When it comes to crossing the vast gulfs between the solar system and other stellar systems, SF writers turn to two main solutions: small and fast1 or big and slow. Perhaps the best known example of big and slow is the generation ship, large enough to qualify as a large town or even a small nation, slow enough that entire lives will be consumed getting to its destination.
Generation ships live in that delightful overlap between seemingly practical and nearly certain to inflict lives of deprivation and misery on their inhabitants. You might wonder what sort of person imagines the immiseration of many many others. SF authors do. Misery is drama. Generation ships offer so very much drama.
Two 20th century authors wrote stories sufficiently remarkable to imprint the essential details of their plot on many—most?—of the generation-ship stories that followed. The best known is Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, a fix-up of the 1941 novellas Universe and Common Sense. A young man makes the (ahem) Astounding discovery that what he took for the whole world is instead a spacecraft lost in the vast depths of space. Mutiny and mass death have led to barbarism and communal amnesia about the ship’s origin, while radiation and blind prejudice have created a never-ending war between the mutants and their “normal” cousins. Given enough time, all of the life support systems on the ship will break down, so landing the ship while these systems still work would seem to be the obvious course of action. However, it’s hard for the masses to give up their superstitions long enough to organize escape.
Years before Orphans, however, there was Murray Leinster’s 1935 “Promixa Centauri.” The voyage in “Proxima” lasted only seven years, and the Adastra managed to arrive at the system for which they had originally aimed. That seven years was still long enough for the social order to break down, for the crew to divide itself into the command crew (still clinging to power) and the restless “Mut” majority2. Fortunately, the natives of the Proxima system don’t care about the entrenched divisions of human society; they are far more interested in the fact that both loyalists and Muts are made of meat. Tasty, tasty meat. Truly, there are no social problems that applied carnivory cannot resolve.
A surprising number of authors have written variations on Leinster and Heinlein’s plots, stories in which bold explorers head towards distant worlds, only to fall into barbarism, genetic degeneration, and doom along the way. Going by works like Mayflies, Captive Universe, End of Exile, The Starlost, and others, generation ships are one means to protracted abuse of one’s descendants. A choice which will doubtless ensure the undying hatred of the poor progeny.
Even when, as in the case of Stephen Baxter’s Mayflower II, some attempt is made to avoid degeneration and eventual extinction, that effort does not seem to help much. Lesson: do not put a do-nothing immortal idiot in charge of implementing the plan.
But not every generation ship ends up drifting lifeless and slowly cooling in the galactic abyss or careening directly into a star. A very lucky few are like The Dazzle of Day’s generation ship Dusty Miller, whose 175-year journey and eventual settlement on an alien world succeed because the passengers are Quakers, essentially decent people who wouldn’t think of eating each other. Still, the generation-ship success-rate is low enough that I recommend anyone who suspects they are in a generation ship novel master the lyrics to Gir’s Doom Song.
There may be a way to make the generation ship concept actually work. The essential issue is, as Natalie Zutter once explained, that even large spaceships are probably going to be small compared to the Earth; hence their resources, cultural and otherwise, will be insufficient for the challenge of interstellar travel. We know that the Earth very definitely can support entire civilizations for millennia. Why not simply use the Earth itself as our generation ship?
Novels like Sins of the Father and A World Out of Time aside, affixing rocket engines to planets is likely to prove impractical. The answer is to cultivate patience and spend the centuries and millennia on our comfortable human concerns while the stars come to us. The stars of the Milky Way are in constant motion, their distances always changing. At present the nearest star is an inconvenient 4.2 light years away, but as recently as 70,000 years ago Scholz’s star was a picayune 52,000 astronomical units away!
We missed our chance to visit Scholz’s Star, but Gliese 710 may present an even more promising opportunity. Whereas Schotz’s Star is just a run-of-the-mill red dwarf with a brown dwarf companion, Gliese 710 is a comparatively sun-like star. Even better, its closest approach may be even closer than Schotz’s Star, a mere 13,000 AU, perhaps less. Perhaps much, much less, although I suppose a pass through the inner system is too much to hope for.
