Rite of Passage [Hardcover]

 

 

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In a 1976 introduction to the republication of this classic sci-fi novel, first published in 1968, author Alexei Panshin says he was looking for three big ingredients to make the novel work: a main character who would be a young girl, a huge spaceship with thousands of residents aboard, and an aboriginal-type ritual where youths are sent on a vision or wilderness quest to prove their adulthood. In other words, a rite of passage.

Panshin accomplished all three objectives in this novel, as he puts the protagonist, Mia Havero, through a coming-of-age test somewhere in the interstellar reaches of far space. What is remarkable is that he pulls this off by getting inside the mind of a girl (Panshin being a young man) and tells the tale in the first person. Mia describes her teenage years on board a huge structure called the Ship, which is an interstellar spaceship hollowed out of a gigantic asteroid twenty by thirty by ten miles in size. This asteroid is one of many colonizing ships ferrying people to various planets, several centuries after the Earth has destroyed itself in a population war. Many of these passengers take up new lives on the new planets they find, but many others remain on the asteroid ships, preferring the lifestyle of high technology it offers. Mia's father is a councilor for their ship, which we learn has about 30,000 people on board. Every young person has to eventually be left on their own on a planet and fend for themselves for a month, to test their survival skills. If they pass, they become adults, as early as 14 years of age.

The first two thirds of the novel of 254 pages deals with Mia growing up and learning of the philosophies of the past ages and the world she lives in, and of her brief contacts with the pioneers on the planets they pass. She comes to realize that there is a status quo and a caste system between the planets and the ships, and that it is very much like the exploitive system between old world colonies and homelands, ie slavery and oppression of a sort. In the final third of the novel, Mia and some friends are dropped onto a planet for their Trial, or rite of passage. By now, I was interested enough in Mia to wonder what she might face there alone. But I was a bit disappointed that Panshin only dealt with this section of her life in this short fashion. In fact, Mia's rite of passage isn't so grueling or revealing as I first would have thought. There are some scenes where she has questioned the moralities of her father's generation about the fair treatment of other peoples, ie the so-called Mudeaters of the lowlier planets. I guess this transition in her mind is in itself her rite of passage.

I really expected a detailed and very lengthy episode of Mia alone on an alien planet, trying to survive with her wits, the way earthside aboriginals had to do. The novel does read nicely and Mia is a captivating character just the same. If the reader looks at this story in the overall sense of space pioneering with children directly involved, it comes off okay. It reminded me a little bit of the youngsters in the Lois McMaster Bujold novels about Miles Vorkosigan, but those characters were hard to believe; Mia isn't hard to believe, which helps make her very real to us. It is a bit like the child in Ender's Game as well, a coming-of-age for a very young adult. A relatively decent read. Rite of Passage won the 1968 Nebula Award as best novel, and was second only to John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar for that year's Hugo Award as well.

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