Re: Books.
Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2017 6:44 am
DAY 3.2
In mid-September, right after finishing Prometheans, I launched in my second DAY of the third WEEK. This time around, I would for the first time read a single physical volume which comprised of three single books, an omnibus edition, though it felt weird to call it that since the whole thing is only 450 pages long. Very small font, though... It's Ben Bova's The Exiles Trilogy: Exiled from Earth/Flight of Exiles/End of Exile, seemingly one of his classics.
Exiled from Earth: It's the middle of the 21st century, and the power of nation-states has been subjugated by a world government based in Messina, Sicily, former Italy. Many problems have been solved by the centralized power; wars are pretty much a thing of the past, and the ecological catastrophe has been pushed back as well. Many people live perfectly comfortable lives, not even to mention the rich. And yet, the world is heading toward a Malthusian catastrophe, the Limits of Growth have been torn to shreds, the world is succumbing under 12 billion souls. The inner cities have been given up by the authorities and are urban warzones ruled by rival gangs that fight bitter small-scale wars.
Into this semi-dystopia, a genetics lab makes a breakthrough in germline technology and anti-aging research, promising to get rid of essentially any genetic ailment as well as virtual immortality. These findings are too much for the world government. If this news leaks, chaos will ensue, everyone will want to become immortal and there are way too many people anyway. Therefore, not only is the lab shut down, but the scientists - and many others, I think in total about 1500 - are rounded up, mainly biologists/geneticists, but also a bunch of physicists. The world Government, which is actually less despotic than the back cover wants you to believe, must come up with a pragmatic answer to this "problem" - and decides to exile the scientists to a large space station in orbit!
Most of the book deals with the travails, flights and escapes of one Lou Christopher, one of the leading scientists of the genetics institute. But in the end, he does not win out, and they all get exiled. After a lot of discussion, they decide to make this exile permanent by transforming the space station into a long-range generation ship, and leaving for alpha Centauri, where a planet has been discovered in the habitable zone!
Flight of Exiles: The second book dives right in! Nearly half a century has passed, of the people still alive who built "the ship", all are in cryosleep, their sons and daughters are in command. And right from the first sentence on, the action hammers at you, as a fire in one of the cryosleep compartments kills not just Lou Christopher, but also a colleague of his (who had shown up a few times in the first book) who is the father of Larry Belsen, who now gets to be the protagonist. Lou's son Dan, Larry's best friend, is injured in the fire. While he is in the sick bay, Larry and Val, the girl both friends are gunning for, but who truly loves (or so she claims...) only Larry, orchestrate a vote so that Larry gets command of the ship, a position that was fully expected to go to Dan. Friendship turning to hatred, friends becoming enemies, go!
The ship is nearing Alpha Centauri, and it's not looking good after all. The planet has life on it, but vegetation only, and looks inhospitable. Should the ship slow down and go into orbit, or continue right on (goal as yet unknown). The rivalry escalates, people get hurt, then killed, truth gets ever more muddled and the reader becomes more and more undecided on who the reliable narrator is. It is decided that the ship will go into orbit, a pioneering group is sent down, but a massive storm kills nearly all of them, with Dan surviving. Were they trying to get rid of him?
In the end, after a bunch of seeming twists and turns, the novel flakes out a bit by concluding in a predictable way. Dan is indeed the bad guy who went crazy, Larry gets the girl, and the ship refuels and flies on. All in all, a quite different tale from the first book, lots of psycho stuff, pretty cool. I do wonder if it was somehow based on some classic work, because the "best friends become enemies because of a girl" is one of those ages-old plotlines.
End of Exile: And now for another incredible jump. It is far, far in the future. The ship is mostly dead space, pierced by meteoroids, in vacuum. Humanity is reduced to a miserable group of children and teenagers who dwell in a dilapidated but mostly functional part of the ship. It's Lord of the Flights, everyone. All these kids had been raised from cryo and brought up by a single old man, the final survivor of "knowledgeable" humanity, as in, the people who actually had a sense of history and continuity. But conflicts had erupted and finally something had smashed into the bridge, killing all there. And even the wise old man retreated years ago, "up" to where, it is said, there is no more weight.
