Molly Gloss.
The Dazzle of Day.
Saga Press. 1997
rating : 4.5 : passes the time
review : 16 December 2024
Brave, hopeful folks from countries around the world come together to build and live upon the Dusty Miller, a generational starship on a mission toward a hospitable planet. The journey is long and full of strife as disease and psychology impact the colonists of the small ship until they arrive. Then they must decide to disembark onto an imposing planet or stay aboard a deteriorating ship and search again.
Gloss’s subtle and lyrical prose examines the lives and personal struggles of the passengers—now among the stars—and evokes the struggle of our complicated history on Earth.
The Earth is dying, so a community of Esperanto-speaking Quakers convert an orbital station into a starship, and set off to look for a new world. A hundred years later, their ship is slowly deteriorating, children are being born with radiation-induced deformities, but the new world is cold, semi-barren and inhospitable. What to do?
This is a more realistic view of generation travel to new planets: the gradual loss of function on the ship, and the inhospitability of alien worlds. The new world is hostile, and there is a genuine choice to make: stay on the slowly decaying but known, warm, and understood enclosed ship, or move to the new wild, cold, inhospitable, terrifyingly open world? Neither choice is good.
Despite being well written, this is depressing on many levels, and not just because of the realistic appraisal of the colonisation task in hand (although I am not convinced by the ecology of the new world: oxygen atmosphere and birdlike creatures, but precious little vegetation?; and I am very not convinced by the reiki healing scene). The Quaker lifestyle means that conflicts are resolved peacefully, by discussions in Meetings; yet despite some interesting resolutions that result from this approach, everyone seems so glum: there is no joy or excitement, just the same daily banal routine, and people not really liking each other, or understanding themselves. The day to day existence feels dull, and the lack of opportunity for growth feels stifling. I just didn’t care for the characters, or what choice they made.