Title:

Generation Ship

Author:

Michael Mammay

Category:

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

January 26, 2024

hat a disappointment Generation Ship turned out to be. The premise sounded awesome - a spaceship that has spent generations in space is finally approaching the planet that they have targeted for colonization. The novel opens when the ship (I don't recall if the ship was ever named) is just 140 days out - a little more than four months before the colonists will be in orbit around Promissa. Yet instead of excitement and interest, most the novel seems to neglect what I anticipated being the major storyline. Rather than the characters showing great excitement from achieving their lifelong goal, the characters instead are portrayed as soon engrossed their endless petty disputes that they hardly register the fact that their largest goal is about to be achieved.

Generation Ship is 585 pages long, yet it takes until page 450 before the ship finally arrives at Promissa. Mysteriously, every probe sent to the surface of Promissa stops transmitting almost immediately, and so the crew (and the reader) know almost nothing about the planet for the bulk of the book. We do learn that Promissa has an atmosphere that is breathable by humans - but if there is free oxygen in an atmosphere, it indicates the certain presence of life. Indeed, with only about a hundred pages remaining, I was convinced that Generation Ship must be the opening book in a series, because so little attention had been paid to Promissa. Generation Ship turned out to be a stand alone novel, but only because Mammay races through all the exciting parts - for example, we never even read about the the climatic moment when the ship achieves orbit; the narrative suddenly jumps ahead to landers entering the atmosphere.

Only the scientist Sheila Jackson seems to care about the limited data that has been returned by the probes. All the rest of the crew is involved in their tiresome squabbles.

We meet Eddie Dannin, who is a genius coder. She is so good at writing code that she can hack any system, create a neural link, and integrate 'weak' AIs into the ship's function (I must have missed the explanation of where these AIs came from, or perhaps Eddie created them also? It did seem that there was nothing she couldn't do.) Although Eddie is the most interesting personality of the crew members, it found her a bit tiresome. I know ultra-competent hackers are now a staple in many novels, but I have grown bored with their unrealistic talents.

Jarred Pantel is the governor. His entire motivation is to manage any situation, and so he wants to prevent the limited information that is returned by the probes from reaching the broad crew members. I couldn't figure out the political situation - Pantel's title is governor, but was he elected? There is no mention of any mechanism for removing him from office, so is he a dictator for life? There is no sign of a Congress, Parliament or other legislative body, it seems Pantel is the entire government of 18,000 colonists in one person. At the end, Pantel makes the boneheaded decision to immediately send hundreds of colonists to the planet's surface as soon as the ship achieves orbit, even though they know that Promissa harbors life. Not even pausing to evaluate the planet from orbit before placing hundreds of lives at risk? Even though something weird has happened to every probe sent to the surface? Pantel overrides all the objections of the scientists. Someone ought to have slapped Pantel upside the head, hoping to knock some sense into his empty-headed noggin.

George Iannou is a farmer. Pantel contrives to have Iannou be seen as the face of the "resistance", Pantel figures he can use the big galoot as a puppet, allowing him to control the resistance. But Iannou has more smarts than Pantel anticipated.

Mark Rector is a member of the Security Force (Secfor) who yearns for promotion. He seems wonderfully incapable of preventing situations from escalating. Guns? On a pressurized spaceship surrounded by vacuum - really? At the end of the book, Rector makes a suggestion so dumb that it makes Pantel's decision to send 600 colonists to surface seem like a wise choice.

Not only does the book stint on information about Promissa, there is also very little detail about how the ship works. I think that there is a big spinning torus, holding multiple decks, but how the ship works is not explained. We know it has a fusion power source - does this power engines? Is there any communication with Earth (it is never mentioned). Indeed, there isn't any explanation why the ship was launched in the first place. Were they fleeing a biosphere collapse? Plague? There is a hint that the colonists fear AIs, so maybe humanity is threatened by machine intelligence?

Only humans inhabit the ship, there is zero mention of any other lifeform, not even pollinating bees for the agricultural sector. Is there a big bank for frozen animals just waiting to be thawed out? Perhaps additional colonists await in cold storage? We never find out.

Nor does Mammay give us any details of the new solar system. Is the sun a G-type star? Is it a binary system? Are there any other planets? At the very end of the book, Rector mentions mining probes visiting asteroids when he is explaining his truly idiotic idea. I wondered why the ship didn't rendezvous with a large asteroid, and get busy hollowing it out to create a huge new habitat, an environment that would not be threatened by alien lifeforms. It was astonishing that the crew has no contingency plan for what to do if the planet is already the home to alien life. They want a planet with a breathable atmosphere, but any atmosphere with free oxygen is a planet that harbors life. If the ship's crew constructed a new home on a big asteroid in the new solar system, they could have studied Promissa at their leisure, and finally understood what challenges they would face if they did colonize it.

Compared to other books with vaguely similar themes, such as the magnificent Children of Time or the unsettling Hull Zero Three, Generation Ship fails to measure up. It seemed to me that Mammay failed to take advantage of the two storylines with the most interest: the exploration of a new planet, and the description of how his colony ship worked. Mammay is an established author, yet if Generation Ship is the best he can produce, I think I will skip his other efforts.