Starhiker

Starhiker is ostensibly a straight- forward adventure story, but what begins as external action from the floating city of The Fragrant Cloud to the land of the Tfeligen be- comes an internal landscape in which Bo, a wandering minstrel from earth, must travel. The time is thousands of years in the futurę when the earth is a backwater planet ruled by a race of benevo- lent despots called the Hrau. Our solar system is only a minor inter- stellar relay stop controlled by the Hrau. However, Bo's vivid imagi- nation is a powerful weapon against the Hrau's restrictions as he secretly roams from colony to colony seeking truth and the company of kindred spirits. The blind pursuit of an impossible destiny leads him just to the other side of his dreams. Starhiker depicts the wrench- ing strangeness of real contact with the unfamiliar—it comes to grips with what it might feel like to contact truły alien peoples and be involved in unfamiliar situations. * This work was first published in somewhat different form in the June 1976 issue of Amazing under the title "Starhiker" and in the September 1976 issue of Amazing under the title "The Dream Lion." [Cover] designed by Eve Callahan