Fiction Analysis - 'Voyage to Alpha Centauri' by Michael D. O'Brien
Big men with screwdrivers story turned on its head
Author’s note: Fiction Analysis is officially a series now. Enjoy this analysis of another science fiction story.
Warning: There will be spoilers. It’s almost impossible to do an in-depth analysis of this book without spoilers. But I’ll try my best to mitigate them.
Get the book here. Or if you don’t like Amazon, you can get it straight from the publisher.
Introduction
Michael D. O’Brien is an interesting figure. A man of many talents, he is known in the world of writing for his Father Elijah books. But he’s not known for writing science fiction stories, with Voyage to Alpha Centauri being his first and (at the moment of this writing) only science fiction story.
How did Mr. O’Brien perform in his first foray into the genre?
Pretty well, I must say. Though I’m sure readers might expect my answer given that I only put in works that I like for this series so I will go into more detail.
I learned about the existence of Voyage to Alpha Centauri from a YouTube comment on a Reason & Theology video about aliens. I won’t get into the details out of fear of spoiling the book. To make a long story short, I finally decided to give this book a read.
It was a slow burn, which I had expected given what I’ve glanced from the reviews on Amazon. If you’re expecting to be thrown into the action quickly, you will be disappointed.
But it did not take long for this book to become a page turner for me. I finished this book at last year’s Lent. I’ve been wanting to talk about this book for a while, and I see this analysis as my opportunity to do so.
But the book’s ‘slow start’ brings me to the criticisms that I’ve often heard about O’Brien’s books: that they’re overly long. I haven’t read his more famous works so I can’t comment on them. But from what I’ve seen of Voyage to Alpha Centauri, I can understand where this criticism comes from.
On the other hand, the book’s length and detailed exposition on the characters’ lives are important in getting us to care about the events to come.
People who read my previous analysis may accuse me of contradicting myself given that I’ve gushed about Faith and Empire because of how it handled the protagonist’s backstory. Furthermore, the two books could not have been more different than one another once we put aside the fact that they’re both ‘Catholic Science Fiction’. Hence, readers might be forgiven for thinking that I’ve contradicted myself for liking both of them.
In my defense, Faith and Empire is a pulp fiction work while Voyage to Alpha Centauri is a ‘big men with screwdrivers’ story with a Catholic twist. Hence the blurb of this fiction analysis.
In short, I like them for different reasons. Just as I like ice cream for being cold and hot chocolate for being hot.
But let’s move on, shall we?
Like with my previous analysis, I will focus on the book’s setting, the characters, and the story.
Setting and Worldbuilding
Voyage to Alpha Centauri took place 80 years into the future. The Earth had been turned into a world government dystopia which seemed to be a combination of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But our story does not focus on Earth, but rather on the spaceship known as the Kosmos. Holding 677 people in total, the Kosmos is a ship that can travel at half the speed of light. The goal of the Kosmos is to reach the Alpha Centauri system, ascertain the possibility of life on other planets, and then go back home to report everything that had happened.
Yes, this is a ‘hard science fiction’ story.
But thankfully for people like me, O’Brien was able to write a hard science fiction story that isn’t boring.
The reason why I found this book to be a page turner (though I know that others may disagree) is because of the worldbuilding. While the story took place on the Kosmos, we learned much of the Earth based on the backstories of the characters in the book.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eventually, the Kosmos reached Alpha Centauri and discovered an inhabitable world that the people named Mundus Nova (or Nova for short). Nova is a veritable paradise, but there’s a twist. In fact, the whole history of planet Nova is a twist. Thus, I will say no more on this.
Except that it’s a great twist, though the ‘big men with screwdrivers’ crowd will probably hate it.
You can’t accuse O’Brien for being a concise writer, but I found that he knows how to write scenes that will stick with you. For me, it’s when the protagonist was using the futuristic equivalent of Netflix. All well and good except that the people in the movies literally die. Basically, there were people signing up to be actors in these movies as the means to commit suicide. It’s a win-win situation for the parties involved as the studio can now have a ‘realistic death scene’.
The scene is never mentioned again but it’s such a vivid example of the dystopia’s culture of death that I can never forget it.
If I could choose a fictional universe to live in, Voyage to Alpha Centauri would be at the very bottom of my list (sort of, read on).
Characters
Moving on to the characters. This book has a diverse cast of characters, in more ways than one. I know that ‘diversity’ is a meme nowadays and for good reason. But for this book, it makes sense since the world government brought all of the best and brightest from all around the world to be in the Kosmos.
Our hero for this story is Neil de Hoyos, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose discoveries had allowed for the development of the engine that made the voyage possible in the first place. Neil is an interesting character. Though a fallen away Catholic, he could never shake off the religion of his youth. And even as an atheist, our hero still has enough virtue that readers will find him admirable.
