Christmas Special: A History of Generation Ships in Science-Fiction

Science-fiction is the history of the (imagined) future

(This essay contains multiple spoilers about several science fiction novels; I will put the spoilers all in footnotes at the bottom: SO DON'T READ THE FOOTNOTES IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THE SPOILERS)

In 1958, British World War II veteran Brian Aldiss published his first novel, one that relied on some of his experiences during the Burma campaign in the humid Southeast Asian jungle.

In the novel, a group of jungle dwellers wanders around their strange environment, and the reader quickly realizes that the jungle has grown inside a gigantic starship. Multiple adventures occur before the protagonists understand that they live inside a sort of interstellar ark in which their ancestors lived, died and bred for generations. Eventually, something even more astounding about their predicament is revealed¹.

Aldiss' novel, called "Non-Stop," was the founding piece for a new kind of science-fiction tale: stories about generation starships, a hypothetical type of craft that travels at sub-light speed while its human occupants spend generations inside, waiting to set foot on another world.

These tales are interesting in themselves, and as illustrations of current concerns, as well as plans and hopes for the future expansion of the human race. Some generation ship novels are among the best sci-fi books ever written; many others are frustrating pieces overflowing with ideas but also prejudices, clichés and particular obsessions that reflect our age only too well.

When we discuss generation ship stories, we not only discuss the future of an idea, or the present state of that idea: we also discuss what writers have imprinted in their minds when they execute that idea. The history of science fiction is long, probably dating back to the 2nd century, when Lucian of Samosata wrote “True Story,” a combined sci-fi/postmodern literary novel that depicts an Argonaut-style trip that ends up with the Greek travelers blown up by a whirlwind, all the way to the Moon, where they come across a king of the Moon at war with the king of the Sun over the colonization of the Morning Star.

Since Lucian, the role of writers, as bards and propagandists for that future, inspiring future generations of engineers, explorers and settlers to do some things and don’t do others — Lucian’s examples, for instance, are mostly negative — can't be stressed hard enough.

"Non-Stop" may not have been the first actual story to depict a generation ship, but is definitely the first complete example of the genre, since it contains almost all of the features later to be seen in similar novels: characters confounded by their situation; characters who forget the reason why they're floating in space in the first time, or doubt that they're actually floating in space; internal struggles for power that go beyond anything the mission designers anticipated; frustration; sickness; swift death; a melancholy reflection on the fragility of human societies.

Even conceding that fact, there are the many varieties of generation ship narratives out there: there are, for example, multiple stories with hibernated crews that are unfrozen at the wrong time, or too early, or too late, or are killed while frozen, or are frozen and de-frozen at specific points by a childish AI ("the Chimp") leading a crazy mission spanning billions of years, such as in Peter Watts' outstanding Sunflower Cycle.

Such narratives, while often similar to those in actual generation ships, are fundamentally different in that it's the very same people who start and end the trip. In fact, the defining characteristic of the generation ship tale is that "generations" span between the start and the end of the journey: at least two. Otherwise it's just a very long trip, with little to do.

A good, little-known example of the non-generational ship tale is "The woman from the ocean," a short story written by Karl Bunker, published in 2014. It’s about an astronaut who comes back to Earth far in the future, with news that colonization of space is impossible because everywhere else in the universe is just too inhospitable.

Like the dudes from the Planet of the Apes, she returns to a much-changed Earth of the far future, due to relativistic effects: society there has regressed to agriculturalism for interesting reasons. In a way, "The woman..." is a sort of variation on "Non-stop": even if the travelers stay sane and focused on the mission, it may be our whole planet that goes crazy and primitive and back to, literally, the law of the jungle.

The interesting thing about "The woman..." is that the protagonist has been to other star systems, and she has returned to Earth in defeat, the last survivor of a doomed enterprise which message is: Earth is where you should be, don’t have silly dreams. This is surprisingly often the message of generation ship stories, and the negativity is only increasing in recent decades.

Take the 2015 sci-fi novel "Aurora," by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like “The woman...” it has a strong independent woman leading an ambitious missions to disappointing, but oddly comforting, results². Both stories underline the harshness of the universe out there and how Earth can be the only place where humans can ever hope to survive, a theme with evident environmentalist undertones.

