Living inside an asteroid? (sci-fi stuff)

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Capa84

Of course it’s feasible. Everyone knows Earth was colonized by alien pioneers travelling in our hollowed out moon.

But you promised you wouldn’t tell! :eek:

[Voyager]

@dtilque

The more I think about it, the more it seems that it’s virtually required that a generation ship in sf have the inhabitants forget they are in a ship. I can’t think of any stories where such a ship has gone for more than a few generations without this happening.

So maybe your twist should be that it doesn’t happen

That’s been done too. Guess the link was right in saying Rites of Passage was the most forgotten Nebula winner. Excellent book. Oddly enough, my daughter read it for school not that long ago.

[gazpacho]

@dtilque

The more I think about it, the more it seems that it’s virtually required that a generation ship in sf have the inhabitants forget they are in a ship. I can’t think of any stories where such a ship has gone for more than a few generations without this happening.

So maybe your twist should be that it doesn’t happen

I am pretty sure I have read one or two stories where that did not happen. What happened instead is that faster than light travel was invented during the time the ship was traveling and when they got there the planet was already colonized by people with faster than light ships.

[bonzer]

[nitpick]

From the bit of the Wiki article quoted by Squink:

Generation ships are often found in science fiction stories. The invention is credited to J. D. Bernal in his 1929 novel The World, The Flesh, & The Devil.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil isn’t a novel. Bernal’s own description in his 1970 foreward to the 2nd edition is that it’s an “essay in prediction”. It’s in the same speculative non-fiction genre as, say, Clarke’s Profiles of the Future.

[/nitpick]

[happywaffle]

Whoa. So, what I thought was a random one-off scifi idea turns out to be a whole damn genre! :smack: Creepily, I was reading a summary of Rendezvous With Rama and several aspects of the story are like EXACTLY what I had in mind. Stupid Arthur C. Clarke, stealing my ideas :dubious:

'S okay, I still like my story idea. Of course now I need to read all those other books to make sure someone else didn’t write it!

I want my royalties, Clarke!

[dtilque]

@Voyager

That’s been done too. Guess the link was right in saying Rites of Passage was the most forgotten Nebula winner. Excellent book. Oddly enough, my daughter read it for school not that long ago.

Rites of Passage is not, I repeat, NOT a generational starship story. Yes, there are multiple generations that have lived on the ship, but that’s the case with the Free Traders in Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and that wasn’t a generational starship story either.

[Voyager]

@dtilque

Rites of Passage is not, I repeat, NOT a generational starship story. Yes, there are multiple generations that have lived on the ship, but that’s the case with the Free Traders in Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and that wasn’t a generational starship story either.

But the “ship” was a hollowed out asteroid, which seems more relevant than stories about ship-bound space-farers. The only real difference is that Panshin’s people didn’t plan on getting off at the other end. Poul Anderson had several novels set in a culture of ship-bound traders - but I wouldn’t consider them as relevant as Panshin’s stories.

He also had a long story, not a novel, about a generational starship which did not forget, based around political battles inside. The hero was a disgraced noble (officer) who was forced to live with the workers, and got into what I could call union organizing. But I don’t think this was a hollowed out asteroid.

[Voyager]

@gazpacho

I am pretty sure I have read one or two stories where that did not happen. What happened instead is that faster than light travel was invented during the time the ship was traveling and when they got there the planet was already colonized by people with faster than light ships.

I don’t remember stories where this happens (but have no doubt they exist) but there are some stories which are close. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars is about twins with telepathy who are used to communicate between earth and an exploratory starship - not a generation ship, but one using relativity to explore in reasonable time as seen by those on the ship. At the end of the book, the study of this telepathy (which works ftl) is used to build an ftl ship. The ship Lazarus Long hijacked is the second rev of the one in Orphans of the Sky, and Libby figured out how to make that ftl - though I don’t remember if they ran into the descendants of the first ship later.

[Lemur866]

“Time Enough for Love” talks about the ship from “Orphans of the Sky”, but the characters discuss it as a curiosity, it’s not part of any of the stories in the book.