Opening Passage: From the Prologue:
All this happened a great long time ago, by which we mean not merely that it was long ago but also that it was great. It was an age of drama and romance, of farce and adventure. Everything was bigger; everything was grander. Heroes were more heroic, lovers more lovely, traitors more treacherous, conflicts more conflicted. There were spaceships bigger than mountains. There were spaceships that were mountains.
People dared greatly, and so, failed greatly. At times, they even achieved greatly. This is the story of one of their achievements. (p. 3)
Summary: In the days of glory of the Audorithadesh Ympriales, four great ships were sent out from earth to colonize the stars -- Red Dwarf, Whale, Indiaman, and Big River. Of these, the vast Whale was built out of a hollowed-out asteroid and kitted with the best that the empire had to offer, a hundred Frames long and fifty Decks high, filled with an entire ecosystem to last for the many generations it would take to make the twelve light-year trip to Tau Ceti. It had two crews. The first is the Blue Crew under the in-captain, whose concern was the maintenance of the internal organization of the ship, so that when it would arrive at Tau Ceti, there would be sufficient numbers and resources for a sustainable colony. The second is the Gold Crew, under the go-captain, whose concern was navigation and propulsion.
Tens of thousands of people within a speeding asteroid-ship make a city, and an artificial city at that. The creation and composition of a society from scratch is a common fantasy, but it always suffers from one obvious flaw: we ourselves are not starting from scratch, but from the societies in which we find ourselves. The great Planners of the Audorithadesh Ympriales who planned out the expedition structured the society of the Whale on the principles they knew, as an idealized version of the society in which they lived, even if adapted for the peculiarities of spaceflight. As an aristocratic empire, they could not but give the internal constitution of the Whale society an aristocratic tinge. The Departments of Blue Crew, like Air, Water, Maintenance, and Eugenics, over time effectively became fiefdoms governed by feudal lords. The society also has begun developing the pathologies of a feudal society, with aristocratic Commanders living well on the backs of lesser crew, demanding protection money and skimming benefits off of anything they can, while acting on behalf of their own Houses at the expense of the good of the Whale as a whole. For instance, at the beginning of the story, the Commanders of Air and of Water are attempting to unite their Houses by marrying their heirs to each other; as Air and Water are already extremely powerful Departments, unifying them threatens to upset the political balances among the different Houses. This is one line of the story, starting off a series of events that will destabilize the society. The Gold Crew, meanwhile, while its nature forces a greater emphasis on merit and achievement, is distant from everyone else; to the Gold Crew, everyone else is just cargo.
The abuses and isolated nature of the aristocratic Houses has led to an increasing amount of discontent among the rest of the population. The second line of the story is that a Mutiny is brewing, as a conspiracy, the Brotherhood, has begun plotting a coup.
In planning across generations, it is also inevitable that the unforeseen will happen. The story takes place eighty years after the Burnout, when about one-tenth of the ship underwent a series of major malfunctions, killing large numbers of people and resulting in part of the ship being avoided by almost all of the rest of the population.This is part of the solution to a puzzle: a man has turned up dead who is not recognized by any of their systems. This is a third line of the story, as we begin to learn by this that the area of the Burnout is not actually uninhabited; there are at least two societies living in the Whale. Civilization is finally going to be faced with its barbarians.
There is perhaps a fourth line, although it seems to have only limited development. Astrogation (Gold Crew) has discovered anomalies that indicate the possible existence of 'tubes' or 'channels' through space that could lead to shortcuts of a sort across vast regions of space. As the Whale has something like eight centuries to go in its journey, this has potentially important ramifications, although the new discoveries also represent significant unknown dangers.
This is a tale of a society collapsing into bloody revolution and attempting to reform in the face of it. It works very well as such, although I think in many ways it would be improved by greater development. All of the lines of the story are well written and full of fascinating aspects; all of them interact in important ways, so that the book works as a unity; but each line seems to move very quickly. The impression this gives -- which may well be right -- is of a first book of a series of two or three books; things are begun that are not fully followed through. This is not a fatal flaw, by any means; the story works well enough on its own, and I particularly liked the tale of 'Lucky' Lutz interwoven throughout, a story of a Marine having greatness thrust upon her very reluctant and unwilling command capability. But many of the things merely gestured at here fit into the larger literary universe of which it is part (the Spiral Arm series) in such a way that some of the through-lines can be dimly anticipated. This makes a good side-tale for In the Lion's Mouth, which takes place in the successor of the society that the Whale will obviously plant on Tau Ceti, and seeing how the society in In the Lion's Mouth began is also interesting.
Favorite Passage:
"You rely on history. But how reliable are records from back in the Dark Ages?"
Venables wondered if his friend was serious. "We call them 'dark' because we cannot read many of their records, not because the people suddenly became stupid and ignorant. They were written with operating systems that soon became obsolete."
"Really? I had always though it ws because they fought a great war. Two of them."
But Venables tossed his head. "Many scholars believe there was only one 'Great War,' not two. To fight a second one so shortly after the first really would have been 'stupid and ignorant.' They think the tale -- what has survived of it -- was reduplicated. Probably different authors told it. They call them the J-version, for Jurman, and the E-version, for English."
"Those were the Doish and the Anglics in Yurp?" Organson folded his hands on the table and presented Venables with an attentive look.
"The two versions are much the same, as you would expect if they were drawing on a common source. A small country in the middle of Yurp fights the rest of the continent -- and holds them off for four or five years."
"That hardly seems likely," Organson said. (p. 164)
Recommendation: Recommended. I would actually recommend reading this after In the Lion's Mouth, although it mostly stands up quite well on its own.
*****
Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale, Caezik SF & Fantasy (Rockville, MD: 2024).
