The Republic of Memory and the Generation Ship Problem
The Republic of Memory is a debut SF novel by Mahmud El Sayed, featuring a generation ship. The novel’s remit is fascinating enough, and I want to use it in this space to talk about generation ships in the popular, recent mindset, since it goes against that trend. Yes, I am going to discuss the KSR Aurora “Problem”.
First, this novel. The Republic of Memory, is set some centuries in the future. The Safina is a large generation ship, apparently one of a fleet, set out by a polity called “The Network Empire” some centuries in the future. The novel begins with a prologue¹ that dumps us in the deep end, and is coincidentally set long before the events of the novel. Something has happened, ten years into the generation ship’s journey from Earth. And the Captain will not go back and find out what happened to Earth, but it is clear that the only way to go is forward.
And then we jump decades ahead. We slowly learn there has been a revolution and the terms of the ship have changed. We get this very carefully as we follow a set of characters on board the Safina. Our primary point of view character for the first half of the novel is Iskander Ezz. Iskander is from a family that specializes in Environmental roles. However, Iskander himself is, ambitiously, trying to make a go at being a translator, who lives in the liminal space between crew (the bulk of the population) and Admin (who run the ship). He hustles a living, trying to gain commissions and good favor by handling the bureaucracy. His ambition and his non-Environmental career put him at odds with his family. And then there is his girlfriend, who would not be acceptable at all and so he keeps her a secret.
While Iskander is the primary POV, we rotate through other POVs, and get some points of view that happen only once, or several times. We get a kaleidoscope of life aboard the Safina, which is now two hundred years into the journey, and has two hundred years yet to run. The author, however, very deliberately shows us that this is no garden. Power outages and breakdowns are a fact of life, and rather scary for a generation ship, traveling between the stars. And those breakdowns and power outages and shortages are all getting worse and worse. People overworked, making it harder to make a life aboard the ship. Discontent grows…and with it, there is revolt and revolution on the wind.
There lies the story of the Safina and its inhabitants.
In telling the story of how a revolution can be built and grow, be set back and surge forward, and how disparate elements can complicate it, The Republic of Memory is a story of rising against oppression and tyranny, of being willing to say no and willing to strike against that tyranny. The novel makes clear of the perils of such action, especially in a closed system such as the Safina. The way the author approaches this, though, is from oblique points of view. The “real” revolutionary, Badreddine, only gets a couple of short POV chapters on his own behalf. The story of this revolution is the slow build toward Badreddine’s actions, and seen through the lenses of people like Iskander, and others somewhat closer to Badreddine himself.
At every turn, though, the author surprises the reader, and layers in subplots and sub-stories into the narrative. The hinge point of the novel is sudden and devastating, and completely upends the script of the story I thought I was reading, and shifts the gears with new perspectives, points of view, and insights. It helped me reassess the book at that point, and the book and its themes of revolution really kick into high gear. It’s nicely timed, thematically, with the “halfway” point of the journey of the Safina, itself. That has a nice thematic resonance.
The worldbuilding, though, is where this novel really shines and shows the author’s thoughts and thought process and interests, above and beyond the mainspring of the story being of revolution and resistance to tyranny. This is a story that sets up our generation ship and its setup, only to show that the injustices on this ship, writ small and large, are a part of everyday life for a wide spectrum of people. There are daisy chains of connections between all of the characters, showing that in the pressure cooker of a generation ship, you are connected to everyone, in the end.
Beyond the story of the revolution, the author has some intriguing thoughts on language, its use, misuse and how the “Street” finds its use for it. As mentioned above, the major character for the first half of the novel is translator Iskander Ezz. This gives us a view and a sense, right away, that the author is fascinated with language and its uses. There are a number of evolved languages from languages in our present day, like Arabek and Inglez. Different decks and areas of the ship speak different versions of the languages. There are formal and not so formal versions of each language.
The real innovation is the creole on the ship, known as Nupol. This is an audacious idea from the author, not only coming up with a creole but dipping us into it, having the reader have to figure out words from context and pattern to understand what they are saying.² This creole is only used frequently by certain characters (which is a lovely bit of worldbuilding showing class and status by language markers). The creole contains words from a variety of old Earth languages, and is also idiosyncratic and individual to each user of the creole. Every user of the creole has their own loan words and borrowed words. And this IS the kind of writer, and novel, who loves wordplay and puns in invented languages. If that is your jam, you are going to adore The Republic of Memory.
