Literature / Orphans of the Sky

(aka: Universe)

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A 1963 science fiction novel (but originally published in May and October 1941 as two separate novelettes, "Universe" and "Common Sense") by Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of a generational ship where the inhabitants have forgotten the purpose of the ship and are living as a pre-technical society. Indeed, the inhabitants of "the Ship" no longer even understand they are on a spaceship — they believe "the Ship" is simply the entire universe — and consider "the Trip" (Starship Vanguard's original mission of interstellar colonization) to be a religious concept, akin to going to Heaven when you die ("he took the Trip" meaning "he died") or perhaps something akin to Judgment Day or the Millennium.

The story itself follows Hugh Hoyland, a low-ranking scientist-priest, who is captured by the Muties and shown the true reality of the Ship when he's taken by Joe-Jim, a two-headed gang leader, to the observation bay in the old Captain's quarters. Struck with something halfway between a scientific breakthrough and religious revelation, Hugh makes it his life mission to learn to steer the Ship, fulfill the divine plan, and finally land on Far Centaurus.

It is one of the earliest depictions of a generational ship, and in particular of the concept of a primitive society living on such a ship after having forgotten its true nature.

Tropes for the book:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Hugh Hoyland, on learning his people's world is actually a spaceship, decides to teach himself how to pilot the ship. According to all common sense of astrogation, no single person can learn the necessary skills to fly a ship by himself, especially one the size that Hoyland is on. However, because all knowledge of this common sense was never printed in text, he never realizes this and thus taught himself all the skills. This is repeated later in the novel when Hoyland, not realizing the difficulty of managing a landing and the sheer danger his life is in, successfully lands his craft (a smaller shuttle, not the Ship itself) on a planet, although in this case that was largely because the Ship's builders knew that it would be piloted by later-generation crew and put in very good autopilots.
• Adam and Eve Plot: Implicitly. At the end, the sole landing party on the new planet consists of Hugh, Bill, Alan, and their wives, who do not have the means to leave once they get there, with the implication being that will serve as the founders of a new human population there.
• Adipose Rex: The current Captain, a monarchic figure who carries the old crew title by long-forgotten tradition, is a tremendously fat and indolent man who rarely bothers to leave his chambers.
• And This Is for...: At the end, while playing out his Heroic Sacrifice, Jim calls out the names of the people that Narby's men had killed — his conjoined twin Joe, his henchman Bobo, and himself in the bargain — as he cuts down his foes.
• Apocalyptic Log: Aboard the one remaining shuttle, Hugh finds the written log of one of the pilots, later taken up by one of the ship's minor officers (who had succeeded to the role of captain, when all qualified personnel had been killed). It outlines some information about the mutiny, the scale of the deaths, famine, the beginning of cannibalism and mutations, and how the survivors, in the course of a generation or two, had begun to see the ship as the entire world. Interestingly, no cause for the mutiny is ever mentioned, just that it was started by "Metalsmith Ordinary Huff."
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: The only weapons known on the ship are slingshots and knives. Eventually Hugh and Joe-Jim rediscover the idea of the sword, which is a complete game-changer.
• The Big Guy: Bobo, metaphorically speaking. He's actually the shortest of the main characters, being a dwarf, but he's also very strong and very fast, although he's not much one for thinking. As a result, he's usually the main member of the group to be trusted with tasks involving heavy lifting, fighting, or subduing people.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Joe-Jim is one of the smartest people on the ship, and in terms of pure intellect and reasoning power is quite likely the smartest person around, period. However, he is by inclination perfectly content with looking after his personal comfort and welfare, and rarely cares to truly exert himself outside of using idle reading or debate to fill up his free time. As a result, most of the intellectual revolution ends up being spearheaded by Hugh, who, while less quick-witted or imaginative, is profoundly driven and more stubborn about tackling the problems that he ends up facing.
  Joe-Jim's minds were brilliantly penetrating when he cared to exert himself; he remained a superficial dilettante because he rarely cared.
• Cannibal Tribe: The "Muties" catch and eat members of the "Crew" (the relatively more civilized — and unmutated — descendants of the crewmembers who did not join the original mutiny). "Muties" also eat each other if there isn't any other meat to be had.
• Cargo Cult: The post-mutiny shipboard society recalls scientific and technical knowledge only in the form of ritualized behavior and poorly understood superstition. The Crew and Muties both worship Jordan — that is, the Jordan Foundation that built the ship — as a god, "Scientists" are a priestly caste who focus on memorizing and protecting dogma, and old textbooks and manuals are preserved as religious texts but, because they talk about complicated concepts that nobody actually understands, they are believed to be highly allegorical spiritual and moral treatises.
