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]

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.

[connatic]

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

[connactic.livejournal.com]

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

[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?

[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.)

[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.