When “Aurora” begins, the ship is starting to fall apart after almost 200 years out in space, just as it’s reaching its destination in Tau Ceti³. Devi, a 5th or 6th generation traveler stuck in the ship, is a woman genius who fixes all sorts of problems arising, and in her spare time teaches the AI how to think proactively and narrate its story.

Devi has a husband who is the personification of blandness, Badim, who somehow survives the entire novel without saying or doing anything memorable even though he’s in the thick of everything. This pair has Freya, a daughter that Devi herself describes as a bit dumb, an example of how the “zoo effect” is making the tame humans aboard Ship (it has no name, strangely, this Ship) dumber; but Freya confounds her mother's expectations and eventually becomes the mission's leader⁴.

A very relevant fact is that the Ship, as depicted by Robinson, is very much in line with mainstream SF conventions of how future colonization should work, and is perhaps the classic standard-issue Generation Ship: it has plenty of animal and human diversity, but the differences between humans stop at the skin-color level; underneath, they are all the same, enlightened modern person of the future type with just the right amount of funny foreign names: religion, ethnicity, race, nationality and language differences have all disappeared, and all there’s left is some holidays (we have Halloween, you have Día de los Muertos!) and food specialties.

Really, Robinson should teach the world how he managed to squeeze Jews and Muslims, Russians and Poles, Koreans and Japanese in the same ship for generations, with no problem at all! His generation ship is, much like Robinson’s Mars, an extension of Northern California without the unsavory bits. There are no pious Muslims objecting to pigs running around in the ship, no Spaniards objecting to the objection on the grounds that one can’t spend 200 years without ham. Latinos happily speak inglés, sí, señor, at all times with clear crystalline accents, so Freya can understand.

Like many other writers, Robinson is a firm believer in "The Lathe of Heaven” principle, the notion that in the future we’ll have every current social problem except racism, and racism is absent from his mission, having been happily eradicated by the enlightened humans of the future⁵. Another beloved, common characteristic of generation ships is the addition of areas with varied landscapes and climates, mimicking Earth, but often with no sense or purpose other than wasting space with pointless decoration. Whoever designed Robinson's Ship decided that having a Mongolian biome and Mongolians was really important; but there’s no Chinese biome, even though there are 300 times more Chinese than Mongolians on Earth, approximately. In the future world without racism, present scorn for all things Chinese remains alive and well.

In “Aurora,” the trip is OK and things really go downhill for everyone involved when it ends. The point is: even if the colonists survive the journey, bad, bad things can (and will!) happen at the destination⁶. In "Ark" (2009), one of many excellent novels by Stephen Baxter, the faster trip (just three generations for this generation-ship story) is truly hellish, since the colonists were forced to leave Earth just before the planet was made inhabitable, and they have the extra strain of knowing they are the last hope for the human race.

Colonists in "Ark" fight, rape and kill each other while stranded in two narrow hulls with no fake Mongolian steppes to excite the mind. Grace Gray, the strong independent woman who is Ark's protagonist (and who eventually passes on the torch to her daughter Helen, also strong, and independent), is a "gate crasher," one of a handful of people who were not supposed to be saved in the Ark but gate-crashed her way into the ship anyway, which doesn't really raise spirits within the mission.

On arrival in the planet they call "Earth II" in 82 Eridani, things are not so rosy as they anticipated (surprise!) The planet is barely livable at all, and Grace, like the hopeless Freya, takes a pretty radical decision⁷. This decision, to Baxter's credit, somehow makes a lot more sense in "Ark" than in "Aurora."

A nice touch in "Ark" is that, again unlike the case with "Aurora," the narration keeps in touch with the dissidents from Grace's and Freya's motherly regimes. The second hull travels all the way to Earth III, and things get dicey when Wilson, a daredevil pilot who becomes the leader of a rapey, violent gang — the usual outcome for strong independent men in Generation Ship stories — convinces his idiotic men-mates that they're not actually floating in space but living in a virtual reality⁸. From Aldiss' times, the idea that people inside of space tin cans will go crazy in such ways is widespread.