• Centrifugal Gravity: The entire ship is rotating on its long axis (although its inhabitants are as ignorant of this fact as the inhabitants of Earth once were of Earth's rotation); the higher-gravity levels where the Crew live are actually farther out towards the outer hull of the spaceship, while the lower-gravity areas where the Muties live are closer in towards the center (including a zero-gravity area along the Ship's main axis).
• City in a Bottle: The ship's inhabitants lost all knowledge that they are on a ship (along with most other knowledge) after a failed mutiny. As such, the current generation thinks that the whole universe is just the ship.
• Colony Ship: The Vanguard was intended as one of these, planned from the beginning to be of the "Generation Ship" type. Too bad about the mutiny, and the total breakdown of the ship's command structure and internal society to the point where everyone forgot they were even on a vessel of any sort, and them drifting unpowered and unpiloted for many generations.
• Conjoined Twins: Joe-Jim, the mutant leaders, are two heads that share the same body. He enjoys playing checkers against himself; he used to favor poker, but Joe accused Jim of cheating. They don't necessarily sleep at the same time, which obliges one head to talk in whispers when the other wants to get some shut-eye. Below the necks, they share control of the body; long practice has mostly made it seamless, but there are still occasional struggles for control of a givens set of motor nerves.
• The Coup: Towards the end, the characters realize that, in order for Crew and Mutie society to be pacified, the current orthodox leadership and short-sighted, piggish Captain of the Crew needs to be replaced. As a result, Phineas Narby, already a senior scientist-priest and the leader of the ideological bloc containing most of the young, ambitious members of his caste, calls for a meeting of the senior officers, then invites in his new mutant allies, assassinates the Captain, has his men install him as a replacement, and then has the few remaining recalcitrants massacred. A similar process happen on the upper decks, as Joe-Jim's gang, already the largest among the Muties, uses the newfound support to take over or wipe out its rivals.
• Covers Always Lie: One Baen Books edition shows three of the significant mutants on the cover: Joe-Jim sitting on a large chair or throne, with Bobo and the bladesmith on either side of him. Joe-Jim looks pretty much as described. Bobo is described in the book as being a four-foot tall microcephalic ("pinhead") with superhuman musculature. In this image, he is a short (but not dwarfish), stocky, muscular man with a perfectly normal head. The bladesmith is a wrinkled old woman with four arms and gray facial hair, but the cover makes her into an attractive, busty, red-haired young woman, still with four arms. Probably more significant though is that none of the normal humans are shown at all, when Hugh Hoyland and Bill Ertz are the main protagonists.
• Dumb Muscle: Bobo, a mutant with dwarfism and microcephaly, is very simple-minded and doesn't concern himself with concepts that don't involve fighting, eating, or comfort. He is also exceptionally strong and very fast, which combined with his absolute loyalty to Joe-Jim makes him the primary bruiser and physical fighter for the main cast.
• Fictional Greetings and Farewells: The ubiquitous phrase, "Good eating!" serves as greeting, farewell, and benediction. Understandable in a society where getting enough food is pretty much the only thing people need to be concerned with, and early generations went through times of famine.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: For reasons unspecified, Huff, who held the rank of "Metalsmith Ordinary," started a mutiny aboard the Vanguard. This ended with the deaths of ninety percent of the crew, the total abandonment of the colonization mission, and the ship drifting through space for many generations. Huff became the Satan figure in the ship's religion.
• Future Imperfect: The Crew's feudal society has lost almost all knowledge of their advanced ancestors, and remembers what it does know in very flawed and peculiar ways. The Jordan Foundation, which built the ship, is remembered as Jordan, the god who made the world and people. The Ship's Metalsmith Roy Huff, who led the mutiny that resulted in the collapse of the Ship's original order, is remembered as a cursed first sinner against divine order by the Crew and as a secondary deity by the Muties, both of whom know him only as Huff. Physics textbooks are believed to be philosophic texts that use abstract terms to talk about ethical or religious concepts (the law of gravity, for instance, is considered to be a poetic metaphor for romantic love since it talks about the "attraction of two bodies"), while descriptions of the universe outside the Ship, which is now considered to be the whole world, are believed to have been a sort of shared worldbuilding tradition among idle philosophers. Among the Muties, Joe-Jim the two-headed intellectual has developed a much more coherent understanding of reality from endless debates with himself after reading stolen books, but also has no concept of fiction and thus treats novels the same way as he does physics textbooks and, when discussing the stars, speculates that they might be "maybe thousands of miles" distant and that they might be even as big as the Ship.
