BRAKING DAY

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

One hundred thirty years after launch, the generation ship Archimedes is preparing for Braking Day, the moment when it, along with the two other ships in the colonization fleet, will fire up their engines to begin to slow down to make rendezvous with a new world in orbit around the Destination Star in Adam Oyebanji's novel Braking Day. As the ship's engineering and navigation teams prepare the vessel for this momentous occasion, Ravi MacLeod, an engineering midshipman, begins to wonder if something might be going on behind the scenes.

MacLeod is not a typical engineering middy. His family is known on the ship as a group of neer-do-wells and trouble makers. Moreover, the ship has a rigidly defined caste system, which means that even when Ravi is afforded the opportunity to become an engineer, he never rises above the suspicion his family ties engender. Ravi's closest friend is his cousin, Boz, who embodies all of the negative expectations of the MacLeod clan and whose anti-authoritarian streak and hacking skills have left her under the threat of being recycled, the capital punishment which had been meted out to Ravi's father.

In addition to the strange behavior by the officers on board Archimedes, including the closing off of a main corridor, Ravi finds himself hallucinating a woman floating outside Archimedes without a space suit who begins sending him messages. In addition, the activities of the BonVoy, a group of terrorists who believe the ship should not settle on a planet and ruin its environment, but rather should maintain its journey, are escalating. Ravi is attempting to process all of this while keeping his nose clean and dealing with a potentially malfunctioning cybernetic implant, which everyone aboard the fleet has.

Oyebanji has built a complex society on an equally complex generation ship. Set several generations after launch, the Archimedes and its sister ships, the Bohr and the Chandrasekhar, are no longer the pristine, fully functional ships that started out. They each have run into their own share of problems, ranging from fires to hydroponics failure. Although they maintain cordial relationships with the other ships, including an intership sporting league, each of the ships have also created their own culture. Ravi's adventures allow Oyebanji to explore the differences between the ships as the underlying mysteries regarding the events around Braking Day and the breakdown of Ravi's own implants, are revealed.

Occasionally, Oyebanji drops something into the story which seems out of place. Despite being several generations into the voyage, illicit tobacco is still grown and smoked as cigarettes on board the ship. For all the novel's up-to-date discussion of computer implants and intelligent machines, there is a nostalgic, almost dated feel to the novel, perhaps an issue caused by the idea of a generation ship as a setting. The sense of nostalgia the setting provides creates a strange tension with the more up-to-date technology that Oyebanji includes.

Ravi and Boz are eventually able to figure out what the officer class is up to as well as the origin of Ravi's hallucinations. They ability to resolve the issues that those solutions reveal seem to be a little too easy given the society that Oyebanji has set up. As an individual, Ravi can to bring about change in a culture that is change averse in a way that is, once again, nostalgic for the science fiction that was published in the pulp era, even if the writing style is more modern and sophisticated than earlier science fiction.

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