Rime

by Tim Lebbon

Alone, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea…

Adrift in space, a gigantic freighter, Cradle, carrying seventeen million souls makes its slow journey across the universe.

They are in search of a new home, a ‘Goldilocks’ planet to sustain human life after the decimation and downfall of planet Earth.

One man, a control room tech, is part of a generation destined to live their lives protecting those of the sleeping millions onboard Cradle.

But soon, everything is about to change…

When Cradle encounters five unknown entities flying just beyond its radars, the ship’s AI calls for caution. Comms go down across the gargantuan ship, cutting the tech from the millions of other souls under his watch.

Those in cryosleep don’t realise the danger they are in. Their lives are in the balance.

And the alien ships are fast approaching…

Now this lonely technician must make his decision: will he stand his ground, and risk the lives of millions?

Or is it time to admit that humanity has strayed too far into the unknown?

Mankind’s fate is in his hands. Soon, the consequences of his actions and the message he bears will be felt for generations to come…

RIME is a gripping sci fi novella, retelling the harrowing tale of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner against the indomitable backdrop of deep space.

TIM LEBBON is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the thriller The Hunt, and other recent releases include The Silence and Alien: Out of the Shadows. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. Future books include The Rage War (an Alien/Predator trilogy), and the Relics trilogy from Titan.

The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released September 2015, and other projects in development include Playtime (an original script with Stephen Volk), My Haunted House with Gravy Media, The Hunt, Exorcising Angels (based on a novella with Simon Clark), and a TV Series proposal of The Silence.

Venture Press is a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK’s leading independent digital publisher. We are committed to the discovery and rediscovery of immensely talented authors in the SFF genre, and continue to push boundaries in search of great literature. Join us as we venture across universes and unknown landscapes – past, present and future.

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Genres: Science Fiction, Novella, Fiction

61 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 27, 2016

About the author

I love writing, reading, triathlon, real ale, chocolate, good movies, occasional bad movies, and cake.

I was born in London in 1969, lived in Devon until I was eight, and the next twenty years were spent in Newport. My wife Tracey and I then did a Good Thing and moved back to the country, and we now live in the little village of Goytre in Monmouthshire with our kids Ellie and Daniel. And our dog, Blu, who is the size of a donkey.

I love the countryside ... I do a lot of running and cycling, and live in the best part of the world for that.

I've had loads of books published in the UK, USA, and around the world, including novels, novellas, and collections. I write horror, fantasy, and now thrillers, and I've been writing as a living for over 8 years. I've won quite a few awards for my original fiction, and I've also written tie-in projects for Star Wars, Alien, Hellboy, The Cabin in the Woods, and 30 Days of Night.

A movie's just been made of my short story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage and Sarah Wayne Callies. There are other projects in development, too.

I'd love to hear from you!

Reviews

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been reading Lebbon since his Leisure pub days, where he stuck quite exclusively to scary. Since then he's branched out to fantasy and scifi, this is a sample of the latter and it's quite good. Some familiar themes here as an enormous AI managed space ship traveling from the dying Earth to a distant potentially inhabitable planet gets intercepted by mysterious extraterrestrials...with some seriously disastrous consequences. There's one survivor left and he's got quite a story to tell. Like most good scifi (like most good fiction in general) this is more of a morality play about the flawed earthlings than aliens, meaning of life, survival and all that. Well written, but somehow not compelling enough, something left to be desired. Then again for a freebie it was a nice find and, since this one is merely a novella, a perfectly entertaining way to spend about 75 minutes.

[Lena · Rating 2 out of 5]

“I’m being charged, then?” Luke’s smile drops. Olivia looks away,...“I don’t think there was ever any doubt,” Olivia says. "You’re responsible for the deaths of seventeen million people.”

This is a short sad scifi tale of the fate, of the demise, of a generation ship due to an act of violence. I think this was meant as a cautionary tale but mostly it was all just very sad and not scary. Then again, I'm already one to think the worst of generation ships because of the inhuman conditions and hopelessness you are imposing on your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc for the hope of your seed finally being planted in a garden planet far far away. If you've ever seen Pandorum, or to a lesser extent Ascension, you know how bad such things could get.

I'm a big fan of Coldbrook but this story I did not enjoy.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main character in Rime is a man who is put in an impossible position when the ship he is on appears to come under attack by alien life forms, and he takes action to protect the ship full of humans in cryosleep... with disastrous results. He has to deal with the loss of his love, and everyone on board, while being called to answer for his actions in a most interesting way.

