Couldn't find the cover image that was on the edition I read. This one's infinitely cheesier. That being said, it was an extremely cheesy book. The cover image doesn't do it much of an injustice. The premise is that there are levels of hyperspace where the speed of light is much slower than it is in our normal space. The eponymous space ship, the Redshift, travels at a level of hyperspace where the speed of light is something like ten miles per hour, so if you sprint you can exceed it. This slightly improbable but extremely entertaining premise makes for a pretty fun read... but only as long as the story is actually taking place on the ship. Once the speed of light gets back to normal, the story drops off quite a lot. Weird cults, clumsy psychologizing, and predictable romance just can't compete with cool science effects.For anyone who's studied special relativity, it's an especially fun thought experiment (just skim the on-the-planet part). While reading I was constantly reminded of my dad's physics exams. (My dad is a now-retired physics professor.) To make the math more manageable, he used to set the speed of light at 100 mph, and Lincoln Continentals equipped with stopwatches figured "large" in many of the problems. I'm not sure whether the author of Redshift, Stith, accounts adequately for mass increase, or whether he just left it out for convenience's sake. A good question for dad next time I see him!!