Still, even 13,000 AU would be a challenge for present technology. It took New Horizons about a decade to cover the 40 AU to Pluto. 13,000 AU is much larger than 40 AU. Not to worry. We have time to work on our spacecraft. Gliese 710 is at present just under 20 parsecs away. At its current breakneck speed towards us, it should be here in just 1.3 million years.
1: Sometimes even faster than light. Although no credible evidence exists that the speed of light can be exceeded, writers are willing to embrace the possibility that light might be outpaced somehow. Never underestimate the persuasive power of somehow.
2: “Mut” stands not for mutant but mutineer.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Janet Kagan’s Mirabile stories aren’t directly set on the generation ships, but they are recent history. The main character refers to herself as 3rd generation Mirabilan. One of the ships had a major disease outbreak in flight, and a chunk of index to the ship’s library went missing in transit, but overall it seems to have gone pretty well.
I really really need to review Kagan’s books on my site….
Panshin’s Ships are a bit of an oddity: faster-than-light but also generation ships of a sort, in that the crews kept living in them after delivering the passengers to the colony worlds.
We missed our chance to visit Scholz’s Star, but Gliese 710 may present an even more promising opportunity. Whereas Schotz’s Star is just a run-of-the-mill red dwarf, its brown dwarf companion Gliese 710 is a comparatively sun-like star.
Assuming this somewhat confusing sentence is an editing error, for “Schotz’s star is just a run-of-the-mill red dwarf with a brown dwarf companion, while Gliese 710 is a comparatively sun-like star” (a K7, so somewhat cooler and lower-mass, but that’s pretty good by stellar standards.)
I am still very fond of Mayflies — many scenes still stay with me, including the detail that the initial slide into anarchy began with what was essentially a zoning dispute.
The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson is the generational ship story that has stuck with me since high school. I really enjoyed reading it as a teen.
See also Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. It’s like Amber, but in Spaaaace!
If we ever do go to the stars, generation ships are one of the only plausible ways to do so. Unless we develop some reactionless drive, we are not likely to achieve accelerations of even more than a small fraction of lightspeed. And any trade or travel back and forth to a colony world would be unlikely.
While I can hope that someone would step up to the plate, I can’t imagine that any nation or nations would make the investment to build a generation ship, unless they were desperate to ensure human survival. And even in those situations, they would probably dither around until the resources for the ship were no longer available.
One possibility is a space-based civilization developing in the solar system, already comfortable with living in space, launching a generation ship. They might not even be interested in landing on a planet when they got there, and could choose some interesting destinations, not being tethered to needing a “goldilocks” planet.
Garbled sentence fixed, along some other errors!
Speed and acceleration are related but different: one is how fast something is going, and the other is how quickly speed changes with respect to time.
Never underestimate the power of self-agrandizement. What better way to memorialize the Supreme Ultra-President for Life than by sending one thousand stalwarts and the SUPfL’s cryopreserved body to found a colony in their name on Proxima b?
Even if the generation ship makes it to a new star system, you know that the crew is going to set itself up as gods or wizards or whatnot and lord it over the poor passengers who now have to submit and sometimes pray to their technology-wielding masters. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, welcome to your new life as a store of spare body parts for your new crew rulers.
And if it’s not the crew it’s the ship’s computer. That silicon bastard always has it out for its meat cargo, whether they come in the frozen or the fresh variety, and will set itself up as a god rather than relinquish control once planetfall has been made – sometimes a lot sooner.
I suppose it wasn’t technically a generation ship, but I’ve always had a fondness for the Golgafrinchan ‘B’ Ark.
I worry about the stability of planetary orbits when Gliese 710 comes near. While looking at Mars (and Venus) may work as a short term goal, leaving the solar system (or living in self contained habitations) may be necessary in a mere 1.3 million years.