While I enjoyed this short read, I recently read a novel in the Alien universe by Tim Lebbon, and perhaps reading this novella so soon after finishing that spoiled it a bit for me. There were some similar ideas explored in both around how much trust we put in the machines we build, and in the humans we set to take care of us.

I received a review copy from NetGalley.
Review originally posted at Book of Bogan.

[Wayne McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Rime' by Tim Lebbon is about a man on board a generation ship. I might have been a bit jaded coming in to this story because I just finished a similar story that I thought was better.

The main character is a man on board a generation ship with 17 million people. When the ship has an encounter with alien beings, the tech has to make a decision. The fallout of that decision ends up being disastrous, including losing someone he loves. He then has to stand trial for his actions.

The book shifts back and forth from the present to the past. The main character has a mind that seems to wander. It's a short read and I did like it. Initially, I was bothered by the ending, but after thinking it over, I ended up liking it.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Endeavour Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some negative reviews here about the lack of scientific credibility. Get over it people, it's a story and a very short one at that. I enjoyed it for what it was, something to read in one sitting to cleanse your pallet between reading meatier stuff. It still had some good world building and character development despite its length. Just ignore the 'science' and enjoy the short ride.

[Dave-Brendon Burgh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review coming soon. :)

[Eddie Ruminski · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable journey, albeit one that feels a little underwhelming at its completion.

[Wampuscat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story is a science fiction adaptation (loose) of the poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1897). If you have never read that poem, or can't remember it if you have, then I recommend you go back and re-read it before you read this story.

I recommend you read it regardless, because it is one of the best poems I know.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is a lot to unpack in this short tale. I found it likable, but with some negatives.

The favorable attitude I have toward the story is derived from what it attempted to achieve. The unfavorable attitude comes from some of the ideas posited in the 'universe' where it takes place.

The writing style is decent, if slightly overly dramatic. I give that a hand wave because it was trying to bring out the emotion of the poem it was modeled after. I did find myself speed reading (which for me means skipping over 'fluffy words') through parts of it because of this.

The Main Character (no name given, MC for short) is a member of the crew on the generation ship, Cradle. It is controlled by an A.I. of the same name. The A.I. is directly connected to minds of its 'crew' from shortly after their births. It is several generations since they left a dying Earth to save humanity by escorting a few million sleeping humans to another star. The crew is generational, while the passengers are Earthborn.

The story itself is the MC telling what happened to the ship and why he is the sole survivor and responsible for their deaths. This is great tie-in to the Poem, as the Ancient Mariner was also a lone survivor of a ships crew whose deaths he was responsible for causing.

I think the author did a great job of steering a story set in space and the far future in parallel to the Poem. I admire and compliment the creativity that was used. I can definitely recommend reading this one (after re-reading TRotAM). I give this 3 stars can call it a Worthwhile Read.

Now, there are some issues I have with the overall universe, which I will detail below. They are spoiler filled, however, so do not read further until you read the story itself.


The problem I have with this generation ship is that several thousand individuals are required to maintain the ship, but instead of rotating the crew who volunteered for the mission, they utilized a breeding community who's descendants are born and die on board, and are forced into the roles of crew. That they blithely accept this after several generations is a flawed assumption to me. They are basically slaves to the sleeping passengers and the A.I. I think some of them would have revolted by now.

The sudden blaming of the MC for all that transpires seems unjust. In the Poem, the Ancient Mariner commits an act of malice with no reason, which results in his being blamed for events that transpire after. In Rime, the MC commits an act that, while perhaps rash, was also a result of fear at being separated from contact with Cradle and all other crew - which had never happened in his whole life - and also had been ushered into a cannon emplacement on the ship that was designed to be used in defense. The A.I. of Cradle was really at fault for this situation more so than the MC, IMHO.

Ultimately, Rime of the Ancient Mariner is interpreted as a comment on appreciating the beauty of God's creation and prayer. This story, was more of a cautionary tale about overreacting in a violent way that could result in a tragic misunderstanding & hostility between humanity and alien beings. While I can see the difficulty in projecting the encouragement of prayer in the context of space based sci-fi, the non-violence message (in the face of a threat) seemed a bit off-putting to me. That resulted in the loss of a star in my review.


Still, this is one of the better stories I've read in a while, and I do recommend it.

