![]() ![]() It’s one of those SF concepts, like time travel or clones, that seems just as useful for mainstream writers, many of whom, as we’ve noted before, are coming to treat SF traditions as a kind of app store. ![]() But we’re never going to see a whole tradition of generation Amtrak novels (endless as some of those journeys may seem), and boats are old hat, so the generation ship remains the vehicle of choice for societal microcosms. ![]() ![]() The idea of putting a large number of people in a confined vessel and then using it as an allegory or mirror of society is at least as old as the medieval tradition of the ship of fools and as clichéd as movies like Titanic, and at times writers have even transferred the idea to trains, as in China Miéville’s Railsea or the film Snowpiercer. Whether or not you believe generation starships will ever be a viable concept (an argument most recently engaged by Kim Stanley Robinson in Aurora), the stories are never going to go away: the notion is just too useful in too many ways. ![]()
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