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

[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.