Great surprise from this older story. Classic adventure with black hole time dilation combined with spaceship exploration.

Analog May 1982

Farrar Reinfeld lives in a habitat orbiting a black hole. He has a small spaceship and earns a living by taking “dives” close to the black hole, for research or excavation missions. The constant time shifts puts his life in a weird state, as culture and langauge change drastically around him. One day he more or less gets forced into doing a mission with someone looking for survivors on a spaceship near the black hole. The man who hires him has ulterior motives and of course things go haywire.

The plot that follows is well paced action adventure, but what I enjoyed the most was the world building and rich characterization. Reinfeld is a tragic fate with how displaced in time he is, and the setting with a habitat orbiting a black hole could easily have laid the groundwork for an expanded series of stories, but kept neatly at this nice entertaining story.

Read in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #12, ed. Terry Carr
Originally published in Analog May 1982
Rating: 4