• Future Primitive: By the time the novel takes place, the Crew has become so backward that they think the ship is the whole Universe, and live in what is essentially a feudal society consisting primarily of subsistence farmers ruled by a priestly caste of "Scientists", a nobility descended from the officers, and a king-like Captain. Even the concept of discrete time units has been lost, without days or seasons with which to divide timekeeping. The only reason that the ship still works is that its reactor^note the secondary reactor, actually, the main one having gone kaput during the mutiny can convert any matter into energy at pretty much 100% efficiency. Everything that is no longer useful, including the dead, is used as fuel for the reactor. The Muties of the upper decks have regressed even farther, and now live as a loose scattering of raiders, squatters, and scavengers.
• Generation Ships: The story has the massive generation ship Vanguard whose inhabitants have forgotten their origins and fallen into barbarism, yet the ship still functions after centuries of neglect (albeit with an assist from Cargo Cult maintenance procedures). An excerpt indicates the ship was specifically designed in a way that minimized the amount of automation and moving parts, thus reducing wear and tear and extending the functional lifespan of the ship.
• Heroic Sacrifice: At the climax, as the main characters are being chased down by Narby's men and trying to make it the Ship's last lifeboat, Joe takes a knife in his eye and dies. His conjoined brother Jim chooses to stay behind, fighting to the death in order to buy time for the rest of the group to flee.
• Lost Technology: The Ship's society is fallen to such a state that, while the Ship's original systems are still maintained out of rote ritual, none of it is understood as anything other than the universe's natural processes as created by God and actual manufactured technology tops out at knives and slingshots. As a result, one of the primary reasons why The Coup goes the way it does at the end is because the main characters' faction has, by means of reading old novels, worked out how to recreate ancient and powerful weapons — that is, swords and metal armor.
• Low Culture, High Tech: The characters live on a generation ship whose crew mutinied several generations back and lost most of its old technical, historic, and scientific knowledge. The result is a society that still maintains the surviving mechanical system by ritual and dutifully memorizes the old manuals of use, while living in a classically feudal government where most people are subsistence farmers, and utilize no weaponry more advanced than knives and slingshots. The only reason the ship itself still works (including life support) is that it's powered by a reactor that can convert any matter into energy at pretty much 100% efficiency. Everything that is no longer useful, including the dead, is used as fuel for the reactor.
• Meet the New Boss: Narby joins in an alliance with Hugh, Bill Ertz, and Joe-Jim to overthrow the old Captain. The two obvious choices for the new Captain are Ertz and Narby, but Ertz decides to keep the peace and focus on the mission, and concedes the job to Narby. Before long, it becomes apparent that Narby has no interest in the mission, and just wants to consolidate his own power and maintain the status quo.
• Mile-Long Ship: As is appropriate for a Generation Ship and Colony Ship. Mention is made of how long it takes to walk in a circle around the ship, or to climb up to the levels of low weight, although length is only vaguely implied.
• Mutants: The "Muties" who live in the lower-gravity parts of the ship seem to have gotten their name both from being descendants of the crewmembers whose mutiny helped propel the ship into barbarism, but very much also from the word "mutant": The "Muties" include the microcephalic dwarf Bobo; Joe-Jim, a two-headed man — that is, a pair of conjoined twins, albeit very closely conjoined — who is a leader of the "Muties"; and a four-armed woman who serves as a knifemaker for the Mutie community. Mutant children are sometimes born among the Crew as well, but they are usually killed at birth.
• The Mutiny: A mutiny generations ago is a major part of the backstory of "the Ship". Although the mutineers were not successful in taking control of the ship, the mutiny was a watershed event in the breakdown of civilization and order which transformed the Starship Vanguard into "the Ship". In the present, the Ship is still divided between the feudalistic Crew in the lower decks and the tribal Muties in the upper, while Roy Huff, the leader of the original revolt, is remembered in the Crew's religion as a Cain-like first sinner figure against the original, perfect order created by God.
• Name Drop: One of Narby's early appearances in the second novella, Common Sense, has him repeatedly referring to the quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific beliefs of the Crew as "common sense."
• No Woman's Land: Crew society is extremely misogynistic — women are expected to live as ancillaries to their male relatives or spouses, and obey orders with no backtalk. Perhaps best shown with Hugh, who chooses two wives after the rebellion: An older one named Chloe for practical purposes, and a younger one whom he doesn't even allow to have a name, for his personal enjoyment. He thinks nothing of beating her into compliance. Mutie society is more egalitarian; the knife-maker, who holds one of the positions of highest rank and safety by dint of being the only one who knows how to operate the forge and make weapons, is a woman.
