Fiction : Schism : Generation Ships

[drew]

That's really weird.

Whatever I do the 'i' is covered up by the 'l'. I've tried deleting and retyping... still the same problem. For now I've put a space between hol and ies!

Ho hum!

Openoffice bug perhaps?

Cheers,

Drew.

[Commander McLane]

A good story, though I am not entirely sure whether formally and stilisticly it entirely matches the criteria of a short story. Anyway, I liked it!

I noticed something of which I don't know if it's deliberately so: In the end Miriam leaves her restricted code and starts using words like "ship", "stars" and even "galaxy" (a completely new one).

The story reminded me of some other stories on top of the citations already mentioned (which I didn't know myself BTW).

First Isaac Asimov's "Rendezvous with Rama" came to my mind. But of course the perspective is completely different. In Asimov's story the protagonists try to find out as much as possible about a massive interstellar ship that enters the solar system. In your story it's quite the opposite, the research being inside-out.

Then there a two stories that I read in a SF-anthology around the same time as Asimov's. I remember neither titles nor authors. One was about a human population living in the remnants of our civilization in a distant future, but not knowing anything about the technology that still runs it. That's until one of them accidentally discovers the control-room of the building they're in and learns how to switch on and off the lights. All the others can understand this only as an act of God. And the second is located in a generation ship orbiting the Earth. Something went wrong, its inhabitants don't have the slightest idea who and where they are. They have become much smaller then normal men and their biological clock ticks four times as fast. They are monitored by a human spy who lives among them under-cover, until of course one of them finds out the truth about them.

And then I seem to remember a movie I saw perhaps 30 years ago about the changes and mis-developments in the society on board, which has turned into a similar hierarchic society than you are describing, I think with "alphas", "betas" and "gammas", IIRC.

Of course, the generation-ship-motive will always result in some basic concepts that will be similar.

However, I think you have added to that some ideas I really like. And your story clarifies some issues about generation ships, that could well be reflected in Draco_Caeles' OXP.

The question of time and speed for example. The ship in your story has been travelling for a good 900 years, and its destination is still 423 years away. It originated from earth and is aiming at Tianve. Now, even if Earth is not present on the Elite and Oolite galactic map, we know it is not too far from Lave. (See the wonderful and very informative website of Selezen for some reflections on that as well as on the timelines.) The distance from Lave to Tianve is 89.6 LY, so we can assume a distance between Earth and Tianve of roughly 90 LY as well. If we divide this 90 LY by the travel time (let's say 1350 years), we get 0.06666666666 LM as the generation ship's speed. This also seems more likely to me than the 0.145 Draco_Caeles has given them in his OXP, given the propelling technology that is assumingly in use.

This has other consequences as well. Given the speed of generation ships and the time Oolite is set in, we wouldn't expect to meet generation ships out of Galaxy 1. They simply couldn't have got out of the first galaxy by the time of Oolite, if we agree to the hypothesis that the eight galaxies are distant areas of the same galaxy that can't be reached without wormholes. By the time of Oolite generation ships should be confined to a circle with a radius of roughly 60 LY around Lave. (Well, perhaps we shouldn't be too scrupulous about that.)

I like the idea of the Oracle and the whole religious cult. In the end we find out that "Oracle" in reality is an acronym for the ship's computer. Now, why would anybody name a computer to match that acronym? And I guess this was deliberately done so. The answer springs to mind: Perhaps the whole religious cult is no aberration, but was carefully designed in the first place, from the very beginning, before the ship set on its journey? And why that? Because only a religious cult would be strong enough to survive and keep the ship and the society on-board running for 45 generations, 1350 years! I find this a stunning idea.

I have however some doubts, as far as other details of the exposition are concerned. Allow me to share them here.

We learn that the people on-board obey the rules and rituals of their religious cult. Only as an enlightened person Miriam starts to question them. It seems to me that this kind of obedience perhaps is overfulfilling and therefore perverting the intentions of the generation who boarded the ship. Why is that?

