Genesis by Paul Chafe
About 1/3 through Chafe's Genesis and it's... not as good. I don't want to be mean, but I can think of a better path for space exploration than the all-or-nothing generation ship the author proposes - and I remember Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, which I categorize as a horror story. -And there's some politics that are not my flavor.
1612 - Tuesday, 25 September 2007:
...I'm still working through Genesis when I'm at the hovel (grave warnings and dire consequences for taking a USB drive or laptop to work). About 2/3 now and... the generation ship project was initiated as the personal crusade of a UN secretary-general who is evidently answerable to no one (got that much right at least), the UN is multiply and variously arrogant and condescending, and not once in the entire book is the United States even acknowledged to have ever existed despite UN headquarters still being in New York City (they spend Euros there (and everywhere else)). This work is slipping into the Socialist Utopia category. Now it's 177 years after the ship was launched, on a voyage expected to take millenia, and it looks like they're heading toward a caste system. -On a less political note I'm disappointed that a society that would, even through coersion, devote such enormous resources to such a project, would seem to completely ignore colonizing Luna, Mars, the Belt, the gas-giant moons, and artificial habitats wherever they found a LaGrange point, and would almost completely ignore the scarcely-imaginable potential of spaceborne industry (a single asteroid can contain more nickel-iron than the entire human race has used since maybe ever), agriculture (they'll build a 30km sublight starship based on one man's traumatic childhood but won't slap together a few 1km hydroponic stations in that same synchronous orbit, where they'd have only a few minutes of not-daylight every 24 hours, if that? And they build a 40,000km orbital elevator for the ship but don't think of hanging some farms and apartments off it?), and power generation (there are a few solar power satellites - but c'mon, this book has fusion power (to drive the ship and provide an artificial sun inside) and a beanstalk and only incidentally has a small amount of surplus solar power coming down the wire for dirtside use, when the first half of the book bawls about people not being able to afford to turn on electric lights in their own apartments in NYC?).
1613 - Wednesday, 26 September 2007:
Chafe's Genesis now begins to devolve into church-bashing, stereotyping clergy and religious parents as narrow-minded power-hungry child-abusers. I'm agnostic, but Christians - the obvious target here - are generally on my side in the Culture Wars and seeing my allies thus attacked offends me. -As for S.M. Stirling's lame excuse that one shouldn't assume that the fascistic horror stories he writes have anything to do with his personal views, authors have been putting their own messages into their work since Homer. That's what writing, especially fiction and not least science fiction, is for.
1615 - Friday, 28 September 2007:
...I finished Chafe's Genesis, which, while not the full Orphans of the Sky creep-me-out, was a downer with the passengers losing nearly all their history, most of their understanding of who they were and where they were going, and degenerating to a medieval level while the ship plunges on for potentially ever until something breaks and they all die, making the whole thing - the resources, the expense, the brilliance, the sacrifices, the Vision - meaningless. Now if, if there's a sequel where Daring Adventurers and Free Thinkers Courageously Rediscover the True Nature of the generation ship - which, if memory serves, was kinda what happened with OotS, at least a little - then I'll dish out some redemption, but after a quite good showing in the Man-Kzin Wars franchise this was not what I was expecting from this author.
1616 - Saturday, 29 September 2007:
Comparing Lucifer's Hammer to Genesis, one sees a triumphant tale of disaster, adventure, perseverance and brilliance, vs. one of closed-mindedness, bureaucratic scheming, cultural stereotyping, and dissipation. Kinda like comparing WWII's generation to this one. Okay, I'll stop bashing it now....
1895 - Friday, 18 July 2008:
I have posted a (very short) new segment of my story, something my muse has been chewing on since I read Paul Chafe's Genesis and was ticked off by it. Chafe's previous work, Destiny's Forge, which could serve as a clean ending to the Man-Kzin Wars, was Really Quite Good; but Genesis was... just... lame, sinking into what I viewed as eco-freakyness, Ludditism, and Christian-bashing-by-proxy. Hence this tiny little rebuttal. Once you reach orbit you're halfway to the rest of the 'verse, and riches the human mind can scarcely comprehend. Chafe - and the Vloss - appear to have never grokked that. -In fairness, Wikipedia describes Genesis as first of a trilogy and Chafe does have a chance to pull out of the dive. We'll see.
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