I had such a great time with this book! It really grabbed my attention and would not let go. The politics are just incredible here. There are some surprising twists and turns as well. I recommend this one!

I have had the good fortune to read two really good sci-fi novels in a row. This is normally not a genre that I gravitate towards. However, something about the description in Generation Ship caught my attention and I am always looking for good sci-fi to recommend to my students that love the genre. A shades of gray type book where you can relate to all of the characters - at least a little. With twists and turns that keep you reading to the very end, this is a winner!

I liked this book fine, but I wanted to love it and the fact that I didn't love it made me like it a little less. Sorry, book! I think the publisher really oversold it with "Tyrannical leaders! Rebellion!" Only one person dies! And they broke the law! There is a rebellion, I guess, but the governor just kind of has a different perspective and agenda? And doesn't really do anything particularly crazy? Like, if he were president, I wouldn't vote for him, but I wouldn't be super concerned about him doing anything crazy either. It also didn't help that this is a multiple POV book where I just did not care about two of the POV characters. I will still recommend this to a lot of readers, especially those looking for good introductory science-fiction.

When a generation ship finally arrives at the planet they have longed to land on and things don’t go to plan. The POV switches among a large cast of the soon to be colonists and everyone has an agenda. I liked that there are mostly average people looking out for their own best interests in the book and they do get in one another’s way. The planet isn’t what they had hoped for and now the ship has to deal with that as well. I really enjoyed this one and wonder if there will be another book set in this universe in the future.

Published by Harper Voyager on October 17, 2023

If it is impossible to travel faster than light or to circumvent that restriction with wormholes or warp drives, generation ships will be necessary to expand humanity beyond our solar system. Unfortunately, humans don’t always play well together. Thousands of humans living on an interstellar cruise ship probably won’t last more than twenty years before their society starts to fall apart. After a century, chaos seems inevitable. Non-Stop remains my favorite example of a generation ship that has gone to ruin.

The ship in Michael Mammay’s novel has defied the odds. It has been in flight for more than two centuries. As the novel begins, it is one hundred days from its destination. The ship has maintained order with elements of authoritarian rule. Power is shared between the governor (who makes decisions based on politics) and the captain (whose job is to keep the ship safe). The ship’s charter requires everyone to work in an assigned job until they reach the age of 75, when they have a nice birthday party before being recycled. The ship’s population is capped at 18,000. Each death permits a new birth, which must be authorized by bureaucrats.

The idea of dying before the body is ready for a natural death doesn’t bother the ship’s population until they near their destination. Continuing to kill people when the ship may soon be sending colonists to the planet seems unnecessary to those who are about to die as well as their families and friends. Protests mount.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that colonization will occur. Every probe sent to the planet (apart from those that scout uninhabitable land masses) has malfunctioned. A probe that managed to send pictures before the connection was lost seems to have taken a picture of something with eyes. Probes flown over a desert land mass seem to show the ruins of a building. Some people believe that the ship should press on to a new destination rather than interfere with indigenous life, although conquering or killing indigenous life is pretty much the story of human history.

Each chapter focuses on a character. The key characters are Mark Rector, who works in the security force (Secfor) and believes government should rule with a fist; Jarred Pantel, the governor whose sole goal is to retain or increase his power; Sheila Jackson, a scientist who opposes the governor’s plan to start colonization before they have more data about the planet; Eddie Dannon, a coder and hacker who develops a way to jack her mind into the ship’s software; and George Iannou, a reluctant protest leader whose loyalties are unclear.

The plot noodles around for way too many words, wrapping around familiar concepts that include first contact, the development of digital sentience, and the Gaia hypothesis. Most of the story, however, consists of passengers on the ship arguing with each other. It takes far too long for passengers to make their way to the planet and solve its mysteries. Once they finally arrive on the planet, they take their shipboard arguments with them. The ensuing events seem secondary to the quarrels that are the novel’s true plot. I suppose it might be fair to say that political revolution within a confined spaceship is the true plot, but this isn’t the kind of meaningful revolution we got from Heinlein, who had grumpy but determined men using catapaults to chuck moon rocks at the Earth. Mammay's is a revolution reminiscent of the January 6 insurrection, where aimless people wandered around and made noise.

