Paradises Lost

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

An intricate novella about the middle generations of a multi-generational spaceship, those with no memory of Earth and no chance of setting foot on the target planet. A few generations back, a religion started with the belief that nothing outside the ship matters, but you have to keep the ship functional and traveling. By now it’s become the belief that nothing outside the ship exists at all, that the home they left was a myth, and that their destination is a myth too, and only the journey is real.

What happens when that ideology takes hold of the ship’s leadership? And navigation? And education? After all, why teach children about animals, or forests, or how to farm on a planet? They’ll never see one.

And what happens when that ideology faces proof that the destination is real?

On one hand, it’s a classic case of dogma vs. science, or humanity’s insistence on ignoring slow, long-term crises like climate change. On the other hand, it’s not as if there’s a way for most people on the ship to prove the existence of planets anymore. They just have to take the word of their ancestors that their world existed. The destination world is as unknowable as an afterlife.

So it becomes a matter of trust: do you believe the religious teachings that match your experience, or do you believe the historical and scientific teachings that don’t? And if you do have the knowledge and resources to check scientifically, do you accept or reject what you find out?

“Paradises Lost” was originally published in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories), and is also collected in The Found and the Lost.

Echoes

There are a zillion stories about generation ships. But I see echoes of the story in Czerneda’s The Gate to Futures Past, with the people trapped on a space ship and facing the question of what’s real about their existence…in Burke’s Semiosis, where the later generations of colonists have a completely different outlook from the first generation who came from Earth…and in Heaven’s Vault, a game in which an archaeologist seeks out the history of the nebula she lives in, even though the learned believe time is a loop, and the idea of coming from somewhere is unfathomable to them.

And of course we see that question of competing worldviews in the real world, as science and technology become too complex for casual understanding and pundits peddle “alternative facts” while discouraging people from checking up on them.