A review by expendablemudge
Nebula Awards 31: SFWA's Choices for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year by Kelley Eskridge, Pamela Sargent, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dan Raphael, A.E. van Vogt, David Lunde, Elizabeth Hand, Lisa Goldstein, James Patrick Kelly, Esther M. Friesner, Robert J. Sawyer, Dale Bailey, Maureen F. McHugh
3.0
This review is for an unanthologized van Vogt short story, Centaurus II (link is to the June 1947 Astounding where it appeared), which isn't safe to add because there are some folks who think this is a cataloging website not a review site.
Rating: 3* of five
This is part of a series of generation-ship stories that Joachim Boaz is running that a collection of bloggers are participating in. His review of the story Thirteen for Centaurus by J.G. Ballard is linked.
This novelette is by the altogether less talented writer van Vogt; J.G. Ballard blows van Vogt's prose style into a pile of barely perceptible dust fragments. It takes a generation-ship setting as a stand-in for the reign of Edward III. All the events that occur are part of the playbook that Isabella and Mortimer used to depose the old king. Anyway, whatever his sources, the generation ship itself has little relevance. Its purpose is to close the horizons of the people within as effectively as the Black Death did England of the 1340s. The story's weakness is its simple inability to connect with the reader on any but the most superficial levels. I don't necessarily demand that I get every i crossed and t dotted but I'd like to have some idea of what and why the ship got built and sent out; I'd like to have a glimmer that there are people below decks whose purposes are meaningful to them; I'm just that kind of a hairpin. I got none of those things, though I did get plenty of action reported to me, and I got some glancing awareness that Earth is indeed rare among the innumerable planets in this galaxy, therefore urgently needed by humanity.
There's a message I can get behind.
But in the end, I read the story without the pleasure or the sense of immersion that marked my read of Thirteen for Centaurus. This story was, apparently, never anthologized by the practically obsessively anthologizing van Vogt; that says something. The prose is serviceable, the idea a good one, and I'd be remiss if I didn't give it its due: He thought through the issues of human nature as applied to a long, isolated voyage, and came to a conclusion I can heartily agree with, ie that Humanity is made up of nasty wolves and lazy sheep and if you're bristling at that binary's harshness, you're a sheep.
È finita la commedia.
Rating: 3* of five
This is part of a series of generation-ship stories that Joachim Boaz is running that a collection of bloggers are participating in. His review of the story Thirteen for Centaurus by J.G. Ballard is linked.
This novelette is by the altogether less talented writer van Vogt; J.G. Ballard blows van Vogt's prose style into a pile of barely perceptible dust fragments. It takes a generation-ship setting as a stand-in for the reign of Edward III. All the events that occur are part of the playbook that Isabella and Mortimer used to depose the old king. Anyway, whatever his sources, the generation ship itself has little relevance. Its purpose is to close the horizons of the people within as effectively as the Black Death did England of the 1340s. The story's weakness is its simple inability to connect with the reader on any but the most superficial levels. I don't necessarily demand that I get every i crossed and t dotted but I'd like to have some idea of what and why the ship got built and sent out; I'd like to have a glimmer that there are people below decks whose purposes are meaningful to them; I'm just that kind of a hairpin. I got none of those things, though I did get plenty of action reported to me, and I got some glancing awareness that Earth is indeed rare among the innumerable planets in this galaxy, therefore urgently needed by humanity.
There's a message I can get behind.
But in the end, I read the story without the pleasure or the sense of immersion that marked my read of Thirteen for Centaurus. This story was, apparently, never anthologized by the practically obsessively anthologizing van Vogt; that says something. The prose is serviceable, the idea a good one, and I'd be remiss if I didn't give it its due: He thought through the issues of human nature as applied to a long, isolated voyage, and came to a conclusion I can heartily agree with, ie that Humanity is made up of nasty wolves and lazy sheep and if you're bristling at that binary's harshness, you're a sheep.
È finita la commedia.