Mammay’s prose is adequate, although his style is wordy and prone to lazy clichés (“it hurt like nobody’s business”). A good third of the novel could have been cut without harming the plot or character development. The essential parts of the novel relate a story that has some interesting moments, but not enough to stand as riveting fiction. As a fan of generation ship novels, I was disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

When we consider interstellar exploration, there are three general concepts that are typically used: Faster-Then-Light (FTL) travel (this would include such things as wormholes, gates, etc.); CryoStasis (basically sleep through the trip); and Generation Ships (everybody stays aware, has kids and trains up each generation until they get to their destination). This book obviously uses the last one. And while there is some good science here (gravity is from spin, etc.), it ignores enough to basically be a typically city in space civilization with a few nods toward expected limitations. One such limitation is a “Logan’s Run” style population control scheme that as the ship nears is ultimate destination, provide the spark that sets in motion the political dram that takes up the bulk of this story.

There are five (5) PoV: the Governor as the compromised politician trying to hold on to power at any cost, an uber hacker stuck in the maintenance division with no way out, a “farmer” reluctantly recruited as the rebel leader, an ambitious security officer maneuvering to get recognition for his awesomeness … and a senior scientist caught in the middle just trying to do the right thing … throw in a Captain who mostly stays off screen as an ultimate arbitrator (and mostly useless), a crime boss and a few hot headed rebels and security personnel and you get quite a mess (aka drama) that was fairly simple and predictable. The only one I found interesting was the hacker (Eddie). Frankly the total chaos of the ships contingent was more or less a copy of what you was expect in a small city and not something that would work very well for a long range colonization effort … which really makes this just a simple story in space (with a back drop of thousands of colonists represented by a handful of characters). Some of the action/interaction was pretty simple and at times bordering on ridiculous.

The arrival … arguably the most interesting part for me … was crammed into the last forth of the story and wasn’t very developed, making the ending fairly disappointing (and predicable, with most of the conflict here moving into the realm of fantasy). That makes for an entertaining story, but not much more than that.

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#GenerationShip #NetGalley

I'm starting to really love 3rd person POVs with multiple MCs because you get a feeling for each of their motives, reasonings, and feelings. This was a sci-fi novel that was really easy to follow through the eyes of 5 characters, a technician, a governor, an agriculturalist, a scientist, and an officer. At the start, we learn we're on a space craft carrying thousands of passengers and crew to a planet that might be inhabitable for humans and has been traveling for 250 years. We take the vastness of that idea and narrow in on the things happening just on the ship while still alluding to the idea of potential life-forms on the planet.

I found myself itching to get to the planet and see what it's like, but found the tension on the ship to be much more interesting. Imagine being on a ship for generations, some generations literally present to continue life while still following mission protocols, and being so close to seeing the planet, mere months away, and having to accept death so that another person can live. So you'll see a constant struggle between how individuals feel vs what's the common good. Add that to a pretty big book and you'll be surprised in how quickly it moves along. I'm very excited to see this story continue!

This was my first book written by Mammay and it won't be the last!
Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and publisher for the advanced copy.

I’m going to try and restrain my strong desire to be nitpicky with this book. I’m coming hot off of finishing it, and let’s just say I very much disliked this novel. I haven’t read Mammay’s previous work, constantly putting it off for one reason or another. But I am like a smaller celestial body to a larger one when it comes to the generation ship sub genre. I’m a sucker, folks, and while I don’t like that about myself, I have embraced it. Generation Ship, by Michael Mammay, is a drawn-out saga of a book that accomplishes very little despite its six hundred page heft. Much like the book title, it feels uninspired.

Two hundred days left until this two hundred fifty year journey will be over. A planet is out there waiting to be colonized, and excitement is high. However, the probes dispatched to survey the planet are not responding, and the governor wants to keep that information under wraps. A woman who was to show up to be recycled on her seventy-fifth birthday refuses her duty, and is accidentally killed by a cop. A hacker discovers the probes’ data and sells it on the black market leading to a concerned public. And a measly farmer somehow gets wrapped up in the life extension movement to remove the seventy five year cap. But all the while, the ship approaches the planet, and no one knows what is going to happen next.

