'Paradises Lost', in The Found and the Lost

"Yes. It’s about a multi-generational space journey from Earth. Unlike some similar visions, they don’t have cryo-sleep or anything like that, the generations are lived through the trip, which is a sort of utopian dream—going from an Earth that is no longer serving their vision of what the good life is, to another planet. There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to add it to the list. Unlike most of the works I chose, this is not a well-known story. I wanted to add something new into the mix. And also we have so many fantasies these days—mainstream fantasies—about colonising Mars. People say things like, ‘it’s about the future survival of the human race,’ which seems ludicrous to me. We can barely survive on the planet we’ve evolved on, how can we imagine we can terraform a planet that’s not able to sustain us? But that fantasy of escape from Earth is alive and well today. “They arrive like a different species of human to the humans that could live on this planet” So, Paradises Lost. The pluralisation is important. Each generation has different ideas about paradise. The zero generation had a vision, and they wrote the constitution for the ship: this is what we’re going to do, and it will take 200 years to get there. The middle generations are just supposed to keep everyone alive so that by the time they get there, there will be colonists. And of course the colonists are supposed to continue that vision. But though 200 years, for a multi-generational ship, is not that long, if you think politically that’s a very long time. Think of America at its bicentennial: how close was it to following what the founding fathers set out? How much has changed in the last 200 years? Cultural changes and different values arise. As with The Dispossessed , this novel shows that you can’t fix a political policy in time. Even in a small space—4000 individuals, over 200 years—different political ideas arrive. And they start to imagine the ship itself as their world. So when they finally do arrive at the supposed paradise, this new green planet, they are looking for electrical outlets. They’re used to not wearing shoes, and find the ground uncomfortable. They haven’t brought any species other than plants with them, and the microbes needed for the soil, so they have no living memory of animals. So any other creatures around freak them out. So they arrive like a different species of human to the humans that could live on this planet. I think that deep materiality of her vision brings us back down to Earth, if you will, from these fantasies about colonising Mars. Not usually so directly. Obviously the multigenerational space ship is something you might recognise. There’s The Word for World is Forest— a lot of earlier science fiction is about either terraforming or resource extraction from a planet, but very seldom do you see sentient indigenous people resisting that effort. Or if you do, it becomes a space battle war with no sympathy for the original inhabitants. It doesn’t have that same critique of colonialism perspective. She also wrote fantasy . I’ve read a lot less of her fantasy, because I’m mainly a science fiction person. But my understanding, from what I’ve read of her fantasy, is that she also remixed fantasy tropes, and perhaps more overtly. In her science fiction work, she’s more charting new territory. Think of The Left Hand of Darkness : on one level, it’s a story about a cultural emissary going to meet a new civilisation. We could call that a science fiction trope, sure. But what’s more important is what she’s doing with gender, rather than the stuff around visiting a new culture. It’s a reinvention of what the genre can do, more than playing with tropes."