SPOILER for BETA-2!
The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 29 Apr 1999
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/601

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Robert Patterson — 29 Apr 1999, 17:09

Warning: this post is a spoiler for Samuel R. Delany: The Ballad of Beta-2

"Mantis" may be correct in that the colonists have left the ship. It has
been awhile since I read it, but as I recall the action takes place at least
in part on board the ship. The basic premise is that the generation-ship
left Earth right before the discovery of FTL travel thru hyperspace, so this
ship is the only human ship ever to have traveled across an interstellar
void in normal space.

It turns out that they had a near-disastrous encounter with some kind of (as
I recall) highly intelligent energy life form that only lives far away from
gravity wells. Humanity has never discovered it because they only travel
through normal space near stars. I'll send more specifics when I get home
and can look at the book again.

  --
  Robert Patterson
  
  http://home.midsouth.rr.com/rpatterson
  
  
  -----Original Message-----
  From: whorl-errors at lists.best.com [mailto:whorl-errors at lists.best.com]On
  Behalf Of Michael Andre-Driussi
  Sent: Thursday, April 29, 1999 2:58 PM
  To: whorl at lists.best.com
  Subject: (whorl) re: BETA-2

> Don't forget
> 
> Samuel R. Delany: THE BALLAD OF BETA 2
> 
> This would fall sorta into the "Colonies from " category, though like Long
> Sun, the colonists still live in the ship.

Good call, Robert Patterson! Refresh my memory further: IIRC, BB2 is about
an anthropologist (from Terra or the civilized sphere) who is examining the
hulk of the colony ship in orbit--I remember he translated one doorway
label as "sacrifice to the water gods" or something like that, a literal
take on "navigation."  His primary clues are contained within the epic poem
of the colonists (I thought they were on the ground by then).  So it is a
"discovery of Troy" type of deal, in the sense of using garbled heroic
poetry to figure out what happened on the long voyage.

So spill it: what happened to the colonists (I remember something about
some unexpected radiation washing over the ship out in the void)?  And any
other details you can recollect (how long was the voyage, what target star,
etc.).

=mantis=



*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

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