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The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense with expectation for the new system that is to be their home. Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the detection of electronic signals from one of the planets comes as a shock. In millennia of slow expansion, humanity has never encountered aliens, and yet these new signals cannot be ignored. They suspect a fast robot probe has overtaken them, and send probes of their own to investigate. On a world called Ground, whose inhabitants are struggling into the age of radio, petroleum and powered flight, a young astronomer searching for distant planets detects an anomaly that he presumes must be a comet. His friend, a brilliant foreign physicist, calculates the orbit, only to discover an anomaly of his own. The comet is slowing down ...… (more)
User reviews
Book reading is odd sometimes - some themes you hardly ever encounter, and then by chance you come across two at once. I'd just finished LeGuin's short story collection which ends with a Generational Ship tale, and then I picked up this Learning
Weirdly we never get the actual third person voice of Atomic, she's only ever represented as her biolog entries (quite why people are still writing blogs x000 years in the future is never explained). I'm also not too convinced by the atomic (ie fission) power or weapons, these too seem far too old for such a futuristic vessel.
As the ship gets closer to the planet they realise that instead of an empty world like all previous encouters there civilisation has colonised, this one contains higher life forms. Darvin's people are evolved from batlike creatures, and still in an almost feudal competitive society. This is contrasted well with the interally complex capitlaistically driven politics of the ship - where the oldest 'original hundredthousand' citizens are still active, and genemodified to speeds and plots beyond the comprehension of their younger shipmates.
Surprisingly the jumps in POV and gaps in the timescale work farely well. This style of wrting often leads to disconcerting changes, but careful chapter breaks make it farely clear what is going on. Despite this I wasn't that impressed though. I'm not quite sure why, the aliens were fun, as was that modifications to Horrocks and the elders. Possibly Ken was just trying too hard to make a sociological point, the idealist imperial communist aliens weren't explored as deeply as they could have been, and likewise the details of the ship could have had more explanations. Although the cover blurb sells this as a 'first contact' novel, this theme is barely touched upon amidst the politicing on both sides, and this is a detriment to both. The subtitle also mentions a "scientific romance" there is no romance and precious little science in it.
Readable, at time intruiging, but much more could have been made of it.
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I found the world / society / race building consistently the best thing about the book (both for the surprisingly human aliens and for the surprisingly different-from-human homo sapiens colonists who come visiting). Not the deepest and at times leaving me feeling that I had missed some logical leap, but interesting enough to keep me reading and keep me thinking.
On the other hand, the characters never did much for me. Our human protagonists Atomic Discourse Gale and Horrocks Mathmatical had clever names, but not much else to recommend them. I found the alien protagonist Darvin somewhat more sympathetic, but generally too good to be true, and smack dab in the middle of far too many amazing events to be particularly plausible.
As we approach the climax of the book, the human people all act like thirteen year olds (whether sixteen, of sixty, or three thousand), the alien people all act with a wisdom beyond any explanation, and the readers are thrown a big curveball which somehow makes everything work out ok.
I could see this being quite satisfying for a young reader seeking validation of their opinions that (1) they are wise beyond their years, and (2) old people are dumb.
SPOILER FROM HERE:
I really liked the way we were dragged along to believe in human superiority
The plot seemed to be building up to a confrontation of sorts between the human colonist and the alien natives, but this was side-stepped.
There are a few
I especially liked how human and alien the aliens were. Ken Macleod makes a huge effort to make the aliens seem humans, but when the story ends, the aliens are truly alien...
This is a great story. I highly recommend it.