@8: Ramscoops might very well get us to the stars without needing generation ships. Use planet (or moon) based lasers to build up initial speed, then light the torch.
I would put forward Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World as a successful version of a generation ship. Now, it’s only two generations, one nearly immortal “crew” and their offspring that they decant 18 to 20 years from reaching their destination. There is the problem of their target world is occupado, but, hey, there wouldn’t be any story to tell, would there?
yes , Jacob’s Ladder is the best , most fun , challenging and fascinating generation ship ! How about Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for a ” gone wrong ship” !
13: Unfortunately, Heppenheimer showed back in the 1970s that your classic proton-proton Bussard Ramjet is a hilarious number of orders of magnitude better at dispersing energy than it is at generating it. For ramjets to have the same performance they do in books like A World Out of Time, they need some end run around the unwillingness of protons to combine.
There are end-runs. For example, one could use a Nicoll-Dyson Laser to beam energy to the ship, which could then use it to interact with the interstellar medium. Your classic NDL can evaporate an Earth-sized planet at a million light years so supply power to a starship only a few light years away should be a doddle. Well, unless they forget to reset the dial from “evaporate planet” to “power starship.”
I think the only plausible technology for colonising the planets of other stars will involve sending relatively small robotic probes that have the capacity to create a significant infrastructure and then grow humans from frozen embryos.
Of course, machines capable of the above – as well as raising human children – would need abilities comparable to humans, and they might decide not to bother about the embryos when the time comes.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is a detailed and relatively recent examination of life on a generation ship at the end of its voyage, and of how the descendants of the crew deal with what they found there. Robinson puts his usual effort into scientific verisimilitude, and tells a good story.
Can’t think of how it got left out here.
I ignored it for two reasons: I don’t think much of it and because another Tor reviewer covered it in detail and I didn’t want to reprise her work. Instead, I provided a link.
Citizen of the Galaxy has hospitable generation ships, the fore-runners to Panshin’s.
Weren’t big STL ships implicated in A Gift From Earth? Or were they sleeper ships?
The Slowboats were a combination of generation (ish) and sleeper ships. Crew stayed away and built up bitter resentments of the sleepers over decades. Passengers got to sleep the decades away and wake up as slaves.
Words to live by. Everything around us was willed into existence by the power of somehow. Everything around us was once impossible. Now it isn’t. FTL…somehow!
I checked with a space freighter pilot, he reckons he can get us there in less than 12.
@12 I love the Golgafrinchan B Ark too, and I especially love the hidden joke that so many people don’t get about it. People joke about sending all the undesirables of their society on a B Ark, or that people/groups they don’t like only being fit for the B Ark, but what happened to the Golgafrinchan’s left behind? The wastrels and idiots of the B Ark inherited a whole planet, but what does the text say happened to the superior folk who stayed behind? I’m a proud B-Arker, and glad to be one. Now can someone lend me a leaf to buy a cup of tea?
@10 You are absolutely right. Sloppy grammar on my part.
@12 Thanks for reminding me of one of the greatest moments in interstellar emigration! :-)
Elizabeth Bear’s Dust quartet!
That energetic problem for fast relativistic travel is a doozy. You know gamma, the wonderful time-dilation factor that promises to let you travel for light-years in a short subjective time? Yeah, that’s identical to the total energy your ship has to have, expressed in multiples of its mass times c^2.
An interesting take on generation ships is found in John Macvey’s Journey to Alpha Centauri, which is mostly a non-fiction book about the challenges of interstellar travel, but which concludes with a few chapters of fiction about a multi-generational trip to the stars complete with a mutiny (and counter-mutiny). I read this in 1977, possibly before I read the Orphans of the Stars, and remember working on various calculations about design of a generation ship (before I knew calculus).
Was that the one where the ship’s passengers began dying of a heretofore unknown form of radiation?
I haven’t read it since 1977, so I couldn’t tell you…
P.S. Google books indicates that the book does have a mysterious “Space Sickness.”