[Ross Macpherson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite one of the worst books I've read. There are numerous clumsy continuity errors and character inconsistencies that imply a lack of care and effort on the parts of both author and editor, but this book is deeply unconvincing on almost every level: the science as presented makes no sense, and as a result the world building and a substantial component of the plot are unconvincing. Being a bit oblique to avoid spoilers, the protagonist ends up interacting with a world 3000 years in advance of his own, and yet it is entirely recognisable to him and he has no trouble operating within it or grasping their technology. Imagine bringing Socrates or Homer forward to our time, and them being not even slightly affected by the vast differences of the world in which we live.

The hibernation technology in the book is referred to multiple times as cryo, which implies the use of cold temperatures to preserve life. However one of the characters claims that when the ship undergoes its disaster all the frozen passengers die because they were "frozen in time," and that being woken they then experienced their entire frozen period in an instant, thus living decades in seconds because of not being woken in some correct fashion that the author never specifies. As well as the dissonance of these two irreconcilable approaches, and the nonsense of its understanding of the physics of time, the ability to control time in such a fashion would be so far beyond the rest of the technology presented that it would vastly alter how any culture that had control of it would operate. I present this here as an example of how carelessly written and thoughtlessly constructed this book is.

However said protagonist is the inhabitant of a generation starship, the product of a civilisation at least a few centuries in advance of our own, and yet he talks and acts like a blokey 21st century man. People and their manner of speaking are in part a product of their environment. What is the point of creating a character and a world if you're not going to make any effort to try to engage with how they would think or speak?

In summary, there is a bit in this book where the main character encounters something he believes is a God and that God says to him, entirely without irony, "We need to talk," and if you think that is good writing then maybe you will like this book. If you'd prefer to read a flawed but at least intelligently thought out generation starship book, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, and if you want to read an actually well-written book, go with Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

[Taig · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautifully written and extraordinary tale!

I’ve had the pleasure of reading quite a bit from Tim Lebbon over the years. And every time I finish one of his novels, I’m reminded of just how poignant and deep so much of his writing is. Why is that? Is it just because Mr. Lebbon is so intelligent? For he most assuredly is that. Or does it have more to do with his experiences and his unique perspectives of life and of this world that allow him to create such profound and moving works? In truth, I guess it really doesn’t matter how he’s able to write so beautifully and with such depth; what’s important, of course, is that he does.

Many years ago, in college, I read the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Perhaps you did too. And, while I surely didn’t fully understand or appreciate it as I would come to many years later, I was enchanted by that strange tale and by its eerie and profound message. Mr. Lebbon obviously was too. Coleridge’s original poem’s gravity and its depth and its poignance are on full display here in Mr. Lebbon’s creation and nothing is lost. The setting is quite different—and that’s part of its unfailing charm and appeal—but the tragedy and the sense of sorrow and loss are the same.

The novel—or novella, as it’s relatively brief—is a masterpiece of characterization, narrative, pacing and tension. You may already know the story or you can certainly read about it by others far more talented than myself, so I’ll not waste your time by relating its story here. Suffice it to say that Mr. Lebbon is a master at really allowing his readers to genuinely feel what his characters feel and to vicariously experience what his characters experience. Rime is exciting, engaging and full of things that provide great depth and food for thought and for further pondering long after the reading has finished. Perhaps that’s the highest praise I can give Rime—that it’s a masterpiece of writing and storytelling that you won’t soon forget. And, like all of Lebbon’s work, it’s more than worth the trip.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Free from Amazon for Kindle and short, so I read it. Some strong language and scenes. No sex scenes, though.

Some interesting worldbuilding, but too much generic as well. The author seems to have no experience with religion either, in terms of how it was handled. Very Arthur C. Clark 3001 in multiple ways, really. And the key scene seems to have been set up in such a forced fashion that it makes no sense. And the tech makes no sense either. Nor the economics of how things managed to get done in the settings described. For example, how could they have built such an amazing ship?

Anyway, the interesting thoughts here are enough to redeem from a 1-star rating, though.

[Richard Barber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't really read much science fiction these days. When I was younger I devoured Asimov and Heinlein and Brunner etc, but not so much now...
Rime is science fiction, but it's also horror and a little love story. It's a short piece, and a poignant piece of work for its brevity. One of those occasions when I was genuinely sorry the study came to an end.
loved it. More like this, please, Tim.

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun but sad tale

Rime is a tropey sci fi but one written with skill. Lebbon instills the protagonist with a compelling struggle and tale that fills the familiar beats of a generation ship narrative, but manages to engage the subtle undercurrents of emotion. As a Kindle single, it is a short short story but one that is very enjoyable.

