"Fifth Planet" by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle

I just read "Fifth Planet" (1963) by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle.  In brief, you don't need to read it.  It contains nothing terribly interesting nor thought-provoking which you can't find elsewhere in better quality.

Back in the 1980s, the cool lady who lived next door moved out, and she gave me a big box full of old sci-fi novels.  I am still reading through these old paperbacks.

One of them is "Fifth Planet."  I was going on a plane trip, so I read this old paperback to fend off boredom. 

When you read old sci-fi stories (or watch old sci-fi movies), you have to make allowances for the unreality of the science, or else you will be an insufferable prick, complaining about every nitpicky detail, and ruining it for everyone else.  Basically, in order to enjoy the story (e.g. people travelling in space), you have to overlook all kinds of science details (e.g. inefficiency of chemical rockets, relativistic velocity limitations and effects, spacecraft interiors are necessarily cramped, etc.). 

If you do decide to explain all the nitpicky science details, you will wind up with a very tedious story.  Similarly, I don't care how the guts of my car work, I only care that it still runs and takes me where I want to go.  Similarly, just as a spaceship is a real vehicle, in a story it is a literary vehicle: as a reader, I don't care how it works, I only care that it gets spacemen from point A to point B; if it breaks in some way, that failure should serve the plot somehow.

You might think that I am simply a dolt, that I'm bored by science, or that I'm just spouting off idiotically.  However, the playwright Anton Chekhov has detailed this sentiment with his rule, known as "Chekhov's Gun": if you have a story wherein you mention that there is a gun in the room, you need to have that gun go off in the next 2 chapters or so; otherwise, the gun in the room is irrelevant and you should eliminate it from your story. 

Fred Hoyle is apparently a knighted British astrophysicist.  In his novel about space travel and policy in 2087, he has decided not to spare you the technological detail.  Seriously, there are approximately 6 pages of engineers standing around debating how the rocket should work.  Worse, the entire rocket is fictional; you will never need to know how this rocket works in real life, buy Hoyle tells you anyway.

The Hoyles also give loads of other details the reader does not need to know, including the color patterns of a plush toy donkey.  "You can put your pajamas in it."  The donkey is irrelevant.  The whole donkey scene is irrelevant. 

In fact, the whole first 100 pages of this almost-200-page novel are irrelevant.  You really don't need to know how the rocket works.  The author is either trying to impress you that he knows about science and engineering; or that he thinks you will be amazed by the possibility that humans might build interstellar rockets, and that you have boundless curiosity about every detail.  I suspect that the truth is worse: Hoyle had an idea about how to make a rocket, and he couldn't resist telling you about it for 6 pages.  Hoyle details characters who later die in ways which are irrelevant to the nature of their personalities.  Hoyle spends several pages making a point using an electrical switch that a Soviet cosmonaut is going insane.  This goes nowhere.

Once you get past that first 100 pages, the whole thing becomes kind of a "Twilight Zone"/"One Step Beyond" mind-bender which is quite interesting; it's kind of like breaking the sound barrier in that the flying is rough until you actually get past Mach 1.

Regardless, you don't really need to read any part of the novel at all.  At best, it's a comment about the Cold War, which ended less than 30 years after the novel was written. 

The most interesting part of the novel, for me, was that the US was depicted as having an interstate high-speed rail network, using which an astronaut sleeps with his girlfriend in New York City the night before his big rocket launch in Florida.  (Either it's high-speed rail, or Hoyle has underestimated this 1100-mile commute.)  Unfortunately, Hoyle decided to gloss over the details of that awesome rail network.  Europe has had high-speed rail for years and we should have it now, but certain Republican state Governors are determined to keep their states "flyover states" and relegate a sane American transportation policy to the world of science fiction.