I recently highlighted this cover as an example of hokey science fiction cover art in the classic science fiction time of the mid 20th century. Meanwhile I have read this book and many thoughts about it are tugging me this way and that. It’s a fairly thin, small book of only 160 pages, but the type is very small. This was printed in 1959. In a more modern format there would probably be about 350 pages or so.
When reading Seed of Light, I realized again – and I tend to keep forgetting this fact – that I really don’t like reading “classic science fiction.” What I mean by classic is probably that it was written somewhere between 1930 and 1975. I tend to enjoy the more modern works of Orson Scott Card, Stephen Baxter, John Scalzi and contemporaries.
One of the reasons for this is that the authors usually portray a future that to them is utopian, and to me is distant past. George Orwell first published 1984 in 1949. He went 35 years into the future. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001 in 1968. He went 33 years into the future. And Cooper wrote Seed of Light in 1959, and it starts playing around 1980, after the world has experienced a nuclear war that devastated the globe and ruined the entire atmosphere.
Humanity built a starship, 100 meters high and 20 meters wide in the shape of a rocket (see the picture on the cover). This starship is launched with a select group of 5 men and 5 women and all provisions and life support they would need for years, or decades, while traveling to another star. The ship is the “seed” of humanity and meant to save a few individuals to keep humanity from complete extinction.
Of course, Cooper didn’t expect computers, digital records, automated controls, and deep space communications. In 1959, the Russians had plans to launch humans into space, but Gagarin didn’t fly until 1961. So Cooper’s spaceship of the 1980s was a rocket based on pre-computing technology. The crew had records on microfiche. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that, but for me it makes the story so contrived, I have a hard time remaining captivated by it and I get distracted analyzing it.
Seed of Light is a great generation starship story, really one of the better ones I remember reading.
However, there are a lot of problems with the book overall. It’s divided into three parts. Part one is about politics on earth between 1960 and 1980, and how the world was ruined. Frankly, I didn’t care, and I forced myself to skim over it. Looking back, the entire part one could have been left out and replaced with a one-page exposition on why the starship was built and why it had to leave earth. There was no connection between all the characters in part one and those in part two. It was boring and irrelevant.
Part two told the story of the first few generations of the star travelers. What would it feel like to be in a tin can 100 meters long and 20 meters wide for decades, knowing that you’d be there for the rest of your life? Then there was the second generation, their children. They were born on the ship. They grew up and were educated on the ship. When they were old enough, they took over running it. They had children of their own. Then the third generation came. Only a few of the first were left. Leaving earth was now a distant legend, nothing more. This went on for 1000 years, 40 generations. Cooper did a good job in part two describing this kind of life and experience.
In part three Cooper no longer told a story but basically lectured. He stopped writing a novel, but simply rambled on about far-out concepts of telepathy, telepathic projection into the future, determinism, faster than light travel, and all the stuff he was obviously interested in. Somehow he needed to fit all this into the story. The entire part three, designed to resolve the plot, ended up being nothing but exposition. There is very little dialog in that section. The whole thing has a feeling of deus ex machina, and the end, while inventive, left me wanting more.
Cooper tried to do too much with this book. He should have thrown out part one and part three, both really irrelevant to the central concept of the generation ship, and built out part two more. I loved reading part two, and worked my way by force through the other stuff.
In the end, I have to say that Seed of Light is a pretty poor book, as novels go, and mostly an opportunity missed, but part two is a must read for anyone interested in generation starships.
Rating: ** (would be one star if part two were not so effective)
When I read “classic” sci-fi I’m less interested in the predictive (or lack of prediction) qualities the authors portrayed than the texts as products of the era (or stepping away from the strictures of an era). Perhaps that’s the historian in me… I like seeing modern worries of the time creep into the works — I like social issues manifesting themselves in interesting ways and unusual and poignant imagery etc. I could care less if he didn’t know about computers or talked about a ruined world which never happened…. But that’s just me I guess.
Of course I see your point, and of course he can’t have predicted the future. To me however, that distracts me.
The problem with this book is that it should have been two different books. The first section spend time on character development, pseudo history, setting up for an epic. Then, 50 pages later, it abandoned it all. None of the characters were even mentioned again. It was like a novella on its own, a prequel, maybe, to set up the purpose for the ride.
Strange book, really.