In the Belly of the Whale, the ambitious final and posthumous novel by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn, explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.
The epic multifaceted 472-page novel takes some time to fully introduce its large cast of characters among 40,000 people who live in the hollowed-out asteroid ship dubbed The Whale. Yet, patience is rewarded with Flynn’s highly plausible and intricate world-building and wise grasp of human nature.
In the Belly of the Whale – one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – builds dramatic intensity coupled with rich and even revelatory insights that freshen this seemingly familiar SF subgenre while raising deeper questions than most SF writers, scientists or space-colonization enthusiasts have considered about the prospects and costs of such generations-long voyages.
At times sobering and disturbing in its mature, realistic portrait of flawed humanity threatening the voyage’s success, Flynn’s epic novel ultimately provokes reflections that linger well after reading it – and that are crucial to consider in the real world as our species takes further steps into space with the dream of someday establishing a beachhead of human civilization beyond our solar system.
After some reflection, I now believe In the Belly of the Whale ranks among Flynn’s best novels, embodying his high level of craftsmanship and wintry-poetic style but most vitally, incorporating his deepest, most thought-provoking insights about humanity and the daunting prospects for sustaining liberty and civilized society beyond Earth.
A CAUTIONARY TALE AND POIGNANT LIBERTARIAN TRAGEDY
Ultimately, I view the novel as both a darkly cautionary tale and a poignant libertarian tragedy about the messy dysfunctionalities and inevitable corruptions of power. Flynn, an avowed libertarian, understood and reveals these as perennial possibilities, amid fallible human social hierarchies with their self-seeking and short-sighted behaviors.
The central theme, and abiding lesson, is that the price of freedom (and survival itself) is eternal vigilance.
That classic lesson of history may seem familiar and is often acknowledged by freedom-lovers. Yet, Flynn’s multi-focused tale drives home this truth with convincing details that accumulate an almost revelatory power.
As Flynn dramatizes, perhaps more clearly and deeply than other SF authors writing in this colony-ship-voyage subgenre, it’s not merely basic survival that comes into question amid various technical and social challenges. Just as important and problematic are the ways such voyages likely would undermine the higher degree of civilization and respect for individual dignity and choice required to sustain a culture of individualistic freedom over generations in such an inhospitable and almost inevitably hierarchical environment.
When even the ability of men and women to fall in love, marry and have children is highly limited and controlled by a eugenics-evoking shipboard authority that’s part of a broader aristocratic and oligarchic ruling class, one understands why many might rebel and demand their freedom – even at some potential cost to the functioning of the ship itself that might undermine the ultimate mission.
Flynn’s story distinctively reframes and broadens the familiar SF plot/trope of colonization of the stars as a quest even more complex and challenging to achieve – even before reaching a new planet!
His novel is especially gripping in weaving a variety of recurrent shipboard crises and social conflicts in the prison-like environment of a large ship. In so doing, the story provokes thought and reminds us that such long voyages might well perpetuate the ancient human tradition of every ship having a militaristic command-and-control structure of a captain and a crew that must follow orders.
THE IMPRESSIVE SCOPE OF A SOCIAL NOVEL
Flynn’s scope is impressive in this social novel, which gradually introduces multiple characters and factions in the ship’s balkanized population. The 40,000 people work in different areas and departments in a highly class-stratified society that worryingly, has inherited Earth’s aristocratic/oligarchic politics, which makes even worse the ship’s military-style command-structure.
Ultimately, this aspect of the novel is actually not a patience-testing flaw but a rewarding strength – and an admirable and fulfilling embodiment of Flynn’s larger ambitions.
That approach is tied directly to Flynn’s global focus: Dramatizing how hard it really will be, from an individualist and libertarian perspective, to not only sustain a colony ship over the centuries on its voyage to another star, but to preserve even a modicum of freedom and civilized modern culture during a centuries-long space voyage.
Flynn is especially good at blending sociology, psychology and culture with hard science fiction.
Among the many tensions on the voyage is the daunting aftermath of the “Big Burnout,” which destroyed habitability in a tenth of the vast ship, prompting its abandonment – though, as the story later reveals, not completely.
IS A COLONY SHIP TANTAMOUNT TO A PRISON?
From the perspective of the Prometheus Awards and its distinctive focus in particular, Flynn’s sobering novel is especially apt in dramatizing the enormous difficulties and libertarian implications of humanity striving over centuries to establish a beachhead of civilization on another planet in another star system – with any continuing culture and habits of liberty.
Perhaps the most illuminating passage in Flynn’s novel makes explicit the socio-political stakes while highlighting the severe constraints the characters face from both human nature and their severely limited environment:
“One often hears the Whale compared to a flying apartment, but there is another comparison that is apt.”
“What’s that?”
“A flying prison.”
When Lucky made no response to this, Peng continued: “We are here without our consent, nor is there any possibility of escape. And like all ‘lifers,’ we have all gone a little ‘stir crazy.’”
