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markyon's review
2.0
This was OK, but sadly I enjoyed it a lot less than I hoped to.
It is clever, there's some nice takes on society and future societies, but overall it left me thinking that it was wanting to be more than it was.
I get the impression the writer would like to be Douglas Adams: but he's not.
It is clever, there's some nice takes on society and future societies, but overall it left me thinking that it was wanting to be more than it was.
I get the impression the writer would like to be Douglas Adams: but he's not.
silverthane's review
1.0
I love sci-fi but sadly this book didn’t make the grade. I have recently adopted the ‘Rule of 50’ if after 50 pages I am not enjoying the book I just put it down. It seems to be a good rule of thumb.
The idea of a spacecraft on a century-long voyage to colonise a distant world caught my imagination but once the characters were introduced I almost instantly lost interest. They are bland and quite irritating. The endless ‘Describe’ sessions between the two main characters really got on my nerves and were totally unnecessary to write about in such detail.
Call me a prude but I hate explicit language or sex scenes in novels unless the language is integral to the story or the sex scene is tastefully written. It seems tacky and unworthy of literature. The erotic segments in this book are vulgar and crass and totally out of place. I don’t expect to have to read the word c*** when referring to a 15 year old girl’s genitals! There are at least a dozen different words the author could have used which leaves me wondering what the hell he was thinking. Perhaps the author is just a vulgar person.
Thank goodness I didn’t buy this rubbish and borrowed it from a library instead.
The idea of a spacecraft on a century-long voyage to colonise a distant world caught my imagination but once the characters were introduced I almost instantly lost interest. They are bland and quite irritating. The endless ‘Describe’ sessions between the two main characters really got on my nerves and were totally unnecessary to write about in such detail.
Call me a prude but I hate explicit language or sex scenes in novels unless the language is integral to the story or the sex scene is tastefully written. It seems tacky and unworthy of literature. The erotic segments in this book are vulgar and crass and totally out of place. I don’t expect to have to read the word c*** when referring to a 15 year old girl’s genitals! There are at least a dozen different words the author could have used which leaves me wondering what the hell he was thinking. Perhaps the author is just a vulgar person.
Thank goodness I didn’t buy this rubbish and borrowed it from a library instead.
smcleish's review
3.0
Warning: this review is going to contain lots of spoilers, without which it would be hard to say what I want to say about it. Please don't read if you don't want to know the plot of the novel.
This review first appeared on my blog here.
Toby Litt is, incidentally, someone I used to vaguely know (I had rooms on the floor below him for a year when we were students). Some of his novels I like a lot, and others not at all. Journey Into Space is the first of his books which I have read which comes between the two extremes. Or, rather, it moves from one to the other, as the story progresses.
Journey Into Space is divided into five sections, each shorter than the previous one, which gives an overall impression spiralling into a central point because of the way the plot develops across them, as well as because of influence the decreasing length has on the reading experience. The whole thing is set on that standard science fiction location, the generation ship on its way to colonise another world, inhabited by a very small community. (In-breeding, something which concerns some of the other writers of this type of stories, is simply handled by gene technology.) The plot covers four generations of life on the ship, not starting at the launch but several generations into the journey.
The first section is the most unusual in science fiction terms. It concerns the meetings between two teen-aged cousins, who share their ideas about Earth, a world they have never seen except in the records carried by the ship and messages received by it. The main way they do this is through "describing", where each tries to make the other feel what it would be like to experience something - rain, grass, the presence of animals - they have never known themselves. The theme here is nostalgia, and how we look at a past we can never actually see fully. This might feel like an extended creative writing exercise ("Produce 500 words describing grass from the point of view of someone who has never seen it in reality"), but it is effective at generating a mood which is shattered at the end of the section - Celeste gives birth a child (in a strange passage using a series of images derived from the describes, while the pair are shunned for their incestuous relationship.
