The Pioneer will take take one hundred and twenty-three years to reach Alpha Centauri. In Starward!, Enrico Yamatsu describes this as a journey of five or six generations. What would it be like to know that you had been born inside a spaceship only so that a later generation would reach the destination? The ship ought to be a mobile environment that you would be happy to live in anyway but it is not. Some complicated psychotechnical ingenuity has been invested in ensuring that, although there will be conflicts within the ship, there will not be an all-destructive Mutiny as there was in Heinlein's Vanguard. (Asimovian predictive social science applied within a Heinleinian generation ship.)
At the beginning of "The Troublemakers," the Pioneer has been in flight for eighty years and there have been at least two Captains. Evan Friday, aged twenty-four, thinks that the internecine power struggles will cause the expedition to fail. He has yet to learn that there is some method in the madness.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I am doubtful of the premise used for "The Troublemakers." My thought being that deliberately engineering trouble on a STL generation ship runs the risk of events escaping all control and restraint, and causing the expedition to fail. I think it would be better to encourage a sense of necessary purpose most people on the ship would agree to. Also, humans don't NEED to be manipulated to quarrel and fight. They can do that all by themselves without assistance!
Ad astra! Sean
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