Product Description

A vast generation ship hurtles away from a violent, troubled Earth to settle on a distant planet orbiting an alien star. Those who set out on this journey are long-since dead. Those who will arrive at their destination have yet to be born. For those who must live and die in the cold emptiness between the stars, there is only the claustrophobic permanence of non-being. Life lived in unending stasis. Then the unthinkable happens: two souls - Auguste and Celeste - rebel. And from the fruit of their rebellion comes a new and powerful force which will take charge of the ship's destiny. Journey into Space is science fiction at its most classic and beguiling: timeless, vast in scope and daring in execution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83036 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Toby Litt was born in 1968. He is the author of Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself, Ghost Story, Hospital and I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay. In 2003, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His website can be found at www.tobylitt.com

Customer Reviews

Simply stunning
I make it a rule to never give a book 10 out of 10. With this book, I either need to makie an exception or dock a point from virtually every other book I've read to make space.

This is a stunning piece of work. A study of life on a generation starship and the repercussions of the rebellious behaviour of two teens. The writing is hypnotic throughout and keeps you gripped in it's velvet claws and refuses to let you go. The storyline may be slightly predictable at times but when the writing is of this quality I don't care.

The title says it all. This is a perfect book. you need to read it.

This is not a rollicking high octane work of sci-fi with two-headed mutants chasing the hapless crew round a doomed ship. Thjis is a thoughtful, insightful examination of humanity under extraordinary circumstances. August and Celeste are beautifully realised as characters but are allowed to fade out of the story as their children and grandchildren take centre stage. the prose is smooth, slick and absorbing throughout. Litt's focus shifts effortlessly from the intensly personal to a godlike perspective which allows him to skim years in sentences (He skims years in a few sentences near the start as well but not on the same scale as he does later). This book is IMHO brilliant.

If you like your sci-fi to be more thoughtful and serious, you have to read this book.

A disappointing novel
The human race has sent the first generational colony ship, the Armenia, to the stars. On board this ship are 100 individuals, all of whom were chosen for the mission and are aware of how life will be: one where they live and die upon the ship, where breeding is strictly controlled to ensure that the rationing will last and that genetic diversity is always present. With information stored with it, the ship's computer, there is nothing that can't be known and there is constant surveillance of all.

August and Celeste are two of the first children born on the ship, closely related through blood and with interests that differ from the rest of the crew. While the crew continue with their lives August and Celeste meet at the abandoned tennis courts and dream of a world where only they exist. It is through these descriptions and their relationship that the seed is sown to forever change to future of the Armenia and its crew.

Journey Into Space is split into five sections, four large and one small epilogue-type. With the first focusing on August and Celeste and the remaining ones then following their descendants, we have a story that covers a long period in the life of the Armenia.

My first impression of Journey Into Space was that it was a very descriptive novel, one where you could feel yourself getting lost in the images it bought. This was very much to do with August and Celeste and the way their exchanges and daydream-like sections separated them from the reality of life on board a never-changing colony ship. Their relationship - two blood relatives of the same age - is not unusual in one sense, but because of the situation they are in they become ever closer which leads to the inevitable sexual attraction. This whole build up is done effectively, but when it gets to the pay off we switch to the next part of the story, that of their son, Orphan.

It is this switch, and the way in which Toby Litt passes years in sentences, that really affected the flow of the story and, ultimately, my enjoyment. While Journey Into Space isn't a huge book by any means (just over 240 pages), it covers a lot of things and more than one change in the society on board the Armenia. While this in itself isn't a bad thing, it never feels like we get fully to grips with each section and the characters we follow. Speaking of the characters, Litt is more than capable of creating some very interesting ones, although this is more to do with the effect on society they have rather than being genuinely enjoyable to read.

Despite how much I wanted to enjoy this book, I just couldn't settle into it enough - it felt much like a half told story in respect to the characters. Looking at the complete novel only draws me to one conclusion - this is an examination of what could happen on a colony ship rather than a story about the journey, which is a real shame because Toby Litt shows so many times throughout this novel just how good a writer he is.

Litt a la Sci Fi
Toby Litt uses the science fiction genre to put his characters in unusual situations that would be difficult or impossible to achieve in any present day or historical literary genre. The events mainly occur on a spaceship, giving a contained environment which could readily be realised in the theatre. The saga of the generations of space travellers unfolds as they get progressively further away from Earth, and it is a cataclysmic event on the latter which gives the book its real impetus. Litt draws on many familiar stories of human history, Emporer Nero and the birth of Christianity for example, making each generation of characters distinctive. Although the book is short and in its latter stages becomes a historical record of the second half of the spaceship's journey, because of the earlier details of two of the children's fantasy imagination of how life is on planet Earth I was kept emotionally involved in the further development of the space community. Litt is a good judge of human behaviour, and I think he has managed to weave a plausible and moving endgame or milestone post for humanity.