The starship Elysian Dawn

Elysian Dawn Place Post 4

Elysian Dawn is a generational colony-class starship built for the Outward-Bound company and launched in 2254. Elysian Dawn, known colloquially by some of the young colonists-elect as Elly-D, was huge. It carried 1000 hand-picked people. Most were aged between 18 and 25 but there were also some children, all younger than five years old. There was space in the living quarters for a great many more.

Elysian Dawn, using a Type 1 FeTtL drive, was the first and by far the biggest of three colony-class starships launched in 2254/55. She carried more people, of sternly-enforced ages, and livestock in stasis tanks. She had a fully-functional farm/garden/recycling system that could technically run forever...or at least for the centuries (none of the people knew how many) it would take to reach its destination; a planet known as Magellan Sixteen. The passengers, all of whom had clean two or three generation gene charts and none of whom was related to more than 2% of the others, had cut all ties with Terra. They chose new surnames. The adults refused to tell their children anything about their lives on Terra. The children were well-educated in most fields, but only two families ever learned anything about electronics. They were communication families, and even they had very limited coded access to the Terra-tat, sending one way logs back to Outward-Bound. 

Education was based on future-proofing. Literature was available, but none of it was contemporary. Most was intended to enrich imagination and knowledge, but also to give a false picture of Terran life. Thus the ship-born knew Greek myths and Shakespeare, Arthurian romance and other ancient writing. 

Elly-D was shaped somewhat like a limbless whale, with a rounded blunt snout at the bows. Here was the celestial map, showing a limited part of space. Apart from that, most people seldom thought of what lay outside or behind. Few of them ever considered their eventual landing, either, beyond the future-proofing drills deemed necessary to keep the knowledge alive for generations to come. They all took it for granted they would never stand on a planet. It didn't trouble them. Elysian Dawn was home. Her rubber-grip floors and curved pale walls kept them safe, provided for them, and allowed them to live contented lives, guided by scientific principle leavened with friendly commonsense. As Moon the healer said, gene charts were useful for choosing a life partner, but there were other things to think about as well. They could probably have lived on reconstituted foodstuffs, but instead they grew crops in real soil, with temperature variation and water drawn from artificial creeks. 

Elysian Dawn was the world to those on board. To Terra, she was a fading memory. Eighteen years into her voyage, she was nothing but a promise and a duty to three remaining directors of Outward-Bound. To one man, Harry Fejoa, she was a lost dream which had played a part in robbing him of his world.

Elysian Dawn appears in the Elydian Dawn series. To read more about the series check out the publisher's link and the Elydian Dawn website.

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. She runs  Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far! Since April 22nd I'm adding in places!