Before starting this review I want to congratulate artist Chris Moore and the (uncredited) designer at Penguin responsible for the cover of this book. It was a brave design choice to park the title and author\u2019s name on the little spaceship in the bottom left hand corner of the cover, but the masses of negative space created, and the minimalist feeling it lends the cover, immediately creates the feeling that this book is a classy artefact and delivers an image of smallness and isolation that is wholly apt. Very nice.<\/p>\n
Toby Litt may be best known as an author of literary novels but he\u2019s also self-confessed fan of genre fiction and of sf in particular \u2013 for example, he wrote a long piece in The Guardian on his debt to JG Ballard<\/a> following that author\u2019s death and his Myspace page<\/a> includes authors like Stanislaw Lem and Neal Stephenson amongst his favourites. So Journey Into Space <\/em>isn\u2019t just an example of a literary author plucking an idea from the science pages of the broadsheets and stumbling around reinventing the wheels that sf authors have been using to build complex machines for generations. \u00a0Litt, in writing a story set onboard a generation spaceship, isn\u2019t working in ignorance of what has gone before, he\u2019s making a conscious choice. And that raises the question of why he\u2019s chosen this form.<\/p>\n Litt\u2019s story begins as the last surviving member of the first generation of the crew of the UNSS Armenia<\/em> is approaching death. Already the fate of the generations that will be born aboard this ship \u2013 who will travel without ever experiencing a departure or an arrival \u2013 is weighing heavily on the collective conscience. The Armenia <\/em>is already outmoded \u2013 it has been overtaken by faster ships from home, parts of the ship are falling into disuse \u2013 and the young crew members are living in an environment that has been pillaged by their forefathers. The girls, for example, must wear hand-me-down bras because the women of the older generation refused to be limited to their allocation in stores. \u00a0The links with home are becoming ever more attenuated. The motivations and the ideals that drove the mission in the first place are fading amongst generations of crew who know nothing of Earth and have no hope of seeing the new world.<\/p>\n Journey Into Space<\/em> follows the fates of five generations of the Armenia\u2019s <\/em>crew whose choices are intimately tied to the fate of the mission. We begin with the beautiful cousins Celeste and August, who dream compulsively of Earth and become lovers and then follow their inbred son Orphan who becomes Armenia\u2019s<\/em> captain. When they receive the news that humanity on Earth has destroyed itself Orphan abandons their mission and turns the ship around. Orphan\u2019s daughter, Three, devotes her life to the ostensibly simple task of making paper and ink so that she can write a brief \u2013 never revealed \u2013 letter to the universe. Jehangir, Three\u2019s nephew, becomes The Nephew creates a religion around the life of his aunt and control\u2019s the ship as he directs it towards its final fate. Finally we meet Herakles and Ultima, who will be the last of the Armenia<\/em>.<\/p>\n These are a damaged crew. \u00a0August and Celeste\u2019s illicit relationship starts a chain of events (magnified by the news that mankind has destroyed itself) that leads to a kind of madness as the crew abandon rationality and science and slip into ever wilder idiocies and manias.<\/p>\n