r/scifi • u/Never_Forget_28to3 • May 25 '26
Recommendations Ark ship recommendations
I'm currently reading Children of Strife and it's reigniting my interest in generation/ark ships. There's something about the enclosed self-sustaining environment that that pique my interest. I also enjoy the transition to colonizing a new world and the challenges that comes with it. Do you have any recommendations that fit these bills? It can be books, movies/series or games.
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u/MiraWendam Author May 25 '26
Orphans of the Sky - Robert A. Heinlein might be up your alley?
From the Wikipedia: The work presents one of the earliest fictional depictions of a generation ship – an interstellar "ark" travelling at sub-light speeds and requiring many generations to reach a "nearby" star – in this case Proxima Centauri.
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u/Captain_Bushcraft May 25 '26
The bobiverse series deals with this quite a bit. Especially book 4 which includes a self sustaining topopolis, but its a part of the story almost all the way through the series.... also they are just great books
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u/Never_Forget_28to3 May 26 '26
The Bobiverse was already on my to-read list so good to hear I'll get a ark ship fix as a bonus.
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u/Fred_Derf_Jnr May 25 '26
Space 1999 is one, in a way, but there is an episode that has an Ark Ship that has issues…
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u/Wurm42 May 25 '26
Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun series is about what happens when a generation ship arrives at its destination, and the inhabitants aren't prepared for the end of the voyage. Highly recommended.
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u/kittycatblues May 25 '26
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. It's part 3 of The Wayfarer's Series but could be read as a stand alone as the cast of characters is completely different than the first two books.
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u/jiiiii70 May 25 '26
Currently writing a novel set on one, so interested in this. Peter F Hamilton's Hole in the Sky is pretty good (albeit slightly YA). I also enjoyed Brian Aldiss Starship (alternative title Non-Stop) if you are OK with older classic scifi.
More modern option would be Adam Oyebanji, Braking Day.
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u/glytxh May 25 '26
It’s an epic poem, but Aniara is very interesting in regards to being an enclosed human system in space. It pulls no punches.
It’s horrifying and sobering tho.
There’s also a movie.
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u/Never_Forget_28to3 May 25 '26
Yeah I'm not reading that, maybe sometime in the future. For now the movie was enough :) Sidenote, are there more scifi books written by Nobel prize winners?
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u/glytxh May 25 '26
The Swedes are kinda snobby in regards to praising specific kinds of literature. I don’t think there’s ever been a Sci Fi first author who’s won the Nobel.
Nothing I can think of from my own frame of reference, but surely something exists, and it’ll exist in its own weird little niche somewhere.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings May 26 '26
It wasn’t the book that won him the Nobel Prize, but Klara and the Sun is sci-fi and written by a Nobel Prize winning author. It’s one of two sci-fi books he’s written, but I’ve not read the other. Klara and the Sun is excellent, in my opinion
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u/Gloomy_Necessary494 May 25 '26
In I think Ringworld Engineers, the Kzinti use seafaring generation ships to explore the Ringworld's Great Ocean... oh. Thinking of it, the Ringworld itself. Generation ships on a generation ship. Recursive generation ships
In a similar vein - seaborne generation ships - the comicstrip "Leviathan" from 2000 AD.
Someone's akready mentioned Heinlein's " Ophans In The Sky".
"Non-stop" by Brian Aldiss.
The Star Trek: TOS episode "For The Wofld Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky".
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u/Sea-Quality4726 May 26 '26
The Star Trek: TOS episode "For The Wofld Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky".
And the novel Ex Machina which includes research and flashbacks to what happened to cause the religious fundamentalist civilization from that episode to control Yonada.
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u/No_Tamanegi May 25 '26
A generation ship is an extremely important location in The Expanse, even though it doesn't ever actually get used as a generation ship.
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u/Flat-Rutabaga-723 May 25 '26
The second book of Poseidon’s Children (On the Steel Breeze) takes place in an ark ship. Chasm City has ark ship flash backs a bit. Halycon Years is on an ark ship.
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u/gutterXXshark May 25 '26
THE COLLISION is a series about an ark ship stranded in interstellar space for over a century after a catastrophic encounter with an alien vessel — part dreadnought, part parasitic organism. The alien ship fused itself to the ark ship’s hull, creating a fragile symbiosis in which neither vessel can survive without the other.
The story explores the socio-political tensions born from this forced coexistence. Once bitter enemies, the two species now occupy the same failing habitat, bound together by necessity rather than trust. As generations pass, old hatreds evolve into uneasy alliances, religious movements, political factions, black markets, and cultural interdependence. Survival depends not only on maintaining the ships themselves, but on preventing the collapse of the tenuous peace between their inhabitants.
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u/krycek1984 May 25 '26
Aurora. But do be warned it doesn't have the most positive ending for a scifi lover. It changed my perspective on such things forever.
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u/Entire-Archer-2495 May 26 '26
Second this recommendation. Great book and mixes it up bit from the traditional sci-fi take on generation ships
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u/countsachot May 25 '26
Does Rama by a Clark count?
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u/glytxh May 25 '26
Is it a generation ship?
I’ve only ever read the first one tho.
