I remember reading a novel many years ago which was a bit hard to understand at the time (I was a kid), but I’d like to take a crack at it again. The trouble is, I can remember neither author nor title.
It was about a society of people who had been raised for generations aboard a huge starship. There was another “race” of people on the starship who were larger and slower than the first race. By the time the novel reaches its end, we find that the larger and slower people are normal and the first race had mutated into a hyper-fast and squeaky group. The very end scene is the starship reaching its goal, perhaps the planet which is to be colonized, I think. I remember scenes about hydroponics gardens . .
Brian Aldiss, “Non-Stop”
Or “Starship” if you’re strictly American.
the fast people were the survivors of the expedition and were mutated to the fast speed by something in the water. They’ve been in orbit after return to Earth isolated for generations while the normals tried to find a cure.
And of course the name “Starship” is itself a freaking plot spoiler. The people on the starship don’t realize they’re on a starship and it’s supposed to be a gigantic revelation. Way to go, American publishers.
Right, but the plot point about the “Giants” is from Aldiss’s novel. There have been lots of generation ship novels, just once I’d like to read one where the generation ship DIDN’T revert to barbarism before they reached their destination.
I was killing a little time at the end of the day at my real job. This was the first time in a few years I’ve been in place to get first reply on one of these.
I may be wrong on a Spoilered detail, because it was from thirty-year-old memory. The trigger macguffin was an extra amino acid, now that I think about it, and it might not have been in the water…
I read a story awhile back about a generation ship that had finally reached it’s destination; a minority who wanted to go ahead and settle the planet they’d found had to mutiny against a majority that wanted to stay on the ship forever like their ancestors had for generations.
There’s something similar in Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe where most of the colonists have been genetically engineered into docility - they’re kept in two isolated populations, and the idea is that when they crossbreed they will breed intelligent descendants - but the ship itself is run by religious fanatics specially chosen because only they would have the attention span needed to see the centuries-long voyage through. Unfortunately they’re not as smart as they should have been and when they reached the target system they concluded that it was “obviously” incapable of supporting life, and just bashed on regardless…
In this case there was a minority of one, an accidental crossbreed who’d popped up before he should have and who had the smarts to realize what was going on.
That one occurred to me immediately. It was one of the first SF books I read (about 3rd grade) & it made quite an impression. But there were definitely no giants!
In a way, Gene Wolfe’s * The Book of the Long Sun*–which I just finished–uses the same theme.
In a very farfetched way…
(And it just occurred to me that multi-generation ships settled the Firefly system. Wonder if any interesting stories took place en route?)
The problem is that there’s usually nothing exciting or interesting going on in the middle of a voyage unless you’ve got the whole revert-to-barbarism or forget-they’re-on-a-starship or been-set-up-to-not-know-they’re-on=a-starship thing going on. I’ve read stories that took place after a multi-generation starship story has completed its voyage, but people usually shy away from the uneventful Middle Voyage.
I wrote such a novel, many years ago, which I called “Angel”, but I couldn’t find anyone interested in publishing it. Midway through their voyage, the generation starship (which certainly did recall their roots, because they were constantly performing maintenance on the ship) encounters a small, fast ship coming at it from almost right angles. They have no idea whether it’s from Earth or elsewhere, and there’s nothing back along the direction of its flight psth for an awful long way. And they have no idea of its intent. Multigenerational starships don’t carry weapons or maneuver rapidly, so this is a serious issue. So what are they going to do about it, whatever it is?
That’s one way to make an exciting incident in the Middle Passage.
Well, there’s this one. They haven’t collapsed to barbarism, but no one remembers where the ship came from, where it is supposed to be going or even exactly why they are out there anymore. (It seems to be an exploration ship. Or maybe a missionary ship.)
((I sorta liked the book but it felt really incomplete, like it had been edited down from something larger maybe. Interesting setting and characters, but…))
There was a television series in the 60’s or 70’s that had a ship with sealed sections, that were all inhabited by different cultures and breeds of humans. Only a few humans knew what was going on anymore. The show focused on a couple people at most that were trying to get to another section of the ship. Does anybody know what that series was?
tanstaafl has it – The Starlost was made in the 1970s. Harlan Ellison was tapped to create it, and felt serriously betrayed by the dumbing-down of his creation. You can read all about it in his intro to the bovelization of his pilot episode, Phoenix Without Ashes (which Ed Bryant novelized). The intro has been published in at least one other Ellison collection. The original teleplay was published circa 1982 in the anthology Faster Than Light (pretty ironic, considering that the point of a Generation Starship is that it ISN’T faster than light) edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski.
Ben Bova (who helped Ellison design the ship) wrote a parody of the whole situation, called The StarCrossed.
I’ve never seen an episode. Despite Ellison’s scathing rebuke, I’m curious. Biut to my knowledge, it’s never been released on any video format, and I’ve never even seen black market videos of it.
In August of 2005, I was watching cable TV in the U.K. on some obscure channel which was actually something like a Bad TV channel and it was showing The Starlost.