In the second section, the child, named Orphan, takes over as the centre of the narrative. He charms his way into becoming the captain of the ship, despite not being terribly bright, and becomes regarded as something of a king and god. He institutes a perpetual, hedonistic party, where everything is done on his slightest whim (though he is manipulated into making decisions by others who have more interest in running the ship). This section seems to be a commentary on a different aspect of today's world, where we are living in the moment without a care for the traditions of the past or for the effects our way of life will have on generations to come. The main problem with this section is that Orphan, as depicted, does not convince the reader hat he has the charm he is credited with
The third section follows the life of Orphan's third child, imaginatively named Three, from spoilt child to ascetic obsessed with being able to write on paper in the old fashioned way, and centre of a new religion, proselytised by her nephew. It is in this section that news reaches the ship that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself. In the final two sections, the nephew takes over the ship after Orphan and Three die; the ship then returns to earth, receiving a signal to indicate that there have been some survivors, before being deliberately crashed into the earth to obliterate defective humanity (leaving just two survivors, in an escape pod, who know that there is no way they can properly survive). This nihilistic section is much less clearly linked to commentary on twenty first century humanity. It seems perfunctory, and poses a fairly common conundrum - how does the narrative survive and who adds the final words describing the death of the last two humans orbiting earth? It may be that this ending is meant to provide some positive message of hope: somehow, some remnant of human civilisation has continued - but it isn't effective in this way for me, being swamped by the nihilistic theme of the book, which seems to be that the human race is better destroyed than allowed to continue.
The message of Journey Into Space (assuming I haven't just completely misinterpreted the novel, and there is one) is made so much the centre of the novel that other aspects of fiction writing suffer, especially characterisation - Celeste and Three are the only individuals given much in the way development. Apart from the descriptions which form part of the game between Celeste and August, there isn't much filling in of the background; like a lot of modern science fiction, Journey Into Space assumes that the reader will be familiar with the basic idea of a generation ship, for instance.
While there are some interesting ideas in Journey Into Space, parts of it simply don't work, and it generally feels under-developed.
This review first appeared on my blog here.
Toby Litt is, incidentally, someone I used to vaguely know (I had rooms on the floor below him for a year when we were students). Some of his novels I like a lot, and others not at all. Journey Into Space is the first of his books which I have read which comes between the two extremes. Or, rather, it moves from one to the other, as the story progresses.
Journey Into Space is divided into five sections, each shorter than the previous one, which gives an overall impression spiralling into a central point because of the way the plot develops across them, as well as because of influence the decreasing length has on the reading experience. The whole thing is set on that standard science fiction location, the generation ship on its way to colonise another world, inhabited by a very small community. (In-breeding, something which concerns some of the other writers of this type of stories, is simply handled by gene technology.) The plot covers four generations of life on the ship, not starting at the launch but several generations into the journey.
The first section is the most unusual in science fiction terms. It concerns the meetings between two teen-aged cousins, who share their ideas about Earth, a world they have never seen except in the records carried by the ship and messages received by it. The main way they do this is through "describing", where each tries to make the other feel what it would be like to experience something - rain, grass, the presence of animals - they have never known themselves. The theme here is nostalgia, and how we look at a past we can never actually see fully. This might feel like an extended creative writing exercise ("Produce 500 words describing grass from the point of view of someone who has never seen it in reality"), but it is effective at generating a mood which is shattered at the end of the section - Celeste gives birth a child (in a strange passage using a series of images derived from the describes, while the pair are shunned for their incestuous relationship.
In the second section, the child, named Orphan, takes over as the centre of the narrative. He charms his way into becoming the captain of the ship, despite not being terribly bright, and becomes regarded as something of a king and god. He institutes a perpetual, hedonistic party, where everything is done on his slightest whim (though he is manipulated into making decisions by others who have more interest in running the ship). This section seems to be a commentary on a different aspect of today's world, where we are living in the moment without a care for the traditions of the past or for the effects our way of life will have on generations to come. The main problem with this section is that Orphan, as depicted, does not convince the reader hat he has the charm he is credited with
The third section follows the life of Orphan's third child, imaginatively named Three, from spoilt child to ascetic obsessed with being able to write on paper in the old fashioned way, and centre of a new religion, proselytised by her nephew. It is in this section that news reaches the ship that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself. In the final two sections, the nephew takes over the ship after Orphan and Three die; the ship then returns to earth, receiving a signal to indicate that there have been some survivors, before being deliberately crashed into the earth to obliterate defective humanity (leaving just two survivors, in an escape pod, who know that there is no way they can properly survive). This nihilistic section is much less clearly linked to commentary on twenty first century humanity. It seems perfunctory, and poses a fairly common conundrum - how does the narrative survive and who adds the final words describing the death of the last two humans orbiting earth? It may be that this ending is meant to provide some positive message of hope: somehow, some remnant of human civilisation has continued - but it isn't effective in this way for me, being swamped by the nihilistic theme of the book, which seems to be that the human race is better destroyed than allowed to continue.
