The movie Wall-E recently brought the concept of a generation starship to a large popular audience. Like most ideas we see in the movies, science fiction literature has been throwing that concept around for a lot of years. In the September 1934 issue of Wonder Stories appeared Laurence Manning's "The Living Galaxy", the "first fully fledged generation starship narrative". From this starting point, Simone Caroti takes us on a tour of what science fiction has had to say on the subject of generation starships.

The book covers a lot of territory. Caroti does not have the laser focus that the title suggests, but instead, in true "in order to tell you this, I need to make sure you are aware of this" fashion, he digresses into other aspects of the history of science fiction, like editors, the magazines they edited, the popular authors of the period, and a bit about the world's political situation. Each section of the book covers a period of history, and each section is introduced with a description of that period apart from the concept at hand.

1. Fathers
2. The Gernsback Era, 1926-1940
3. The Campbell Era, 1937-1949
4. The Birth of the Space Age, 1946-1957
5. The New Wave and Beyond, 1957-1979
6. The Information Age, 1980-2001

After that introductory material, Caroti discusses stories in great detail, comparing and contrasting the growing scientific knowledge and changing attitudes of the stories with those that came before.

Overall, a very good book for those interested in the history of science fiction and the development of concepts in the genre.

It is a poor review that criticizes a book for doing something other than what it sets out to do, rather than discussing the book on its own merits. However, I would really have liked to have seen the works discussed in this book placed into a larger context. The author has set out to analyze a truly narrow subset of science fiction works, and that's generally fine, as works focusing on life aboard generation starships certainly do share many common traits and tropes, but they also share a number of characteristics with other science fiction works that focus on life and societies in both space stations as well as those works looking at human colonies on other worlds, among many other sub-genres. This book sets out to provide a literary criticism of representative works of science fiction written from 1934-2001 detailing life aboard generation starships, and it certainly achieves that objective. In some ways, the book also functions as a kind of literary history of science fiction literature as a genre, adding to its appeal.

Caroti originally wrote this work as his doctoral dissertation (which is available electronically in the ProQuest dissertations and theses database). The book is organized around an introduction, which provides a brief overview of the genre, and six substantive chapters, plus a short conclusion. The first chapter briefly examines the influences of three men who might be termed "godfathers" of generation starship fiction: the scientists Robert Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and J. D. Bernal. While there potted biographies are interesting in their own right, at times I would actually like to seen these men connected a little more closely with the concept of the generation starship. The remaining chapters take a chronological approach, examining roughly a decade or two worth of relevant fiction per chapter it also lives a chronological bibliography of, essentially, all the major short stories and novels concerning generation starships.

The second chapter covers the 1920s and 30s, initially focusing on editor Hugo Gernsback, who, for better or for worse, more or less created science fiction as a coherent genre. Gernsback's vision of what "proper" science fiction stories would be influenced the genre for decades. Literature-wise, Caroti focuses on two short stories: Laurence Manning’s "The Living Galaxy" (1934) and John Wilcox is "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" (1940).

The third chapter covers the late 1930s and 1940s, characterizing this as the “Campbell Era,” after renowned editor John W. Campbell, who is largely credited with popularizing science fiction as a genre, emphasizing "hard" science fiction. Literature-wise, Caroti primarily discusses two linked generation ship short stories by Robert Heinlein: "Universe" and "Common Sense."

The fourth chapter covers the "birth of the space age," which Caroti describes as the second half of the 1940s and most of the 1950s. This is a short chapter and, to be honest, doesn't really say much about new generation starship fiction, mainly adding to the discussion about Heinlein and a few other authors.

The fifth chapter covers the “New Wave and Beyond,” 1957-79, seemingly a long, disparate period of time to squeeze into a single chapter. The generation starship stories discussed in detail include John Brunner’s “Lungfish,” Chad Oliver’s “The Wind Blows Free,” J. G. Ballard’s “Thirteen to Centaurus,” and Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop (published in the U.S. as Starship).

Caroti’s final chapter covers the Information Age from 1980 to 2001, emphasizing Frank M. Robinson’s The Dark Beyond the Stars, Bruce Sterling’s Taklamakan, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun.

While I had read, or was otherwise familiar with, some of the stories and novels discussed in this book, there were still many I hadn’t read. That wasn't a problem though, as Caroti describes each of the works that he discussed in detail well enough that a reader's lack of familiarity with the work in question isn't a problem, as long as one doesn't mind being spoilered.

