Reading the Nebula Award Winners - 1968 - Rite of Passage

In the universe described in 1968’s Nebula Award winner - Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin - Earth becomes uninhabitable in 2041. So far, so plausible. Fortunately, our protagonist’s grandparents escaped in an interplanetary Great Ship in… er… 2025. In my capacity as a citizen of 2025 on the day that another SpaceX rocket exploded on the launchpad, I can only observe that our interplanetary technology is not as advanced as the science fiction writers of the 1960s assumed it would be. 

This technological ineptitude may come as a relief to the teenagers of the future, for they will not have to fear being dumped on a hostile planet to prove that they are tough enough to survive. This is something of a trope in mid-twentieth century sci-fi. I was immediately put in mind of Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, which explores the same premise more engagingly with a tighter plot in fewer pages. 

It is interesting how this trope has evolved. In more recent Young Adult dystopias, it is not enough to pit the teenagers against the savagery of an alien environment to toughen them up (and by extension create a tougher society by weeding out the weaklings). These days, we prefer to bear witness to teenagers forced to fight each other to the death as a form of  entertainment - c.f. Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Battle Royale etc.

Rite of Passage beat Philip K Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? to take the Nebula prize for best science fiction novel. Interesting that Dick’s genuinely philosophical musing on what it means to be human/android should lose out to a novel that has lots of long sections concerning the teenagers’ education in philosophy. So we get the author’s opinion on Thoreau, on Utilitarianism, and on the philosophy of power clumsily inserted and slowing the book down. As one teenage girl opines:

“But I don’t like [the philosophy of power]. For one thing it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between ‘ethically good’ and 'ethically better.' More important, however, Stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power simply say that the results of actions have no importance…”

And so on. I’m not certain that Alexei Panshin has perfectly captured the internal monologue of the average teenager here. 

The titular Rite of Passage doesn't occur until the final few chapters of the book. Our heroine who has spent her childhood as the pampered daughter of a politician on a spaceship must travel to a colony world and survive on her wits. But will she discover that it is actually her own society that is brutally oppressive? (Spoiler alert: yes, she will. But it takes a long time to get there.)

The best bits of this book occur early on and consist of descriptions of the Great Ship, what life is like for a child there, and how the ship and society function. However, I could do without the author insert philosophical views and the finale was underwhelming to say the least.

5/10 - I won’t read again. Note to self: re-read Tunnel in the Sky instead.