The novel “Stardance” by Spider and Jeanne Robinson was published for the first time in 1979.

Shara Drummond wanted be a dancer. She’s very talented but dancers must be petite and thin and Shara is neither. Her dream seems vanished, instead she decides to create the Stardance, a new form of dance in weightlessness and truly three-dimensional.

In order to develop her idea, Shara does everything to be able to work on a space station. There, the microgravity allows her to try movements totally impossible on Earth. However, her prolonged efforts in that environment cause serious risks to her health but they become unimportant when aliens are spotted.

Originally, “Stardance” was a novella published in 1977 in the magazine “Analog”. It was very successful and won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards and in 1978 Spider and Jeanne Robinson published its serialized sequels, again in “Analog”. In 1979 the original novella and its sequels were gathered together to form a novel.

In the novella, Shara Drummond develops the Stardance, a form of dance that exploits the absence of gravity to be fully three-dimensional. Her adventure intersects with that of Charlie Armstead, a former dancer whose career was interrupted by a gun shot and tells the story in the first person.

In order to implement her Stardance, Shara turns to billionaire Bryce Carrington, who manges the Skyfac space station. She’s willing to do anything to achieve her dream, even to risk her health staying for a long time in the absence of gravity.

Spider and Jeanne Robinson started the story when space stations were a very experimental concept. The Soviets launched their Salyut 1 in 1971 and the Americans launched their Skylab in 1973 so the long-term effects of the basence of gravity on the human body weren’t yet well known.

From this point of view, “Stardance” is a bit dated but if you suspend your disbelief you can enjoy a truly amazing story. Jeanne Robinson was a choreographer and a dancer and helped to give the story a unique artistic dimension. It can be appreciated also by people like me who don’t understand anything about dance.

The original novella is the story of Shara’s attempt to fulfill her dream going over every difficulty. It becomes something more thanks to the contact with a group of aliens who arrive in the solar system. The theme of the dance as a form of communication becomes central coming to a conclusion that is sublime and emotional in many different ways.

The following parts that make up the novel expand certain basic concepts of the original story. The discovery of aliens has changed many things but there are still many political differences between the various nations of the Earth. From this point of view, the novel is again a bit dated but in my opinion this doesn’t detract from the plot.

You can note the difference between the novella and the subsequent parts but also the continuity and not just because the story keeps on being told in the first person by Charlie. The political elements become much more important because the great powers get involved in the new contacts with the aliens but dance remains a central theme.

The novella has a reduced amount of protagonists, in the subsequent parts there are several important characters including the representatives of the great world powers. This also makes the relationships more complex, also because there are people who have their own agenda and carry out the their nation’s agenda. That means that there are both personal relationships and power plays.

The novella is very intense, the other parts that make up the novel become more cerebral. It’s not an action story in the ordinary sense but the pace tends to be the fast anyway, especially in the first part. Although it’s narrated in the first person, there are various well developed characters.

When short fiction is turned into a novel it’s inevitable to compare the different versions, especially when the short ones gets other parts added to make the story longer. The novella is really amazing but I think the other parts are still very good. For this reason, I suggest you to read the long version of “Stardance”.