Tau Zero
Poul Anderson · 1970
A Bussard ramjet malfunctions and begins accelerating continuously. The crew must live through the entire future of the universe. Anderson's hard-SF novel is the most rigorous exploration of relativistic time dilation ever written, and the most existentially terrifying thought experiment of 1970s SF.
The case against
Anderson's physics is rigorous; his people are plywood. Crew psychology gets managed through stiff speeches and a sexual economy straight out of 1970, with the constable steadying morale by reassigning bed partners. And the ending bets everything on a cyclic universe the crew can outride, cosmology that was shaky then and is dead now. Magnificent premise, crewed by mannequins.
Science Fiction & Fantasy · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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