And then there is the background radiation of the novel: the Earth they left behind. We get bits and flashes here and there, especially in the second half of the novel. We learn that the Earth was governed, more or less, by a dominant “Network Empire” which seems to have been born out of the Middle East and spread from there. There is talk about its forces going into Africa, and South America, and facing off against the United States. And the “Siege of Vienna”, which reified in my mind the allusions to the Ottoman Empire. This Network Empire is the polity that launched several generation ships, like the Safina. And as mentioned in the prologue, clearly had suffered something catastrophic. It winds up not really mattering to the day to day events aboard the Safina, until, suddenly, it does. It’s a clever bit of worldbuilding and writing to layer the novel as he does with the histories of Earth, the ship, prior revolts and the current status of affairs.
Now, though, I want to think about generation ships in general. I had thought that the last word in generation ships (at least for a good long while) had been written. Yes, I am talking about a novel I’ve wrestled with ever since I read it—Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora. Aurora does try, I feel, to be the last word in generation ship and extrasolar colonization novels by putting forth the thesis that the whole project is a terrible idea. Generation ships are inherently unworkable and fragile things that cannot carry an entire ecosystem on their journey and thus are prone to systems failure on a biological level. Even worse, in Aurora’s view, even if you could get a generation ship going and get it to another star, you are either going to find a useless ball of rock you can’t live on, or worse, you find a world with life on it, and that life is invariably inimical to yours. It’s better, in the view of the message of Aurora, to just stay home and fix Earth and forget human space travel and colonization entirely. It’s not quite the old “Mundane SF” clarion call, but it is awfully close. While I am less sore about it, now, I felt at the time that it was trying to hew too close to Mundane SF and to kill a lot of the sense of wonder of science fiction. And it seemed, for a while, after its publication in 2015, that generation ships, with maybe the exceptions in the Adrian Tchaikovsky Children novels, were a dead letter. Robinson had effectively silenced a subgenre of science fiction, perhaps not intentionally, but done all the same, and quickly. There were a number of other Generation ship novels that very year, and I attribute their lack of success to the closing of the door on the subgenre that Robinson had managed.
And yet, now a decade later, Mahmud El Sayed, in The Republic of Memory, is making a generation-ship novel that is first and foremost a novel about that generation-ship experience.
Unlike, say, Noumenon by Marina Losetter, which has other fish to fry, the novel is about the generation ship experience from a kaleidoscope point of view. Unlike Adam Oyebanji and his Braking Day, which is a more intimate experience, Republic of Memory provides a more comprehensive look at the Generation Ship experience and its nuts and bolts. And yet, Republic of Memory shows the problems of a generation ship, and that it is a ramshackle operation, at best. It doesn’t seem to be disputing Robinson’s thesis that it is hard to colonize the stars, and may be tilting the scales a bit by having a ruined Earth as impetus. (The Children of Time series does the same thing). But when I thought that the definitive last word in innovation of what a generation ship is like and what it means was done by Aurora, The Republic of Memory is here to rectify that.
Between its explorations of culture, language, revolution, power, and yes, generation ships, The Republic of Memory is prima facie evidence that science fiction that is willing to explore old and possibly exhausted tropes still can and does make an impact. If I have one warning it is that the novel either is the first in a series, or the author stops short of the actual revolution itself, perhaps deliberately. I can’t quite decide the intent here. Is this a novel that will be in a perpetual state of flux and becoming since the revolution does not kick off, and done so deliberately by the author? Or is this just the opening act? Time will tell.
The Republic of Memory: A Novel (The Song of the Safina), Mahmud El Sayed, Saga Press, 2026
¹ And that is relevant to recent discourse, too. Are prologues integral to the novel? This prologue is very disconnected from the novel and seems to be not relevant to anything in the novel…until it suddenly and most definitely IS.
² The touchstone I was thinking of when reading this is Iain Banks’ Feersum Endjinn, which has a character speak in a phonetic speech that the reader has to puzzle over and decipher.