It was really hard to get into this tale. In the beginning, a small kid has managed to break one of the pumps of the hydroponics station, dooming many of the kids to die of starvation. He is banished from the group into the dark and unknown beyond, where the rats dwell... He has one last interaction with Linc, our protagonist, a young man who has the singular ability to, as we Germans say "look beyond the rim of the dining plate". Linc manages to activate some of the unused ship systems, such as an instruction program on how to fix a hydro pump. He does fix it, a miracle! But... Forbidden! His kind-of girlfriend, Magda, is the priestess of the impromptu religion centered around worshipping their departed guardian. All his Law comes down to a single video message that plays on a monitor of the cafeteria when she pushes a certain button (Linc had pushed some other buttons on another such system - also Forbidden!), which states that the kids should not fumble around with the equipment. As they all were little kids back then, the message once made sense. But now it is outdated... except for the fact that it is religious doctrine and therefore infallible!! I was really gnashing my teeth at all this taboo mumbo-jumbo that was clearly dooming the final bit of humanity.
Linc is exiled too, but he is much more resourceful than the poor kid from the beginning (Linc finds his rat-gnawed skeleton), and he manages to get all the way up to where their old teacher dwells (he had to move to zero g for health reasons). Many a thing is learned, and it is Linc who informs the old man that there is a single star out there that keeps getting brighter - they are approaching a stellar system! (which, of course, as it turns out, has a habitable planet).
Linc returns from "up" with a mission. To go into the haunted ghost place - aka the bridge - and reactivate the ship's navigation systems so they can perform an orbital insertion burn. But guess what! Taboo! Forbidden! And it is not just the word of the priestess, there is also a total Draco Malfoy (plus Crabbe and Goyle) bully who wants to destroy Linc because he feels he has become a threat to his tiny empire...
As much as I struggled to yet again switch thinking on the narrative structure, this in the end turned out to be the best of the three books. In the truly climatic ending, sabotage by the petty bully destroys the ship's propulsion system, dooming it to fly off again and leave the planet behind forever. But luckily, a "beamer" has also been brought online and with seconds to spare, all the surviving youths, even the recalcitrant Magda and the horrible bully, make it to the surface where they can set about refounding humanity and do a lot of inbreeding... Interestingly, in contrast to my expectation, it's not some future Earth. Contact with Earth completely ended between book 1 and 2 and its fate remains unknown.
I indeed managed to complete the whole thing in just under ten hours!
In mid-September, right after finishing Prometheans, I launched in my second DAY of the third WEEK. This time around, I would for the first time read a single physical volume which comprised of three single books, an omnibus edition, though it felt weird to call it that since the whole thing is only 450 pages long. Very small font, though... It's Ben Bova's The Exiles Trilogy: Exiled from Earth/Flight of Exiles/End of Exile, seemingly one of his classics.
Exiled from Earth: It's the middle of the 21st century, and the power of nation-states has been subjugated by a world government based in Messina, Sicily, former Italy. Many problems have been solved by the centralized power; wars are pretty much a thing of the past, and the ecological catastrophe has been pushed back as well. Many people live perfectly comfortable lives, not even to mention the rich. And yet, the world is heading toward a Malthusian catastrophe, the Limits of Growth have been torn to shreds, the world is succumbing under 12 billion souls. The inner cities have been given up by the authorities and are urban warzones ruled by rival gangs that fight bitter small-scale wars.
Into this semi-dystopia, a genetics lab makes a breakthrough in germline technology and anti-aging research, promising to get rid of essentially any genetic ailment as well as virtual immortality. These findings are too much for the world government. If this news leaks, chaos will ensue, everyone will want to become immortal and there are way too many people anyway. Therefore, not only is the lab shut down, but the scientists - and many others, I think in total about 1500 - are rounded up, mainly biologists/geneticists, but also a bunch of physicists. The world Government, which is actually less despotic than the back cover wants you to believe, must come up with a pragmatic answer to this "problem" - and decides to exile the scientists to a large space station in orbit!
Most of the book deals with the travails, flights and escapes of one Lou Christopher, one of the leading scientists of the genetics institute. But in the end, he does not win out, and they all get exiled. After a lot of discussion, they decide to make this exile permanent by transforming the space station into a long-range generation ship, and leaving for alpha Centauri, where a planet has been discovered in the habitable zone!
