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After his royal family and homeworld are betrayed, Niki Falcon (né Glyndwr) becomes a gestalt pilot. The good news is that he can directly plug into his starship and fly it with his mind; the bad news is he's now a junkie with five years before inevitable madness and death. He's at the end of that allotted time when he gets the opportunity for one last score: a dangerous passenger, deadly opposition, and a ghost from Glyndwr's past. Also, W. B. Yeats.

Falcon starts slow but gradually builds into something rich and unbearable -- and then skips ten years forward for the sake of dissolving into a generic pulp-SF mess. I don't know if I would hate the second half of the book as much as I do if it weren't for the gradual beauty of the first half. But then, it's the second half of the book that advances the central innovative idea of gestalt pilots, who shoot up regularly and love their ships and kill themselves rather than face mental disintegration. The first half of the book, in which Niki is a young and tempestuous princeling in a techno-Celtic civilization, isn't particularly exciting and wouldn't rate a novel by itself. And yet there's some great writing in the first half, and Niki's family develops effortless pathos. By contrast, the second half of the novel feels like one of those yellowing paperbacks with a neon-orange rocketship on the cover that you can still buy for a quarter. Aside from the gestalt pilots, it's straight Saturday-morning space serial. After that first half, I was hoping for something more.