Generation Ship - in Fiction

In Fiction

Generation ships are often found in science fiction stories. Perhaps their earliest description is in the 1929 essay "The World, The Flesh, & The Devil" by J. D. Bernal. The first fiction dealing with one is the 1940 story "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" by Don Wilcox.

Beginning with the 1941 novels Universe and Common Sense by Robert A. Heinlein, a common theme is that inhabitants of a generation ship have forgotten they are on a ship at all, and believe their ship to be the entire universe. French writer Léon Groc actually wrote the first complete novel about this theme in the 1950 book L'Univers Vagabond. In the anglophone world, Brian Aldiss is attributed with the first complete novel dealing exclusively with the theme in the 1958 book Non-Stop. By 1959, Edmund Cooper's Seed of Light was being criticized for dealing with an old-hat subject (though it is often accounted the author's best novel.) Harry Harrison's novel Captive Universe (1969) deals with similar themes.

In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" (1968) the Enterprise encounters a computer-led generation ship, whose inhabitants do not know they are within a ship traveling through space but instead believe themselves to be on a solid world and that the created sky is real. Harlan Ellison's The Starlost, a 1973 Canadian TV series, is set aboard the giant spaceship called The ARK. In the Space: 1999 episode Mission of the Darians (1975) the Alphans encounter the heavily damaged but still populated generation ship Daria, bearing an evil secret.

Gene Wolfe's tetralogy The Book of the Long Sun (1993) deals directly with the challenges facing the inhabitants of the starcrosser Whorl and the continuing challenges after planetfall in The Book of the Short Sun (1999). The 2008 Pixar film WALL-E contains a subplot in which a generation ship containing humans returns to Earth after many centuries. Toby Litt's 2009 novel Journey into Space is about people living on a generation ship and deals with how people cope with the fact that they have never set foot on the Earth and will never set foot on the planet that they are headed towards. Finally, they return back to Earth after an onboard conflict. This method of slow interstellar travel is hinted at in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama (1972) as the spacecraft Rama is analyzed, and this theme continues in the book's sequels. The 1999 Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Disease" features a generation ship of a species called the Varro. The 2010 "Doctor Who" episode, "The Beast Below", centers on a generation ship known as "Starship UK", which contains the entire future population of the United Kingdom (except for Scotland, which opted for its own ship) fleeing the deadly solar flares on the Earth in the 29th century.

In Analogue: A Hate Story a Generation ship from the Republic of Korea called the Mugunghwa is lost 600 years after it leaves Earth. Thousands of years later after FTL travel had been invented an investigator is sent out to find out what happened on the ship. The ship's social structure changes from 21st-century South Korea into a feudal Japanese society. All of the people on the ship eventually die—hundreds of years before it is found.