Star Child (1997)

I thought "Silver Shoes for a Princess" originally published as a short story in 1979, was a brilliant piece. In a way about Creationism versus Evolution but not heavy-handed at all. Hogan handled the theme with charm and humor, with machine minds on a star ship splitting off into Thinker, Skeptic, Scientist and Mystic encapsulating the debate, with them having used a code in their databanks to recreate--us. That short story heads the first section of Star Child, which expands and continues the story. I found the novel disappointing, partly I suppose, because when it comes to these kinds of debates, I'm with Scientist who seemed to win the first round, while in the expanded novel Mystic takes over too much ground for my tastes. I recently read on the Wiki that in "his later years, Hogan's views tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He was a proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism... He criticised the theory of evolution, though he didn't propose theistic creationism as an alternative." I think I see both such concepts in this 1997 novel, and I found that disappointing, and the rest of the novel didn't for me have the freshness and imagination of that first section. ( )