I just finished Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, which was an excellent “generation ship devolved into racist castes” dystopia. I also greatly enjoyed Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy, and Phoebe North’s Starglass and Starbreak, with a Jewish generation ship and how the faith and lifestyle evolved (or…didn’t) during a 500-year voyage.
Didn’t James Blish’s spindizzy drive move planets?
Surprised this article didn’t once touch on Ascension, whose plot twist I thought was a rather clever subversion of the concept of the generation ship.
I forgot Cities in Flight…
About Earth as a ship, I’m reminded of Alan Dean Foster’s “With Friends Like These.” Never underestimate humans’ ingenuity. Or their attachment to certain things:
Following, the planet began to move after the Tpin.
On board the cruiser it was very quiet.
“I see,” whispered Rappan idly, “that they are bringing their moon along also.”
“You get accustomed to something like that,” breathed an engineer. “A moon, I mean.”
WOL @@@@@ 24
“Elizabeth Bear’s Dust quartet!”
Quartet? I thought there were only three books!
It only appeared in an essay, not a story, but I was also kind of partial to Larry Niven’s concept of using magnetic fields from a ringworld to basically use its star as the ignition stage of a Bussard ramjet.
I liked the late James P. Hogan’s “Voyage From Yesteryear”, it had a generation ship that reached it’s destination without social breakdown and a seedship. The Mayflower 2 used a ramscoop to collect hydrogen for it’s deceleration burn.
Robinson puts his usual effort into scientific verisimilitude
See, I know you mean this as a compliment, but it just reminds me of the time in Red Mars that he decided that a zeppelin with electric motors driving its propellers could fly faster upwind if it hung a lot of wind generators out of its cargo bay and used them to generate more electricity to feed the propellors with. (The exact equivalent of Popeye making his sailing dinghy go faster by sitting in the stern blowing hard into the sail.)
Robinson’s grasp of orbital dynamics was also rather lacking. But the bar for hard sf is pretty low as long as the author is a guy.
Say, I may have an idea for another essay…. Two essays.
Delany’s Ballad of Beta Two was another failed generation ship. At least our protagonist got a thesis out of it.
A question I had when reading More Tomorrow by Premee Mohamed is whether an activity counts as scientific research if the circumstances of the research preclude publishing.
@40: a question I suggest the phrase “unpublished research” answers. :-)
An excellent generation ship story was just nominated for a Nebula: “Wind Will Rove” by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s Sep-Oct 2017). A violinist/history teacher struggles to keep the fragments of Earth culture alive, but what does it really mean for music to be alive? Best story I’ve ever read about a piece of music, tied with Rebecca Campbell’s “The High Lonesome Frontier” — which is also about a generation ship, the fragility of information, and the preciousness of what little you can save from the abysm of time. If you loved one, you’ll love the other.
I have not read either. Thank you!
@37
I’d forgotten that. A clanger indeed. Then there was the time he had someone attaching themselves by suction cups to steel rails on Mercury (outside). I was referring to his grasp of the biological and environmental sciences, at which he generally does a pretty good job.
Of course, the bar is generally higher for those if you find the author’s conclusions ideologically unacceptable.
I wonder what someone more familiar with biological and environmental sciences than I am would make of KSR’s take on them.
I will grand KSR’s grasp of the sciences is no worse than Larry Niven’s…
Robinson’s grasp of the biological sciences is generally pretty good, certainly better than average for the SF writers’ community in general. I boggled a bit at the prion in Aurora, but have been meaning to go back and take another look – he’s capable enough that I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt and consider the possibility that I misread him. I am a working professional biologist with a strong interest in ecology and evolution, and he doesn’t set my teeth on edge the way so many of his colleagues do when it comes to handling topics like this.
Funny you should mention Niven, in this regard, in the same metaphorical breath as Robinson. Not a cat’s chance in hell. Niven, I always thought, neither knows or cares about biology. The only times he gets it anywhere near right is when he has a competent co-author, e.g., Barnes.