It seems that even so extremely important tasks as e.g. maintenance of the ship and its engine are only fulfilled and understood as a religious ritual. No doubt that this understanding helps the people on board to fulfill their duties to the letter, and--as I pointed out before--the religious cult may have been carefully designed to work that way. But at the same time the people seem to completely lack any understanding of what they are actually doing, like how the engine works, what it does and, after all, what this all is good for. Even the death of a maintenance worker is understood as a punishment from God for not performing the ritual accurately, it is not understood at all as what it is, the result of contamination with some kind of radiation. My question is: Is this complete lack of engineering and, more so, scientific knowledge and skills probable? Even the word "analysis" is unknown! We have to bear in mind that the generation ship began its journey at some point in the 23rd century (Oolite being set in the 32nd), not in the middle ages or in mythological times (even if from their point of view the beginning of the journey was in a mythological time). In other words: The civilization they came from had scientific and engineering knowledge. After all this civilization wasn't extinct and developed the witchdrive afterwards. And that's only where they started! So: Why doesn't there seem to be any scientific knowledge preserved on the generation ship? It seems unlikely to me that in 900 years(!) the human mind shouldn't have developed any curiosity, shouldn't have done any research on what the world looks like, shouldn't have come up with new technical inventions. If all these powers and capabilities of the human mind were completely overcome by the religious cult, then the cult's designers definitely were too successfull.

After all: What's the purpose of the journey? It's to finally arrive at Tianve and start a settlement there. How are the colonialists going to be prepared for that? They are going to need imagination, ingenuity, inventions, technical skills and a scientifically open mind, if they want to successfully colonize a completely unknown world. At this point their religious cult, which is designed to maintain their ship and the society within forever, will not help them anymore. Perhaps this is the big contradiction of their journey? When they pass the finish line, they will have forgotten everything they are going to need there? Because they had to forget it in order to reach the finish line in the first place? That's an epic theme!

But still I'm not sure if it would be even possible to confine the human mind so much that it couldn't break free in 900 years.

Anyway, these are my toughts on--and inspired by--your story. So in inspiring these kinds of thoughts it's, by any means, a good story! I hope that some of my ideas can perhaps help you to further develop the concept of the generation ship. Feel free!

[Star Gazer]

Good story, drew! Most enjoyable! I don't think the action to guard 'the perceived truth' is any different from actions taken today by nations' guardians to protect us from what they don't want us to know. Not that I'm cynical or paranoid...

Just two small typos I noticed:
Page 7, line16 : 'They were rewards with one of the panels' ... should be ... 'rewarded with'
Page 7, line48 : 'The Cardinal look up, his' ... should be ... 'looked up'

...oh, and there is another Acrobat wierdness on Page 13, line 38 where it is determined to leave out the space between 'Please' and 'state', but if you copy and paste the line into TextEdit, the space appears...

[drew]

Thanks for the post there commander! Fantastic. You've hit on a lot of the themes I myself would explore if I took the story forward. I'm a big fan of Selezen's work and always try to adhere to it.

To take your key themes one by one. I agree with you on the speed/distance thing. All I had to go on was the small bit of 'canon' from the original Elite manual which reads...

Before the development of the WS Thru-Space drive, in all its various forms, interstellar travel occurred in large, self-sustaining environment ships - Generation Ships - most of which have now been logged and their progress monitored. There are more than seventy thousand of these immense vessels ploughing their way through the galaxy, some of them into their 30th generation. The penalty for interference with such a vessel is marooning.

The way I worked out the current journey was as follows:

Current Elite date is around 3125. A generation is about 30 years, and there have been 30 generations (for the earliest ships). That gives a travel time of 900 years or thereabouts. Working backwards from that, a launch time for a genship should be about 2225, early 23rd century or so. Which seems vaguely plausible to me.

I then figured that the genships wouldn't be fired of into space at random, but would be targetted at specific systems. Our current tech is almost at the point of resolving earth like planets around stars, so I figured that this would be pretty straight forward by 2225. I figured they would probably target stars within a 100 ly radius.

I didn't work out the speed, but I like the 0.06 lightspeed. That is still about 400k miles per hour. (Contrast our fastest space probe Voyager 2, at 40k miles per hour) - again, vaguely plausible

70,000 ships is a lot though, particularly given their size! I think in 'reality' only a handful would have been launched.

I was quite mindful of Rendezvous with Rama (great book - though Arthur C. Clarke isn' it?).

As for the Oracle computer... I'd considered both angles, ie. the society was setup to become a religious cult, or it degraded into one. In the end I figured leaving it to the reader would be more fun. I was influenced here by Anne McCaffrey's 'Aivas' computer, which was unearthed by a backward feudal society in the Dragon series. 'AIVAS' stood for 'Advanced intelligent voice address system' or something similar. In that story the population reacts in all sorts of interesting ways to a 'metal box' that can tell the past, show moving images etc. That series very similar in some themes (you had a high tech society colonising a planet and loosing it's technology over an 800 year period and regressing to a feudal state. Then, they discover their ancestors technology...)

