Founder Effects
Some people make fun of stories about generation ships because they often follow in the mould of Heinlein’s Universe (1941): if there is a story about a generation ship, it will suffer a disaster while the crew inside descend into barbarism and self-destruction. Sometimes monsters devour the crew, sometimes a plague kills all the adults, and sometimes radiation turns the voyagers into monstrosities. Geneticists would call that a founder effect: the first story (or the first few members of a species to reproduce in an environment) has a disproportionate influence on everything after. Is there a wider context the critics are overlooking?
At about the same time that Heinlein wrote that story, J.R.R. Tolkien was working on The Fellowship of the Ring. He introduced the underground dwarven city of Khazad-Dûm. And lo, Khazad-Dûm became Moria like the Lonely Mountain became a haunt for dragons! Ever since then, it has been expected that if a story is about an underground dwarven city, the only question is whether it will fall to orcs, giant rats, demons, or dragons first. The Warhammer Old World has that trope, and the game Dwarf Fortress is built around it.
This trope also appears in other genres. Fallout has its Vaults, underground bomb shelters which sometimes break down or became authoritarian nightmares. A tabletop RPG setting which I can’t identify has underground cairns where people hide from a periodic infestation of Beings from Beyond Space. Sometimes the Outer Dark gets in creating an endless series of dungeons to have adventures in. Lovercraft’s Elder Things retreated from a cooling world into underground tunnels with their pet shoggoths, and that did not end well for them either. In Niven’s Magic Goes Away stories, some magicians responds to the depletion of mana by retreating to Australia which has recently become inhabitable; the Warlock foretells that if they do this without changing their way of life, in a few thousand years they will be running out of mana in the middle of a desert.
Tolkien and Heinlein were very influential, and just-so stories about the psychology of stories are just-so stories. But could all of these tropes reflect an underlying idea that the most terrible of monsters is man and that closing your community away in the dark and cold may not be the best long-term strategy? If this trope reoccurs so often it must feel satisfying to a lot of people.
Whatever you think of my just-so story or my psychology babble, I think this cliche is not just part of American science fiction or Tolkienesque fantasy, but a part of weird fiction in general.
(scheduled 6 April 2023, updated 31 May)
