So why

[james_davis_nicoll]

Am I now seeing novels about generation ships actually reaching their destinations? Do the authors not understand how generation ship stories are supposed to work?

Comments

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Tell us again, grandpa, about the Devil and how he spraypainted "THIS IS A SPACESHIP" on the sky in order to lead us astray...

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I liked "Learning the World". Alien space bats!

[seawasp]

Didn't "Heorot's Children" involve a generation ship that arrived at its destination, and all the Hilarity that Ensued?

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that a sleeper ship? I seem to recall some brain damage problems among the colonists due to hibernation (or possibly cosmic rays).

[seawasp]

Hmm, yes, you're probably right. I tend to confuse the two, even though they are distinct in function (the people arriving in the sleeper ship being, in theory, the same people who started and thus not hopefully having gotten quaint theories about the world, spaceships, etc.).

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, that was a sleeper ship.

-- Paul Clarke

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Post-modern generation ships sneer at your silver-age genre conventions.

[(Anonymous)]

The generation ships in one of your least favourite novels, "Search the Sky" get there most of the time, even when their destination world no longer exists (they have alternate destinations).

William Hyde

[ellarien]

Gene Wolfe's Long Sun got there eventually, sort of, as related in the Books of the Short Sun, and those came out some years ago.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Oh, c'mon. Hogan wrote a novel in the 80's where not one but two generation ships got to a world successfully.

Well, admittedly it was more like a half a generation ship, since the trip was short enough that a cadre of children grew up to be teenagers by the time it reached its destination.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Well I for one always wondered why SF writers were so positive that generation ships wouldn't work.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

Plenty of reasons. I do not believe they will ever work[1] in real life either.

[1]"Work" in the sense of "successfully deliver human cargo to another star and founding a colony"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, that they would actually be seriously tried, and yet fail to work in the kinds of interesting ways that happen in SF stories (instead of "everyone on board is dead within a year"), seems considerably less plausible.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Were they so positive, or did they just like telling stories about generation ships that didn't work?

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I was at a con where Seth Solstak (SETI guy) and Jack McDivett (writer) were both adamant that generation ships would never work.

[connatic]

Didn't Ken MacLeod have one a few years ago (Learning the World)?

[connactic.livejournal.com]

gah- I reloaded my page several times to see if I could clear the issue that was making it look like you have my lj username....

Anyway- "Learning the World" only kind of counts- the future society in the novel has no deaths due to aging/disease, so the founder generation is still around on the ship.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

And IIRC they only pop kids near the end, after they've blown most of their reaction mass and have room.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

pssst: you're connaCtic, he's connatic. There's a difference of a C.

[daev.livejournal.com]

whoosh

[connactic.livejournal.com]

"Chasm City" also featured several successful generation ships, although they did end up founding a Crapsack World.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

"Chasm City" has a unique AFAIK plot twist: Several generation ships are launched simultaneously, for redundancy and also in order to avoid stagnation -- there would be continuous cultural exchange en route. As time goes on, people in different ships get more and more suspicious of each other and mutually hostile, until by the time of planetfall they are almost in open war. Few years after planetfall, drop "almost".

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Sleeper ships, I think.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

They were actually both- the colonists were kept frozen but the crew went through several generations.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

That subtype strikes me as having appeared elsewhere, but I can't remember where offhand.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Must've been elsewhere too, but the video game Marathon had its eponymous hybrid generation/sleeper ship; the colonists were on ice, but the much smaller crew (nicknamed "BoBs", from "Born on Board") served out the mission in real time.

-- Steve had a lot of fun in that game; plot wasn't too bad, either.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Pamela Sargent's YA Earthseed (1983) has a generation ship reaching a destination. I think it takes a while to find an acceptable destination planet, though.

Didn't the ship in Frank Robinson's "The Oceans Are Wide" (1954) reach its intended destination?

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

OMG, I read Earthseed when I was in elementary. Years later I wonder if that book (or any other generation ship story?) would have made more sense if I'd hit puberty before reading it. I seem to remember in Earthseed at any rate the girl protagonist (???) and a boy character starting to act like complete idiots around each other, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I read Niven, but weren't some of the settlement ships in Known Space generation ships? Or were they eggships or sleeper ships or just time dilation ships? Not that Niven to my knowledge ever did anything with that, which suggests they were not generation ships...

More to the point:

I suspect it's more a case that authors think the drama on a generation ship has been wrung dry, so they need to move on to the hilarity that ensues when something goes wrong on-planet after the arrival.

(How many ways are there--dramatically--for a generation ship not to reach its target? The accident, the AI goes mad, the uprising, the forget-we-are-on-a-generation-ship...I'm sure there are others.)

Tangential

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of a David Gerrold Star Trek novel featuring the Enterprise discovering an earth-launched generation ship that hadn't "arrived" but was still basically on-mission. This posed an interesting engineering problem. The generation ship had been using a slow push over a very long time span, and had reached something like .999C. While the Enterprise had a Warp Drive that could go faster-than-light, getting their *Impulse* Drive to match velocities with the other ship at *near*-C was not something the engines were designed to do...

Re: Tangential

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

"The speed of C is a wall, they say...."

[resonant.livejournal.com]

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Niven's "early star exploration in Known Space" shtick was to first send probes that reported back yes/no on habitability, then to send followup sleeper ships, I believe, to the YES ones. The catch being that the probes, in a beta-testing failure, actually reported back about a habitable POINT on the planet... This caused Interesting Results on, for example, Jinx, We Made It, and Plateau.

--Dave

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I remember noticing that there didn't seem to have been enough time between the launching of the Jinx probe and the launching of the Jinx slowboat for the probe to have reached Sirius and reported back.

Earth got very lucky with Wunderland; maybe they thought it was a typical case.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

I think they're allowed to reach their destinations, provided Things Go Horribly Wrong after they do.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Two generation ships came to my mind, one 70s and one 80s.

"We who stole the Dream" by Tiptree, a depressing (surprise!) story about oppressed aliens who capture a Terran ship and go looking for their own people. Hmm. Maybe not a generation ship per se, but babies at departure grow to adulthood onboard.

Diane Duane's Rihansu novels have generational space travel as a backdrop. The various adventures and misadventures of the ships have lasting effects on the landed colonialists. (Romulans, to the rest of us.)

A 70s generation ship set of stories by Vonda McIntyre is tickling my memory, but I can't remember if they made landfall or not. I think yes.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

Janet Kagan wrote a book called Mirabile that featured a colony founded from a generation ship. And it's not a 'crapsack world'.

Though they do have problems with the Earth-descended life forms. The people who launched the ship decided to incorporate odd bits of DNA in the frozen life forms in a way that allows some animals, insects and plants to 'give birth' to other species. This is so that even if the animal wasn't included in the inventory, it would eventually be produced by other animals. A cat could potentially give birth to opossums, or a cow could produce a bison calf. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well and occasionally throws out dangerous hybrids like 'Kangaroo Rex', a carnivore with nasty fangs and claws.

Other than that, the world is quite pleasant.

I really wish she had written more.

[ianirving.livejournal.com]

So Why Now? Clearly the generation ships launched in the 60 and 70's have had enough time to arrive at their destinations! Add in a light speed communications delay. Hence the new narratives!! :)

[carbonel]

James White wrote a novel about (among other things) a generation ship -- not originally intended that way, but thigs happened -- that reaches its destination. The destination turns out to be Earth.