An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Read by Cherise Boothe

Those of us who love science fiction are probably well acquainted with the idea of the generation ship story. Starting with Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and Herbert’s Destination: Void, and on through the years (well, many of us started with those; technically the genre began with Don Wilcox's short story, “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years,” published in Amazing in October 1940), and on through the Pixar movie, Wall-E, it’s become a well-established trope. For good reasons, which I will go into shortly.

But first, for anybody not familiar with the concept of the generation ship, here’s the general idea:

Traveling from our solar system to another star, at any currently likely level of technology, will take many, many years. Our nearest neighbor is Proxima Centauri, at 4.243 light years away—which means it takes light, the fastest thing in the universe, 4.243 years to get from here to there. Since we aren’t yet (and aren’t likely to be anytime soon) capable of traveling anywhere near the speed of light, getting there would take a very long time. In fact, at our current capability, it would take over 81,000 years (yes, that’s the right number of zeroes) to get there—and most stars are much further.

Even if we manage to improve our technology quite a bit, it’s likely that it will take centuries, at least, to travel to the nearest star system with potentially-habitable planets in it. But the human lifespan is only several decades, or a bit over a single century at best. So how to solve the problem of visiting or even colonizing another planet beyond our little solar system?

One solution is the generation ship. That's an enormous space vessel which contains everything needed to play host to several generations of humans, each one learning what's needed to keep the ship running from the generation before it. The people who board the ship on Earth become the ancestors of the people who, a varying number of generations later, arrive at the new star system.

Of course, something always goes wrong. (It wouldn’t be much of a story if everything the author had to say could be summarized by the sentence, “Once upon a time, Captain Doe and her crew boarded a great starship; 10 generations later, their descendants all arrived safely.”) There is some kind of disaster—the AI that runs the ship goes crazy or just breaks down in spite of all the fail-safes, often due to human error or fecklessness; those feckless humans decide to play politics with the life of the entire crew and stage a coup, or else they fall prey to illness; basically, something goes so disastrously wrong that the ship’s passengers no longer have the wherewithal to direct or properly maintain the ship, often descending, over the course of many generations, into totalitarianism and/or barbarism and even forgetting that there is a universe outside the ship.

The main good reason, in my opinion, that this trope is much beloved in science fiction is that the ship becomes a claustrophobic little petri dish teeming with humanity’s best and worst traits, duking it out for the highest of stakes. It’s like the classic writer’s workshop exercise where you take two characters who hate each other, put them in an elevator together, then have the elevator break down between floors—but times 10,000: often the ship’s passengers are the only humans alive anywhere, after some apocalyptic disaster on Earth, so the entire fate of our species is in their hands. It’s a grand way of putting human nature under a very uncomfortable microscope, and of giving characters and situations enormous scope within their universe, while keeping the universe down to a manageable size.

This is very much the case in An Unkindness of Ghosts. Ms. Solomon’s generation ship, the HSS Matilda, became the entire universe to its inhabitants so long ago that its passengers scoff at the idea that they *are* passengers, or that there ever was or could be anyplace else besides the ship. Now it’s run a lot like a plantation society; the upper decks are the domain of a light-skinned and very privileged ruling class, while darker-skinned manual laborers with no rights live below. Males dominate, and there is no law other than harsh moral restrictions which are applied however the current dictator and his goons care to apply it.

We enter this society through the person of Aster. She’s a healer—in whatever free time she has when her shifts working the farming levels are over. She’s tremendously intelligent, resilient, and resourceful. She’s also, it becomes clear pretty quickly, not neurotypical—it’s never spelled out as such, but she seems to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum. She’s also not typical when it comes to gender or sexuality, even within her own very rich and diverse lower-deck society, in some parts of which it’s standard to refer to all children as “they/them” rather than “he” or “she” until they’re old enough to declare their gender.

The culture of the lower decks—or I should say the cultures, plural, because, as I just mentioned, there is quite a bit of diversity among the numerous decks—is what makes this book fascinating. Yes, Aster has to discover the clues her long-disappeared mother left her and figure out how to lead the ship to its destination. Yes, she does this while facing incredible deprivation, being preyed upon by guards for whom inflicting gratuitous cruelty is just a perk of the job, and dealing with her best friend’s frequent and violent psychotic episodes. Yes, there’s a romantic subplot (though not a traditional one), and a dictator you’ll desperately wish to be overthrown.

But all of this happens in the context of her society, which is deeply informed by the collective trauma of its enslavement, but which has also very unapologetically shaped itself in whatever ways it sees fit. In order to survive, yes, but also in whatever ways it finds beautiful or important or simply desirable. It’s not monolithic—as in any society, some folks are true believers in the morality of the upper classes and some are scoffers, some are genuinely good and some are selfish and cruel, and some have internalized the deeply scarring belief in their own sub-humanity of their so-called superiors more than others. But it’s a culture with its own language (and its own accents and dialects within that language), its own food, its own legends, and its own mores. And it’s fascinating.

If you have never read a generation ship story before, this is a great place to start. And if you feel like the trope has gotten stale, this book will change your mind. I highly recommend it for adults and mature teens. And I particularly recommend the audiobook version, if you like that sort of thing; Cherise Boothe does a truly magical job of bringing all the voices and accents to life.