I didn’t like much about this book, so I’m going to rip that adhesive medical strip right off. While the ending was a bit of a let down generally, I did like the attempt to tie together some themes that the book was playing with. They weren’t particularly fleshed out until the final chapters, but I think they could have been very strong had they been more carefully integrated throughout the story. I wanted to really highlight that despite being frustrated on the whole, I was able to appreciate something that is near and dear to me before I turn on my critical thinking circuits.

A lot of the problems are rooted within the characters. Mammay has five perspective characters, each with a job title and a specific role within the story. There is a clear attempt to provide a shifting balance as each character has varying interests “related” to their department within the ship. The first issue is that no one seemed to be tied to their department in a personal, let alone an ideological way. They have no major concerns beyond just being able to exist (which, honestly, is relatable), except for the scientist. It doesn’t really allow for any sort of drama to build. This is exacerbated by the fact that all five characters have a similar voice. This not only hurt dialogues between the different perspective characters, it just added a leveled blandness to every interaction.

Every conflict was framed in the same way. Not only in the flow of each chapter, but in how each character approached their problems. Every chapter starts with the POV character learning of the consequences of the previous chapter, serving as a recap of the previous chapter. They then spend the second half reacting to the news of the first half. It leads to a colossal amount of repeat information through tedious dialogue sequences. The reactions often had one of two endings; a master plan to assert dominance that inevitably crumbles at the turn of a page, or an existential worry that the character won’t be able to keep up with the times that never really comes to bite them in the ass. Every character also approaches the problems the same way, get mine. The hacker is the only one who has a different flavor to their self-interested approach, but that’s just because they do computer stuff. Everyone just sort of magically wills their plan into being by speaking it at the end of the chapter. The reader is left to wonder about the nuts and bolts. There is no tension about their plan not actually working if the narrative skips a few days with a separate character being like “I can’t believe they did this.”

Ultimately, a lot of the conflicts that appear in the book are just unrelated to the individual POV journeys. Most of the main characters were barely tangentially related to issues that were being discussed. Political movements sprang up out of nowhere(sometimes implied to be psyops), and yes, the characters had to deal with the consequences but even that was background noise. Instead of long-standing issues coming to head with the arrival, the characters were playing a shortsighted and petty game of whack-a-mole with each other. Nothing major happens on the page within the view of the characters, or because of the characters’ actual actions. Instead, background problems are sometimes solved by creating a new character in the moment to pin the problem on. It lacked any sort of tension to find out Johnny Standin was the bad guy all along. And this infected everything within the book, diluting already vague themes, and ushering in the climax with a wet fart.

If I wanted to read a book about barely two dimensional office workers who are bored and spend their days being petty to their coworkers, I would have found that book. Instead, they are traveling between the stars, stirring up shit for no reason. I like books about unlikeable people, doing mean things in service to some perceived grand plan, or even chaos. But here it’s just to have a one up on someone. If the point was to highlight the pettiness of humanity and callout the lack of foresight, it still fails to really crystallize it as the point. One of the ideas I did end up liking near the end of the book would have even played second fiddle to the idea had both been better fleshed out. Instead, it’s just dumb mean people being dumb and mean to create the illusion of conflict so they can move onto the next thing. In the end, the lack of an actual history of the two hundred fifty years prior to the events within the book mirrors the complete lack of a future.

There are a lot of other issues with the book that I could do a deep dive into but I don’t feel it’s necessary. I didn’t even get into the role of the military as a neutral observer, and boy oh boy, do I have feelings. The lack of detail can be applied to pretty much every aspect of the book: the setting, the characters, the goals, the themes, the dialogue, the internal thoughts and feelings. The book reads like content. And I am not content.

Rating: Generation Ship – Skip this voyage.
-Alex

An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.

This is a generation ship story, obviously, which details the last hundred or so days before the ship reaches its destination, an inhabitable planet, and touches on the first hundred days afterwards. A close look at the political jockeying between the "civilians" on the ship who runs its community and farms, with a glance at the captain, who keeps herself in reserve. An interesting book. Not space opera by any means.

