Michael Mammay

Generation Ship is a story about a colony ship that is approaching a planet they hope will support life so they can settle there. The ship has been traveling so long that they are several generations away from the founders who set off from Earth long ago. When rumors of the possibility of finally reaching a habitable planet the society is disrupted. Some people want to flout the mandatory death at age seventy-five to avoid population beyond their capacity to provide.

Factions arise. People want to revisit other rules of the original charter written by the first generation who left Earth. The rules have kept the ship stable over the centuries, ensuring enough workers, but assuring the population was stable. But it did mean, for example, that people who were more interested in and suitable for other work would get stuck in a department that they had little aptitude for.

What was the most effective and successful element of Generation Ship is how Michael Mammay writes about events within the worldview of each character. This means that people can be in opposition through rational differences based on how their position, their work, limits what they think is important. That means that the security force employee and the governor think stability is most important while the farmer also wants stability but within a more democratic society. The IT hacker/maintenance worker is focused in making the ship more productive, efficient, and safe. The scientist’s framework is what science tells them they can or cannot do. People do bad things, but within an ethical framework constructed by their social and work context. This makes this book so much smarter than most. Its people are complex and no one is evil, they are just limited by their experience.

I don’t rate many books this highly, but Generation Ship was a book I did not want to end. I want to know what happens next. I don’t want to say goodbye, not even with the characters who disappointed me. I want them to redeem themselves. I think it’s possible, even likely.

Mammay succeeded in making me care about all the characters, even the ones whom I thought were in the wrong. They were in the wrong, but honestly, based on their own moral framework and worldview.

And that’s not even mentioning how ingenious Mammay is in coming up with a mind-bending expansion of what life can be. I was honestly flabbergasted, but in a good way.





Generation Ship at Harper Collins
Read an excerpt
Michael Mammay site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/generation-ship/… (meer)

A generation ship packed with would-be colonists traveling at speeds slower than light is one of the most shopworn science fiction settings, but Michael Mammay makes it work, as he did with military sci-fi tropes in his Planetside series.
We meet the starship Voyager (no points for an original ship name) as it enters the system of its target planet near the end of a 250-year journey. Landing probes are not getting their messages out, and even orbital imagery is not what it should be.
The novel follows several characters with competing agendas in the ensuing political crisis. The large cast includes a governor who is a petty autocrat, a cop who overreacts, a scientist who is too often ignored, and a computer hacker who needs a friend. These characters and others are allowed to make a case for themselves, some stronger than others. We learn little about what motivated the first generation to build the ship and get aboard. The ship is a political laboratory. Mammay is more concerned with the sociology than the technology.
We never learn how the ship is powered or how its environmental system works. We do know there is a prohibition against AI, which becomes one of the most engaging plotlines. The best character is the computer hacker who learns to use it.
Bottom line: Human cussedness goes with us to the stars.… (meer)

In Colonyside, the third volume of Michael Mammay’s Planetside series, retired Colonel Carl Butler and his team are reunited to search for a scientist missing from a jungle research station. As soon as they arrive at the barely habitable planet, they are wined and dined by one group while another group takes shots at them and plants bombs and bugs wherever they go. All that is before they take a walk in the jungle. Butler’s charisma as a leader is based on the sure knowledge that he, like his comrades and his enemies, is an unredeemable asshole. Such introspection and a nicely convoluted plot kept me reading. Here’s the opener: “I’m not dead yet. That probably goes without saying, but it was definitely touch and go for a while. Omicron, the company I tussled with a couple years back . . . they don’t like me much. Whatever. They can get in line with most of the rest of the galaxy. Assholes.” See what I mean?… (meer)