Inconstant Star (book)

     Poul Anderson Inconstant Star (1991) A space opera in two parts. Robert and Dorcas Saxtorph have managed to buy a hyperdrive ship, and are hired to fly to a dull red star. There, they discover a Kzin base, which they eventually destroy. In the second novella, they are hired to search for an anomaly that a Wunderlander may have helped some Kzin to find. They find it and the man (who is flying in a sub-light ship), and have a brief encounter with a Kzin ship, which they destroy.
     These stories have the few virtues and many vices of their genre: plots well constructed, characters wooden, politics simplistic (to put it charitably), social milieu marked by adolescent fantasies of willing females and unbelievable fighting skills, relationship problems treated with laughable solemnity and minimal insight, and so on. Anderson usually does much better than this. I guess he wrote these to put bread on the table. Or maybe it's an unpublished early work refurbished for a quick sale.* (2000)