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The Generation Starship in Science Fiction: A Critical History, 1934–2001 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Simone Caroti (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
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This critical history explores the concept of the multi-generational interstellar space voyage in science fiction between 1934, the year of its appearance, into the 21st century. It defines and analyzes what became known as the “generation starship” idea and examines the science and technology behind it, also charting the ways in which generation starships manifest themselves in various SF scenarios. It then traces the history of the generation starship as a reflection of the political, historical, and cultural context of science fiction’s development.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0786460670
  2. Edition
    1st
  3. Sticky notes
    Not Enabled
  4. Publisher
    McFarland
  5. Publication date
    April 26, 2011
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    2955 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“strongly recommended”―Midwest Book Review; “explores the multigenerational interstellar space voyage in science fiction from its first filmic appearance to the 21st century. The history of the generation starship is viewed as a reflection of the political, historical and cultural context of the genre’s development”―CBQ.

About the Author

Simone Caroti is the course director of Science Fiction and Fantasy for the Creative Writing BFA at Full Sail University. He is a senior research scientist for the Astrosociology Research Institute (ARI), a nonprofit organization devoted to bringing the arts, humanities and social sciences into the debate on the future of humanity in space.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B007HYOVRA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ McFarland; 1st edition (April 26, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 26, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2955 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 275 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 12 ratings

About the author

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Simone Caroti

Simone Caroti

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Born in Italy, Simone Caroti isn't there anymore. He moved to the U.S. in 2002 to pursue a master's and a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Purdue University. While working on his graduate degrees he taught Italian, English composition, and literature, and after receiving his Ph.D. in 2009 he taught composition and business writing. In December 2010, he moved to Florida with his wife because she got a really nice job at Kennedy Space Center, and being constitutionally lazy, Simone does not mind shining by reflected light.

He's been keeping busy, though. He taught prep writing, communication, introductory literature, and science fiction at Brevard Community College between spring 2011 and spring 2012 before moving to Full Sail University, where he currently works as Course Director for Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is also a senior research scientist at the Astrosociology Research Institute (ARI), a non-profit organization devoted to bringing the humanities and the social sciences into the debate on human colonization of outer space.

Simone finds this business of being published very cool, so he wants to write more. Let's see if he can pull it off.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
12 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Patrick J. Kelly
4.0 out of 5 stars Everything you wanted to know
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2020
A good reader or writer's reference.
If you are thinking about writing a generation spaceship novel. Read this and you reduce your chances of accidentally re-inventing a plot concept. The same goes for generation spaceship themes and issues within the stories. On the other hand, what he doesn't talk about probably hasn't been written, so go for it.
If you are a reader who loves the sub-genre and you find yourself, as I did, tracking down more gen-spaceship stories, then this book can save you some time and money. He reviews the stories and themes, which can help you identify what you like. Take notes as you read. There is a conventional Bibliography, but it's not like IMDB with a Cliff notes synopsis of each book.
There's excellent analysis here for anyone. He covers the history of the sub-genre from every important angle. I thought literary criticism was guaranteed to be dull. It's not if you are interested.
Caroti does write in turgid prose, like the PhD that he is. (Considering he's not a native speaker, he does quite well.) Be prepared to slow down your reading speed. His precise language is, ultimately, clear.
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Clipper
5.0 out of 5 stars The Generation Starship in Science Fiction
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2011
Verified Purchase
In The Generation Starship in Science Fiction, Simone Caroti's purpose is to offer a critical history of the generation-starship genre, filling what he rightly believes to be a significant gap in science-fiction scholarship. In the book, Caroti explains and illustrates the relationship between generation-starship literature and various scientific, technological, political, and cultural changes taking place over the course of the twentieth century. Caroti is successful in the book's enterprise, which is to illustrate how these changes have continued to help steer the genre's course.

There are six chapters in the book, which are bookended by an introduction and conclusion. In the book's introduction, Caroti describes his project as a study of both the evolution of the starship-generation genre and an analysis of the dramatic tension that is an inherent part of each work of starship fiction: the tension between the original mission given to the first generation of space explorers who ventured away from mother earth and the changing values and goals of future voyagers born aboard the ship. Caroti's two objectives ultimately intertwine, for by the end of the book we come to compare the balance that the generation-starship space explorers seek to achieve with that of their authorial creator, which is to retain as much as possible the romantic and optimistically prophetic spirit of the mission while adapting to new scientific realities and sobering economic and political conditions. As Caroti puts it, the genre functions within "the energy field generated by the tension between the future we want and the future we get."

