Generation Ship
Michael Mammay
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780063252981
Harper Voyager, October 2023, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’ll be looking at a hardish sci-fi book that’s not so secretly a treatise on current political affairs and the timeless element of human nature—Generation Ship by Michael Mammay.

Unlike Mammay’s previous works (some of which I’ve reviewed before, because I think they’re worth your time to read), Generation Ship leans more toward the Arthur C. Clarke or Ben Bova model of science fiction (one focused more on science fact rather than space wizardry) as opposed to the military sci-fi that Mammay has become known for in his Planetside series. In this novel, humanity has sent out a colony ship from Earth to a distant planet on a multi-generational journey, the culmination of which is at hand, but the arrival is not going as smoothly as anyone on board wants. The ship’s society has changed over the hundreds of years of the journey, giving rise to various factions who find themselves at cross-purposes, and that’s before adding in the inexplicable natural hostility of the planet itself. Will anyone survive? Better read the book!

The first thing an astute reader will notice upon reading Generation Ship is that it is an extremely topical encapsulation of the current fractures threatening to splinter the United States of America into warring subdivisions, and it’s here that I have to give Mammay a lot of credit. It would have been very easy to make the characters one dimensional caricatures (the Scheming Politician, the Fascist Security Man, the Naive Radical, the Uninvolved Centrist) but every person in this book has depths that frequently upend the reader’s expectations and reflect the messy complications that involve actual human beings. There aren’t any “bad” people in this story, even though there are villains aplenty, which is a difficult tightrope to walk. Instead, Mammay does a phenomenal job of giving the reader ways to understand the motivations behind the characters’ actions, so readers can empathize with even characters who they might not personally agree with. The second thing an astute reader will notice is that Generation Ship isn’t just a novel concerned with the current hegemonic empire spanning our globe, it’s a story concerned with our survival as a species, and this is where Mammay really delivers. This book, and I cannot stress the point enough, is a snapshot of our planet as a spaceship traversing the deadly void of space and how all of us collectively are destroying the environment that allows us to exist. For all the petty power struggles that the characters in Generation Ship engage in, they all understand that they need the ship intact in order to survive, which is a lesson I hope everyone reading this book not only internalizes, but also makes clear to everyone else in their life who hasn’t read it. In addition, Mammay takes the next step (which is a rare thing to see in this type of story) and makes it clear to the reader that repeating the same mistakes in a new environment isn’t something that’s necessarily going to pan out, in stark contrast to the pro-colonial attitudes that previous hard sci-fi authors have espoused.

The third thing an astute reader will notice is that this is simply a fun book to read. The conflict and drama between the various crewmembers provides a chapter to chapter tension that keeps the pages turning, and major plot beats occur frequently enough to drive an overarching investment in the overall outcome. I think the highest praise I can offer is that while I was reading this novel, I had to pull myself away from it several times to take care of real world obligations, and every time I did I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep reading and see what happened next.

Overall, if you’re looking for a book that’s more concerned with the people behind the technology than the technology itself, and you care even the slightest about our planet, you can’t go wrong with Generation Ship. I fear it’s going to be a niche success that future generations look back on and ask themselves, “why didn’t we pay attention?” (assuming books are still a thing), but hey, maybe everyone will prove me wrong.

Read if: you’ve internalized Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl; you’re capable of thinking of future generations; you can see the grass for the birds.