Neil was not the type of man to take the world government’s nonsense lying down. In the story, Neil became the unofficial leader of a group of dissidents within the Kosmos. But he quickly found out that even in space, the government reigns supreme.
The readers will easily sympathize with Neil’s plight even if he’s very much a flawed figure. This is good since Voyage to Alpha Centauri is written in first person.
The supporting characters in the book are also pretty good. The first that I’ll mention is Pia Sidotra, Neil’s physician and the closest thing we have to a lead female. She was seemingly set up to be a love interest to our hero before their dynamic was thankfully changed into a father-daughter one.
This is good since Pia’s boyfriend Paul Yusupov the pilot is an absolute chad of man. If Voyage to Alpha Centauri was an action story, then Paul would be the protagonist instead of Neil.
As for the villain of the story, we have Elif Larson (Neil mockingly called him Elf). At first Elf seemed to be nothing more than an annoying social worker, very much dedicated to making sure that the world government is respected even in space. But he turned out to be more of a threat than our hero had expected.
Readers may find Elf and his cronies from the Department of Social Infrastructure (DSI) to be an all too familiar group. But I don’t want to be too political and nor do I want to be uncharitable, so I’m just going to leave it at that.
There are way more characters in the book, but I judged these four to be the most important to the story.
Story
Finally, we get to properly talk about the story. As I said before, this book is a ‘big men with screwdrivers’ story. This is the fourth time I’ve said that phrase, so I’ll explain. For this, I’m going to enlist the help of author and blogger Brian Niemeier who coined that term:
I suggest you read the whole article since it’s a great eye opener on science fiction as a genre.
Out of the six tropes of Campbellian hard sci-fi mentioned above, they were all played with in one way or another in Voyage to Alpha Centauri. For example, we can see that the heroes try to solve their problems with their wits instead of brawn. This makes sense since Neil is a scientist, not a soldier.
On the other hand, O’Brien brutally deconstructed these tropes. Needless to say, the story is about as far away from “scientific optimism combined with classical Liberalism” as you can get. And Neil’s attempt to solve his problems with his wits didn’t go all that well either.
Normally I’m not the biggest fan of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘subversion’. But I’m willing to make an exception for ‘hard science fiction’ because there’s just a lot of nonsense that its fans take for granted. The way I see it, O’Brien is not so much tearing down the sub-genre but rather uplifting it. It’s not subversive, it’s superversive.
But I digress.
As I said before, the story itself has a first-person narrative. But in addition, it was written as a series of journal entries. This brings me to how the story itself is structured.
The early parts of the book feels like a ‘slice of life’ story where we follow Neil as he interacted with the Kosmos and the people inside. As I have mentioned earlier, the book has slow start. You won’t get to the action immediately, so readers should be patient.
But then conflict started when Neil and his friends learned that the overbearing world government had been spying on them and everyone else in the Kosmos. This was a shock for everyone who had thought that they would be free from the ‘nanny state’ in space.
This initial conflict, seemingly small in scope would have great ramifications on the story as a whole. But I’m not willing to spoil that part of the book.
The story is great. I’m torn between saying more which will spoil the book and not saying more which may not do the book justice. I’ll just say that this book has everything: adventure, mystery, romance, action, tragedy, and even lightheartedness.
Conclusion
Voyage to Alpha Centauri is a fun adventure, though its slow start may frustrate a lot of people. To those people, I ask you to keep going. For me, the book really picked up when the ship finally landed on planet Nova. Meanwhile, I love the characters and wanted the best for them.
As for the setting, I know that there are people who don’t like dystopia or downer stories in general. I am one of them. Thankfully, the book doesn’t dwell on the darkness too much. The moments of light in the story are beautiful and made even more valuable by all the darkness that surround them.
This brings me to the epilogue of the book. As the readers will learn, Neil is not the only narrator in Voyage to Alpha Centauri. This epilogue, written like Neil’s journal entries, took place about 258 years after the main events of the story.
As you can tell, all previously established characters in the story are long dead at this point.
I know this is spoilers, but this epilogue is the reason why I love the book the way I do. If it wasn’t for the epilogue, I probably would have put this book down after reading it and never touch it again.
I’m going to stop right here because I don’t want to spoil potential readers. But I will leave you all with two things about the epilogue. First, it (and the book as a whole) proves the saying that “the night is darkest just before the dawn”. Second, the final page of the book has beautiful quote (pretty sure it’s not spoilers):
-Michael P. Marpaung
I'm more than halfway through Voyage and decided to poke around the internet to find some reviews or others' thoughts about it, thus I stumbled upon your piece! Happy to find another person who has read this book!