Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, published in 1970, is a landmark of hard SF which pushes out far further, beyond the Milky Way and into the frightening emptiness of intergalactic space. It also deals memorably with time dilation, and a vast spain of eons.
Significantly, Anderson does all of this in a scientifically convincing way, with a plot strongly grounded in his understanding of phyics at the time. This episode takes a close look at the novel, and the reasons why it remains a classic of its type over 50 years later.
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