When I was considering what to do for the next fortnightly book, Michael Flynn's posthumously published novel, In the Belly of the Whale, arrived in the mail. When he died last year, I did my favorite of his novels, In the Country of the Blind; it seems good to do his last novel. It should be quite nice. The work occurs in the same fictional universe as The January Dancer, Up Jim River, In the Lion's Mouth, and On the Razor's Edge, but in terms of the chronology of that fictional universe occurs long before any of those works, so it should be quite standalone. And, given the author, it should be intelligent entertainment, which I rather need given that I've been feeling a little burned out; I started to write 'February 28' as the date in the title of this post, and it took me a moment -- only a moment, but too much of a moment -- to register why that looked wrong.
The Whale of the title is a huge (whale of a) generational starship, designed eventually to reach Tau Ceti (in the constellation of the Whale, Cetus) after many generations of flight. The crew responsible for the ship therefore function as an isolated society, one with a constitution designed by Earth's finest social engineers. A problem with the gravitational plates occurred in flight which led to several hundred deaths and a portion of the ship being mostly unusable. At the beginning of the book, an unknown man -- it's a closed system, there should be no unknown men -- is discovered murdered in a dead-end hallway whose surveillance cameras were out, apparently never repaired, and the primary clue is that his pockets are full of seeds. As the detectives unravel this mystery, I think we'll see the exposure of dangerous cracks in the social system of the ship. Michael Flynn was always interested in the logic of failure. It reminds me somewhat of another of his works, The Wreck of the River of Stars; the essential theme of Wreck, which I've considered doing for the fortnightly book, is failure and collapse due to unintentional mismatches of human personality, whereas this seems like it will be about failure and collapse due to unintentional design flaws in social systems.