@40:
That question comes up in Swanwick’s “Bones of the Earth,” too. The discipline of working as if one’s work might be published (even though that seems very unlikely indeed) turns out to be psychologically helpful.
But surely there’s more merit in carrying out one’s research despite the awareness that success will reduce the entire universe to a thin cloud of quarks? Asking for a friend.
@48: See “The Man From When” by Danny Plachta
Does Rendezvous with Rama count as a generation ship novel?
No love for Ben Bova’s Exiles Trilogy?
– Exiled from Earth
– Flight of Exiles
– End of Exile
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds does a great job of delving into the perils of a group of generation ships and antimatter drives. The ships are crewed by regular-lived people while their “cargo” is frozen long-lived “momios”, it’s another great book from him set in Revelation Space. Accelerando by Charles Stross has a large section on the voyage of a generation ship that is the size of a pop can. the ship has a computer that has the uploaded persons of the crew and their living environment. the ship uses a solar sail driven by a laser situated on one of the moons of Jupiter, I think.
I know YA doesn’t often get much respect among adult readers, but I really enjoyed Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy. While less hard sci fi, it does touch on many of the ethical dilemmas and psychological/sociological effects of running a generational ship for centuries.
No one’s mentioned Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun yet. Interesting in that, while the generation ship is indeed a dystopia, it started that way, and was remarkably stable throughout its journey compared to some of the other stories mentioned.
Not that interesting things don”t happen…
A bit further afield (so to speak), the Japanese manga Knights of Sidonia is based around a functional thousand-year-old generation-ship that has been patched, modified, cannibalized, and rebuilt for generations, yet still functions (generally) as intended. Sidonians conduct mining and colonization missions as time permits (whenever they briefly pass by something useful), and is ruled by an immortal-via-life-support council (until someone stages a coup), with a population of clones and gene-engineered transhumans (most of whom are capable of photosynthesis –the lead character’s need to eat is considered a significant handicap).
Patrick S. Tomlinson’s ‘Ark’ trilogy is a fun read.
While I’m surprised no one mentioned Aldiss’ Non-Stop (US spoiler title: Starship), my favorite variant is White’s The Watch Below which manages to be a generation ship story with a ship, but not a spaceship.
Dear Mr Nicoll,
The ZD magazines (Amazing and Fantastic Adventures) under Ray Palmer have a deservedly bad reputation, but they published some good stories. The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox is one of them and it’s slightly earlier than Universe by Heinlein.
Wilcox was a Palmer regular–a Trained Seal as Manly Wade Wellman, one of the group, described them to me–but he was always a better plotter than Palmer required. The head of the generation-ship project knows that the ship’s society will get out of kilter, so he hides aboard and, between periods of suspended animation, watches and intervenes to bring the ship’s society back on a survival path.
I suspect that if the story had appeared in Astounding as Universe did, it would me much better known today. The ZD mags were very successful in their own day–very considerably outselling Astounding–but they lost to Campbell’s prestige in reprint and with academic historians.
All best,
Dave Drake
@@@@@42 & Mr. Nicoll – Sarah Pinsker posted a link to her story “Wind Will Rove” in its original form on her website. http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove/ If you wanted to read the story but don’t have the magazine it appeared in, that might be an option.
@@@@@ 54 – I’ve been wanting to read these for decades now. I bought the first book way back when and never read it. Maybe your post will make me actually do it.
@@@@@58 “Voyage that Lasted 600 Years” sounds a little like the movie Pandemonium, except without the psychoses. That’s a plus!! I wonder how that would feel seeing generation after generation pass by but with no “real” human connection to them. Maybe that was part of the story. I will try to find it now.
@@@@@Mr. Nicoll – Nice article on plausible ways to get to nearby stars. If we can make it 1.3 million years more, I won’t be around to see it, but I am hopeful.
