Back in 1980 or so I joined the Science Fiction Book Club, I just googled them, I see they're still around. One of the books that I got was Time Storm by Gordon Dickson. I really liked that book and I picked up a few more of his books. One day I started reading Tactics of Mistake and wow! It was awesome. It turned out there were more books in that series, such as Dorsai!, Young Bleys and The Final Encyclopedia. Also Fantastic. I have to put The Childe Cycle series up there with Dune, Foundation and the Ender books. Dickson can do humor, too. Case in point The Dragon and the George.

Arcturus Landing starts off promising enough, introducing us to Malcolm Fletcher and gives us the setting, by a little episode he has with his [gravity] belt failing and he was only saved because of the building's force shield. He's a scientist and he's working on a faster than light drive. Humans had started sending ships beyond their own solar system, only to run into alien races that shoo us back into our own solar system.

The galactic committee gets together and decides that humans will need to be quarantined in our own solar system until humanity grows up unless we can prove ourselves by created an FTL drive.

Mal requests equipment from his company, and gets called into the headquarters. They tell him request denied, that, you're on the wrong path, it's been tried before, we're saving you the heartache of failure.

From there it's sort of a romp. He runs into a couple of people there, they tell him that the company is trying to supress FTL to keep the status quo, they meet a sympathetic alien, the four of them steal a spaceship and go to Venus. They set up a lab there, and he tries to get a working FTL.

If you have this one, go ahead and read it, but if you're looking for a Dickson book, go with any of the books I mentioned earlier.