The message of Journey Into Space (assuming I haven't just completely misinterpreted the novel, and there is one) is made so much the centre of the novel that other aspects of fiction writing suffer, especially characterisation - Celeste and Three are the only individuals given much in the way development. Apart from the descriptions which form part of the game between Celeste and August, there isn't much filling in of the background; like a lot of modern science fiction, Journey Into Space assumes that the reader will be familiar with the basic idea of a generation ship, for instance.
While there are some interesting ideas in Journey Into Space, parts of it simply don't work, and it generally feels under-developed.
tachyondecay's review
2.0
Journey into Space frustrates me. I didn’t like it very much. Its characterization is fractured and shallow. It is brief where it should be verbose, tarries when it should be moving on. About the only thing it has going for it is the fact that it takes place on a generation ship. This is where the frustration sets in, because as much as I didn’t enjoy this book, I can appreciate how Litt depicts some of the pitfalls of a generation ship. He uses it as an effective device for illustrating the ability for a group of humans to enter catastrophic failure mode. It’s kind of depressing.
This slim novel follows three generations aboard the ship. August and Celeste are cousins born in flight. Like everyone else in their generation, they have never walked on a planet. All they know is the kilometre-long Armenia, the ship they call home. Unlike others in their generation, however, August and Celeste have taken the obsession with life on Earth to a new level. They’ve invented a game where they mutually construct a planet, roughly modelled after New England, using only words. Its a hypnotic, addictive process made all the more powerful by Litt’s careful attention to the descriptions. I’ve had to teach descriptive writing to some students as part of their coursework requirements, and I would have loved to quote some pages from this book to show how it can be done. Litt goes on, literally for pages, as he builds a picture of a scene where the only thing happening is weather. No people, no intelligence. Just weather.
August and Celeste don’t settle for weather, though. They end up having sex, having a baby, and there are complications as a result of their consanguinity. The second part of Journey into Space follows the first few years of baby Orphan’s childhood, letting us see how the small ship (and the people back on Earth) react to news of August and Celeste’s incest and try to punish the two accordingly. As the book goes on, Orphan becomes a singularity, a presence that simultaneously destabilizes yet unites the crew as it faces numerous setbacks. Ultimately, the crew aboard this ship engages in an atavistic retreat into sex, religion, and nihilism in an attempt to combat the oppressive sense of loneliness and futility that has taken over their mission.
On one level, the regression of humanity modelled in the crew of the Armenia is sickly fascinating. It’s a kind of cautionary tale: despite our hubris and technology, we are not all that advanced. It’s also a reminder that we are fragile, as a species. We depend on the Earth to keep us alive—space travel is a difficult, all but untenable endeavour with an ambiguous endgame, if any. Generation ships are perhaps a practical but not realistic method of surmounting the obstacles to interstellar travel. The major challenge of generation ships, according to Journey into Space, is that you can take the human out of the planet, but you can’t take the planet out of the human. It all begins when August and Celeste become obssessed with describing Earth, and I can’t really blame them.
It’s an interesting tangent to the nature-versus-nurture discussion. One can certainly socialize a human being to become accustomed to a particular environment. My life in Canada, or now in the UK, is very different from someone who lives in Ecuador or rural China. Transposed, I would be very hard-pressed to feel like my situation is “normal”. So, to some extent, one’s nurturing influences one’s ability to operate in a particular environment. Nevertheless, it seems like our versatility exists within a range of parameters, and that range is pre-programmed for “planet”. Kilometre-long ships just don’t cut it.
Litt makes some good stabs at the issues inherent in generation ships. Likewise, his exploration of failure modes of humanity is often fascinating. There is a certain satisfaction to watching the descent into madness. But his characters are little more than veneers over stock types—and he makes no secret of this. This is curious.
