Generation Ships

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Image from The Starlost fansite

By Ray Tabler

I just finished reading Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji, a hard science fiction novel set on a generation ship coasting its merry way to Tau Ceti. I didn’t realize before I started that it’s a YA book. Which I usually avoid, being only twelve mentally, not chronologically. Pleasantly surprised that Braking day is a gripping, enjoyable read all the same. I highly recommend.

A mixed blessing of reading a lot of science fiction is the inevitable comparison between novels of similar setting and/or plot. Braking Day measures up pretty well, in my humble opinion. Beyond that, though, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of generation ship literature. And could not help but marvel at the variety of themes and twists writers have wrung from the concept.

Of course, I haven’t read all, or even most, of the generation ship literature available. Whatever glimmers of insight contained herein are greatly aided by others who have looked into the matter more deeply. I’ll put links to some of their works at the end (or in the comments, if you’re reading this on FaceBook).

· Size – Generation ships are probably going to be BIG. A journey to even the nearest star will take decades, even traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The crew will age, and die along the way. So, they’ll need to have kids in transit. Those kids will most likely repeat the process. And so on, until the end of the journey. A large population is called for, to prevent inbreeding, and to provide a ready stock of colonists to tame the (hopefully) virgin planet around the destination star. That many people demand a lot of pressurized volume for living space. Generation ships are usually miles long, often spinning to simulate gravity. Many ships of this type are depicted as asteroids, dug, or hollowed out for the purpose. Either steel or stone, that’s a lot of mass to get up to speed, and then slow down at the end of the trip. Which will take a while, and provides all types of possibilities for conflict and drama.

· Decay – Things fall apart. Friction. Wear and tear. Chemical degradation. Loss of air and water to the surrounding vacuum. Sooner or later, even the best-designed and well-built generation ship will get dingy, and dirty, and worn, and broken. Systems degrade and fail. An author could ignore that, presupposing self-repairing nano whatsits, or something like that. But why deny yourself, and the reader, the rich vein of drama which naturally grows from a slowly disintegrating vessel? The ill-defined sense of impending doom often sets a mood, and spurs characters to action, of the author’s choosing.

· Societal Evolution – People will surprise you. Coop them up together for a few generations, and they’ll adapt to the situation in astounding ways. An aspect of Braking Day that struck me as entirely believable was the way the contained society of the ship stratified into an aristocracy of officers and an underclass of crew. Even here on Earth societies are inclined to become hierarchical over time. That propensity would probably be intensified. Understandably so. The consequences of the decisions of the people in charge would be magnified in the enclosed environment. Authority demands unquestioned obedience, for the good of all. That type of thinking becomes ingrained. Dissent would be seen as a threat to the common good. Because, to some degree, it is.

· Malcontents & Troublemakers – A lot of the groups who colonized North America, were people the management of Europe was glad to be rid of. Puritans. Quakers. Amish. Mennonites. Huguenots. The US state of Georgia started out as a penal colony (Australia too). And that was just a few thousand miles of travel involved. A generation ship is tailor-made for persecuted minorities to get a way from it all. And start persecuting people they don’t approve of all on their own. But, that’s another essay. A successful generation ship likely will need more than the normal amount of communal glue to hold it together. Braking Day’s ships are populated with those who had a fundamental issue with the government of old Earth. That provided strong incentive to leave in the first place, and tolerate the long, long trip. Slow Train to Arcturus, by Eric Flint and Dave Freer, tells the tale of an alliance of persecuted minorities, who band together and set sail for distant stars in an enormous generation ship. This ship consists of a string of separate, isolated environments, one for each group. The plan is for each modular environment to break off and colonize a star as the ship passes by it. The remainder travel on without slowing down.

· The Choice-Land or Sail On? – A subplot of Braking Day is the conflict between people on the ship who look forward to ending the journey, and colonizing planets orbiting Tau Ceti, and those who no longer see that as a desirable outcome. The characters have never known another life (132 years of travel) and a portion of the crew are comfortable with carrying on. People indeed do fear change. And a clinging to the status quo, unsustainable as it might be, is entirely believable.

· We’re on a ship? – As you read this, an entire forgotten civilization is being rediscovered beneath the Amazon jungle. People will forget. And they’ll naturally assume that the way things are is the way things have always been. I can easily see this happening on a generation ship. Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (first published as “Universe”) explores this situation. The main character and his companions embark on a hero’s journey to the control room of their ship, not realizing that they are on a ship. The Canadian TV show The Starlost portrays a similar saga of a trio of exiles from an agricultural habitat as they explore the rest of the ship. A Star Trek episode (For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sk) concerns Bones McCoy’s amnesia-related interlude aboard a generation ship, who’s inhabitants think they are on a planet. In Slow Train to Arcturus, some of the habitats have forgotten. Some haven’t.

· The FTL Menace – What’s the use in committing your children and grandchildren to an extended period of eating recycled food and drinking recycled water, only to have some snot-nosed hotrodders invent faster-than-light travel, and get there ahead of you? Irritating, right? This eventuality is explored in The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, and Far Arcturus. (Arcturus seems to be a popular destination in these types of stories.) There must be other, more recent, examples out there. But I couldn’t find them with a quick search. Might be an opportunity for an aspiring writer to plow that ground again. Would be profoundly demoralizing to have wasted generations on a slow boat, and end up decades or centuries out of date once you make orbit in the destination system. Thought you were going to have the whole planet to yourself, and those FTL yahoos are squatting on the best real estate! That’s the downside of betting against human innovation.

There are doubtless aspects of this subject I’ve missed. Please feel free to point those out. I welcome the feedback.

Links:

· Braking Day: https://www.amazon.com/Braking-Day-Adam-Oyebanji/dp/0756418224

· List of Generation Ship Science Fiction Novels/Short Stories, Joachim Boaz: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/sci-fi-article-index/list-of-generation-ship-novels-and-short-stories/

· 10 Compelling Generation Ship Books That Take you on a Journey, Keith Rice: https://theportalist.com/generation-ship-books

· Slow Train to Arcturus: https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Train-Arcturus-Eric-Flint/dp/1416555854

· Orphan of the Sky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky

· The Starlost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starlost

· Star Trek, For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_World_Is_Hollow_and_I_Have_Touched_the_Sky

· The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_That_Lasted_600_Years

· Far Centaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus

Bonus link! Time dilation calculator. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you, relative to the pokey, old stick in the muds back on Earth. If you’re writing hard SF, you probably ought to take this into effect. Here’s a link to a calculator which tells you how much faster time passes for people zipping along at X % of lightspeed: https://www.dcode.fr/time-dilation

END.

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