“Is that a defense of the mutineers? Innocent by reason of insanity?”
Peng tossed his head.
“Understanding is not forgiving. There are three ways to rule men, lieutenant: by one, by some, or by many. Everyone creates in his own image, and the Planners of the Imperium were no exception. So they gave us an aristocracy like themselves. but every regime decays into some form of anarchy. Monarchs become lawless tyrants; aristocracies, squabbling, self-interested oligarchies; and republics decay into democracies.”
Lucky shifted in her seat. “Why are you telling me this? Will there be a quiz later?
Peng smiled without humor.
“In a way. You know, it is easy for the Brotherhood to comfort themselves with the idea that the oppressive regime will be swept away…
…Topple the tsars, and you get the commissars….
…”That mutiny started over heavy taxation, didn’t it? How long was it before the new regime was levying taxes that would have made the old kings blanch? They did their best to limit the powers of their government, after which their government did its best to ignore those limits.”
With this powerful theme, the sobering, only-mildly-hopeful ending seems fitting. Any superficially more libertarian or positive ending, such as setting up a fully free society with one vote or one revolution, would come across as facile and unbelievable. In fact, I’d argue that a happy ending would actually detract from the deep logic, psychology and realism of the story, its characters and themes.
Instead, the ending – which raises at least the possibility that a freer and less corrupt/dysfunctional system might emerge while recognizing that freedom remains an uphill and recurrent battle – truly reflects Flynn’s mature libertarian vision.
HOW THE NOVEL DEEPENS AND TRANSCENDS ITS SUBGENRE
In some ways reminiscent of Poul Anderson at his Scandinavian-wintry, romantic and pessimistic best, Flynn weaves in a mournful, sobering realism about the recurrent failures of humanity in sustaining free societies.
Like Anderson, Flynn appreciates that the quest to sustain civilization – while respecting individual choice and fighting our species’ eternal tendencies toward abuses of power – is both noble and necessary for survival itself.
I’ve read many SF novels in this colony-ship-voyage subgenre, including Heinlein’s Orphans in the Sky and Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop. Most works employ the now-cliched plot that later generations of shipmates have regressed, no longer knowing they’re on a ship.
One defect in such plots, perhaps more apparent in retrospect, is that their happy endings (once greater self-awareness belatedly dawns) begs the question.
Once the ship’s citizens realize their world is a ship within a larger reality, and that their ship requires maintenance, repair and steering, such stories imply the primary dangers have been averted and the voyage is now on the right track, destined to succeed.
But will it? And even if it does reach its destination, at what price to liberty?
In what may be the freshest and most distinctive achievement of In the Belly of the Whale, Flynn poignantly and hauntingly explores serious questions with real-world implications for humanity’s actual future in space.
He forces us to grasp the many other ways things can go wrong and are likely to fail, both socially and technologically, as one generation inevitably succeeds another and struggles to make its own way.
He powerfully brings home emotionally that his characters will never see the promised land (and how that knowledge shapes their sometimes self-defeating behavior).
Above all, Flynn dramatically enriches his tragic libertarian theme with the almost-revelatory depiction of just how inhospitable such a voyage is likely to be, even if it succeeds against the odds, to the cause of freedom.
Because liberty is actually necessary (though not sufficient) for human flourishing, especially for the sustaining of modern tech civilizations, the loss of liberty also threatens the very survival of such colony ships – and planetary colonies.
If liberty is no longer a lived reality for generations of shipmates, what kind of society will be established on any new planet, assuming it’s habitable? And how will the lack of the habits and culture of liberty make the colony even more chancy, undermining progress or survival itself?
A RARE SF NOVEL RECOGNIZING A HARSH REALITY
Flynn’s cautionary tale is even more important and serious in its warnings, if faster-than-light travel is truly ruled out by the laws of physics. If so, then multi-generational asteroid-sized mega-ships seem to be the only way our species could ever realistically venture beyond our solar system to spread colonize other planets.
In theory, at least. But Flynn’s novel underlines how fraught such a venture will be in practice, facing both likely technological and social breakdowns.
In some ways, Flynn, who died in 2013, has left an enduring legacy – not only of his other worthy novels, but by so powerfully dramatizing in his last one such crucial insights about the challenges ahead in fulfilling humanity’s dream of spreading our seed to the stars.
Note: In April 2025, Flynn’s novel was selected as one of five Best Novel finalists.
RELATED READING:
* Read the Prometheus Blog reviews of other current Best Novel nominees, including Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World, Danny King’s Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky and Lionel Shriver’s Mania.
* Check out the full list of 2024 novels nominated for Best Novel.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
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I just read this review of Flynn’s final novel.
The novel sounds amazing (and I’m so sad that it’s the last we’ll ever get from him) – but I wanted to compliment you and say that the REVIEW was also stunningly well written. I can’t think of another book review I’ve ever read that explains a book and its strengths so well.