Generation Ship is a fantastic political drama about the different players and their motives, and how those can shape the future of a civilisation. I highly recommend this to fans of science fiction, and you bet I’ll load all of Michael Mammay’s work onto my kindle.

Full review on my blog.

I still remember the day I first encountered Michael Mammay’s books. I found Planetside in a local bookshop and, being a military SF fan, all but inhaled it. It was so good, in fact, that I wanted to tell everyone about it. When I couldn’t find anyone, I started this blog instead. And just look at me now.

Having established himself as a reliable source of military SF, Mammay’s fifth novel is something of a departure. The closest we get yo the military in Generation Ship is SecFor, the police and security service. The rest of the book is populated with hackers, politicians, scientists, and farmers. As you can imagine, the scope is far broader than previous books. Mammay delivers not just one perspective, but captures the riotous final stages of a journey that affects thousands. All these conflicting characters have their own arc, their own motivation and drive, and they all feel very real. A personal highlight for me was one character (I shan’t name for fear of spoilers) appearing to have a heroic arc, only to slide into more villainous territory as the novel progresses.

This broad scope does come at a price, however. The skipping between characters means we get a slightly disjointed view of their individual narratives. This is aggravated by the long time span of the book. Chapters are helpfully timestamped, but days or even weeks go past in between. Major events are skipped over in favour of dealing with the fallout of said events.

There is also some highly spoilerific material in the latter stages, when the tone of the book changes dramatically. This involves the ship’s eventual destination, and while I found the buildup incredible, but the big reveal left me underwhelmed. Especially when compared to the human drama unfolding elsewhere.

Generation Ship is Mammay’s most ambitious novel to date, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that it hits a few roadblocks along the way. When it’s firing in all cylinders, however, Mammay captures the strife and intrigue of a society under pressure like few others.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book!

Wavering between 3 and 3.5 stars. Conceptually I love a lot of what this book is about (a generation ship dispatched from Earth finally arrives at its destination planet, but the planet appears that it may be already inhabited by intelligent life). There are great questions posed about colonization, the broader cast was diverse, and I liked the focus on the political conflicts that can arise in basically any situation with a group of humans living and working together. The writing style wasn't my favorite-it was easy to read but the characters were a bit flat and just acted their roles within the story without feeling like they had much depth to them. Overall if the topic interests you I'd say to give it a try-it was a relatively quick read for the length.

Great book that has an intriguing plot and surprisingly complex characters and motivations. You'll definitely have a fantastic time reading this novel and I am excited for what comes next from this author.

All the SF novels I have read about multi-generational spaceships traveling for hundreds of years to their journey in the stars tend to be darkly dystopian. The crew in the "Generation Ship" by Michael Mammay certainly face gritty reality. Self-serving politicians, bad cops, bad relationships, rogues, sabotage, challenging relationships, equipment failure, overbearing bosses, lack of personal freedom, etc are all part of this story. Yet, I was happy that the ending was a satisfying improvement over the expected dystopia. "Generation Ship" handled many cool issues including space exploration, scientific investigation, technology, AI, sustainability, etc, yet essentially it was a book about human relationships in a unique setting. I look forward to reading more by Michael Mammay.

I thank Michael Mammay and Harper Voyager for kindly sharing a temporary electronic review copy of this excellent novel.

When I saw Michael Mammay’s Generation Ship pop up on NetGalley, I was intrigued by the blurb, but I’d never heard of the author and wasn’t sure I had time to throw another lengthy novel onto the TBR. Then some of the early ARCs came out with absolutely glowing reviews, and I decided maybe I could make time after all. 

Generation Ship takes place on a generation ship (go figure) nearing the end of its centuries-long voyage. But the promise of a terrestrial home, combined with some of the uncertainty in the data returned from the latest probes, have turned simmering political disagreements into a full-on powder keg. And the five point-of-view characters—a scientist, a coder, a politician, a cop, and a farmer—will be at the center of the burgeoning conflict. 

