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.
