Tuesday, October 24, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter


Noumenon is a story built around a classic SciFi trope - that of a Generation Ship.  For those unfamiliar with the trope, a Generation Ship is a spaceship that solves the problem of the incredibly far distances between objects in space by being entirely self sustaining, such that a colony of individuals crewing said ship could survive indefinitely, with the original crew's distant descendants being the ones to finally reach their destination.  Noumenon follows a fleet of such ships - although in this case, the book is staffed by clones, not by naturally-born descendants - over a large number of generations as they journey to a mysterious star and back.

Fair warning for those reading this review- I have not had a great experiences reading Generation Ship and similar concepts in books, and Noumenon also didn't quite work for me, for reasons I'll point out after the Jump.  Unlike some of those other books (Aurora, Seveneves (sort-of)), I didn't think Noumenon was bad - it definitely had some moments, and the first half was certainly interesting.  But the whole concept of following generations on a ship results in the ideas in the plot becoming even more important than usual, as plot weaknesses can't be covered up by great characters - and there are points where the plot just didn't work for me on this one.

Noumenon is trying in large part to examine how a society would handle the conditions on this voyage, and the psychologies of the people and their descendants under such stress.  But as I've said, and I'll explain further below, it becomes a bit hit or miss, especially near the end.

More after the Jump:

------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
In the year 2088, Humanity has developed the technology to send out inhabited ships to the stars.  While these ships do not have much the ability to travel much faster than light, they can shift between dimensions to make travel to distant stars possible for generation ships, even if it will take several generations for the ships' crew to reach their destination.

Reginald Straifer has made a potentially huge discovery - a star, named LQ Pyxidis, appears strangely on telescopes, as if it is encrusted somehow.  He manages to convince the Planet United Consortium to send out one of these generation ship fleets to the star in order to discover more about this phenomenon.  The colony is to be crewed by clones of individuals carefully chosen to be assets to the mission and who are the best setup to handle the psychological stress of a mission that is thousands of years Earth-wise long.  The colony's name?  Noumenon.  To aid in the colony's success, Reggie puts his own personal AI into the center AI unit of the colony, named "ICC", to help the settlers on the voyage.

But even the best psychologists couldn't quite understand how the voyage would affect the inhabitants and the generations thereafter who would never know the world from which they came. As each generation is born on the way to LQ Pyxidis, the colony faces newer and often bigger stresses, which threaten the safety of the crew and the mission itself.

And when the inhabitants get to LQ Pyxidis, what will they find?  And if they do find something (or not) and head back to Earth, it will be 4000 years later - what will they find back on their home planet?  This is a tale of the colony and how it attempts to adapt and survive.
------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
Noumenon is broken up into two parts: The first part involves the journey of the colony to the star, and basically deals with the early generations.  The second part deals with the colony as it reaches the star and returns home to Earth.  Each chapter deals generally with a new generation of individuals/clones aboard the colony, with each chapter being seen primarily from the viewpoint of one character from that generation - although several chapters take place from ICC's point of view instead of a clone.

In general, the plot of this book is meant to examine how a society would evolve under the conditions set up to begin this voyage, how it would react to the stresses of space, and then how it would react to the varying things they would discover as they reach the mysterious star, face their first technical problems aboard the colony, and then return to an Earth that has undergone its own 4000 years of development.

The issue with a book featuring multiple generations on a generation ship is that you don't wind up sticking with any particular set of characters; as such, the book has to work extra hard to get us to care about each character of importance in each generation....and then has to do it again when we leave those particular characters.  The result is that the plot elements of each generation becomes especially important - if the ideas of the story in each generation don't pan out, things get hard to read as the reader likely doesn't have any attachment to the characters to make him want to stick it out where the plot doesn't work.  By contrast in a more typical plot with the same characters all the way though, a rough patch of plot isn't necessarily fatal if we like the characters enough to care what happens to them.  Noumenon typified this problem for me.

Noumenon spends in general a decent amount of time on each generation, so that we get a full glimpse of the characters involved and the ideas being explored.  To its credit, the book doesn't try to make each generation, even though we're dealing with clones, identical to the last, but tries to develop the main characters of each segment.  And as a result, the first part of this book actually worked for me - I liked each of our four main characters of each chapter, and the plotlines in general worked and were believable.  I cared what happened to each of the characters and so I wanted to read on.

The second half of the book however didn't work for me pretty much at all (I basically enjoyed only the last chapter).  Part of this may be that the book is then dealing with the colony's reactions to the mystery star and then the journey to a future version of Earth, so unlike the first half, it's in essence showing reactions to far off hypothetical concepts rather than something more grounded.

That said, even accepting that as an excuse, the book really lost me in a chapter near the middle of the second half, where the colony deals with what is essentially a concentration camp (those exact words are actually used).  Now, there have been many books which pose settings showing future generations re-enacting the horrors of concentration camps and the like, and those can work (Parable of the Talents features a scary one).  But in this book, the situation essentially seems to rise up out of nowhere, without any setup, and just feels incredibly out of place.

Moreover, the second half features a weaker group of viewpoint characters, with the last two chapters featuring the strongest characters, but still spending a lot of time through the 2nd half with some weak characters.  And even beyond the concentration camp chapter, some of the ideas explored, particularly what had become of humanity during the time the colony had been out in deep space, didn't really work for me, and again, that was a major problem.

Noumenon might work better for others than myself - I see some reputable sources I trust really enjoyed this book.  But it didn't work for me, and I suspect I'll be avoiding generation ship books for the near future.





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