This is the 19th post in my series of vintage generation ship short fiction reviews. I am not entirely sure Fred Saberhagen’s vision exactly fits the definition of a generation ship but it’s so fascinating that I had to share it with you all!
As a reminder for anyone stopping by, all of the stories I’ll review in the series are available online via the link below in the review. And, if you want to work through the reviews from the series from the beginning, here’s my first post from 2019 on Chad Oliver’s “The Wind Blows Free” (1957).
You are welcome to read and discuss along with me as I explore humanity’s visions of generational voyage. And thanks go out to all who have joined already. I also have compiled an extensive index of generation ship SF if you wish to track down my earlier reviews on the topic and any that you might want to read on your own.
Previously: Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971).
Next Up: TBD
Stephen Fabian’s cover for the March 1976 issue of Galaxy
4.25/5 (Very Good)
Fred Saberhagen’s “Birthdays” first appeared in the March 1976 issue of Galaxy. You can read it online here.
Two Experiences of Time in Parallel
Bart, fourteen years old, awakes alone on a colony ship. The nature of the Ship isn’t entirely clear as Bart’s memories have been carefully edited. He walks down the hall and emerges in the Ship’s nursery, filled with twenty four squalling children, replete with robotic assistants and projected images of maternal figures. His task? Serve as the sole human parent: “One human parent, adoptive or real, is necessary to the successful maturation of children; images and machines are psychologically inadequate for optimum results” (86). The catch? The Ship will only revive Bart from cold sleep one day a year.
Two experiences of time emerge within the story. Told from Bart’s perspective, the story traces his evolution of thought over the course of a few months. Simultaneously, he observes the children grow old while he ages but a day a year. Bart tells himself that “the ship would provide explanations and instructions as they became necessary” (88). The Ships suggests that his past “contains tragic and violent things” and that he “must work for the future and achieve a successful revised mission” (89). the Ship won’t explain the mission. The children, as they age, are far more restless and inquisitive.
Each time Bart awakes, he notices small changes in the society the children form. At moments they engage in often violent games, a year later they’ve elected a president (at moments the president contains no term limits suggesting dictatorship) or started a hydroponics garden. Periods of religious furor hit. Bart notices or hears about the premature, and rampant, physical deterioration–varicose veins, cancers, missing teeth, viscose veins–they’re experiencing. Though the fragments they’ve been able to reconstruct from the memory banks and their own observations, Galina suggest the Ship revived suboptimal genetic material. Perhaps the Ship is saving the optimal material for the final generation, the generation that might step out on a new planet. Some of the now adults attempt to break into new parts of the ship cut off from them. Others try to rescue Bart from his forced sleep.
As the numbers dwindle, Kichiro confides that Bart is all that “we old people have to life for. You and the hope that you represent, that one day there will be more people on the Ship, who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we’ve never been able to manage” (117). Bart, almost fifteen, can only nod. And when he awakes the next year, a new path awaits. Or does it?
Final Thoughts
I featured the only other Saberhagen work I’ve read, “The Long Way Home” (1961), earlier in this series. My muted response to his early tale mentioned that it contained the “pieces of a riveting story: isolated prospectors, mysterious ‘Big Dumb Object,’ and a fascinating mystery with profound implications for everyone involved.” However, I found his prose “functional at best” and “fails to convey the immensity, futility, and horror of it all.”
“Birthdays” improves on all points. It’s well-told and contains an effective structure, with a restrictive perspective, used to highlight the profound presence of time that fills ever generation ship story. It’s hard not to feel for Bart, programmed to trust the ship, and his lack of information needed to understand his place in the world. Each of the brief days with the only people he remembers, as they grow from children to adults and decay and die over a few months, tonally shift from happiness to unease to violence and end-of-life introspection and despair. Bart, caught up in the Ship’s programming, can only walk down the hall that opens for him. At least, the next time, there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Or another tragedy. And more memory edits.
Before I sign off, I will address the elephant in the room: is Bart on a generation ship? There are generations. But the generations do not produce the next generation, instead the Ship activates stored genetic material. But, there’s also chance that earlier in the voyage, Bart sees locked sections of the ship that might be living quarters for far more people, that the generations were naturally replacing each other before an accident caused the Ship’s revised plan. From what Saberhagen reveals through Bart’s limited perspective, there is not a definitive answer. This is a fantastic twist on the formula.
Recommended.
Freff’s interior art for the March 1976 issue of Galaxy
Tom Kidd’s cover for the 1981 1st edition
Freff’s interior art for the March 1976 issue of Galaxy
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
I read Birthdays a few years ago in my ‘generation ship’ phase and had a good re-read of it today over a coffee. My first read has been so-so, a mid-to-shallow variant. This reading I’m pleased to find the story does well at touching those variations without getting caught up in them. If you were intent on introducing the genship genre to a newcomer, this would be a good, one-sitting starting point. Thanks for re-surfacing this story.
As the re-read has settled with me today there are elements of the story that stand out. The timelapse-like stages of life, physical and mental; a mashup of child development models and progressive stages of adult world-view, intercut with glimpses of primate behaviour studies.
The idea of knowledge loss and re-acquisition …raises the question of how to sustain knowledge across generations; storytelling (performance) and memory training (rehearsal and retention as a core act of basal human cognition) and uninterrupted transmission from old to young and old to young (see: ‘homo narrans’)… again, how to recover when the line is severed.
