Icarus at the Edge of Time is a fairly standard sci-fi short story; it reminds me of one I read a few decades ago -- I forget the author -- in which a crusty old starship captain goes to space and, because of the time dilation involved in moving at such speeds, he arrives home when his young son is now only a distant memory, honored for the very pacifistic tendencies the captain once disdained.

In Icarus, by Brian Greene, the title character is a brilliant teenager traveling on the Proxima, a generation ship, to contact extraterrestrial life. His great-grandfather had volunteered for the original mission, and Icarus's descendants will finish it. Meanwhile, Icarus is condemned to a lifetime of monotonous space travel, and he longs for more.

When the ship approaches a black hole -- something that has never yet been explored -- Icarus ignores his father's warnings and launches a one-man vessel to skirt the edges and return ... but he forgot to take into account the way black holes bend time. When he emerges -- only an hour later by his estimation -- the Proxima's lonely route is now a space highway, and the Proxima has been rust for thousands of years.

It's a pretty good story, but I'm not sure it alone warrants an entire book. It is a mere 34 pages, and each two-page spread holds only a few words or sentences. It was published as a board book -- with thick cardboard pages -- to show off the illustrations. There are 15 of them, all photographs taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a large black dot grows and shrinks in the center to show readers that Icarus is approaching, then leaving, the black hole. (Sadly, the only purpose served by the dot is to block a portion of the photos, which would be gorgeous if not obscured.)

Greene is a professor of mathematics and physics, and he has written nonfiction on the subject of the cosmos, so I can't quibble with the science. If he says a black hole would bend time, I believe him. And I enjoyed the story, which took only a few minutes to read, but I can't imagine I'll ever want to read it again. So I guess I'll pass the book on to someone who doesn't mind a very large book containing a very short story taking up valuable shelf space.