Liking Hugh Valland

We have almost finished rereading World Without Stars. Most of what remains is just how the good guys beat the bad guys although the concluding chapter is very different: the quiet Earth followed by the big reveal right at the end of the last page.

I had remembered this novel as presenting a distinctive fictional future of the antithanatic and the instantaneous intergalactic space jumps but what I have discovered on the current rereading is the likeableness of the character, Hugh Valland. No one in real life has three thousand years in which to become tougher and smarter than they already were but it is possible to meet potential Hugh Vallands and it is also possible, having espoused a cause, to learn by experience that some of your fellow campaigners are thoroughly good, intelligent and even wise. Faith in a cause can be partly faith, or trust, in some of its proponents. Of course, causes differ, to say the least. However, Valland's cause is simply to return to Earth and that at least is uncontroversial.