#generation ship

Different generational ships have different rules for what goes up. Some will want you to select a list of 1,000s of books, others 10,000s, others 100,000s. While recourses are tight on those ships, the amount of books that are taken up are largely determined more by how little the people running these projects care. The tech people and companies and governments doing these stuff rarely even give thought to the idea that there are more then 1,000 books that matter. And while knowledge on science and history can be condensed so that the most information in stores in as little space as you can get away with, literature is all or nothing by its nature, either the branch of humanity their creating has a book or it doesn't.

There are details that determine a lot of the choices you make. Sometimes fiction and nonfiction are separated, sometimes they're in one category, though in recent years separating them has become standard. Another important thing is if they limit you by number of books, by total word count of everything you give them, by total page count of everything you give them, or by some combination of them. If they are limiting by word count or page count you can try to prioritize short stories so that they have the maximum amount of stories and authors, with only the really important longer texts being worth it. Or if they just want a total number of books you might want to do the opposite, choosing longer texts over shorter ones so the people on the ship have the most literature you can get away with giving them. Or do you reject such practicalities, deciding that what matters is that the best stories make it through.

And then there's so much to what books you actually pick. Because everything is being sacrificed for something else. If you're already putting on the Iliad and Odyssey is it worth it to put on Works and Days or do you already have enough of Greek mythology from that era? They'll have a limited view of the Greek pantheon without works and days, but if you cut if you might have room for a mythology that will be entirely cut if it was put on, it's loss meaning there's just enough room for the Poetic Edda or The Journey to the West. Are you going to try to do one work per author for the sake of getting as many authors in? Is it better that Metamorphosis is the only Kafka work and At the Mountains of Madness is the only Lovecraft story, or that some author is entirely removed so that those two can be better represented. Shakespeare looms so large over the question of how much work can be from the same author, because it feels right to have the complete works of Shakespeare but you're cutting so much for the sake of it. Is Shakespeare's least known, least influential play worth cutting if it means that another author gets to be remembered?

What about diversity. It's easy for an English major to talk about reading more diverse writers in the low steaks situation of a college classroom where the more well known works of white cishet men will still be there nomatter what. But when there's the question of what you should cut its so easy for those principles to fall away. Will you really cut some or all of the works of Twain, or Voltaire, or Kipling for the sake of allowing someone marginalized to have representation? Especially when a generational ship will inherently create a monoculture. When artifical sperm generation might even mean your ship will be all female? On that note do you take the conditions of the ship into account? Do you describe blue skies to those who will never see them?

You're also having to deal with the censorship of the people launching the ship. Like, a lot of generational ships are government controlled. A shockingly large percentage of private generational ships are either the pet project of trillionaires or the mission of religious fundamentalists. So when histories and sociological information are biased or censored literature might be all a ship has to counter that narrative. Mabye an evangelical ship's only hint that queerness exists will be Dorian Grey. Mabye a ship helmed by the richest man on earth is doomed to not know Marx but they can at least have Brave New World. The British government writes its most flattering histories to tell its people where they can from but mabye you can get away with giving their subjects Things Fall Apart.

Ultimately you have to realize you're not just giving them books to read while they're alone in space, but the start of their literary tradition when they colonize a new planet. Just like how ships are given the genetic code of animals and plants to build new ecosystems with, all the books they're given will be the basis for the books authors write on a civilization in another star system. There will be an entire society building their ideas of culture off of what you choose to give them. And likewise everything you don't give them will not inspire their culture. When you choose to put Paradise Lost on a ship you're not just giving them one book written in the 1600s, you're giving them the capacity to write books inspired by it, you're giving them hundreds of future years of books about angels and demons and creators and creations. And every book is like that. Every book is the basis for something you can barely imagine. If you give them Works and Days to compliment the Iliad and Odyssey, you're not just giving them another book to read, you're deciding what the names Zeus and Aires and Athena mean on a planet you'll never see with a civilization that is yet to exist but that you know will.

Cyberrats Art- The Astrid!

(Pitchposting is a way of giving away ideas that threaten to grow in my mind until they become draft documents. They are free to a good home, though there's no guarantee that I won't try to write them at some point.)

Alright, hear me out: it's a generation ship, one expected to reach its destination with an entirely new generation of people who never knew the homeland, except instead of being a scifi concept, we're doing it as mundane as possible.

I think this is one of those ideas that only appeals to me because I immediately start thinking about the logistics of it all, and there's something in the mundane, gritty realism that really appeals to me. Mostly I'm worldbuilding and problem solving, trying to get at what it would actually be like for people to have been at sea their entire lives, to have a ship that either needs to endure the waves or be rebuilt as it goes.

