[Tau Zero] is the ultimate "hard science-fiction" novel. Everybody else who has been trying to write this kind of thing can now fold up his tent and creep silently away.

The scientific problem is deceptively simple: What happens when an interstellar vessel, accelerating at a steady one gravity, is damaged in such a way that it can't stop doing so?…

The eventual consequences of this seemingly modest and constricting set of assumptions are so staggering as to make the inter-galactic epic of E. E. Smith, Ph.D. (who made up all his "science") seem in retrospect like a trip with mommy to the corner grocer. (p. 14)

[Anderson's book is mind-boggling because when you finish it you realize that:] It is almost all completely possible. Only at the very end does the author pull a rabbit out of his hat, and it seems like a rabbit only because of...