In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.
Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.
Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.
Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.
There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.
The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.
Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.