As for the 'unquestioning obediance', this I felt (sadly) was grounded in some real experience. I had some friends who got sucked into a very cultish church - smart, intelligent people. They eventually sold their house, car and gave all their money to it, seeming to loose the power of independant thought. They were absolutely convinced that they were right and all their previous friends were agents of 'Evil'. Intelligence seems to be no defence against the power of suggestion. Very sad, but very true.

There is a terrifying quote from one Christian organisation I know...

Give me the child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.

I imagine life aboard a genship would be extremely strict, with little tolerance for independant thinking, almost military.

In terms of 'not understanding machines', I consider this believable in the sense that most of us do not understand the tools and machines we use, other than operating them. I have a working knowledge of my car, but lack the ability to fix it. Only a tiny percentage of our population is actually able to envisage, design and construct a complex device - most of us never do.

We all tend to go through life as a series of routines, and only very rarely do any of us stop and ask, "Why (fundamentally) am I doing this?" You could (at a stretch) argue that our devotion to work, earning money, spending it on maintaining a us/a house/a car in an endless cycle amounts to a pretty slavish 'religion'...

I was quite influenced in this by the Isaac Asimov 'Psychohistory' in the Foundation series, In this the societal future of the galactic empire was worked thousands of years in advance (a predicted period of anarchy as the empire fell).

I also saw the ship as holding different 'strata' of people. Menials were obviously at the bottom with limited education. In between were the acolytes. I hadn't worked this all out in detail, but it seemed to me that people would be given education suitable to their job. People further up had more knowledge and more responsibility. Not disimilar to how the Romans and Greeks organised themselves successfully for hundreds of years.

Was the ship going to prepared for the task upon arrival? The big question! Again, I'd thought of quite a few basic possibilities, but who knows what will happen in 423 years! This is directly linked to the theme of was the religion intended or not... One for the reader again.

Thanks for the thought provoking post! This is what I enjoy most about people reading my stories. Thanks!

Cheers,

Drew.

[drew]

Good story, drew! Most enjoyable! I don't think the action to guard 'the perceived truth' is any different from actions taken today by nations' guardians to protect us from what they don't want us to know. Not that I'm cynical or paranoid...

Just two small typos I noticed:
Page 7, line16 : 'They were rewards with one of the panels' ... should be ... 'rewarded with'
Page 7, line48 : 'The Cardinal look up, his' ... should be ... 'looked up'

...oh, and there is another Acrobat wierdness on Page 13, line 38 where it is determined to leave out the space between 'Please' and 'state', but if you copy and paste the line into TextEdit, the space appears...

Thanks for that - will amend. Something wacky going on with adobe there...

Paranoid? You can't be TOO paranoid!

Cheers,

Drew.

[Commander McLane]

Again, thanks for the thought-provoking story!

Just a few responses:

I was quite mindful of Rendezvous with Rama (great book - though Arthur C. Clarke isn' it?).

You're right, of course! (And sorry to Arthur C., wherever he may read this!)

As for the 'unquestioning obediance', this I felt (sadly) was grounded in some real experience.

Point taken. I agree that this happens all the time, and that some of the more questionable cults are consciously exploiting this willingness.

In terms of 'not understanding machines', I consider this believable in the sense that most of us do not understand the tools and machines we use, other than operating them.

Hmmm. I agree with that, but my point is that the people you are describing in the story don't even seem to know that they are operating a machine. They perform a religious ritual as a religious ritual, not because what they do makes any sense to them. And even if you are unable to fix your car, you wouldn't mix up operating (= driving) it with a religious practise, thereby completely overlooking the minuscle fact that it transports you from one point to another.