Yeah, I think there is a lot more to talk in the story than what I covered — which is always a good sign. I too am fascinated by how knowledge can be sustained across generations. Unfortunately, Saberhagen sets all of that up to be irrelevant with the world that he creates in the story as it does not have naturally created generations. The Ship actively prevents knowledge from being conveyed via memory edits and Bart emerging in a new portion of the ship with the new generation without the physical remains left by the earlier group to preserve knowledge (the carved art piece with the history of the group, the records they stated they started keeping, the biology lab they created, etc). This really isn’t the story that dives into those great elements in a sustained and meaningful way. It’s not designed to do so.
Delany’s The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965) places that question at the heart of his story (he examines a series of ballads written that harbor deep secrets about the voyage) — despite my quibbles with the novel itself, it at least tries to tackle that in a sustained way.
Hello Mark. I’m not entirely sure that “Birthdays” even is a generation ship though. From what we are told, it’s more set up like a seed ship sent to a distant planet and designed to trigger the emergence of a first generation from storage. Saberhagen’s twist on both formula — the standard generation ship with multiple naturally produced generations and the strife that results (with the classic we don’t want to go down to the surface of our new planet ending)–is that there are multiple sterile generations that the ship has to create, either according to plan or because of an accident that suggest that eventually naturally producing humans will be created. All of this is to say, it’s a good story but not what I would use to introduce the genre to the newcomer! If a classic formula generationship was wanted to assign… For that I’d probably go with Brunner’s “Lungfish” (1957).
It’s a seedship with hints of genship lurking in the backdrop — 69+20 years notwithstanding, there is an unknown amount of time prior, could be zero, could be 500.
I’m wondering about the 69 day/chapter structure. He could easily have expanded to 69 full chapters so I wonder if this story is Saberhagen toying with the genship genre, working a book up from outline, via Wilcox’s 600 years/six awakenings, but freezing it in outline(ish) form. The story feels incomplete…I’m looking for the thesis or problem Saberhagan is solving that wasn’t already dealt with in vintage genship stories. Maybe he just needed to get it out of his system; he prepped it for submission and went on to other work (see below). FWIW, it was accepted, we are talking about it, it has been remembered.
Back to the Wilcox’s 6-awakenings idea: Seldon’s vault awakenings comes to mind, and Wells’ time traveller, seen from outside the time machine as a periodic visitor along the timeline — what is the source of this narrative mechanic? Maybe the periodic awakening of Dracula? Wilcox’s Keeper of Traditions was described as an Ogre by his fifth awakening, feared and mythologized by the passengers. Then in 1978 we have the first of Saberhagen’s Dracula series…was Bart a vampire prototype?
Ballad of Beta-2 and Daughters of Earth on order. I have to admit Orphans and Starship are my touchstones; I read them young, everything else is compare and contrast.
My review of the Wilcox. https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/04/24/generation-ship-short-story-review-don-wilcoxs-the-voyage-that-lasted-600-years-1940/
“Daughters of Earth” isn’t a generationship story. Do you mean to reference Merril’s three short stories on the generation ship theme (all reviewed on my site) that were going to be a novel that never came about?
Orphans and Starship (Non-Stop) are also reviewed on the site — long before I started this series.
600 years: “…sheer horror of the spaceship as petri dish for a nightmarish sequence of crises…” That’s funny. I somehow conflate 600 with JkJerome’s New Utopia, i.e. light Victorian expository humour, and every time I remind myself (600) isn’t a comedy. 600 is read out of necessity for those so inclined. A re-read only with a purpose. Read many times in part out of disbelief and in part with the hope of extracting one more grain of insight on the topic. See also: self-flagellation.
“Daughters” yes, not so much the genship side (or lack thereof) but interested in the matrilineal aspect, and she’s a new author for me. As a genealogist most of my research is on the mothers, male records are easy, so it’s the mother who are interesting; I make of point to tell my daughters of their many great and Xgreat grandmothers and how they connect. The bookseller where I found Beta-2 had a copy of Merill’s collection so I got it too (can’t order just one book).
I did read your Orphans review (of course I did) and others you’ve done; I’m not an Orphans apologist, however, Orphans was among the very first books I read, hooked me on the concept, if not the delivery. Such was the shaping of a 10-yr old mind. Starship was a welcome antidote.
Good good. Sometimes I put the links so that others can follow the conversation 🙂
Yeah, “Daughters of Earth” (1952) is a fantastic story. One of the more radical 50s feminist visions in my view.
● Saberhagen was another author I read in my teen years that I liked. However, after years and years of being a second-string author, writing for the Galaxy magazines, he became a fan favorite under the editorialship of Jim Baen. Baen took him, and several other “Galaxy” authors (like Arsen Darnay, David Drake, Spider Robinson, etc.) to Ace when he left “Galaxy/If”, where Saberhagen’s writing career took off. It may be that this was meant to be a longer piece, but now faced with popularity, he started writing up all of those ideas that had been perculating in his brain over the years, and just didn’t have time to get to. Thus, no time to really go back and rework old stories/ideas, now was the time to get all of those ideas down while he could, and now had the time to write up.
● By the way, your reprinting of that Steve Fabian “Galaxy” cover just reminds me of how much I miss Fabian’s artwork. You either loved his style, or hated it.