Rite of Passage

Mia lives on a generation ship, which has been going for 164 years, and that has fled the Earth before it was destroyed in 2041. Seven ships escaped and established over a hundred colonies in the following years.

There is a coming-of-age thing where all 14-year-olds are dropped on a planet (in three month batches), where they have to survive for thirty days – no exceptions, and plenty of deaths. This is to weed out the incompetent and also for population control.

Mia is a cool girl – she likes playing soccer, calls planet-dwellers Mudeaters, and is very independent. She lived in a general children’s dormitory for five years (4-9) until she ran off, caught a shuttle and visited her dad, who then shocked her by moving to the much less desirable fifth level, from the better fourth (1-3 are infrastructure, engineering, agriculture), where Mia is both unhappy and unpopular.

Children go to school till they are 14. Additionally, they usually have an assigned tutor. Her tutor is Mr Mbele, who is also tutoring Jimmy. Mbele sits on the city council, like her dad, and they rarely agree about anything – but he still asked Mbele to tutor her, because he studied under him, and while they disagree on colony matters, they still respect each other.

Ship sentiment is that the Mudeaters are peasants, idiot farmers, well-suited to staying alive on those dangerous, rough planets, while the ship people were smart and took care of tech stuff. The trading arrangements were knowledge or technology for materials. (The ship is a split, hollowed-out asteroid).

Mia accompanies her father down to a planet, and we see first-hand how ugly her prejudices are. She is shocked by a lot, e.g. siblings close in age (long lives and population control mean that siblings on the ship are rarely closer than 20 years apart). Planets have stores, on the ship, you requisition stuff. And those stupid Mudeaters dare to have misconceptions about life on the ship! This planet mines tungsten ore for the ship, and the ship keeps the knowledge of how to work with it secret. On the planet, the ship people are called Grabbies, and are seen as parasites. Mia’s dad explains that Mbele believes in “exceptions to the rule and treating the colonists better than we treat ourselves”, so now we know who is good and who is evil.

Mia and her age group start on her training for the planet exposure thing. To train them to move well and have fine motor control, training isn’t just standard survival and fighting, but also dance and needlepoint (all taught by the same guy), which is so neat – though later on, they also actually take down a tiger as a group. She and others go on adventures on the ship, which turn out to be harder to do and more nerve-wracking than anticipated, and there is a bit of character growth that feels actually natural. She and Jimmy kiss, and it feels absolutely as good-awkward-what as a first teenage kiss ought to.

They are taught philosophy: utilitarianism (which Mia figures out quickly isn’t compatible with how humans work), stoicism (too static/status-quo for Mia’s taste), and so on. Mia talks her way into the Records part of the library and finds out she had a brother – 40 years older than she and dead for 15 years. He must’ve been at least a bit similar to her, because he wrote a novel (Mia likes reading old novels and is annoyed by the fact that nobody is writing new ones anymore), tough it is pretty terrible.

Mia and Jimmy get closer to figuring out what they want to do in life, mostly by realising that they don’t actually like the direction they were going in by default. With Mbele, they start discussing prejudices (and it’s casually dropped that Mbele has dark skin, as you might have expected, and Mia’s skin is even darker). Buuut then Mia takes her father’s side (“are Mudeaters even people”) to the extreme, and she and Jimmy fight, and ~break up (the relationship/frienship).

The trial starts, and Mia heads out by herself. Her prejudices have gotten worse – she sees planetside humans as barely human, as bad caricatures. Disgusting Free Birthers. She voices her thoughts like an idiot, and the people there take her pickup signal, and say they have one of them in jail. Mia goes undercover and thanks to a kind man, learns the local dialect and how to fit in. She rescues Jimmy, who doesn’t have his signal either. (She has to watch as her protector is beaten to death by the police for helping her.)

Jimmy and Mia make up and make out. They steal back their signal, killing locals in the process, and make it back – 17 of 29 made it back, in all. This causes trouble: deaths are expected, but natives hunting down the kids isn’t. There is a big council meeting with the whole ship present to vote. Her dad is making big speeches of how it’s the colonists’s fault for forgetting technological knowledge, and that this particular planet is evil and ought to be destroyed, on account of not having birth control and general evilness. The popular vote goes 16k:10k for nuking the planet.

This happens. The end (Mia moves out from home and experiences some more … growth? and just big moral WTF of “how can people I like do something absolutely terrible like this”).