Firestar is not Michael Flynn’s best book, but its defects are defects of ambition. In The Country of the Blind, his first novel, was sharply focused, both as a narrative and in theme. Firestar attempts a greater breadth of vision and is sometimes awkward in handling it. Nonetheless, it was a captivating reading, with moments of real intensity.

Flynn's setting is our world in the very near future, 1999, 2000, and 2007. Three plot threads provide contrasting views of that setting: a group of pilots recruited for a private space venture based in Brazil; a group of students attending a New Jersey public school, Witherspoon High School, whose management has been subcontracted to a corporate venture; the corporate and personal struggles of Mariesa van Huyten, heiress of a vast fortune and sponsor of the other two ventures.

Interspersed are short chapters of montage in the style of Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, perhaps the most memorable of which are "Some Things That Can Happen to You," showing various forms of governmental harassment of van Huyten-owned enterprises, and "News Break," in which a series of videotaped reaction shots are edited for broadcast and in the process every statement that might produce a favorable impression of van Huyten's venture is deleted.

Of the three plots, the spaceflight one is actually the least interesting, too much of it centers on the personalities of the pilots, especially their personal flaws. Flynn seems hesitant to believe that raw engineering can be dramatic; having spent most of Apollo 13 on the edge of my seat, I don't agree. In showing that Mariesa van Huyten's motive for sponsoring a private space venture is obsession with the danger of an asteroidal impact on the Earth, Flynn further undercuts the sense that space exploration and development have any inherent worth as human ventures.

Conversely, the human elements work extremely well in the educational plot, which tracks about a dozen students from high school into adult life. A particularly clever sequence has three black gang members chanting lines from "Horatius," which they have heard in school and whose story strikes them as clearly analogous to the dangers of their own lives. Flynn shows remarkable dramatic skill in bringing those lines back at the book's climax, in a very different context but in the mind of one of the same characters.

The theme of this story seems to be the need for inspiration in the lives of the young, and Flynn makes it persuasive that his young characters are inspired in various ways by their unorthodox education. Unfortunately, we are shown little of the actual process of education that achieves this.

Tying these two plots together is Mariesa van Huyten, heir to one of the largest industrial fortunes in the United States. Her characterization is "realistic," meaning that it emphasizes her flaws and contradictions—perhaps not the best choice for a work intended as an epic. Flynn might have done better to reread Macauley, or Kipling and emulate their techniques of characterization, if he was aiming at romantic or tragic heroism.

Mariesa's unhappy marriage to a teacher from Witherspoon High School and her complete non-communication with her mother establish that she is as awkward in emotional matters as she is brilliant in intellect and entrepreneurship; but the point could have been made more economically and without trivializing her or so much of the novel. Perhaps Flynn is trying to attract readers who want a "human" story—but such readers would presumably be assuming that marital problems are human but business, science, and education are not, which is diametrically opposed to Flynn's own theme.

On the other hand, a strength of Flynn's novel is that its conflicts do take place among the sympathetic characters. Even the closest thing it has to a villain, the environmental activist Phil Albright, is carefully shown to be honest and intellectually sophisticated, able to see some virtue in Mariessa van Huyten’s and her projects. Ayn Rand used to say that the real conflicts in her novels were between the heroes because it was the heroes who were efficacious. Flynn seems to follow the same principle, to good effect. Perhaps the best application of this strategy is the honest relationship between Mariessa van Huyten and Styx, a young poet who turns against Mariessa after learning that her support is motivated partly by the thought that Styx may become an artistic voice for Mariessa’s visions — in this case Flynn dramatizes the relationship between Mariessa’s achievements and flaws compactly and effectively.

Firestar, then, is an uneven work, not so much because its scope is too large — Flynn does far better at integrating his disparate plotlines than many award-winning novelists—but because it doesn’t sufficiently trust its own scope. A story of this magnitude needs larger characters to carry it. But it’s still worth reading for the ideas, the clever turns of plot, characterization and phrasing, and above all for the spirit it conveys.

At the climactic sequence in Macedonia, Flynn weaves together multiple lines of causality in a brilliant convergent sequence, one in which the moral choices of many previously introduced characters were essential to the action, and to showing how they had been influenced by their education in earlier chapters, making this one of the best climaxes I’ve seen in recent fiction and a sufficient justification for reading Firestar. Despite its unevenness, it will be strong competition for the other nominees for 1997’s Prometheus Award.