Despite throwing the reader into the deep end with five unique perspective characters in the first five chapters, Generation Ship starts remarkably quickly, with two immediately compelling events that pull all five into the thick of the conflict that will drive the entire book. What follows is hundreds of pages of people working at cross-purposes, due to conflicts in their personal ambition, their moral beliefs, or their interpretations of incomplete scientific data. One of the five leans a bit cynical and self-serving from the start—and another joins him as the book progresses—but by and large, it’s easy to understand what drives each character and how it throws them into conflict. 

And the conflicts themselves are interesting. There are political disputes surrounding euthanasia and career mobility, subversive violence, police brutality, and the shadow of a potential first contact scenario looming over the whole thing. This is absolutely a political novel, but it’s not one that lacks for excitement. I was a little disappointed at just how often the characters found themselves taking actions into their own hands due to an extreme distrust of those around them—especially with one being so talented that taking action into their own hands felt at times like a cheat code—but it wasn’t hard to see how the distrust arose, and the resulting conflagrations were excellent reading. 

Generation Ship is very much a standalone, addressing one extended series of conflicts, and so the promised arrival at the destination is more the culmination of all the battles along the way than it is the start of a brand new one. I felt the first contact plot had layers enough to completely redefine what came before, but the book chose to focus more on the internal conflicts than the external ones, and the planetary arrival certainly made for a gripping climax. I might’ve liked to see a little bit more extended denouement—and there was a frustrating character decision or two—but the last quarter of the book was nearly impossible to put down, and it’s hard to complain too much about such a thrilling finish. 

I found the worldbuilding fairly easy to follow, with careful consideration of many of the practical details of life in space without devolving into pages of technobabble. I did find the frequent futuristic updates to common idioms to be a bit immersion-breaking—it seems more plausible to me that language would evolve entirely new idioms while retaining archaic terms in old ones than going all-in on phrases like “I’m an open-source program” or “I thought we were on the same screen”—but this is a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. 

Overall, Generation Ship is an engaging political sci-fi with points-of-view spanning five different corners of the central conflict. For those who called Battlestar Galactica “The West Wing in space” and saw it as a compliment, this one is very much worth the read. 

Recommended if you like: multi-POV political sci-fi. 


Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

2.5 stars. I've read and enjoyed Michael Mammay's Planetside books so I was looking forward to trying something different from him. Initially, I thought a book about a generation ship and all its inner workings would be an interesting and compelling read. I've read a couple of other things with generation ships that I enjoyed, but I'm sorry to say, unlike the description says, I did not find this riveting. For the most part, I found this to be a slow-moving story that didn't compel me to pick it up and read it. There were a lot of political machinations in this book. That in itself wasn't a bad thing, but I ended up wanting more danger, action and intrigue along with the political machinations than it gave me. I also wanted characters I could care about. I really wanted to like at least some of the characters in this book, and at times I almost did like Sheila and Eddie, but in the end I didn't find any of them very likeable.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for providing me with an ARC of this book.

After over 250 years, the colony ship Voyager is approaching its final destination. Four months out from arrival, the first data comes back from the satellite probes sent in advance, confirming that yes, the planet appears to be habitable as predicted...but also contact has been lost with all probes sent to the surface. When the governor of Voyager decides to suppress this troubling news, it sparks a chain reaction of events that lead many to question if it's time for a change in how the ship is run. As factions begin to form, the science team is left scrambling trying to find answers. After over two centuries of travel, is it possible they may not be able to land at all?

Generation Ship is a fascinating premise that unfortunately isn't grounded by compelling characters. I am a sucker for space race/space travel stories, as they usually involve a team of people coming together to solve a problem. I love the proceduralness of it all. So I felt right at home as Generation Ship began, with the science team realizing there's a problem with the data they're getting and they don't know why. The author takes a snapshot approach to storytelling, with each chapter jumping ahead days or sometimes weeks in the chronology. In some regards this makes sense; it would realistically take some time for new data from the planet to arrive, etc. and the author wanted to jump to when new things were happening. And I did like those scenes of evolving understanding of what lies ahead, as the scientists try to piece together what they can about their potential new home.