I hate showing off my genre snobbery, but Journey into Space reads like a literary fiction author intruding into science fiction. Litt grasps the generation ship motif as an effective setting for his tale. Genre fiction, particularly science fiction, often suffers complaints that its characters are thin and mostly stock, there only for the author to abuse as they explore the concept du jour. Literary fiction authors know better, of course; they are all about character. These conventional stereotypes would expect Litt to produce a deep, intense novel about a generation ship with multiple, detailed character sketches across all three generations. We get the opposite.
There is certainly something to be said for beautiful prose and memorable description. However, beautiful prose alone does not suffice for me. I also need characters who can make the story come alive. Three almost does this in the last act, with her incredible patience in learning how to make paper and ink. But it’s not quite enough. Journey into Space is a technically accomplished, well-written novel, but it isn’t all that satisfying as a story.
This slim novel follows three generations aboard the ship. August and Celeste are cousins born in flight. Like everyone else in their generation, they have never walked on a planet. All they know is the kilometre-long Armenia, the ship they call home. Unlike others in their generation, however, August and Celeste have taken the obsession with life on Earth to a new level. They’ve invented a game where they mutually construct a planet, roughly modelled after New England, using only words. Its a hypnotic, addictive process made all the more powerful by Litt’s careful attention to the descriptions. I’ve had to teach descriptive writing to some students as part of their coursework requirements, and I would have loved to quote some pages from this book to show how it can be done. Litt goes on, literally for pages, as he builds a picture of a scene where the only thing happening is weather. No people, no intelligence. Just weather.
August and Celeste don’t settle for weather, though. They end up having sex, having a baby, and there are complications as a result of their consanguinity. The second part of Journey into Space follows the first few years of baby Orphan’s childhood, letting us see how the small ship (and the people back on Earth) react to news of August and Celeste’s incest and try to punish the two accordingly. As the book goes on, Orphan becomes a singularity, a presence that simultaneously destabilizes yet unites the crew as it faces numerous setbacks. Ultimately, the crew aboard this ship engages in an atavistic retreat into sex, religion, and nihilism in an attempt to combat the oppressive sense of loneliness and futility that has taken over their mission.
On one level, the regression of humanity modelled in the crew of the Armenia is sickly fascinating. It’s a kind of cautionary tale: despite our hubris and technology, we are not all that advanced. It’s also a reminder that we are fragile, as a species. We depend on the Earth to keep us alive—space travel is a difficult, all but untenable endeavour with an ambiguous endgame, if any. Generation ships are perhaps a practical but not realistic method of surmounting the obstacles to interstellar travel. The major challenge of generation ships, according to Journey into Space, is that you can take the human out of the planet, but you can’t take the planet out of the human. It all begins when August and Celeste become obssessed with describing Earth, and I can’t really blame them.
It’s an interesting tangent to the nature-versus-nurture discussion. One can certainly socialize a human being to become accustomed to a particular environment. My life in Canada, or now in the UK, is very different from someone who lives in Ecuador or rural China. Transposed, I would be very hard-pressed to feel like my situation is “normal”. So, to some extent, one’s nurturing influences one’s ability to operate in a particular environment. Nevertheless, it seems like our versatility exists within a range of parameters, and that range is pre-programmed for “planet”. Kilometre-long ships just don’t cut it.
Litt makes some good stabs at the issues inherent in generation ships. Likewise, his exploration of failure modes of humanity is often fascinating. There is a certain satisfaction to watching the descent into madness. But his characters are little more than veneers over stock types—and he makes no secret of this. This is curious.
I hate showing off my genre snobbery, but Journey into Space reads like a literary fiction author intruding into science fiction. Litt grasps the generation ship motif as an effective setting for his tale. Genre fiction, particularly science fiction, often suffers complaints that its characters are thin and mostly stock, there only for the author to abuse as they explore the concept du jour. Literary fiction authors know better, of course; they are all about character. These conventional stereotypes would expect Litt to produce a deep, intense novel about a generation ship with multiple, detailed character sketches across all three generations. We get the opposite.
There is certainly something to be said for beautiful prose and memorable description. However, beautiful prose alone does not suffice for me. I also need characters who can make the story come alive. Three almost does this in the last act, with her incredible patience in learning how to make paper and ink. But it’s not quite enough. Journey into Space is a technically accomplished, well-written novel, but it isn’t all that satisfying as a story.
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