GENERATION STARSHIPS

   For writers unwilling to power their starships with FASTER-THAN-LIGHT drives or to make use of a relativistic time contraction, there is a real problem in sending ships between the stars: the length of the voyage, which would normally span many human lifetimes. The usual answers are to put the crew into SUSPENDED ANIMATION, as in James WHITE's The Dream Millennium (1974), to send germ cells only, as in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's "TheBig Space Fuck" (1972), or to use a generation starship, whereby the human beings who reached the destination would be the remote descendants of the original, long-dead crew, intervening generations having lived and died aboard the journeying vessel.It was probably Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY who first saw the necessity for using generation starships in the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; he presented the idea in "The Future of Earth andMankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scientific essays in 1928 but may have been conceived even earlier. Tsiolkovsky here argued for the construction in the future of space-going "Noah's Arks": he envisaged such journeys as taking many thousands of years.The first GENRE-SF use of the notion was probably Don WILCOX's "The Voyage thatLasted 600 Years" (1940) in AMZ. Here the captain of the ship is in hibernation, but wakes every 100 years to check on progress. Each time he wakes he finds great social changes among the successive descendants of the crew, and a sinking into brutality accompanied by plague. His successive appearances render him an object of superstitious awe to the tribesmen on board. The theme of social change and degeneration inaugurated by Wilcox was to become the dominant motif of such stories. (In Seekers of Tomorrow (1966) Sam MOSKOWITZ claims the first generation-starship story to be Laurence MANNING's "The Living Galaxy" (1934), which is set in a small, self-powered world and so does not fully embody the concept.)The other dominant theme was presented in the following year in an altogether more famous story, "Universe" (1941) by Robert A. HEINLEIN, and in its sequel in ASF the following month, "CommonSense" (1941); the two were published in book form as Orphans of the Sky (fixup 1963 UK). In this classic generation-starship story the crew have forgotten that they are on a ship and have descended to a state of rigidly stratified and superstitious social organization; the unusually intelligent hero discovers the truth in a traumatic CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH. Indeed generation-starship stories remained paradigmatic forthe conceptual-breakthrough theme, and are important, too, in rite-of-passage stories showing the growth from puberty to adulthood (POCKET UNIVERSES). Brian W. ALDISS, who loved the idea but thought itcrudely developed by Heinlein, devoted his first novel, Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship US), to a very successful reworking of the same theme. Otherstories in which surviving generations think of the ship as a world and not a mode of transport are "Spacebred Generations" (1953; vt "Target Generation") by Clifford D. SIMAK, "Ship of Shadows" (1969) by FritzLEIBER, in which the ship is not strictly a starship, though the degenerated society is similar, and Harry HARRISON's amazing Captive Universe (1969), in which the crew and colonists have been transformed, inan act of insane CULTURAL ENGINEERING, into medieval monks and Aztec peasants.Some stories begin at the outset of or after the end of a generation-starship voyage. Arthur C. CLARKE's early story "Rescue Party" (1946) has Earth evacuated in the face of a coming nova, the evacueesheading confidently towards the stars in a giant fleet of primitive generation rocketships. Brian M. STABLEFORD's Promised Land (1974) tells of a society of colonists whose social structure is based on that developed over generations in the starship on which they arrived.An interesting variant which appears in several stories, most notably John BRUNNER's "Lungfish" (1957; vt "Rendezvous with Destiny" USA), has theship itself taking on the role in its occupants' minds of surrogate mother; even on reaching their destination they will not leave the womb. This theme is also prominent in the Simak story mentioned above.Thegeneration-starship idea has been used little outside genre sf, though a spectacular exception is the epic poem Aniara (1956; trans 1963) by the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet Harry MARTINSON. An opera by Karl-BirgerBlomdahl (1916-1968), Aniara, based on the poem, was performed in 1959. The story pits human values against inhuman technology on a generation starship.Among the more interesting stories about social changes on generation starships are the Aldiss, Harrison, Heinlein, Leiber and Simak tales already cited, along with: The Space-Born (1956) by E.C. TUBB; RITE OF PASSAGE (1968) by Alexei PANSHIN (though, since the starship inquestion can travel also through HYPERSPACE, this is not a pure example of the subgenre); The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965) by Samuel R. DELANY; Rogue Ship (1947-63; fixup 1965) by A.E. VAN VOGT; Seed of Light (1959) by EdmundCOOPER; The Star Seekers (1953) by Milton LESSER, which features a four-way division of society in a hollowed-out asteroid; Alpha Centauri - or Die! (1953 Planet Stories as "Ark of Mars"; fixup 1963 dos) by Leigh BRACKETT; 200 Years to Christmas (1961) by J.T. MCINTOSH, which features acompetently thought-out but conventional cyclic history within the ship; "Bliss" (1962) by David ROME; and Noah II (1970 US; rev 1975 UK) by RogerDIXON.Some enterprising variants on the theme are found. In Arthur SELLINGS's "A Start in Life" (1951) a plague decimates the ship, leaving two 5-year-old survivors to be raised by ROBOTS. Judith MERRIL's "Wish Upon a Star" (1958) features a ship originally crewed by 20 women and fourmen, with a resultant matriarchal society. Chad OLIVER's "The Wind Blows Free" (1957) takes the birth-trauma theme to its logical conclusion with astory about a man who, goaded to near-madness by the claustrophobic society of the ship, opens an airlock only to find that the ship landed on a planet some centuries back.Harlan ELLISON wrote the script for a generation-starship tv series, The STARLOST , made in Canada, disastrously, in 1973. Ellison repudiated the series as it stood, and used his derisive pseudonym Cordwainer Bird in the credits; his original script for the pilot episode appears as "Phoenix without Ashes" in Faster than Light (anth 1976) ed Jack DANN and George ZEBROWSKI, and was alsonovelized as Phoenix without Ashes * (1975) with Edward BRYANT.From the mid-1970s the theme has been used only sparsely. An interesting variation is found in Damien BRODERICK's idea-packed The Dreaming Dragons (1980), in which a generation TIME MACHINE is uncovered beneath Ayers Rock in the Australian desert. In Pamela SARGENT's juvenile novel Earthseed (1983) thegeneration starship is a hollowed-out asteroid occupied by teenagers. In Kevin O'DONNELL Jr's Mayflies (1979) the lives of humans seem ephemeral(hence the title) by contrast with the near-immortal human brain, embedded in the ship's computer, which (only partially) controls those lives; and the voyage accomplished in Frank M. ROBINSON's The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991) is ultimately circular. The most ambitious recent attempt to investthe theme with new energy is contained in Gene WOLFE's Book of the Long Sun, whose first 3 vols - Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the LongSun (1994) and Calde of the Long Sun (1994) - are set entirely within a generation starship called the Whorl.

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