But the result is what feels like a surface level approach to the problems. The chapters are fairly short, which makes a six hundred page book move rather quickly, but it also means we don't get a lot of time to sit with developments as they unfold. We see a character react to a problem, the next chapter we're a few days later with a different character who is telling us all the fallout from the previous character's decision, and as a result of that fallout THEY make a decision that causes more complications. It's a very linear chain of events, which makes the focus feel a bit narrow given that this ship contains thousands of people.

To be fair, the author is trying to cover a lot of ground, and the conflicts he raises are interesting. For instance, the ship has survived for centuries by instituting an "end of life" policy. When a person reaches the age of 75, they voluntarily submit to medical euthanasia; this ensures a stable population as new infants are born at a controlled rate. But while everyone adhered to the policy in deep space, they begin to balk at it when news about the new planet begins to leak. Why should people continue to die when their new home is so close? These are the kinds of issues the author dives into over the course of the book, including the interplay of science vs. politics vs. public opinion.

But where I struggled with the book was the fact that I wasn't really rooting for any of the characters. And it wasn't until I started writing this review that I really put my finger on what was bothering me. As I mentioned before, I liked the premise of this book because I like stories of people coming together to solve a problem. Unfortunately, in this book, pretty much everyone makes the problems worse in some way. No one is a particularly effective leader or problem solver. The governor mismanages communication and responses to public reaction, the head of security constantly escalates problems, and the lead scientist is great with data, but not with getting people to listen to her.

The result is one disaster after another because people can't get out of their own way, either because of seeking personal glory, lack of leadership, or just general ineptitude. And that's fine if that's the story the author wanted to tell! It just wasn't the kind of story that resonates with me personally, even if perhaps it's a more realistic one.

Generation Ship is a fast-moving tale about a ship forced to grapple with the fact that the future it envisioned may not be the one it gets. All of its characters are struggling to adapt as the factors that used to govern their day to day life drastically change in a short amount of time. I didn't necessarily mind the politics, even if they were the enemy of rational thought. It was more that I needed a character to rally around, someone who was capable of pulling together this ship. Instead, the collective cast stumbles its way to an ending. There are interesting bones to this story to be sure, but as a person who puts a lot of weight on character, I just didn't have enough to keep me invested.

A solid 5/5. This was a great book of social politics and human nature. If you like political intrigue and interesting cultural development in a vacuum, this is for you! The spread of characters was large, well-voiced, and attractively immersive. I particularly enjoyed how this was a very solidly scifi book but the women involved felt like actual people, not just “the wife” or “the strong independent female”. Everyone felt realistic when they were good and when they were bad, like actual people with flaws and not written caricatures, and I think that’s one of the tremendous strengths of this book.

In regards to the writing, I would call this a medium-slow paced book with high stakes. It is absolutely worth the ride. Imagine a pot of water boiling on a stove. Everything builds on itself until the whole thing boils over, and then there is no turning back. It hit all my buttons and I’ll definitely be watching Mammay for more!

(P.S.- I will be adding a review on Amazon once the title is eligible to be reviewed, but cannot currently.)

Technically a 3.5 - not good enough to be a 4, but higher quality than a 3.

<i>Generation Ship</i> takes place on a giant space ship that has been traveling from Earth to a potential new planet for 250 years. Society aboard is strictly structured by profession, with a political structure involving a governor, a captain, and directors of each industry. As the ship approaches the planet that the settlers hope to make their new home, political and societal issues begin to rise to the surface. Told from five perspectives, this well-written story tends to drag.

What I enjoyed/appreciated:
- world-building and descriptions of the ship's social structure.
- Sheila Jackson and Eddie Dannin
- conversations about police brutality and government censorship

And what I didn't:
- the overly slow pacing for the first 3/4 of the book and then the overly quick pacing of last 1/4.
- the other three perspectives
- Characters and plot lines that weren't resolved/underdeveloped
- political plot lines that were ALL over the place

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for a copy of this book!

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars

250 years ago the colony ship Voyager left Earth with 18,000 people to colonize the planet of Promissa. Now with arrival imminent, the ship is having trouble with their probes on the new planet and lots of unrest among the crew.

Told from multiple POV, Generation Ship was an enjoyable book about space colonization. Lots of power struggles among those in power and those not. Loved the day to day life info of living on a ship.