• Oh, My Gods!:
  • The Ship was originally built by the Jordan Foundation. In the present, the Foundation itself is long forgotten, but the Crew and the Muties both worship "Jordan" as a god and swear by his name. Huff, the leader of the original mutiny, is used in Crew parlance where "Hell" or "devil" might be in modern use; the Muties use him as another god-figure to swear to.
  • As a result of food tending to be scarce on the Ship, both groups also use "good eating" as a general polite farewell.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Subverted. The Ship's scientists are essentially priests of a monotheistic religion with a roughly scientific appearance, and in their number there is a faction of skeptical, practical men who have come to disregard the old talk of divine plans, sin, and mysticism as worthless nonsense except as a form of social control, and concern themselves only with the practical matters of keeping society running. However, the old religion does actively maintain a number of truths, even if in highly distorted form, about the Ship's origin as a deliberately designed thing intended to go on a specific journey, which the young skeptics reject alongside the rest. In fact, Narby's refusal to listen to any of the old tales means that he ultimately remains completely unwilling to accept that the Ship is actually a moving thing, that the universe outside of it exists, and that it is reaching its ultimate destination.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The group that bands together to end the ignorance of the Ship's downfallen state, prevent a genocidal war against the Muties, and bring about the Trip's conclusion ends up being an apostate scientist-priest, a kidnapped member of the same order who was also the chief architect of the looming war, an uneducated peasant swept up by chance, a two-headed mutant leader, and a microcephalous dwarf brusier.
• Ragnarök-Proofing: The Ship was created out of extremely finely refined materials and with engine systems that worked primarily through electric circuits instead of moving parts, in order to limit friction damage. As a result, it's, at least on a human timescale, essentially eternal, and has continued to function smoothly in all the long ages of savagery after the mutiny.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Joe-Jim the mutant has this dynamic with himself. Joe, the right-hand head, is stubborn, irritable, and proud. Jim, the left-hand head, is calmer and more contemplative. They mostly work in concert, but disagreements periodically crop up and require them to retire to a private argument until both heads are back on the same page.
• Rip Van Winkle: Although he is not asleep, Hugh's first capture by Joe-Jim and Bobo has this effect. He is kept up in mutie territory for so long, everyone believes he has died, and one of his friends comments on how much gray hair he has. Many of the people he knew on the Crew levels have died, and a new generation is in charge. Although the society is largely unchanged, there is a faction of Scientists who believe that the teachings might have more than metaphorical meaning.
• Shown Their Work: The finale takes a few pages to emphasize the sheer, actual scale of cosmic systems, in order to point out the immense distances between stellar and planetary bodies, the effective impossibility of telling planets and stars apart from each other with the naked eye unless one has considerable prior knowledge, and the extreme rarity of habitable worlds, in order to point out that it was only by sheer, literally astronomically good luck Hugh and his group were able to leave the Ship while it was close enough to a planet to actually see it, with just enough fuel to land on one of its moons instead of the gas giant itself, and closest to a habitable moon.
• Small, Secluded World: The story is set on a generation ship where a mutiny left most of the officers dead. Without a command structure the society gradually devolved into a superstitious Cargo Cult that believes the ship is the only thing in existence. Narby flat-out states the stars seen from the one window on the ship are nothing more than an elaborate trick by their ancestors.
• Sword Almighty: Joe-Jim likes old books, particularly Alexandre Dumas, which gives Hugh the idea of having the bladesmith forge swords for the coalition of Joe-Jim and Narby's forces. Everyone else on the ship has short knives for throwing or hand-to-hand fighting. The swords can't be thrown, but at close range allow them to easily defeat opponents with short knives.
• Sworn Brothers: After resolving to take over the Ship, reveal the true nature of the world to the Crew, and unite Crew and Muties to finish the Trip, the main characters stab themselves in the upper arms and press their shoulders together to mingle their blood while swearing an oath of companionship.
  "Blade for blade!"
  "Back to back!"
  "Blood to blood!"
  "Blood brothers, to the end of the Trip!"
• The Theocracy: The Crew's society is effectively a theocracy by fact if not by name. While a Captain nominally serves as a monarch, the current one is an indolent and ineffective figure who leaves matters of rule to his subordinates. Instead, the Scientists — nominally descended from the Ship's old scientific and engineering personnel, but now a priestly caste — are the main arbiters of morality and social direction, study old texts that lower ranks are not permitted to see, oversee the Converter that produces the Ship's energy, and conduct the ritualized maintenance of shipboard systems. Below them are the Officers, petty nobility who see to most day-to-day affairs, and the common Crew.
• Two Beings, One Body: Joe-Jim Gregory, the two-headed leader(s) of a powerful mutie gang.