Chapter 1 ("Fathers") describes the genesis of the genre and the roles of three key players in its inception: Robert Goddard, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and J. D. Bernal. Chapters 2-6 underscore constitutive changes within the genre while also pointing out the inherent, structural tension that the works have in common. Chapter 2 ("The Gernsback Era, 1926-1940) provides us with a thorough overview of Hugo Gernsback's work as an author and publisher, which Caroti conceives as "determining the agenda through which [science fiction] should express itself." Chapter 3 ("The Campbell Era, 1937-1949") covers a transitional period in which Gernsback's influence begins to weaken as the United States enters World War II. Rather than voicing the optimism of human capability, authors like John W. Campbell contemplated human limitations, what Caroti describes as "the smallness of the human within the largeness of the universe." In the fourth chapter ("The Birth of the Space Age, 1946-1957"), Caroti argues that the generational-starship fiction taking place over the twelve years after World War II reflected the new, sobering realities brought forth primarily by the horrors on both the Western and Eastern fronts of this global conflict. As scientists and serious thinkers started to consider the darker, sinister side of technological advancement, so did science-fiction writers, especially those of the generation-starship variety. Caroti helps us appreciate how the improved literary quality of the genre was linked to its self-conscious questioning of the value of the starship mission. Chapter 5 ("The New Wave and Beyond, 1957-1979"), which for me is the most fascinating, elucidates why the Sputnik event in Cold-War history was seminal for the science-fiction community. While generation starship literature of the previous period provided an internal critique of its literature, Caroti contends that after Sputnik the agenda itself had changed. The space age and the fiction running alongside it no longer conceived themselves as being part of a universal cause, but rather part of a highly competitive and nationalistic one. The sixth chapter ("The Information Age, 1980-2001") contemplates the consequences of a new era of science fiction in which there was a widespread proliferation of its literature and in which there was not a clearly-perceived mission statement. Caroti's claim is that this problem is tied to the somewhat directionless existence of the space program after Apollo. The Conclusion contemplates what has occurred within the science fiction community over the last ten years since the cataclysm of 9/11 and describes the tenuousness and ambiguities within this new period.

This book should be a very important one for science-fiction scholars because it is a groundbreaking and comprehensive attempt to understand the changes taking place within the U.S. generation-starship genre over the twentieth century and would serve as an excellent supplement for graduate and advanced undergraduate-survey courses on science fiction. It is also an excellent read for any curious-minded, active reader of science fiction. Moreover, the book is exceptionally well written, infused with the spirit of both a scholar and enthusiastic SF reader. The writing is clear, earnest, and frequently permeated with an idiom that comes from the SF genre itself, an idiom that especially comes in handy when Caroti is expressing a complex idea. Take, for example, Caroti's metaphorical description of what essentially happened to SF literature at the end of the Gernsback/Campbell eras, eras characterized by a rather optimistic vision: "When this vision was suddenly overtaken by a present of unprecedented complexity, when the inert metal skull of the Gernsback robot gave way to the microchip querying the world from inside of the gleaming polyalloy shell of the cyborg's brain, classic SF stopped being able to tell the future, and became frustrated prophecy." What I love about a sentence like this is that it colorfully explains the complicated disposition of the genre. Throughout the book, a reader can look forward to this sort of elucidating and animated prose.

As a work constituted by rigorous scholarship, conceptual clarity, and great writing, I give it a strong endorsement.
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Ed Gosney
4.0 out of 5 stars Are we there yet?
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2011
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 subgenre, 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.
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Top reviews from other countries

Clem Schermann
4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting, but challenging - no spoilers
Reviewed in Germany on December 22, 2012
Verified Purchase
Sorry for butchering English in advance ... Still, I am a bloody Kraut. And yet, I would like to share some thoughts on this book-title I have just finished reading.

Caroti discusses the sub-genre of "generation starships" in relation to the history of sf-literature starting in the late 1920ies up into the infant years of the 21st century. At first she characterizes typical elements showing up in this sub-genre of sf, and she roots it back to real space-sciences especially within the 1920ies (first section of the book).

From then on she splits the complete topic into all in all six sections naming them by either important personalities in the (American) history of sf-literature (like Gernsback or Campbell) or certain characteristics of sf-literature (like "New Wave" or "Information Age"). In each section she describes the general development and characteristics of SF in the given "era" and even relates sf to issues, developments and situations in the real world. Doing so she explains the role and impact of space-sciences, and space-travel or military space-strategies regarding the changes in sf-literature. With a conclusion, an appendix with a substantial list of generation starship literature titles, and a section with plenty of notes the book ends.

The main part of each of the six major sections and the conclusion is dedicated to short stories, novellas, novels, narrations of whatever kind, sometimes even other sf-pop-culture-products, which all deal with the sf-sub-genre of "generation starships". And each title discussed (and those are many in her work) is summarized and thoroughly analyzed regarding content, implications, style etc.; but Caroti does not focus on methods of analyzing those titles from the point of a litterateur alone, but she pays a lot of attention to the social-scientific implications being reflected in each story as well - like whether a certain generation-ship story is about generation-rifts, utopian, criticism to worldly matters etc.

Caroti's book is a blast. To people like me, who have started delving in this particular topic (sf, generation ship) and who have no serious background in literature or social-sciences, sometimes the sheer amount of content in each section, paragraph and even sentence is quite a load; regardless of that it is very interesting and exciting delving deeper and deeper into her thoughts and results of her analysis. Because of this I am hesitant to give 5 stars, although it feels like this; but 4 stars it is worth it anyway. Also the 5 stars would be a little bit too much, because Caroti does not spend a lot of effort on "technical aspects" or the reflection of "technical aspects" of generation starships, which I hoped to find in her broad work. Still: I don't really miss that now that I have read her book. I'd love to give it 4.5 stars, but the system won't allow me to do it. SO I stay with honest 4 stars instead of doubting 5 stars.

Hope that helps!
All the best!
Liam
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