I wanted to recommend an odd and little read book to you, the novel –sort of — Earthship & Starsong by “Ethan I. Shedley” (“Shedley” is the pseudonym for Boris Beizer, who usually writes technical nonfiction works on computer software testing). The book supposes a world where humanity has used up its resources and faces a perilous climactic crisis. Then, human beings sort of destroy an entire civilization. It gets much worse from there. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ethan-i-shedley/earth-ship-and-star-song/
In the book several types of generational ships are explored and the generation ships in question carry the genetic material of the Earth, but not really always entire families, etc. It’s a little like Kim Stanley Robinson in that “Shedley” focuses a lot on the plausible technologies to make it happen.
I can’t say its great fiction per se, but it’s chock-full of eye-popping ideas. Thanks again for the article!
@49: Just to elaborate (now that I have a few more minutes): “The Man from When” is the story in which someone meets the first time traveler from the future, who is indeed very proud of that fact in spite of the fact that
(rot13)geniryvat gb gur cnfg jvyy unir qrfgeblrq gur ragver Rnegu bs gur shgher.
The fellow who meets the first time traveler still thinks this might be worth it, and asks how far in the future the fellow is from. Unfortunately, it’s
(rot13)Rvtugrra zvahgrf
I think the concept of generation ships may have become outmoded by developments in AI, robotics, genetics, and cryogenics. There’s no reason now why an interstellar ship couldn’t be crewed by robots, computers, and (presuming technology advances reasonably) androids all equipped with AI, with the humans frozen as embryos to be thawed and trained some 20 to 30 years before planetfall. It certainly would make resource and power requirements much simpler on a slower than light interstellar flight. Frankly, given the choice between the resource requirements for a generation ship vs. the requirements for a nuclear fusion pulse rocket, it would be more cost efficient to develop nuclear fusion pulse rockets, which would allow the ability to reach the nearest stars within a single lifetime vs. having to maintain an society in space for several generations. It may well be that future readers will look on generation ship stories with the same eye that we look at stories with Venus as a tropical jungle planet.
@@@@@35 I think that was actually part of the plot in Ringworld’s Children.
And speaking of Niven I would just have to add the Klemperer (sp?) rosette of planets that appeared in the original Ringworld
This was a group of planets that were set to revolve around a common centre of gravity. They became the setting for the X of Worlds novels.
I always thought that Rama from Rendezvous with Rama was a generation ship that had either been used and abandoned or the crew had died out.
I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out you’d have to be crazy to take a slower-than-light ship to another star system. There’s a good chance your descendants will arrive and find it’s already inhabited by people who came from earth on a faster-than-light ship which was developed while the generation ship was en route.
The evidence any sort of ftl is possible (let alone, with the resources available to a human civilization) is sufficiently poor I would not count on it being a good chance.
@63. That’s okay, if/when we develop FTL then we’ll leave them a note saying to expect visitors in a few hundred years. It’d probably be a good thing for both societies to encounter differing experiences.
@63, A. E. van Vogt’s Far Centaurus was published in 1944. That involved a sort of hibernation rather than a generation ship, but by the time the protagonists arrive at their destination, the ancestors of humans who arrived on faster ships are there to, um, “greet” them.
@62 — I thought that in Ringworld’s Children they’d actually given the Ringworld hyperdrive?
But yes, good call on the rosette as well.
Rite of Passage (the Panshin) and Citizen of the Galaxy do not have true generation ships; in both, the ships are FTL and make frequent planetfalls. IIRC both novels make clear that the ship inhabitants could not survive without trade with the planetbound, and in Citizen exogamy is enforced (partly within but substantially outside the individual ship, via periodic meets); in Rite the ship population is large enough (~15,000) that it might survive without swapping people with other ships. The current equivalent of Citizen is the merchanter ships of Cherryh’s universe; they’re 100% exogamic, which is easy when the ships spend almost as much time docked as they do moving.
@37: Robinson is worse; puffing into a sail isn’t as efficient as facing backwards, but it would give some propulsion.
