![]() ![]() The lower-weight decks are the home of "the muties," a group named either for their descent from the plotters of a long-ago mutiny or for the frequency of genetic mutations among them (which don't exist among the crew because they commit infanticide whenever a mutation occurs). The "crew" live on the high-weight decks of the ship, and are organized into a highly stratified and rigidly patriarchal society dominated by "scientists," who are really priests of a sort, and whose religious texts are the ship's technical manuals. ![]() Orphans of the Sky tells the story of Hugh Hoyland, an illiterate peasant living on a generation starship whose inhabitants have long-since forgotten the purpose of their voyage (or even that they are on a voyage). So it was with some trepidation that I began Orphans of the Sky, a novel structured as two novellas by Robert Heinlein, an author I know primarily (and not positively) from the militarist novel Starship Troopers to the more interesting, but tediously smug Stranger in a Strange Land. Several attempts to go through with this, though, have foundered on an iceberg of hack writing, outdated social norms and the naive optimism about science, technology and "progress" that permeates so much pre-New Wave SF. I often romanticize the notion of sitting down on a lazy Sunday with a classic SF novel I bought for under $2 at a used bookstore. ![]()
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