WHERE WILL WE GO WHEN THE SUN DIES?

Why oh why is it necessary to bill everything as a catastrophe or a disaster, no matter how remote? Macvey is a perfectly respectable writer on astronomy with more than a few titles behind him. Here, however, the peg for information is a titillating space spectacular: where-to-go-when-disaster-threatens. . . five billion years from now! The resulting chapters deal in a perfectly respectable way with: the ho-hum news that none of our planetary neighbors is habitable; opinions on the origin of the solar system and life on earth; the possibility that a tenth planet lurks beyond Pluto (degraded to an icy ball); and conjectures concerning a planet or two circling our second nearest astral neighbor, Barnard's Star. Then the horizons widen, and Macvey considers havens for the Earth-doomed in planetary systems that might exist in association with either the odd single star or with multiple star systems in this galaxy or the next. He even discusses, in a light-hearted vein, what kind of spaceships could take us from here to there. Much of this is the everyday stuff of current futurist or catastrophe works. Much could also have benefited from tighter editing: ""It is now coming into the realms of possibility that. . ."" and other space-occupying syllables leaden the text. On the other hand, there is the occasional sharp analogy: the chances of stars colliding, we are told, are as remote as the possibility of any two of three tennis balls hitting each other if dropped into the ocean from widely scattered shores. So, read if you hanker after a contemporary summing up of the life and death of stars and people, but expect no scintillations in style or content.