The Wilson archetype often finds his comeuppance at the hand of strong independent women in stories involving Generation Ships and interstellar colonization. A perfect example comes from another Baxter novel, "Proxima" (2013), in which a bunch of desperadoes are dumped on a rocky planet around Proxima Centauri that has breathable air, as a sort of Australian-style colonization plan.

Mardina, a strong independent woman who was one of the female guards protecting the desperadoes in ship that took them to Proxima, is left behind with them and she eventually comes across the gang leader of a "Mad Max"-style group of survivors: instead of discussing his crimes, she quickly grabs an arrow from her quiver and, Hunger Games-style, shoots this Wilson dead, ending his short, bloody reign of terror and releasing his henchmen from terrified obedience.

Wilson-like dudes have an even harder time of it in"Seveneves," Neil Stephenson's 2015 classic, in which the unexplained disintegration of the Moon leads to the slow destruction of our planet via bombardment and the hurried construction of a sort of Generation Ship/Space Station in orbit around Earth. The Seven Eves of the title are the seven (!) strong independent women who eventually survive the ordeal, after every single man, including many Wilson types, kill each other⁹.

Stephenson has made a career of writing about strong independent women in spaceships who won't take either a yes or no for an answer, or really any answer at all, from cowardly stupid men. In his long, thrilling, Generation Ship-like "Pushing Ice" (2005), a wild ride into alien technology and manufactured universes, it's two women rather than one who strongly, independently push mankind towards its furthest reaches.

The predominance of female protagonists in sci-fi is, of course, a novelty of recent decades. In the supposedly golden era of sci-fi when Aldiss started to write, men led the struggles along the way, and those on arrival, with most female protagonists as love interests/maidens in despair. One thing remains the same, however: mankind's worst instincts often express themselves in full inside the hulls, and males are almost always the carriers of those instincts. 

Honestly, it's no wonder that many people inside Generation Ships just prefer to forget about the mission, and enjoy however little is enjoyable inside the steppe-less ships. In Richard Russo's "Ship of Fools" (2001), nobody in the spaceship Argonos can really tell why they're traveling through space, where they're heading and what they will do when their descendants arrive. In fact, no one on board can even say for certain where the ship came from.

At least, in "Ship of Fools" people have a certain idea that they're something called human, and they organize themselves along societal lines that any human can recognize: a class-system has developed in which the commoners and poor serve in the lower levels and provide maintenance for the ship, while the aristocrats rule and recommend that the poor eat cake, whenever they complain about their lot.

In Greg Bear's "Hull Zero Three" (2010), forgetfulness reaches a whole new level: one spends dozens of pages with a man who wakes up from a dream-like state, naked and freezing, with no memory. He's led by a little girl, who calls him Teacher, through a series of corridors in a generation ship in search of warmth. Everything is broken down and malfunctioning and the huge craft is full of strange non-human creatures, who join the Teacher and the Girl in a diversity fan-fest/quest to understand just what the hell is going on.

Eventually, the reader comes to the realization that Teacher is a clone who has been resurrected several times before. Clones are a nice, relatively recent addition to the Generation Ship genre, and one that is best, and most forcefully, developed in "Noumenon," a 2017 novel by Marina J. Lostetter.

"Noumenon's” central conceit is that generation ships would be best manned by clones re-cycling copies of themselves.

As the novel starts, young scientist Reginald Straifer has discovered that the star LQ Pix may, or may not be, surrounded by a Dyson Sphere; this is the late 21st century, and the world has been thoroughly Kim Stanley Robinson-ed: decent, multi-ethnic technocrats rule, conflict has diminished, and there's plenty of money to set up several long-range missions, no questions asked — so, to his surprise, the young scientist manages to get a huge amount of resources to send a ship all the way to the alleged Sphere.

After careful consideration, Straifer decides that he prefers to send an entire fleet of mid-size ships, connected through shuttles, rather than a large mothership. This will travel a huge distance using some sort of modern technology that allows flying at significant fractions of the speed of light; and then, for some reason not really entirely explained, return to Earth to report on the findings instead of just mailing them.

