We like this one because it presents a host of philosophical quandaries, centered around the question of what makes us who we are. Robert Heinlein wrote one of the most famous early works using the trope in Orphans of the Sky, while Elizabeth Bear (the Jacob's Ladder trilogy) and Kim Stanley Robinson ( Aurora, which posits we're probably better off staying at home) have produced notable recent examples. Crews of fictional generation ships face all the usual dangers inherent in space travel, with the additional complication that anyone who actually had a choice about being there will be dead before the ship actually gets anywhere. Scientists and writers have long suggested that the only true means of getting people from one star to another in the vastness of space is by packing a bunch of families onto a very large ship and sending them all off on a journey that might take centuries. A good percentage of outer-space science fiction prefers to avoid coping with the vast distances between stars by sending ships down wormholes (see below) or through hyperspeed (see further below, FTL). Books can include cryosleep as a background element (Mur Lafferty’s recent award-nominee Six Wakes follows a crew of clones ferrying slumbering cargo across the stars) or foreground it into the plot (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time shows us the evolution of an entire alien species, but keeps its human characters alive for the duration, only popping them out of hibernation once a generation), so the trope is often about much more than a clever way to skip past the boring parts.Īgain, the thing about space is… there’s a lot of it, and it takes a really, really long time to get anywhere. Khan preserved himself for centuries before wreaking his wrath on Captain Kirk, and the several members of the ill-fated crew of the Odyssey in the film and novel versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey napped their ways to Jupiter. Think Rip Van Winkle, or, if you're a bit less classy, Encino Man. Cryosleep (aka suspended animation) involves a character or characters that are placed in something like an induced coma for the duration of a long voyage, or perhaps in order to survive over long spans of time.
So dull, in fact, that knocking people out for long journeys between stars has become a trope.
There’s cool stuff in space, sure, but 99.9% of it is pretty empty.
0 kommentar(er)
