided by technology until the dramatic conclusion. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1971.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Science Fiction & Fantasy Books by Award: 1971 Award Winners & Nominees )〕 ==Plot== ''Tau Zero'' follows the crew of the starship ''Leonora Christine'', a colonization vessel crewed by 25 men and 25 women aiming to reach a distant star system. The ship is powered by a Bussard ramjet, which was proposed 10 years before Anderson wrote the book. This engine is not capable of faster-than-light travel, and so the voyage is subject to relativity and time dilation: the crew will spend 5 years on board, but 33 years will pass on the Earth before they arrive at their destination. The ship accelerates during the first half of the journey and decelerates during the second. However, it flies through a nebula before the half-way point, damaging the deceleration module. Since the engines must be kept running to provide particle/radiation shielding, and because of the hard radiation produced by the engines, the crew can neither repair the decelerator nor turn off the accelerator. The text consists of narrative prose interspersed with paragraphs in which Anderson explains the scientific basis of relativity, time dilation, the ship's mechanics and details of the cosmos outside. As there is no hope of completing the original mission, the crew increase acceleration even more; they need to leave the Milky Way altogether in order to reach a region where the local gas density, and the concomitant radiation hazard, are low enough that they can repair the decelerator. The ship's ever-increasing velocity brings the time dilation to extreme levels and takes the crew further and further away from any possibility of contact with humanity. The initial plan is to locate and land on a suitable planet in another galaxy. Millions of years would have passed since their departure, and in any case they would be millions of light years from Earth. However, they find the vacuum of intergalactic space insufficient for safety; they must instead travel to a region between superclusters of galaxies to make repairs. They do, but the extremely thinly spread matter is then too dispersed to use for deceleration. They must wait, flying free but essentially without the ability to change course, until they randomly encounter enough galactic matter to try to decelerate enough to search for habitable planets. To make the waiting time shorter, they continue accelerating through the first several galaxies they encounter, more and more closely approaching the speed of light with tau, or proper time, decreasing closer and closer to zero. Throughout the story, Charles Reymont, the ship's Constable, fights to keep hope alive in the confined community and at the same time maintain order and discipline, sometimes at great emotional cost to himself. He explains his system to his partner Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling: "The human animal wants a father-mother image but, at the same time, resents being disciplined. You can get stability like this: The ultimate authority source is kept remote, god-like, practically unapproachable. Your immediate superior is a mean son-of-a-bitch who makes you toe the mark and whom you therefore detest. But his own superior is as kind and sympathetic as rank allows ... The end result is that Captain Telander's been isolated. His infallibility doesn't have to cope with essentially unfixable human messes ... I'm the traditional top sergeant. Hard, harsh, demanding, overbearing, inconsiderate, brutal. Not so bad as to start a petition for my removal. But enough to irritate, be disliked, although respected. That's good for the troops. It's healthier to be mad at me than to dwell on personal woes... (Officer ) Lindgren smooths things out. As first officer, she sustains my power. But she overrules me from time to time. She exercises her rank to bend regulations in favor of mercy. Therefore she adds benignity to the attributes of Ultimate Authority." ''(Chapter 12)'' The storyline is similar to that of the long poem and later opera ''Aniara'', in which the ship was unable to stop and doomed to travel endlessly, but ''Tau Zero'' has a more upbeat ending (albeit one that does not conform to modern thinking on the evolution of the universe).〔Accelerating universe〕 By the time the ship is repaired, tau has decreased to less than a billionth and the crew experience "billion-year cycles which passed as moments". But by the time that they are ready to attempt to find a future home, they realize that the universe is approaching a big crunch. The universe collapses (a process the starship survives because there is still enough uncondensed hydrogen for maneuvering, outside the monobloc) and then explodes in a new big bang. The voyagers then decelerate, examining potential star systems. They eventually disembark at a planet with a habitat suitably similar to Earth, on which the vegetation has a vivid bluish-green color. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tau Zero」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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