Genesis

by Paul Chafe

1. This is “Big Idea” science fiction, in the same class as Larry Niven’s Ringworld and its sequels, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama novels, written by a working scientist with a military background.

2. Paul Chafe contributed stories to the top-selling Man-Kzin Wars volumes VII, VIII and IX, and is well-known to the readers of that top-selling series (over 350,000 copies in print).

3. An infantry officer in the Canadian forces Reserve who has served with four regiments, he brings first-hand military experience to this novel.

4. Advertising in Locus , more.

The human race is running out of time on overcrowded Earth, and only one man has the courage to save it. Colony ship Ark is the greatest project the human race will ever attempt, a self contained world one hundred years in the building, launched on a ten thousand year voyage to carry the seeds of civilization to the stars. It is humanity's final gamble for escape from a desperate world, but the price of hope is measured in lives.



Joshua Crewe , Ark's designer. Obsessed with his vision, he's devoted his life to winning the power to turn it into reality. No burden is too great to bear in pursuit of his dream—especially when other people are the ones to bear it.



Aurora Brady , first of the spaceborn, with one foot in the future and one in the past. She must give power to her enemies to see Ark launched, but giving too much will mean its destruction.



Jedidiah Fourgere , a simple farm boy, he finds himself caught up in a revolution that will forever change the balance of power in Ark's hermetically sealed world. Torn between love and faith, humanity's future lies in his hands.

Master storyteller Paul Chafe presents Genesis , the gripping first book of the Ark trilogy.

Genres: Science Fiction, Ebooks

624 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[David Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

4/5ths of the novel deals with the politics and technological breakthroughs of building a colony ship that would last 10,000 years - long enough to reach a distant star. The remainder is about life aboard a closed environment that has a small contingent of technicians and a much larger society of farmers drawn from a fundamentalist religious sect called the Believers. This is really two stories, one dovetailed into the next.

I have serious mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand, Paul wrote a compelling story, but on the other I found myself skimming at times. I realize that Paul has created a future world, requiring a vast amount of detail, but at times the story got lost in the clutter. In one scene it took 6 pages to get a character from one point to another several hundred feet higher.

I found this book unnerving and frightening as it so fully reflects what has gone on in the world of politics and religion throughout history. The characters were very real, such that I found myself demanding that a few grow spines and stand up to the evil so abundant in the pages. But I also understand that not everyone can be a Rambo: practiced in the art of killing without thought or emotion. The characters were imbued with emotional and physical weakness and amply displayed the frailties of the human condition. They also showed personal strength and how great minds can be so easily misguided, embracing the very evil they so vehemently denounce, all in the name of God.

I was disturbed when one of the few characters who showed common sense, logic and intelligence was murdered in the act of rescuing another survivor from the evil clutches of Believer Bishop Nemmer and his army of heartless murdering inquisitors. For that I have to hand it to Paul for being able to stir such deep emotions in me.

This is a cruel novel, steeped in mindless faith, ignorance and power. Ugly as it is, I think Paul is one of the few writers who can delve so deeply into the hearts of men and find what should be so clearly seen, but often is hidden beneath the cloak of piety and good works. Yet, the novel rejoices in the technological abilities of man.

I'm not one to pick a novel apart over typos, but there were far too many. You'd think a novel published by Baen would be almost error free.

In a way I was saddened that the novel ended where it did. I felt it was incomplete, but then I could see where this could lead to a series. Still, once I got a couple chapters in I felt compelled to complete the reading even though it was far too detailed for my taste.

The key word, if one must be sought to describe this novel, is 'disturbing'.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible book - I can't believe I just spent the last 4-5 hours reading it, and I have the next one on the shelf. Mostly a story about man leaving the planet and how terrible religion took over on the ship for the voyage of 1oK years. Definitely not one to put on the recommend list.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good premise, a little simplistic 'fundies vs scientists' machinations. The end is rather cynical.

[Mike Ventura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure how I feel about this book... I enjoyed the hard science fiction and I enjoyed the puritanical zealots conflict. The narrative was spot on and compelling, even the jumps in time to quickly further the trajectory of the story was done well - creating three unique story arcs under the overarching umbrella.
Even so, I still don't know how I feel about this novel. Genuinely no idea if I liked it or not but I'm jumping into Exodus right away to fully evaluate the work as a whole.

[Gendou · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book.
From time to time I was grew tired of the religion theme, but the hard science fiction kept me thinking.
My favorite parts were the stages of technical planning, and the space elevator.
I also enjoyed the second half of the book, which focused on a generation of people born on the Ark.
For me, the characters were pretty engaging, which is high praise for a hard science fiction book.

I read someone's review calling this book a whining rant against religion.
This is a realistic science fiction book.
The battle between the Profit and the Ark is a sadly believable one.
So is the conflict between the crew and the believers on the arc.

If this story sounds like a whining rant against religion to you, then you must not like what you see when a light is held up to religion's impact on society.

The lesson I took away from this book is that power struggles will always exist, even on an interstellar voyage. Also that the tool of religion is more stable than the tool of education, because it costs less.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are plenty of writers who possess the depth of empathy to write believable characters who don't share their worldview. Paul Chafe isn't one of them. While I appreciated the attempt to write about future humans in all of their complexity -- particularly when most hard scifi implausibly imagines future humans as robotically areligious -- Chafe completely fails to paint anything but a caricature of religious belief. His "Believers" are either cynical political brinksmen, manipulating religion to gain power (bad), or they are (also cynical) secret agnostics willing to maintain the pretense of faith for the sake of social cohesion (better). The only Believers who actually, you know, believe are dangerous madmen.

I'd almost be interested enough in what happens to the Ark to pick up the second book, but then I realized I could just reread Clarke's Rama books instead for a far more interesting exploration of the generation-ship concept.

[Chris Maguire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrific. It drags a little at the end when the story looses all of it's science, but it's still great fiction. I'd love to take a tour of the ark with an Oculus Rift; I feel like I've already been. I'd like to have read more about mining on the moon or using asteroids after the cable was set up; even just more of the development of the ark and the possibilities opened up by a space elevator. In fact, I'd think that earth would use the ark as a temporary base to establish a moon colony: given what seems like limitless energy and a base, with gravity, in space, I would expect people to harvest asteroids, develop bases on the moon and mars and build a string of arks, potentially even re-stocking earth. Anyways, good read.

[Arylin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genesis by Paul Chafe was an interesting read. The story really take place in three major parts following three main characters over a period of about 350 years. It tells the story of the Ark, Humanities first interstealler generation ship and the struggles to get it built as well as the inner strife that comes from the people that populate it after it's launch. Because of the way that time flows in this novel it did feel a bit disjointed moving from one time frame to the next but that still was not as detracting from the story that I expected. All in all I enjoyed this book and look foward to reading the next one.

[juice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book conflicted me - midway through it I was ready to give it a five, by the end I wanted to give it a three because of the utterly insipid ending.

Nice idea, good writing, struggled at the finish as the author simply threw up his hands and admitted he didn't know what to do with it.

Bizarrely, I think too much was crammed into the one book. Unlike most, in which a series is one decent book that got stretched WAY beyond what it deserved, this ihas been overly condensed.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes a good read but frequently leaves too much unresolved. He tells basically three stories in chronological order, and each one could easily be expanded to describe more time around the central events. Seeing here that it is just the first book of a trilogy makes me a little hopeful that may change with the next two books. We'll see.

[Karolyn Pavlik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't expecting to find polygamy and fundamentalist Mormons in a sci-fi book. The book gets a bit bogged down in details at times.