So, what I find unlikely is that the inhabitants of the generation ship completely fail to recognize their machines as being machines at all. And all I am saying is: for the honour of mankind, couldn't at least one individual in 900 years have come to that conclusion (and then make disciples, just to stay in the religious idiom)?!? ("Ah, this is not only our temple, this is an energy-source! Now, what is all this energy used for? Ah, it powers our habitat! What kind of habitat is that, and isn't there a lot of excess energy just for the nice light-bulbs? Ah, there is a kind of engine attached to it! Now, what does this engine move? Ah, the whole habitat as such! But now, where does the habitat move through, where from and where to? Ah, there is an out-side!..." and so on)

[Captain Hesperus]

So, what I find unlikely is that the inhabitants of the generation ship completely fail to recognize their machines as being machines at all. And all I am saying is: for the honour of mankind, couldn't at least one individual in 900 years have come to that conclusion (and then make disciples, just to stay in the religious idiom)?!? ("Ah, this is not only our temple, this is an energy-source! Now, what is all this energy used for? Ah, it powers our habitat! What kind of habitat is that, and isn't there a lot of excess energy just for the nice light-bulbs? Ah, there is a kind of engine attached to it! Now, what does this engine move? Ah, the whole habitat as such! But now, where does the habitat move through, where from and where to? Ah, there is an out-side!..." and so on)

For such talented individuals, there is the Ritual of Eire-Loq....

Captain Hesperus

[drew]

Hmmm. I agree with that, but my point is that the people you are describing in the story don't even seem to know that they are operating a machine. They perform a religious ritual as a religious ritual, not because what they do makes any sense to them. And even if you are unable to fix your car, you wouldn't mix up operating (= driving) it with a religious practise, thereby completely overlooking the minuscle fact that it transports you from one point to another.

So, what I find unlikely is that the inhabitants of the generation ship completely fail to recognize their machines as being machines at all. And all I am saying is: for the honour of mankind, couldn't at least one individual in 900 years have come to that conclusion (and then make disciples, just to stay in the religious idiom)?!? ("Ah, this is not only our temple, this is an energy-source! Now, what is all this energy used for? Ah, it powers our habitat! What kind of habitat is that, and isn't there a lot of excess energy just for the nice light-bulbs? Ah, there is a kind of engine attached to it! Now, what does this engine move? Ah, the whole habitat as such! But now, where does the habitat move through, where from and where to? Ah, there is an out-side!..." and so on)

It's a good point! This sounds like a good sequel idea, perhaps a generation or two down the line...

It's a difficult one. I do quite a bit of lecturing on astronomy and computers as an aside and it is scary how infrequently children are asking the 'how does it work' question nowadays. I appreciate they still know it's a mechanical device, but even so, given our tendency to ascribe emotions, feelings and deities to inanimate objects...

...I can see baby 'menials' playing with a variety of toys not dissimilar to our current 'fisher price' 'press button get reward' toys, and that's about all they would need...

Arthur C. Clarke made a couple of related points in Rendezvous with Rama too:

1. When one of his characters looks up at the inside of the ship with water streaming down in a curve due to the coriolis effect and comments that "Newton would have gone crazy trying to work out physics in a place like this". Given that 'Rama' and the genships apparently have no external windows (accept in the 'Tabernacle'/Bridge) what would prompt people to consider the concept of 'outside' or 'elsewhere'?

2. His famous quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Perhaps the society regressed too far, to a point where they couldn't bridge to gaps in in understanding. It would be like presenting a flatscreen dvd player to a medieval scholar - what would the reaction be? Fear, wonder, revulsion? The device would be so far out of context there might not be a way to explain what it was doing in concepts the scholar could grasp.

For such talented individuals, there is the Ritual of Eire-Loq....

That could be a serious rationalisation! Those in power would have a vested interesting in maintaining the status quo (lowercase S, lowercase Q )

Cheers,

Drew.

[Commander McLane]

Perhaps the society regressed too far, to a point where they couldn't bridge to gaps in in understanding. It wouldbe like presenting a flatscreen dvd player to a medieval scholar - what would the reaction be? Fear, wonder, revulsion?

Then it would also be worthwhile to explore the reasons of this regression. Because one thing we know for sure: The generation that boarded the ship was able to build it! So they mastered its technology. When and why was that mastership lost?

And another point: There is at least one individual on board who does recognize the nature of the ship: the Cardinal. He also knows the meaning of the technical terms and can communicate with the ship's computer. That raises more questions: Is he alone? Or is there a whole class of operators of the ship hidden in the background, only one of them being visible for the common people: the "Cardinal"? I think the latter, because it would be an gargantuesque task in every generation to pick one of the regressed people and educate him (or her?) enough to "bridge to gaps in in understanding", turning magic into technology again for him (as overcoming the magic view of the world and replacing it with a scientific/technical view is an undertaking so vast that even more than four centuries of enlightenment on current Earth haven't been able to bring it to an end)! And even Miriam, as far as she came in revealing the secrets of the Ooniverse, is still seeing the Oracle as completely magic. So I opt for the secret class of Operators (yeah! it's time for some conspiracy-theory on the Generation Ship).