@50: IIRC the ship in Rama shut down between solar systems. (I don’t remember whether this was deliberate, or a degeneration as @62 recalls). This would make it equivalent to the many novels in which suspended animation lets the departing crew become colonists (however much later). Suspension pretty much wipes out all of the problems of a generation ship, while bringing a new one: waking up the corpsicles.
@61: you are much more optimistic about AI than I am; I suspect the people produced by that schema would not strike us as sane, and maybe not even human.
#57 – ‘The Watch Below’ is one of my favourites too. And it has TWO generation ships, the ship under the ocean manned by trapped humans, and the interstellar one crewed by aliens!
Janet Kagan’s The Stubbornest Broad on Earth plays with the idea of the generation ship that gets met.
I’m so glad you mentioned Molly Gloss’ The Dazzle of Day. Her Dusty Miller remains my favorite generation ship. Its community gave me hope that humans could indeed survive generations in space, and succeed in settling new worlds.
I worry about the stability of planetary orbits when Gliese 710 comes near
At thousands of AUs, you shouldn’t. And logic should tell you that after four thousand million years, these two encounters are unlikely to have been the solar system’s closest ones by a long chalk.
For long interstellar travel, not much beats the system in Greg Benford & Larry Niven’s Bowl of Heaven, which has a starship/habitat built around a star being used as propulsion. The inhabitants collect (not very willingly) new inhabitants from star systems they pass through, and just carry on a grand tour of the galaxy.
Unfortunately the Human exploration ship is a standard Niven Bussard ramjet, with a cryo-sleeping crew. Sigh.
Recent publication: Marina Lostetter, Noumenon. I don’t recommend it — I think it changes how science works as the “plot” demands (cf Garrett’s comment about gravitational mass in the Lensmen books coming and going as required) — but it’s definitely a generation ship, with the added kink that the inhabitants are clones of people on Earth, re-cloned as they ~wear out.
Searching for Sins of the Father tells me that Wikipedia’s disambiguation page is not comprehensive, but still leaves me unsure which book of that name you mean.
I mean this one.
@63, @65, @66
More likely than reaching your destination and getting greeted by a colony that beat you there with FTL is to be part-way there and have an FTL ship come up alongside offering to give you a lift.
The whole “surprise!” plot relies on either somehow forgetting where the ships are or an FTL system that doesn’t allow you to go to random places in deep space. The latter would also require not having any way to communicate, (even 2 bits per second lets you send a few thousand words a day, more than enough for important news).
Someone, somewhere must have done the story of a generation ship funded by selling it as a 300 year long reality show. Both versions, one where the passengers are aware they are watched and one where they are not.
I remembered another take on generation starships – the 1970s concept album “Intergalactic Touring Band” (featuring Meatloaf!) had three songs about generation starships – one about the difficulty of getting people to volunteer, one about a ship that lost control of its trajectory (surviving just fine, but with no way to get to anywhere in particular) and one about an actual successful arrival.
Spinrad’s “Riding the Torch” and Skrutskie‘s upcoming Hullmetal Girls feature unintentional generation ships, where habitable worlds turned out to be much, much, much rarer than expected when the fleet set out.
Amazing that no one has mentioned uploads, a sidestep to many of the problems.
@68 CHip137:
I don’t quite think so. Based on Merchanter’s Luck, and Tripoint Cherryh’s Merchanters of the immediate post-war generation seem to spend 1-2 weeks in port and 2 months or more on a trip. Exact dates are rarely given, and even that is enough for Exogamy to work perfectly well, But the emphasis in those books is that in-flight is a crew member’s real life, and port is a vacation, often combined with a several-night’s stand.
-DES
Ursula LeGuin’s novella Paradises Lost, in the collection The Birthday of the World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradises_Lost
Not really a generation ship, per se, as the residents are approximately immortal, but Robert Reed’s Great Ship from Marrow.
Of course, the ship is about the size of Jupiter, and doing a lap around the Milky Way.