The black hole Book

I liked all the stories here, but Paradises Lost I loved. I thought about it since yesterday, and decided to knock this book up from four to five stars because of Paradises Lost, and that's the story I'd like to write about here.

This novella is about a generational ship travelling from Earth to a new, distant planet, to study it and see whether or not it can be colonized. After reading this, I was considering whether such an enterprise would ever be successful, not because of technological limitations, but rather if human nature would be doomed to compromise it.

We get to know a bit about the ships history, but the main focus lies on the fifth generation to live on the ship. The technological aspects of the ship works very well, people are safe and comfortable, they have never known cold or hunger or thirst or just being really tired after a long day of physical labor. They always walk barefoot, and children are naked, because their environment perfectly accommodates human needs and wants.

In one way they're very smart people, but at the same time very naive. They cannot imagine the hardships of colonizing a new planet. Or even of living without walls around them all the time. They cannot even imagine clouds, wind, sky. They know in theory what these things are, but have no feel for them. There are several very interesting paragraphs about what "nature" "human nature" civilization" and "control" really mean, seen from the perspective of people who have never set foot on a place with wild nature, but always been confined to a human-made environment.

In a way they are institutionalized. Some of them starts to think that "the departure" and "the arrival" are metaphorical concepts, and the only things that exists are the ship and the voyage. This is also a story about the power of religion or the danger of cults. The generational ship started out as a mostly atheistic enterprise - how to deal with startup religions is even laid down in their constitution. But maybe it's ingrained in human nature to search for something to believe in? And how all this played out on an isolated, generational ship was completely fascinating to read about.

Towards the end, I had this dark, nervous feeling inside me that went something like "Will the remnants of of the clear, scientific, sensible minds that first left Earth still be strong enough to win out over the crazies?" The power struggle and political/religious scheming, based on manipulating people's world view, really got to me. This story shows the struggle between different sides of the human mind, and that made it profound in a way few authors can manage. Like in so many of her works, it's Le Guin's anthropological and philosophical mind that makes Paradises Lost shine.