In a clear sign of his maturing talent, Ken Macleod put aside the hard-edged singularity science fiction that is the hallmark of his earlier novels and focused on the emotions of human interaction in 2005’s Learning the World. His effort was recognized, as the novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the sf equivalent of the Best Film Oscar, and won the Prometheus Award (okay, not quite as prestigious, this is given to the best libertarian science fiction novel of the year).
14,000 odd years from now humanity has spread through solar systems spanning hundreds of light years but never cracked the light speed barrier so that travel and communications are effectively one way. Thousands of people contract together to travel to new systems in huge world ships, journeys of several hundred years but since lifespans are measured in the thousands this is not too great a commitment. No children are born along the way until a couple of decades before the end, when the “ship generation” is sired (or decanted, actually).
The ship generation are bred with the desire to get out and build as soon as the destination star is reached, having spent their upbringing conceiving and architecting a myriad of habitats and production facilities. The founder generation spend the voyage in intellectual ferment–though this is but lightly covered by MacLeod–and then provide the capital required by their children’s construction plans.
The third group aboard are the ship’s crew, whose lives are not that intertwined with the voyagers and who rarely alight into the new system but travel time and again as the ship is restocked with resources and immigrants. They are, however, signatories to the contract that defines the governance and control of the massive vessels.
In all these years and journeys, no multicellular life has been encountered, directly or through active emissions. Not until But the Sky, My Lady, the Sky! arrives at Destiny Star and finds an Earth-like world populated by bat-like beings at approximately the technology level of 100 years ago or so (in our real world).
MacLeod subtitles this “A Scientific Romance” which was an early name for the speculative fiction genre and I think he’s constructed the book to reach back, in part, to those initial efforts by splitting it in two parallel threads. The main thread covers actions, confrontations and conspiracies of the shipboard folk, much of it through blog entries of a teenage girl, while the other is set on the alien’s world, focused on three scientists who discover the strange new light in their sky.
If I had one disappointment with Learning the World (the title of that girl’s blog, if you’re wondering) it would be the last chapter. MacLeod has written a satisfying, intriguing tale that could have ended without this postscript but apparently could not let go without a metaphysical explication.
recommended
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