A future Earth engaged in exploring and colonizing as much of the galaxy as it can reach -- and exploiting every little discovery it makes along the way -- is the backdrop for Mike Brotherton's Star Dragon. This hard SF novel features disarmingly soft technological extrapolation, portraying in detail a human race that has fully embraced the glorious (if often-squishy) potential of genetic engineering. In Brotherton's universe, clothes are grown and furnishings are furred beasts capable of adapting to an individual's every comfort requirement. Small creatures devour the dust on spaceships, whose skin absorbs stellar radiation that would otherwise endanger the crew. Moreover, Star Dragon's humans can live for centuries, redesigning their bodies as radically as imagination permits.

With so much power at their collective fingertips, humanity has created a society whose most serious limitations are posed by the pitfalls of high-speed space travel and the effects of relativity on travelers. The crew of a ship voyaging to a colony forty light years distant will experience only a few weeks in transit, but forty years will pass on that colony before the ship arrives. Returning home eighty years (and a few subjective months) later, spacefarers are subject to massive culture shock as the still-evolving biotech revolution continues to make over their homeworlds.

Researcher Sam Fisher has had enough of just that, returning to Earth to settle down after losing a total of seventy years on three scientific expeditions. No sooner has he resolved to put down roots, though, than he finds himself being courted by recruiters working on a record-setting 245-lightyear journey. An unmanned probe in the Cygni binary star system has sent back images of a creature living in the secondary star's accretion disk. To study the creature, Sam will have to turn his back on Earth for half a millennium, facing the possible death of everyone he knows and the remote chance that humans will have engineered themselves into another life form entirely before his return. But Sam's scientific curiosity, always obsessive, takes over. He must see the dragons for himself, must personally oversee the attempt to capture one and unlock its mysteries.

In Star Dragon, Brotherton pits a crew of neurotic malcontents -- the only volunteers available when the cost of the voyage is five hundred years of lost time -- against an incomprehensible new form of life. The probe's footage of the dragon raises more questions than it answers, and the humans hurtling through space toward SS Cygni have no way of knowing if it is intelligent or artificially engineered. What's more, the consequences of interfering with the dragons have been ill-considered, set aside in favor of profit-driven imperatives.

The ship, laden with enough malleable biomass for every contingency, becomes a microcosm of the society that spawned it. Isolated from home, each crew member becomes a symbol for trends moving within the greater human population. One scientist displays the irrational fear of death experienced in a culture whose life extension treatments invite individuals to believe they might become immortal. Another is a thrill-seeker, looking for long relativity jumps out of a desire to experience as much human history as she possibly can.

It is Fisher and the ship's captain, Lena Fang, though, on whom most of this symbolic freight rests. Fang is already all-but-obsolete, and her struggle to imbue meaning into her job, to truly captain a ship, reflects the broader uncertainty of a human race which is increasingly indistinguishable from its own gadgetry. Fang relies on technology while resenting her dependence. Fisher, on the other hand, trusts nobody but himself, believing that he and a few well-programmed devices are the only ones who can capture a dragon safely. The two humans form a counterpoint to the star system they are travelling to -- drawing each others' energy, sometimes achieving a balance and, at other times, exploding.

This tight definition of each character's role and story arc gives Star Dragon a pleasing ensemble-cast feel, but the gestalt comes at a cost. The characters themselves often seem more like pieces on a gameboard than individuals; even Sam and Lena are deprived of any convincing depth as they run through their paces. The author's prose style is similarly utilitarian, lending itself to straightforward storytelling in a way that sometimes holds readers at arm's length from becoming fully immersed in the story.

Star Dragon's strengths are rooted in its concept: the intriguing layers of its setting, its use of biotechnology and the suspenseful convolutions of the dragon hunt. Brotherton's first novel offers outstanding fare for any reader looking for hard science fiction combined with adventure on a truly grand scale.

A. M. Dellamonica's fiction first appeared in print in 1986 and despite repeated washings remains in circulation, most recently in Mojo: Conjure Stories and Land/Space. Three of her works can be found any time at scifi.com, and her 2002 story "A Slow Day at the Gallery" is in The Year's Best SF 8. To contact her, email alyx@sff.net.