Review: In the Belly of the Whale

In the Belly of the Whale by Michael Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. This was closer to 4.5 stars, but not enough to push it to 5.

The book tells the story of a generation starship on its way to a far flung star with the purpose of expanding human habitation. The ship is home to roughly 40000 humans largely consisting of people taken from Asian and UK/European cultures. The ship has completed less than a millennia's worth of travel with more than a millennia to go. The crew are all great, great, great....great grandchildren of the first generation that launched from the Earth.

Roughly 80 years prior to the current story, the ship experienced a catastrophe where a section of the ship collapsed rendering that section theoretically uninhabitable. "Theoretically" as there are people who live there. They don't live well, but they are free of the strictures and structures imposed on the crew.

Those legal and social constraints form the core of the conflict within the novel. There are two leadership classes. One is in charge of navigation of the ship. These elites are viewed as being mostly benign as they are prevented from having children and thus cannot form any sort of dynasty. Instead, they "adopt" the next generation of navigators from the crew based on aptitude.

The other leadership class runs the various systems needed to keep people alive; i.e. food, air, water, maintenance, security, etc. Those leaders have evolved a self-limiting social structure whereby their children frequently inherit positions of great power. They use the power of those positions to accrue great wealth and still greater power.

The rest of the crew finds this situation intolerable. A mutiny/revolution eventually unfolds.

That is the general plot of the book. The subtext comments on what it means to be elite, what it means to lead, and what sort of organizational principles are needed to ensure that power is not turned toward the support of private/personal interests at everyone else's expense. The author does a great job of keeping the subtext from subsuming the plot/text of the book and becoming a thinly veiled polemic.

There are two features of the book that limited my enjoyment. The first is the number of characters. The book begins with a listing of the cast/crew including formal and informal names. Perhaps my age may be getting in the way, but the number of characters and the number of names (formal/informal/nicknames/positional) for each character got in my way a few times. There wasn't enough differentiation between the characters/names.

The second feature is the author's choice to include disparate scenes within a single chapter with no visual demarcation between those scenes. The book will spend several paragraphs and/or pages following one set of characters. The following paragraph then jumps to a different group of characters and different location without any additional visual indication that the location has shifted. This sort of jump occurs several times within a single chapter. This storytelling technique was unusual, quirky, and periodically disconcerting. Perhaps it is a byproduct of reading an e-book rather than a physical book.

One very positive feature of the book is the author's ability to show a culture that exists hundreds of years after our own. There are many cultural facets that are obviously derived from our time. But it is equally obvious that time has changed those cultural touchstones. The result is that the reader experiences a bit of anticipation for the next moment when an echo of our modern society is revealed through the lens of a culture that exists hundreds of years in our future.

Another positive feature is that the author has carefully considered the technical demands of maintaining a starship and crew for thousands of years. What limits must be put in place to prevent over population? How can problems associated with inbreeding be avoided? What sort of weapons are going to be acceptable? How much security/surveillance will be tolerated?

Overall, this is a highly enjoyable book. Well worth the effort.

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