Generation Ships: Difference between revisions

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* Generation ships (called longliners) are used to carry messages and trade between planets in [[Frederik Pohl]] and C. M. Kornbluth's "Search the Sky". They're pretty horrid: while they don't ''quite'' forget their mission, the people on board end up suffering fairly severe mental retardation (it's not too clear why, possibly a lack of intellectual stimulation?), and they're kept from overpopulation by massive infanticide. But ''every'' place in that book is in horrible shape: it's a horribly [[Darker and Edgier]] world before it was popular. The longliners appear to use ''liquid fuel rockets'', which is what the Saturn V rockets used; in 1970, with a millionth of the distance a Longliner travels.

* In Octavia Butler's ''[[Lilith's Brood|Liliths Brood]]'', the Oankali travel on these as they go from world to world making genetic trades. Also a [[Living Ship]].

* In Brian Aldiss' ''Non-Stop'': A plague on a generation ship reduces the passengers to barbarism: they lose all idea of who they are or even what a spaceship ''is''. The bioengineered plants go into overdrive, turning the ship into a jungle, increasing the sense of obscuration and isolation. The reader's first clue as to what's going on is when the jungle turns out to have bulkheads.

* In Brian Aldiss's ''[[Non-Stop]]'': A plague on a generation ship reduces the passengers to barbarism: they lose all idea of who they are or even what a spaceship ''is''. The bioengineered plants go into overdrive, turning the ship into a jungle, increasing the sense of obscuration and isolation. The reader's first clue as to what's going on is when the jungle turns out to have bulkheads.

* Non-space example: in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', the khepri residents of New Crobuzon are descended from refugees who'd fled a mysterious disaster on their native continent. As their ramshackle ships took decades to cross the ocean, and thousands of the refugees died en route, some khepri vessels technically invoke this trope by having only ship-born crew members left on board when they reached land.

* Another non-space generation ship is Armada from ''[[The Scar]]'' by China Mieville, which is a floating city build by connecting hundreds of regular ships. It doesn't have a permanent destination and it is not meant to ever reach land (as it is a piratical society), but has a permanent population that has lived in the city for generations.

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* The short story "[http://www.wagar.org.uk/?page_id=553 Schism]," set in the ''[[Elite]]'' universe, examines what happens when a homegrown [[Cult Colony]] inside a Generation Ship that has been out of contact with human civilization for centuries encounters another derelict vessel in the void of space.

* [[Robert Reed]] is a fan of this trope. His short story, ''The Children's Crusade'', is about a simulation of a crashed alien starship on Mars - in which the organic passengers are essentially cargo, while the robotic crew controls the ship. ''Chrysalis'' has the last lifeboat of humanity traveling through the galaxy to collect species before [[In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves|they destroy themselves]], with immortal robots controlling the ship. ''The Winemaster'' has a Buick being used essentially as a generation ''car'' - the transhuman / post human residents are so small and live so quickly that an hour real time is like a year to them; several generations go by in the trip from a northern state into Canada.

== Live Action TV ==