Rite of Passage

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This article is about the science fiction novel. For the Stargate SG-1 episode, see Rite of Passage (Stargate SG-1).

Rite of Passage ISBN 0-671-44068-3 is a science fiction novel by Alexei Panshin. Published in 1968, this novel about a Shipboard teenager's coming of age won that year's Nebula Award.

Rite of Passage is told as a flashback by Mia Havero, the daughter of the Chairman of the Ship's Council, after she has completed her own rite of passage, also known as Trial. She has survived for thirty days on a colony planet with minimal supplies as part of her initiation into adulthood on one of the many Ships that survived Earth's destruction in AD 2041. To prevent overpopulation on the Ships, family units can only produce children with the approval of the Ships' Eugenics Council. The penalty for breaking this rule is exile to a colony world.

By the year 2196, Mia Havero is twelve years old and, like most of Ship-bound humanity, regards the colonists as "Mudeaters", a derogatory reference to frontier life on a planet. When she accompanies her father on a trading mission to the planet Grainau, Mia learns from the children of a Grainau trader that the feeling is mutual; many on the colony worlds call Ship people "Grabbies" because they take whatever they physically can't produce on the Ships in return for abstract knowledge and technology, the heritage of Earth.

When Mia returns to the Ship, in addition to her regular studies, she chooses to take survival class the following year. Survival class is every thirteen-year-old's preparation for Trial. By placing adolescents in situations they would normally encounter on a planet, the Ship's population hopes to prepare them for a productive adult life. However, the mortality rate of Trial participants is quite high, so no expense is spared to make the fourteen-year-olds the best they can be.

In 2198, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Mia and her class are dispatched to the planet Tintera. She quickly chooses the tiger strategy over the turtle strategy; that is, she chooses to act on this world rather than hide out for the month that she's on planet. Mia soon encounters two slave catchers on horseback, and they capture her as compensation for losing the Losels, native humanoids they use as slave labor. When Mia gets to the nearest town for protection, she's at first repulsed by the fact that all Tinterans are "Free Birthers" -- they have no population control.

One of the natives, political dissident Daniel Kutsov, explains to Mia that her own speech gives her away as being from the Ship. She also learns that they've captured one more Trial participant and a scoutship from a previous expedition. Kustov tells Mia that Ship people are at the best of times regarded with indifference, and at the worst times killed. Daniel helps Mia escape and reach the territorial jail where the participant, a boy her age named Jimmy Dentremont, is being held. They ride away from the jail together, and Daniel sacrifices himself so they can escape the territory.

Riding through the night in the pouring rain, Mia and Jimmy arrive the following day at police headquarters for the province, where Jimmy retrieves his signal device which will call for the Ship to pick them up at the end of the Trial month. Before they leave Tintera, they're also able to blow up the building where the scoutship has been stored.

The day after Mia and Jimmy return with fifteen others (out of a total thirty sent to Tintera), preparations are made for a Shipwide Assembly to debate what to do about Tintera because they're Free Birthers, possibly enslavers, and a potential danger to the Ship itself. As Mia hears and takes part in the Assembly's debate, her views change so she can't bring herself to condemn the Tinterans en masse. Despite the fact that the Tinterans -- and by extension, all colony worlds -- may feel resentment at the Ships' "unfair" withholding of human knowledge, the Ships nevertheless seek to avoid what happened to Earth. Perceiving the Tinterans as beyond re-education, the Assembly votes by an eight-to-five margin to destroy Tintera in the name of 'moral discipline'. Mia and Jimmy, as adults, are now obliged to settle in their own living quarters on board Ship, but they known they will someday be in a position to change things themselves.