Five Stories About Generation Ships That Don’t End in Disaster

[james_davis_nicoll]

Five Stories About Generation Ships That Don’t End in Disaster

Comments

[chrysostom]

IIRC, Frank Robinson's "The Oceans Are Wide" ended non-disastrously.

[chrysostom]

Oh, Pamela Sargent's Earthseed, I think?

[heron61]

There's also Emily Devenport's Medusa Uploaded and Medusa in the Graveyard and half of Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City, both of which feature generation ships that arrive at their destination, and in the 2nd case, found a mildly successful colony.

[mindstalk]

I thought Chasm City was sleeper ships? I was going to dominate it as a case of disaster despite almost everyone being frozen. (Inter-ship conflict.)

[heron61]

You're correct - I remember multiple scenes on board the ships heading to Sky's Edge, and so I misremembered them as generation ships - wow, it's odd to realize it's been 19 years since I read it. However, while there were definitely problems, the sort-of generation ships (since the inhabitants were exceedingly long lived) in Reynolds' On the Steel Breeze. also reached their destination. Also, while it was a bizarre novel clearly based on Marshall Savage's nonsense futurism in his The Millennial Project Ken MacLeod's Learning the World is about and entire society of people who are immortals that found new colonies via generation ships.

I think as a general rule novels where the inhabitants of the generation ship or ships are immortal or at least very long lived tend to be filled with notably less doom.

[connactic]

The fleet that founds Sky's Edge is a both sleeper and generation ships- the ships are ran by a small generational crew and have a cargo of sleeper colonists.

[beamjockey]

Rick Guidice's painting of O'Neill cylinders from the NASA Space Settlements study: Tor's choice to illustrate this, not yours, I'm guessing?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Nope. Mostly I don't think to specify the banners.

[sporky_rat]

I am reminded of Khan, but he had a sleeper ship, not a generation ship.

[(Anonymous)]

He didn't exactly have it.

[scott_sanford]

He and his friends had it longer than anyone else.

[ba_munronoe]

Is there such a thing as a ship too big to be considered a generation ship? The planet-sized ship in Ted Reynold's Ker-plop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ker-Plop ), which has living space far vaster than any merely surface-inhabited natural world, has been traveling for 300,000 years and its inhabitants seem well enough off.

[connactic]

I think the definition mostly comes down to purpose. If the purpose of the ship is to allow your species to colonize another place, it's a generation ship. If it's just a habitat, it's something else.