Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage.

The Short of It

Plot: Upon turning 14, everyone aboard the ship must survive 30 days unassisted on one of the colony planets.

Page Count: 254

Award: 1968 Nebula

Worth a read: Yes, but it's YA.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Minimal
Review: A coming-of-age story, a clearly YA entry. Good approach to perspective and prejudice by showing what those living on ships think of on planets and vice versa. A number of themes are told a bit on the nose; this makes sense given the younger target audience. 

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

The only fair way to judge this is understanding that it is meant for teens (probably?). Which is to say that I would not recommend this to an adult. With that preface out of the way, let's get into it.

We are treated to a first person narrator, Mia. Over the course of the story she ages from 12 to 14, and the language reflects that age; it is intentionally simple and often childlike. This is consistent with the character as depicted and works well enough. It certainly places us firmly in her shoes; it's a tight first person, so we experience her ignorance and prejudice. The timbre of the book is a bit odd, however, as she informs us at the very beginning that this is being put to paper seven years later - when she is 19. With that in mind, passages like the following are very strange:

In soccer you have a five-man front line, three halfbacks who serve as the first line of defense and who bring the ball up so the forward line can take it and score, two fullbacks who play defense only, and a goalie who guards the nets. It's a game of constant motion that stops only when a penalty is called or when a ball goes out of bounds or when a score is made, and then stops only for a moment.

I was playing the inside left position on the forward line because I have a strong left-footed kick. It's my natural kicking foot.

This sounds far more like a twelve year old than someone pushing twenty. This remains the case throughout; I initially thought it was impressive that Panshin maintained the book at a level for tweens, but it does not gel with a 19 year old. 

On that note, this book has the most explicit sex scene I've encountered thus far (in the Hugo/Nebula winners) - another odd inclusion when the rest is aimed quite young.

Plot meanders somewhat, which leaves a sizable cache of points that are made to seem important before being dropped completely. These are all to round out the character, of course, but some are bizarrely unfinished or under-explored.

Other than an understandable narrator, the main draw of this book is its depiction of human civilization split between on-planet colonists and on-ship scientists/artists. Both sides believe all sorts of unreasonable things about the other, and the amoeba-like absorption of prejudice by children is used to bring some of these to the fore. It's heavy handed but well executed. A heavy hand is a constant in Rite of Passage - it seems a bit condescending even for younger readers.

This book has aged astonishingly well, and is a solid coming-of-age tale with some heavy themes to consider. It would be a good read for someone in their early teens; less so for anyone much older than that. Could spark some good dinner table conversation, I'm sure.

If you're inclined to pick this one up, please use the link below! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you.

Greetings, Stranger. It is I, a link!

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

Well, the colony planets are a capitalist dystopia and the ship populations are a communist dystopia. So, that's a thing. I appreciate them both being depicted as perverse in their own ways; the exploitation of labor by capitalism, the rigid control necessary for communism. The issue is that it is depicted with the subtlety of a sneeze at a funeral. We also have these opposing ideas made abundantly and redundantly clear. 

Early in the book we are given a peek at exploitative mining occurring on one of the colony planets. This is not clear enough, so we need to have slavery on another. On the ship they can only have a limited number of children to preserve resources, which is enforced by law. This is insufficiently clear, so there is a Ship Eugenist and we discuss the virtues of eugenics at length. Also they exile a woman for exceeding her child quota. This is the writing style. "This is not actually about space colonies, get it? It's about the real world!" - Alexei Panshin, probably.

Of course, the title of the book is also its central concept, and is explained at length:

"Well, Mr. Fosnight forgot something he usually says, so I'll say it for him if I can remember more or less how it goes. There's an anthropological name for Trial. They call it a rite of passage. It's a formal way of passing from one stage of your life to another. All societies have them. The- important thing to remember is that it makes being an adult a meaningful sort of thing, because adulthood has been earned when you come back from Trial. That makes Trial worth concentrating on."

And then there's The Ethics Essay.

(Cut to: a black and white shot of a child holding a book and talking to an author)

Child: I just don't know what your characters think about different ethical systems!

Voice-over: Has this ever happened to you? Were your characters too busy demonstrating how they saw the world, as opposed to simply stating it?

Introducing... just straight up having the main character and her boyfriend write essays about ethics and then discuss them in a classroom.

Child: Wow! This is so, so, so, very, very clear! There is no way to miss the point!

Author: Thanks, Ethics Essays!

Here's an example of what this looks like in the actual text: 

I don't like utilitarianism as a prescription, either. Treating pleasure and pain as quantities by which good can be measured seems very mechanical, and people become just another factor to adjust in the equation. Pragmatically, it seems to make sense to say --One hundred lives saved at the cost of one?--go ahead! The utilitarian would say it every time--he would have to say it. But who gave him the right to say it? What if the one doesn't have any choice in the matter, but is blindly sacrificed for, say, one hundred Mudeaters whose very existence he is unaware of? Say the choice was between Daddy or Jimmy and a hundred Mudeaters. I wouldn't make a utilitarian choice and I don't think I could be easily convinced that the answer should be made by use of the number of pounds of human flesh involved.

People are not objects.

These come up a number of times, totaling many pages of somewhat circuitous descriptions of different ethical systems. They are awkwardly worked into the book; at one point Mia, apropos of nothing, decides to take out her notebook and write about stoicism. You know, how people do. Here's another bit later:

"This is a point that's important to me. I don't like this oversimple categorizing. Some of my ancestors were persecuted during one period and held to be inferior simply because their skins were dark."

That was plain silly, because my skin happens to be darker than Mr. Mbele's and I don't feel inferior to anybody.

"But that's not an essential difference," I said. "This is. They just aren't as good as we are."

Good message, good to have kids think about these things, and wow does Panshin hammer his messages home.

The other main issue with this book is how many plot points are brought up in the first half of the book that are completely irrelevant later on. The kids sneak out of an airlock to check out the outside of the ship. Consequences: learning a lesson about using people. Nothing else, never comes up again. Most of the early book is characterization; it's a short book, but it's a shame that none of the stuff from the early book comes up again later.

All in all, a decent read for a younger crowd. With some ethics stealthily inserted.

Well, Stranger, it's Communism... in SPACE!

And don't forget to read a book!