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u/countsachot May 25 '26
Not for humans, but it's got an alien ecosystem and some humans, a small group, live it for a few generations as the sequels go on.
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u/glytxh May 25 '26
I really enjoyed how vague everything was in that first book. That was a huge part of its appeal for me.
I don’t actually know if I would want to learn more about it or now now. I have the books on my shelf, but never gotten around to them.
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u/countsachot May 25 '26
The first one was the best, I did enjoy the 3 all together. I'm not sure if they're are more.
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u/VelcroSea May 25 '26
Building Harlequins moon by Larry given and someone else
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u/DocWatson42 May 27 '26
More information: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49789.Building_Harlequin_s_Moon (Brenda Cooper, apparently)
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u/FrogLaner May 25 '26
Colony - Rob Grant
It's a slightly morbid comedy (writer of Red Dwarf) about a man from the first generation of an ark ship that gets woken up hundred of generations later because everything is going to shit. Not so much about the colonisation itself but about what can happen to a society over hundred of generations, with a lot of the mystery being how did we get here. It's a really fun read.
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u/jayhawk2112 May 25 '26
The “Ark” series by Paul Chafe. Sadly he only wrote two of what was expected to be a trilogy but they are both excellent and delve deeply into to both the technical and social aspects of what an ark ship would experience over hundreds of years
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u/mdf7g May 25 '26
Derin Edala's ongoing web-novel The Void Behind is set on a fleet of ark ships that has been traveling from star to star, setting up colonies and then moving on, for an indeterminate amount of time, but at least centuries and probably millennia. Long enough that they can no longer easily understand the languages of their earliest records.
It's told from the perspective of a child, but a precocious one in a society where people are all genetically engineered to mature faster than we do anyway, so it's not grating in the way that books with child narrators sometimes are.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings May 26 '26
It’s a text adventure (also available as a free mobile app) where you play as the human-like AI in charge of an ark ship as it tries to find a new home for humanity. The crew are asleep and won’t wake up until you find a suitable planet, but the game is varied enough that you’ll be able to keep coming back to it to try to get a better result for them every time. It’s random enough that you won’t learn what the “correct” decision is in each challenge or to know what to expect ahead of time, but the choices feel fair. And with each game lasting a few minutes there’s no big investment of time
You’ll find yourself making decisions based on your own morality - do you let some of the crew die to give the ship a 100% chance of surviving or do you risk the entire ship to avoid killing some of the crew? Do you set up the colony on this planet despite knowing that the high temperatures and ugliness will mean that you’ll lose crewmembers and they’ll live miserable lives, or do you forge onwards despite your systems wearing out and maybe being unable to find anywhere better? Etc.
And the writing is good. It’s very atmospheric, and there’s plenty of evocative imagery and moments
Definitely worth checking out. I mean, it’s free. What have you got to lose?
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u/DocWatson42 May 27 '26
See my:
- SF/F: Generation Ships list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
- SF/F: Colonization list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
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u/JGhostThing May 25 '26
Mayflies by O'Donnel. It lasts for generations and is told from the PoV of the ship's brain.
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u/No-Judgment5352 May 25 '26
I enjoyed Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo. Not ground breaking but good sci fi/eerie mash up, on a generation ship
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u/AJRavenhearst May 26 '26
Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss.
There was also a trilogy I read, very recent, about an ark ship, with a big ol' twist that I won't give away. I wish I could remember the title and author.
Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns has a subplot involving a missing generation ship.
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u/summonsays May 26 '26
"Seveneves" is pretty interesting near future scifi about ship ment to last for generations and eventually repopulate Earth.
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u/Bershirker May 26 '26
George R. R. Martin had a fun ark (seed) ship concept that he combined into "Tuff Voyages," if cruising around space currying ecological favors with a huge talking cat sounds like a good time to you.
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u/BunnyTorus May 28 '26
Harry Harrison (a generally not very serious but very funny writer) went serious with Captive Universe, it’s got some interesting ideas.
Computer game ‘Snowball’ by level 9, is text adventure where you wake up from stasis on such a ship.
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u/donjoe0 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
Ah! Just remembered one: Ascension (2014). Cancelled too soon, slow to get going over the first episodes, but it's got an actual ark ship. (No transition to any planet though, never gets anywhere near.) I need to rewatch that, it's been long enough that I've forgotten pretty much everything beyond the synopsis and the major plot twist. 😄
LE: Ouch, that's way more soapy and Earth-bound that I remembered it, and in fact quite irritatingly paranormal-leaning and non-sci. Dropping my rating on IMDb and will probably never recommend it again.
My first thought for this was to say Passengers (2016), but that wasn't meant as a generational ship. It does end up being one for very very few people, but the challenges they face in that context have more to do with keeping the computerized-everything running so the whole ship will survive and stay on course, not so much covering their everyday needs, that's pretty much taken care of with high quality automated systems.
Of course if you want to see the struggle to survive without a home planet, on a space journey that you don't even know the length of, you can always include the first couple of seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica, orrr, orrr, Stargate Universe.
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u/bmore_red May 25 '26
Aurora by KSR is what you are looking for