Science Fiction Matters— An engaging variant of a classic trope.

Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

This is a well-done reworking of a classic science fiction trope. The nice thing about the book is that it doesn’t settle for the usual approach but offers something different than what I’ve seen in other books of this sub-genre.

The generation ship has been traveling to the planet Promissa for 300 years. It is about three months from arriving in the Promissa system. The preliminary indications are looking good. The atmosphere of the planet is perfect for human life. However, there is a pesky problem that none of the orbits can land on the planet.

However, this mystery is put on the back burner as people realize that it is no longer necessary to cap the population at 18,000 by liquidating people on their 75th birthday. The political pressure of near success is causing the human social system to become disordered.

The story is novel because of these two factors. Most generation ship stories occur mid-flight, when the passengers of the ship have lost all sense of what they are doing. Often, they don’t even know that they are on a ship. Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky is the classic and model of the genre. In orphans, the population is divided into crew and “muties” — short for mutineers. No one remembers that they are on a generation ship. The discovery that they are about to collide with the sun they have been aiming for moves the story.

In this book, the political issues about demanding relief from a necessarily oppressive social system and the need to keep things together until the mission is truly complete move the story. The book follows a half dozen characters on the various sides of the controversy. By and large, all of the characters are empathetic, even though they are opposed to each other, and even though some, like the governor, are extremely manipulative.

The author, Michael Mammay, asks what it would be like if people reached their goals after so long.

The actual completion of the mission is an anti-climax. It turns out that there is a reason for the problem with the probes, and it changes everything about the possibility of colonization of the planet. I found the author’s resolution to be unsatisfying, although under the circumstances, it may have been the only course open. I find it hard to believe that people would give up the dream of their fathers quite so easily.

Nonetheless, apart from that, the idea of showing us the end of a generations-long mission from the perspective of people living through the last months of the project is a great idea. Mammay’s writing is solid, and, as I’ve said, the characters were well drawn.