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| They had forgotten the stars, forgotten the journey, forgotten even the idea of forgetting. |
Ah, that’s not true! That was hyperbole. He has crossed my mind, at least twice (so double my laughable misrepresentation, at a minimum); when reading The Expanse novels of which reviews to follow in, hmm, maybe 25-40 months, wherein the generation ship the Mormons were building to cross the stars was half-inched by the OPA to knock Eros off its terminal trajectory to Earth; and indeed, when John and Elis asked Producer Dave (or was it the podcast about not being a fish?*) how many people it would take to send on a spaceship out to the nearest potentially inhabitable heliosphere in terms of avoiding in-breeding during the subsequent generations of people who might never know anything except life on board the vessel (I think they arrived at 100): I was immediately put, in both instances, into a mind to remember the plight of the ship-bound characters of Non-Stop.
I’m not spoiling the plot (but I will not drop the bombshell ending on you!) when I say this is the story of Roy Complain, a member of the Greene tribe who live a measly, grubbing existence, unaware that their lives are lived in entirety on one deck of a massive spacecraft on its way back to Earth from an Earth colony. There, the returning crew were exposed to a rogue amino acid which wrought a great plague on the crew, and civilization on board ruptured and failed, leading eventually to warring tribes and the loss of collective memory of the ship’s true purpose. Roy’s is the 23rd generation of inhabitants since the plague.
It all goes a bit Heart of Darkness when Roy and a small band of tribesmen set off, inspired by tribal shaman, Marapper - who believes they can make it to the control room and regain control of the ship - through the ‘ponics and down through the levels to look for the fabled Forwards, and discover the lost knowledge of their origins.
There was a similar book written and serialized in the 40s by Robert A Heinlein, Orphans Of The Sky, but I haven’t read it so can’t make a useful comparison, but I understand that on the symbolic level, as opposed to the Campbellian, Conradian quest storyline, they both deal with how arbitrary the origins of morals and ethics might seem to the disinterested observer. Roy’s anthropological quest is also a little like the trope, regurgitated recently in different forms in Family Guy and the I Am Groot shorts, of the micro-universe, where the reader is peering into an undiscovered world.
A bit like the omniscient narrator in any** Thomas Hardy novel.
Where was I? Oh yes, the ending. Well as it turns out... you’ll need to read the book to learn the big reveal which, if I may say so, clangs in rather unsatisfactorily as though Aldiss had something else pressing to do, or had a hard deadline and had to file copy. It’s not quite what Frank Skinner calls, “that’ll do”, but it’s not far off.
But to bring it all back together, I’m sure someone must have tried to film this – there were rumours of the Dr Who director Jamie Magnus Stone writing and directing a TV series – as it is eminently cinematic, and the slow reveal of information as the story progresses feels quite J J Abrams. And, as a Grand Master of SF, Aldiss sure knows how to tell a story.
* In retrospect, it is increasing in likelihood that this was the podcast, and not Elis & John: https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com/
**Of the two I’ve read.
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