March 14, 2013
The other lazy assumption about social change is that it all goes in one direction. Here there is actually a case to be made; but if there is indeed a slow-rising monotone across the centuries, there are some mighty harmonic waves imposed on it.
There has recently been a modest rash of news items about habitable planets in orbit around other stars. This started just before Christmas and put me in mind of a story from my sci-fi-soaked adolescence: J. T. McIntosh’s 200 Years to Christmas. (You can buy it in book form.)
The story belongs to the multigenerational starship subgenre within sci-fi that scorns easy copouts about warp drives, Lorentz time dilation, or wormholes in spacetime. In these stories, to get to other solar systems you only have to plod along through interstellar space for a few centuries, with generations living and dying on the ship. This allows for some interesting sociological explorations.
200 Years to Christmas is by no means a stellar [sic] example of the subgenre. (For a better one, try Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop.) It has serious literary shortcomings even by sci-fi standards. It does, though, contain one interesting idea.
Where societies develop at all, as they have among European peoples this past millennium, their morality passes through distinct phases. In England the easygoing flamboyance of the late Tudors and early Stuarts gave way to Cromwell’s Puritans, who yielded to the license of the Restoration, which was muted somewhat by the First Great Awakening, then degenerated into Regency libertinism, which was smothered by the Victorians. (Much of the fun of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels is watching Fraser’s hero surf the transition from the second-last to last of those eras.)
The interesting idea in 200 Years to Christmas is that among a starship’s limited, isolated population (this one has around 800 souls), these phases will occur more quickly““every five to fifteen years,” McIntosh tells us”and will be more intense, as a short pendulum swings faster than a long one.
We see the starship’s inhabitants at the halfway point in their 400-year journey”hence the title”and watch as they pass from a Gay Phase (this was 1959, remember; the current bastard meaning of “gay” had not yet escaped into general usage) of wild partying to a puritanical Revival. The social dynamics are drawn accurately.
Some people backed Revival because they believed in it, some because they were afraid to oppose it, some because all their friends were doing it, some merely because they couldn”t see any reason why they shouldn”t.
In that respect at least, human nature’s fundamentals never change.
Image of pendulum courtesy of Shutterstock