I give this book 3.5 stars out of five. At times I would've liked to seen Caroti place generation starship fiction into a broader context, and at other times, the text was a bit dry and I wanted to see him talk more specifically about individual works and do a deeper analysis of them. The book does exactly what it says it will, and no more. I’d also have liked to see Caroti include one final chapter that discusses the generation ship literature of the last decade – as he says in his brief conclusion, the first decade of the twenty-first century has produced a large number of new, relevant works. So why not tell us about those? I would recommend it for those interested in serious, literary criticism of science fiction works, as well as those science fiction fans who find themselves fascinated by the concept of a generation starship. If you just happen to be a science fiction fan who's looking for some fun, interesting commentary on one type of science fiction, I'd probably recommend a different work, as this will tends toward the academic and lit crit side of things.

Review copyright 2011 J. Andrew Byers ( )

The Generation Starship in Science Fiction, A Critical History, 1934-2001, by Simone Caroti, involved much more detail into individual stories than one would typically imagine in a book that covers so many decades of stories. Definitely not being an expert myself on the subject, but a mere science fiction fan who is decently read but still an infant in so many ways, I was surprised that so few stories fell into this subgenre, which obviously brought about the necessity by the author to go deeper in his analyses of these stories.

And that was fine with me, because the subject definitely proved quite fascinating. Obviously there are differing opinions on just how human behavior might play out in these scenarios, and whether certain authors intended to capture what they thought might actually occur or just plain wanted to tell an interesting tale, the readers of these stories come out the winners.

I must admit that I was not familiar with many of the stories Caroti discussed here. Especially the older stories he talked about, and I applaud him for his research on these. It would be nice if someone out there would take the short stories and novellas presented in this critical book and put them into an anthology. What a great companion piece!

Caroti broke his history down into six logical sections and did a nice job of explaining why he did such, the science fiction that was going on in those eras, and where these stories and ideas seemed to fit in with the science of the day. But the book starts off with a nice introduction of real science and the seeming impossibility of traveling far and long into space, or at least in a faster-than-light mode. If you decide to read this book, which I recommend to any science fiction lover, don't skip the intro. Although I believe that most science fiction readers already know that some of the best nuggets come from introductions, so I'm probably preaching to the choir.

I must admit that after having read this book I previously had no real reading experience within this sub-genre, although I have read Rendezvous With Rama and a couple of the Vinge books that are mentioned. And Caroti was successful, at least as far as I'm personally concerned, because I'm now interested in reading several of the pieces he discussed, such as the Brian Aldis book Non-Stop and Lungfish by John Brunner. I've always been fascinated by how people react when put in controlled situations that are out of their control, such as the TV show Survivor. Though that may come as a "disconnect" to some people, to me there is a relationship; hence, another reason to read generation starship stories.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of science fiction and those who dream of going beyond the stars. ( )

This is an interesting but somewhat dry critical account of generation starships. I haven't read most of the works analyzed, so it was interesting to see tropes appear in them that I had experienced elsewhere.

Some more specific, if somewhat disjointed, thoughts about it:

1) I wish the author had more to say about the common ending to this sort of book, where it turns out that the second generation of interstellar travelers has better engines (often, but not always, FTL) and ends up beating out the first generation. There was some discussion of books like this (and I've read several others that he didn't touch on) but I would have liked a unified analysis of them.
2) The choice of 2001 -- and specifically the 9/11 attacks -- as an endpoint to the analysis seemed entirely random to me. The epilogue admits that an uptick in generation-ship stories that started in the '90s continued and in fact intensified in the '00s; this would seem to suggest that 9/11 had no effect whatsoever on people's desire to write/read these works, and the analogies the book made between Manhattan and generation ships when felt extraordinarily strained to me. ( )

I have mixed feelings about this book on several levels. The title was about Generation Starships in Science Fiction but quite often he would spill over into other areas or just Science Fiction in general. Some of that is expected but it sometimes got tedious. Some of the asides were interesting and others made me want to skip over parts.

I think one of the biggest problems I had with this is I hadn't actually read any of the works in question and many of them sounded really fun to read. This drove me crazy because while reading along he would get to a point in the book describing the events and I'd decide I want to read this story! And he would proceed to finish giving the rest of the plot away. That coupled with his jumping back and forth referring to different parts of books or stories he'd already covered made it hard to follow for someone who was as unfamiliar with the subject as I turned out to be.

I also got the feeling that at times the author was trying to impress with his vocabulary. Outside of Calvin & Hobbes I have not come across the word 'transmogrify' and he used it at least 3 times. There are several others that stuck out to me as I read as well. Overall, not bad, I suspect that if you have read fairly heavily in the genre it would be a fun book to read, and it has given me a long list of book to try out, once I forget how they end. ( )