[Ike Rose-author · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engrossing

I was caught up by the story from the first paragraph. The narrator's amazement at being alive and his survivor's guilt was immediate. I enjoyed the detailed description of a generation ship, and the format kept me engrossed.
I was annoyed by the description of bodies flying past the screen, some still moving, when they would have been instantly destroyed.

[Ruth Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid science fiction. An enjoyable read.

A good story with intriguing characters. Consequences matter and the levels of consequence are layered well in this story. I look forward to reading more from this writer.

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won’t say that I don’t like a good old fashioned nineteen-fifties twilight-zoney skiffy story from time to time, but this was definitely not one of those times. Or if it was intended as a pastiche, Lebbon just wasn’t up to par to whoever he was pastiche-ing.

[Tracy Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story

Well written and just the right length. I recommend it if you're in the mood for a good short story.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating story

It's a short read that keeps your attention and never gets boring. I want to see the author write more stories like it.

[Jack Landfather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was a good read! Enjoyed the plot and was able to almost guess which way things were going!
Highly recommend!

[Sam Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the Coleridge poem, I like the Iron Maiden version, and I like this sci-fi version.

[Kayleigh Marie Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, would you look at that - yet another truly brilliant book by Tim Lebbon!

Great premise, love the alternating timelines in the story, intrigue, danger, ALIENS, what's not to love?

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking

I'm still musing over the implications of one frightened man's act, what he did and the results. Really an astounding book. Easily could become a classic. Definitely worth a read, maybe two or three times to really "get it." This author has a mind, a talent, that I am sure I will read more of his works.

If this short story were available in a slim, tooled leather binding, I would buy it for my bookshelf - the one I keep for my future grandchildren and their children.


HIGHLY RECOMMEND

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

After finishing it, I'm struggling to give Rime a decent review.

On the plus side, it's well written, easy to read, and incredibly short (pretty much read the entire story in 40 min). And it's Tim Lebbon who I've come to regard as one of the best kept secrets of the horror genre.

On the negative, it's not very deep, original or even that enjoyable of a story. And while it's a positive, it's also a negative that it's so short.

Honestly though, I didn't particularly enjoy Rime. Maybe that's because all of its aspects have been done before, and done better. And maybe, and probably most likely, it's because I know that Lebbon is way better than this (both The Silence and Coldbrook were far superior to this novella). Plus what was the point of the whole thing? I get that this is kind of a modern day retelling of the classic Rime of the Ancient Mariner (hence the title), but that poem had a purpose and actually had a conclusion that made sense. Here though? I really don't know what Lebbon was trying to get across.

Funny, now that I think about it. So far Lebbon has managed to write the first 5 star novel I've read in 2017 and now the first sub-3 star story. Guess it just goes to show you can't win them all.

[DB in Richmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Received ARC from NetGalley for reading/review.
RIME is a science fiction novella length piece told in first person narrative. Tim Lebbon weaves a story that seems a small piece of our future which is all too plausible. The shipborn technician and all he thinks he knows versus a greater and somewhat smaller universe than others have found.

[Vanessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

A novella about one man, a generational ship, and a decision that quite frankly, steers the path of humanity. Although well written, and with a promising premise, I found the characters were hastily drawn and the moral (point?) of the story never came across to me.

[Lucas M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible

I'm a fan of Tim Lebbon, but most of the work I've read by him has been horror, so I was curious about how he would handle sci-fi. In a word: masterful. This story tells about one man's mistake and the journey he travels. It was incredibly haunting and suspenseful throughout. I enjoyed every moment and give it my highest recommendation. Well done!

[Damon Lord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving retelling of a classic tale

This is a wonderful, moving tale. When one considers the origin and inspiration for the tale, namely the classic poem "Time of the Ancient Mariner", it becomes even more poignant and touching, as this SF retelling of a timeless piece adds new depths to a haunting narrative.

[Happy Goat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review on Happy Goat Horror:
https://happygoathorror.com/2022/11/2...

I'd recommend this to people who enjoy horror set in space (obviously), and to those who enjoy existential themes that will stick with you long after finishing the story. And honestly, just a general horror audience - this is a terrific piece of work.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent sci-fi tale. A retelling of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; whereas the death of an albatross brings disaster to a sailing ship in the original, in this tale the killing of an alien being brings vengeance upon a "generation ship" from earth.

[Carolyn Atkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Read


I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It reminds me of the old science fiction authors such as Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. I really enjoy this kind of story, and as usual, it was too short for me. When I find an enjoyable book, I wish they were longer.