Flight of Exiles: The second book dives right in! Nearly half a century has passed, of the people still alive who built "the ship", all are in cryosleep, their sons and daughters are in command. And right from the first sentence on, the action hammers at you, as a fire in one of the cryosleep compartments kills not just Lou Christopher, but also a colleague of his (who had shown up a few times in the first book) who is the father of Larry Belsen, who now gets to be the protagonist. Lou's son Dan, Larry's best friend, is injured in the fire. While he is in the sick bay, Larry and Val, the girl both friends are gunning for, but who truly loves (or so she claims...) only Larry, orchestrate a vote so that Larry gets command of the ship, a position that was fully expected to go to Dan. Friendship turning to hatred, friends becoming enemies, go!
The ship is nearing Alpha Centauri, and it's not looking good after all. The planet has life on it, but vegetation only, and looks inhospitable. Should the ship slow down and go into orbit, or continue right on (goal as yet unknown). The rivalry escalates, people get hurt, then killed, truth gets ever more muddled and the reader becomes more and more undecided on who the reliable narrator is. It is decided that the ship will go into orbit, a pioneering group is sent down, but a massive storm kills nearly all of them, with Dan surviving. Were they trying to get rid of him?
In the end, after a bunch of seeming twists and turns, the novel flakes out a bit by concluding in a predictable way. Dan is indeed the bad guy who went crazy, Larry gets the girl, and the ship refuels and flies on. All in all, a quite different tale from the first book, lots of psycho stuff, pretty cool. I do wonder if it was somehow based on some classic work, because the "best friends become enemies because of a girl" is one of those ages-old plotlines.
End of Exile: And now for another incredible jump. It is far, far in the future. The ship is mostly dead space, pierced by meteoroids, in vacuum. Humanity is reduced to a miserable group of children and teenagers who dwell in a dilapidated but mostly functional part of the ship. It's Lord of the Flights, everyone. All these kids had been raised from cryo and brought up by a single old man, the final survivor of "knowledgeable" humanity, as in, the people who actually had a sense of history and continuity. But conflicts had erupted and finally something had smashed into the bridge, killing all there. And even the wise old man retreated years ago, "up" to where, it is said, there is no more weight.
It was really hard to get into this tale. In the beginning, a small kid has managed to break one of the pumps of the hydroponics station, dooming many of the kids to die of starvation. He is banished from the group into the dark and unknown beyond, where the rats dwell... He has one last interaction with Linc, our protagonist, a young man who has the singular ability to, as we Germans say "look beyond the rim of the dining plate". Linc manages to activate some of the unused ship systems, such as an instruction program on how to fix a hydro pump. He does fix it, a miracle! But... Forbidden! His kind-of girlfriend, Magda, is the priestess of the impromptu religion centered around worshipping their departed guardian. All his Law comes down to a single video message that plays on a monitor of the cafeteria when she pushes a certain button (Linc had pushed some other buttons on another such system - also Forbidden!), which states that the kids should not fumble around with the equipment. As they all were little kids back then, the message once made sense. But now it is outdated... except for the fact that it is religious doctrine and therefore infallible!! I was really gnashing my teeth at all this taboo mumbo-jumbo that was clearly dooming the final bit of humanity.
Linc is exiled too, but he is much more resourceful than the poor kid from the beginning (Linc finds his rat-gnawed skeleton), and he manages to get all the way up to where their old teacher dwells (he had to move to zero g for health reasons). Many a thing is learned, and it is Linc who informs the old man that there is a single star out there that keeps getting brighter - they are approaching a stellar system! (which, of course, as it turns out, has a habitable planet).
Linc returns from "up" with a mission. To go into the haunted ghost place - aka the bridge - and reactivate the ship's navigation systems so they can perform an orbital insertion burn. But guess what! Taboo! Forbidden! And it is not just the word of the priestess, there is also a total Draco Malfoy (plus Crabbe and Goyle) bully who wants to destroy Linc because he feels he has become a threat to his tiny empire...
As much as I struggled to yet again switch thinking on the narrative structure, this in the end turned out to be the best of the three books. In the truly climatic ending, sabotage by the petty bully destroys the ship's propulsion system, dooming it to fly off again and leave the planet behind forever. But luckily, a "beamer" has also been brought online and with seconds to spare, all the surviving youths, even the recalcitrant Magda and the horrible bully, make it to the surface where they can set about refounding humanity and do a lot of inbreeding... Interestingly, in contrast to my expectation, it's not some future Earth. Contact with Earth completely ended between book 1 and 2 and its fate remains unknown.
I indeed managed to complete the whole thing in just under ten hours!