Mindflight

Mindflight is Stephen Goldin's 1978 SF novel, the first of his loose Mindflight universe. The protagonist is Sho Tepper, a starship pilot whose neural interface with the ship is the reason he can fly the impossibly fast Sho-class vessels and the reason his colleagues keep dying or breaking down. The novel follows him through one mission that turns out to be impossible.

Goldin writes the hard-SF procedural with NASA-contractor-era care (he worked at NASA before turning to full-time fiction). The neural-interface speculative biology is rigorously developed before the action escalates. The Sho-class ship is one of the more carefully imagined SF vessels of its era. The character work is competent rather than rich; Sho Tepper is more a function of the plot than a fully realized protagonist. The conclusion earns its emotional weight.

Recommended for fans of 1970s hard SF (Frederik Pohl's Gateway, Larry Niven's Ringworld), and for readers looking for books like Mindflight in the neural-interface-as-burden subgenre. Three solid stars.