Since the destination is very far and the trip very long, even at huge speeds, a Generation Fleet is constructed with multiple ships devoted to specific tasks — one for biomes in which to live the illusion that one is on Earth, some for scientific research, others for manufacturing or living quarters — and one of those ships shines above all: a reproduction ship, in which genetic copies of all of the fleet members are stored, so that clones can be produced at will.

Reasons are given for the preference for a clone crew but, honestly, they are not very convincing. The main reason is that the crew must be very large to account for attrition, attend to the mission needs, etc, and Earth can't really afford to lose so many brilliant minds. Really? That means a bunch of brilliant, capable people are selected, and then cloned: their clones are raised in a sort of massive hippie-techno commune in Iceland, because our obsession with Nordic minimalism hasn't gone away by the early 22st century, the one prediction in all these books that I found truly terrifying; then, at the age of 20-something, the mission is sent off into space.

I wouldn't vote for this arrangement for that sort of trip. But this is the arrangement. And it leads to a series of consequences, only some of which are predictable.

For example, people form couples, but can't have children: they receive clones to raise in the ship; they themselves are "put out of action" at a certain age, so that the crew won't be too elderly, but a younger clone of themselves, who they may know very well, will be around and be, for example, David Roman II, followed by a David Roman III and a David Roman IV, and they can coincide for a while, eyeing each other warily¹⁰.

There's not a lot of voting here. The position of mission captain is actually inherited by the clones of the first captain, and the same happens for several key positions such as those of head of communications, research, etc.

This arrangement is pretty unique in the history of sci-fi¹¹, and leads to all sorts of interesting plot lines¹². It really is striking to realize that things have been ordered so that the same social relationships that were set up at launch in the 22nd century are to be replicated ad infinitum, for the duration of the mission.

There's a Latino clone, Diego Santibar, who literally spends several generations as a ship gardener (a high-end gardener, though!) At one point in the novel, it seems that one of the Santibar iterations is kind of tired of being around plants and one breathes a sigh of relief: could it be that there's a crack in this immense façade of genetic determinism? No. It turns out that Diego's supposed clone is actually somebody else's clone: thus his disatisfaction with Diego's eternal lot. The understanding is that Santibar's next actual clone will be very happy with a return to his gardening.

Something similar happens with John Mahler, the aforementioned mission captain, who remains the same mission-obsessed creep with authoritarian tendencies throughout, despite a colorful change of jobs¹³. Margarita, the head of communications (with Earth), remains exactly the same corporate drone through centuries of iterations. The clones of Sailuk, the Eskimo wife of captain Mahler (diversity is our strength!), keep marrying Mahler clones, as if proving a theory of love or attachment imprinted in the genes.

The biggest element of social and mission flexibility is provided by the most stable character in the mission, the Artificial Intelligence that helps the crew control the ships and everything that happens in them. This AI is supposedly based on a cellphone AI that Straifer I used to love, and is very well described: it is in fact, one of the most credible characters in the novel; an artificial sentient being that sticks to the mission but has leeway to adjust and shift priorities as long as they don't conflict with the ultimate, set-in-stone goals: a milder, better-mannered version of Watts' Chimp.

It really is endearing how Lostetter and her characters remain faithful to the book's hard notion of genetic determinism. Sadly, the book's final pages, in a very distant future with very weird humans, don't really work as the well as the precedent parts. One big lesson of Generation Ship stories is that we 21st century humans may not necessarily understand or be interested in the doings and feelings of our very distant descendants, who by necessity just don't have a lot in common with us -- that is, unless they are clones of the same 21st century people, obsessively reborn.

In “Noumenon,” the clones are so much more sympathetic than 4th millennium humans. In “Seveneves,” the triumphant descendants of the epic survivors are just entirely uninteresting, being so very detached from our reality; much the same happens with the colonies left behind by Baxter's “Ark,” even after a much shorter time span. In Watts' Sunflower Cycle, ship-bound humans are terrified of even casting a glance at the things that will descend from humans and live millions of years from now.