I was going to say that this needs to be fantasy, but I guess technically it can be an Alderson Disk or something. An Alderson Disk has a habitable circumference of approximately a billion kilometers, a sailing ship can go maybe eighty miles a day, that's a ballpark of 12.5 million days to circumnavigate the disk, which is 34,000 years. That's a hell of a lot of generations, twice as long as we've had agriculture. (But you could also just have it be a fantasy world that's larger than our own, with a generation ship that was only trying to flee to greener pastures that are a hundred years away.)

The purest version of this story is a world that's just water, to match the void of space. The ship sails, repairs are made from flotsam and jetsam and driftwood from unspecified places, rainwater is caught and put into barrels, pitch is used for patching, fish and kelp are hauled up from the ocean, birds are captured from the sky, and the ship must necessarily endure storms and swells.

I've always felt there was something compelling about constrained living situations, places where everyone knows everyone and you have to make it work because there's absolutely no way out — where you're on a knife's edge because there's only so much preparation you can do. A generation ship needs to think about absolutely all of its needs and how it will deal with the deterioration of all things over time, along with problems that might only crop up once every hundred years, or problems that won't become apparent until long after the ship has left the dock.

Let's say you have a sailing ship the size of one of the largest sailing vessels of the 19th century, a thousand people all told. The families are carefully braided to prevent accidental incest, everyone has their position in life, every master has at least one apprentice but probably more so gout or cancer don't eliminate the last person who knew how to make more pitch.

This is clearly an Idea story, one that starts with a ridiculous premise and then explores it, but one of my favorite things about idea stories is finding the characters and the conflicts within them. For a generation ship, the biggest, most obvious conflict is the conflict between generations: the old people who once knew dry land, the middle generation who will likely die before the destination is reached, and the children who will be the beneficiaries of all this travel.

We have a woman who was born to the sea, who loves the sea, who loves the travel and takes great joy in knowing that she's probably not going to see the end of it until she's ancient. We have the grizzled sailor who's nearly risen to the rank of captain and sees the whole mission as utter foolishness. A boy of thirteen who is obsessed with writing stories about the land they've set off toward and keeps his telescope on the horizon, hoping that the predictions were off, that they're somehow two decades early. A girl of sixteen who doesn't feel suited to the marriage that's planned for her, who is secretly in love with her best friend. A scientist who has been quietly advancing the state of knowledge with every new fish brought up from the deeps.

And then there's the plot, which there are so, so many options for. I would start the novel with simple sailing, a few chapters of the daily routine, the personalities, their petty fights with each other, and the stress of being in the middle of unfathomably deep waters whose depths are only glimpsed when the nets bring up something new. Then ... an island, another ship, sea creatures that have a glimmer of intelligence, a storm that makes the ship limp, spoilage that threatens starvation unless drastic action is taken, a political squabble that might bring all the plans crashing down.

Maybe it's a book about being trapped by the past, or about hanging on by what feels like a delicate thread, or about how systems are fragile and careful thinking and brave leadership are the only things that will get us through.

They turn out to be basically a stellar-scale ark ship from a Kardashev 5 civilization, but they’re apparently very new to the idea of being that powerful, because they apparently *just* developed the ability to “spark” the birth of a new universe manually when they and many other arks left their home universe. Then they weren’t paying attention, the population of the ark panicked when they nearly ran out of fuel (read: the black hole they were using for thrust and power was nearly gone due to Hawking Radiation), so they hastily sparked a Big Bang — ours — and performed a “galactobraking” maneuver riiiight into what would later become the Milky Way, and meekly ask any passerby ships from newer civs to “please trade physics data, we have no idea what your weapons are made of and we’d like to know in case pirates attack.”

The ISGV Valeria, launched in 2287, was intended to be the first of mankind's attempts at an interstellar voyage at sublight speeds. No individual piece of hardware on board was particularly advanced, but the scale of the megastructure was novel - built with the intent that multiple native earth ecosystems could be transplanted aboard, and that radiation shielding and powerful floodlights fed by a long-duration fusion reactor could allow those ecosystems to persist naturally, with minimal maintenance or interference by crew.

Human civilization aboard Valeria could be sustained in the same way that it did on Earth - farming, industrial production, and all other aspects of society could be performed using the same automated systems as on the ground, and passengers could expect very little labor to be needed during the voyage. Valeria promised exploration without struggle, colonization without guilt, and glory without compromising the luxury to which most earthbound humans are accustomed.