Generation Starships and After: 'Never Anywhere to Go But in'?(Critical Essay‪)‬

Science fiction is a genre (or mode) that thrives on weird inventions and, more than that, on cognitive breakthroughs, fundamental ontological, existential and topographical revelations and questions: what are we? what life are we leading? where are we? Yet it is also strongly intertextual: very many stories are versions of basic story types or rewrites of earlier stories; the genre divides into subgenres, and subtypes of story divide off from those, and both authors and readers tend to be conscious of this. SF is historically conscious, often setting itself to represent and critique the present by the way it imagines the future; hungry for sensation and innovation; and intensely self-referential. One subgenre in SF is that of stories concerning the Generation Starship. Since the nearest stars are a very long way away, and Faster Than Light travel is, to put it mildly, very unfeasible, it may be that the one practical way to reach the stars is on a vast ship equipped to journey for generations, so that only the descendants of those who set out will reach their destination. Certain narrative lines seem to follow almost inevitably from this stipulation, though it may be that they are also historically conditioned: the story will be about the journey itself; and the starship, journeying through space as Earth does, will become a kind of Earth or a metaphor for Earth. And if the journey rather than the arrival matters, and the moment of departure is so distant as to be almost forgotten, then memory of Earth and of the mission which Earth entrusted to those whom it also exiled forever, may well grow dim. The mission may well have been launched in desperation, since it is likely that only a crisis on Earth could lead its people to pour resources into such a vast ship and then to send its crew off without hope of return; but then, ironically, Earth's last hope and effort will cease to belong to Earth, cease to be human, perhaps.