Our connection with our far-flung descendants in the stars, or even low-Earth orbit, will one day become very, very thin. We, living at the very start of the 6th millennium of civilization, are lucky that we can still think of Lucian of Samosata and Qin Shi Huangdi as people we might trade lives with.

We can only hope that our distant descendants still think of themselves as humans, and think of us as worthy ancestors, rather than hopeless brutes dominated by clichés and group-think, slaves to literary fashions devised in college for the benefit of wealthy graduates. You know, the kind of people who would justify their class privilege by making all the right social noises in their novels.

SPOILERS BELOW:          

1. That the starship is actually orbiting Earth, having gone to another star system and then returned when the human colonists encountered an alien pathogen that almost wiped them out and caused the societal collapse in which the protagonists live early in the book.

2. In both books, the leading characters are happy with having managed failure rather well, by the low standards they set for themselves.

3. An illustrious place in SF history, where Downbelow Station is located. That fictitious station gives the classic 1981 novel, written by the actual strong independent woman Carolyn Janice (C.J.) Cherry, its title.

4. Robinson has stated that Freya is his avatar in the novel, which isn't an entirely flattering statement. It must be said Robinson's leading heroes in his famous Red Mars trilogy were also pretty frustrating people to spend time with.

5. In “The Lathe of Heaven,” author Ursula Le Guin presents a future in which all humans are race-less and gray. To my knowledge, there's only one generation ship novel in which racism plays any role, "An unkindness of ghosts"(2017), a straightforward, extended analogy for American chattel slavery.

6. A prion kills the explorers left on the moon that the Aurora mission planned to colonize. Freya then becomes the spokeswoman for history's most defeatist movement: she gets half of the people in the Ship to vote for cutting and running back home. It's important to underline that, in "Non-stop", there is no clear explanation of the pandemic that led to the ship returning Earth, so it's all vague and easier to take: in Aurora, there's enough detail to infuriate those of us who think a prion shouldn't be an unbeatable enemy for those with tech allowing for interstellar travel.

7. She leads a faction of the colonists in one the ship's hulls back to Earth, which turns out to be yet another not-so-great decision. A handful of humans survive in an underwater location in the flooded Earth, and she does find them. Their best plan is to eventually colonize the world ocean with a race of genetically modified humans: a sub-optimal outcome at best.

8. They breach the hull, and most get killed (but not Wilson). The survivors, led by Helen and fellow strong independent woman Holle, end up colonizing Earth III, a cold tidally-locked planet with dense air. Meanwhile the optimists who decided to stay in hostile Earth II do find a way to survive; Baxter later wrote three, separate short stories depicting the future of these colonies.

9. They end up stranded on the universe's least promising piece of real estate for colonization: a chunk of the Moon around the inhabitable Earth. But there's nothing that strong independent women working together without the bother of having men around can't accomplish. You go, girls!

10. Lostetter, to her credit, explores the mythology that such a society generates.

11. Not entirely unique, though. In "Six Wakes" (2017), Mur Lafferty concocts a hibernation ship that, for reasons, is controlled by six convicts who are cloned over and over again (while being injected the memories of their departed versions), while keeping the same roles and positions in the ship.

12. An early wave of despair-driven suicides leads to the first decision to not clone those who killed themselves, since — the deterministic genetic rationale goes — that means their genes weren't so ideally suited for the mission to start with. The same happens after, at one point, a rebellion — led by men, of course — threatens the mission: the ringleaders are decomissioned and not cloned anymore. Later, the fourth clone of the mission captain kills himself, and his clones are also kept in storage — so the clone of the second-in-command, the scientist Straifer, becomes captain for a while until, soon after arrival on what turns out to be an actual Dyson Sphere, he goes kind of nuts and dies suddenly. He's also not cloned for a long while. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that cold, calculating, deterministic scientific types are the most unforgiving people on the universe.

13. Mahler IV kills himself, thus turning his line into undesirable, but is later cloned again to head the Nazi-style squad that keeps an eye over other clones of ex rebels, misfits and suicides while they are worked to death inside of mines in a minor planet captured to extract resources for the mission.