[Disembodied]

Then it would also be worthwhile to explore the reasons of this regression. Because one thing we know for sure: The generation that boarded the ship was able to build it! So they mastered its technology. When and why was that mastership lost?

The generation who boarded the ship could have been very small -- say no more than 40 people. Even with a low (positive) birthrate, over 30 generations you're going to get a big population out of 40 people. Some judicious murders early on could have quickly eliminated all those who knew the real nature of the ship, leaving the murderer(s) free to steep any offspring not their own (either already born on board, or produced from harvested gametes) in ignorance and superstition.

It wouldn't even have to be murder: some large-scale accident which wipes out almost all the small adult crew, leaving just one person alone with a freezer full of frozen sperm and eggs, a shaky grip on reality and a half-baked grasp of artificial womb technology.

And another point: There is at least one individual on board who does recognize the nature of the ship: the Cardinal. He also knows the meaning of the technical terms and can communicate with the ship's computer. That raises more questions: Is he alone? Or is there a whole class of operators of the ship hidden in the background, only one of them being visible for the common people: the "Cardinal"? I think the latter, because it would be an gargantuesque task in every generation to pick one of the regressed people and educate him (or her?) enough to "bridge to gaps in in understanding", turning magic into technology again for him (as overcoming the magic view of the world and replacing it with a scientific/technical view is an undertaking so vast that even more than four centuries of enlightenment on current Earth haven't been able to bring it to an end)! And even Miriam, as far as she came in revealing the secrets of the Ooniverse, is still seeing the Oracle as completely magic. So I opt for the secret class of Operators (yeah! it's time for some conspiracy-theory on the Generation Ship).

The Cardinal (and the secret class of Operators) could be the lineal descendants of the original murderer/survivor(s), or some other favoured group, who know the truth, or some close variation thereof, and who, for their own reasons, keep it to themselves and perpetuate the cult among the rest of the population. It might be relatively easy for such a group, with access to environmental controls, to discourage any questions and stifle any dissent. The Catholic Church managed to get a good 1000 years' use out of slapping Interdictions on whole countries, and that didn't actually have any physical effect at all: imagine how much more impressive a religion would be if their priests were armed with curses that actually worked...

[Cmdr. Maegil]

It kind of reminds me of Paranoia RPG...

[*cat]

The Asimov reference is probably to the Foundation books; in several of them, science has become ritual and religion.
Also, in Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2 and 3 books, there's a whole world that has lost its scientific knowledge.

[Arexack_Heretic]

just started reading.
one typo: page2 last word. Inviolate

suggestion: intead of saints, maybe it would be more logical for Miriam to speculate that the lights are other genships, on their way to Nirvana. Afterall the ship is the world, nothing was outside before. If there is an outside, it stands to reason there are more worlds.

typo: page 11; Miriam is refered to as he.
last page: interstella (+r)

A nice read. thanks Drew.



I have read a story about a genship before...they also had lost lots of knowledge, much had become heredetary and guild like. Mapmaking was forbidden IIRC and questions were discouraged.
only few knew the truth of the matter, but there had been a violent mutiny not long after ignition and they had missed their target. Systems were beginning to break down. The protagonist decides to explore and eventually finds the Bridge. Can't recall whether they managed to land or they decided to live on oblivious.
iirc it was 'ship of fools' by RP Russo. or maybe Marrow by R Reed.

[Uncle Reno]

just started reading.
one typo: page2 last word. Inviolate

Which is the word spelt correctly, in the story it is spelt "involiate"

[Rxke]

And the second is located in a generation ship orbiting the Earth. Something went wrong, its inhabitants don't have the slightest idea who and where they are. They have become much smaller then normal men and their biological clock ticks four times as fast. They are monitored by a human spy who lives among them under-cover, until of course one of them finds out the truth about them.

"Non-stop". Don't remember by who... Will have to hunt for it when I'm home, quite liked the story (didn't yet read Drew's, will finally do so in a minute or so...)

edit edit: Finally read it, during lunchbreak a day later. No regrets.