tivasyk reviewed Generation Ship by Michael Mammay
In this riveting, stand-alone novel from Michael Mammay, author of Planetside, the beginning of a …
disappointing
2 stars
mammay's «generation ship» starts as something good. up to around 20% i was into it and enjoying, although waiting for the real sci-fi part to kick in.
turns out there's very little sci-fi here, and what's there is disappointingly naïve and disfunctional. mammay's «generation ship» is… like ksr's «aurora» but without «aurora»; like howey's «wool omnibus» but without the silo; like medina station from corey's «persepolis rising» but without the station, action or any space sci-fi! it's just politics in a jar with spiders.
yes, the five main characters are somewhat interesting, alive, believable… but they are in a complete vacuum. their actions are driven only by the social dynamics. the whole plot could have been placed in an open field on earth where nothing ever happens and it still could be the same thick volume.
i mean… this could have been such a huge sci-fi story! if only it …
mammay's «generation ship» starts as something good. up to around 20% i was into it and enjoying, although waiting for the real sci-fi part to kick in.
turns out there's very little sci-fi here, and what's there is disappointingly naïve and disfunctional. mammay's «generation ship» is… like ksr's «aurora» but without «aurora»; like howey's «wool omnibus» but without the silo; like medina station from corey's «persepolis rising» but without the station, action or any space sci-fi! it's just politics in a jar with spiders.
yes, the five main characters are somewhat interesting, alive, believable… but they are in a complete vacuum. their actions are driven only by the social dynamics. the whole plot could have been placed in an open field on earth where nothing ever happens and it still could be the same thick volume.
i mean… this could have been such a huge sci-fi story! if only it had even a tiny bit of sci-fi :-/
one of the stupidest things about «generation ship», a red flag, an indicator of the author's sloppy neglect to the sci-fi component is «the device». not communicator, not smartphone, smartpad, pda or some such name — nope, just «the device».
nobody ever calls their devices «the device». it just doesn't happen, we, humans, always invent names for things we use daily.
if i think about why the author decided to leave this «blob» of a writing in, i begin to really understand why i couldn't enjoy the «generation ship».
next comes hacking, programming and it engineering in general… oh my forking gowd… oh my dear… the way some people see programming is just… so… naïve? good thing we don't have to rely on sci-fi writers doing programming :-D seriously though: i get it, it's difficult to write fiction about programming for computer-illiterate, and it must be especially difficult for authors who know rabbit shit about it, but come on?! this level of ignorance borders with idiocity. it takes maybe a day of reading, or an hour of conversation with someone who works in the field to at least begin to understand how the work with code is done.
the way mr. mammay depicts it is further, much further from any believable reality than young kids playing pretend doctors on plastic babies in kindergarten are from real surgery! — and i'm not even talking about the later part with virtual-reality-like fusion with an ai: a lot of good authors have gone a similar route because once we're in the fairy-land it serves no purpouse (i guess) even trying to imagine a believable way of interacting with complex systems :-/
and now to the serious part that matters. forget the missing sci-fy, the disappointingly unrealistic cyberpunk part. obviously, the author wanted to show us their understanding and solutions to two philosophycal problems specific to sci-fi:
1) how a authonomous micro-society (of ≈ 10 thousand people) could function, and
2) how humanity should ethically tackle the problem of the first contact with an alien civilization.
and oh my god, the author repeats the mistakes of so many brilliant writers (heinlein comes to mind at once) before them by proposing solutions so naïve and disfunctional they should be part of philosophy / sociology / history courses in high school.
the author's solution to #1 is democracy. i won't go into details of why it won't work in a setting with very, very limited space and resources where the survival of the the whole society depends on every individual's ability to balance the private & societal interests. humans are social animals, but with a very strong individualistic behaviours, we are not a hive mind, and some of us will always, always ignore or fail to evaluate the danger to the colony in order to pursue personal gain. it's mostly ok on a planet (a large ecology tolerance) but quickly goes boom in a smaller ecosystems. democracy just won't work.
the authors' solution to #2 is… mr. columbus turns his ships around! no colonization because the aborigins asked him nicely. while i totally understand how this can be attractive to the modern audience… this is just not the way it works in any realistic setting. we can fantacize whether christopher columbus could have turned around in search of less habitable planets, sorry, lands, but he was neither the only nor even the first to arrive in america; faced with real danger to survival, humans shed their layers of their fake «humanism» and fight for their life. ugly? yes. but inevitable unless one invents a different human species without the kind of underlaying programming we have :-(
bottom line: it's not exactly a bad book, but i could hardly enjoy it: for the most part, it"s more of a political drama than sci-fi, and whatever sci-fi there is, it is very naïve. i need to remember to avoid mr. mammay's books, i really don't enjoy leaving disappointed reviews.
personal rating 2/5 because:
• the book is long, i love long books;
•• the text is well written, easy and pleasant to read;
••• adventure is the main reason i read fiction — here it's basically missing;
•••• enough realism to create a believable, functioning setting — missing;
••••• am i so in love with the text, the world, the characters, and the meta (ideas behind it all) that i'll want to own a paper copy of the book and reread it from time to time? here, absolutely not.
