Book Review: Rite of Passage

Alexei Panshin

1968

Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

The main character of Rite of Passage is a twelve-year-old girl, Mia Havero, who lives on a spaceship with her father and a couple tens of thousands of other people. They live on the ship, wandering across the galaxy, because 160 years ago Earth was rendered unfit for human habitation in some kind of apocalyptic war. The war's survivors fled in ships; intellectuals (like Mia’s forebears) stayed aboard, and less skilled, less educated people settled on various colony planets.

The ships and the colony planets have had a strained relationship ever since, one in which the ships get goods and materials from the colonies and the colonies get a teensy bit of carefully doled-out technological help in return.

Because space on the ships is finite, overpopulation is a potential problem. Ship residents learned hard lessons from overpopulation on Earth (which is sort of implied to be the cause of the war) and have taken measures to keep their numbers constant. One such measure is that when any child turns fourteen, they have to go through a Trial: they get dropped on a random colony planet, raw and wild and backward, and have to last there, alone, for a month. If they survive to be picked back up by their ship, they are adults with full voting rights. If they don’t, well, then, they don’t. It’s a bit far-fetched and passive-aggressive as a method of population control, but there it is.

Mia is precociously smart, self-reliant, and inquisitive. She is also undisciplined (by either her absent mother or her preoccupied, hands-off father), obnoxiously prejudiced about people who are different than her, and more than a little bit antisocial in the way she thinks only about herself. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to really care, how her rude and snotty comments hurt others.

                                         

This book is billed as a sympathetic coming-of-age story, in which our heroine starts out as a naïve child in a cloistered world and then is forced to grow up and conquer her fears and preconceptions through a series of challenges. But it comes off more as the story of a self-centered girl who gets away with a lot of insensitivity by being brash, plucky, and resourceful. And maybe learns a little bit of tolerance at the end, in spite of herself.

Mia’s challenges start when her father gets elected to the chairmanship of the Ship’s Council, and they have to move to a new level of the ship away from all her friends. At first she thinks that all the people on her new level are stupid, but eventually she fights, bullies, and daredevils her way into the good graces of a new group of friends and realizes that maybe they’re pretty much the same as the people she knew on her old level.

Her second challenge is when her father brings her with him on a diplomatic trip to the colony planet of Grainau, where she first meets some of the planet-dwellers that she and her friends have grown up calling “Mudeaters.” She meets colonist kids who think she is snotty (which she is) and self-centered (which she is) and part of a system that denies them access to technology that would help them advance (which she is) and she, in turn, thinks that they’re grubby and smelly and stupid and wear weird clothes. She doesn’t really leave the planet having changed her mind about any of this.

Mia’s training for trial, which starts a year and a half before Trial itself, brings on more challenges, including proving herself to a new group of peers and, somewhat randomly, learning to ride a horse, building a log cabin, and killing a tiger. It is pretty taxing, and I guess there is a sense of victory in it when she accomplishes each of these things, but it doesn’t seem to teach her to be any less opinionated or any more aware of others.

And, finally, at fourteen, Mia goes through her Trial itself. She is dropped onto the colony planet Tintera and discovers that the people there are Free-Birthers, which means they go having children willy-nilly as much as they want, and she is appalled by that. She runs afoul of a bunch of nasty road bandits who destroy her homing beacon, and she is angry at that. She meets locals who seem like they are enslaving the indigenous semi-intelligent life forms, and she is disgusted by that. But, all in all, it is oddly anti-climactic; it doesn't seem all that much harder than any of the challenges she faced on the ship when she was younger.

And she also doesn’t go back to the ship all that much changed. She does run into the elderly Tinterian Mr. Kutsov, who provides her with her obligatory example of the Kindly Mudeater, letting her hole up in his house for a couple weeks. But she later abandons Mr. Kutsov, and then witnesses him being beaten to death by the police, which doesn’t do much to alleviate her prejudice of planet-dwellers in general. And she does rescue her friend Jimmy, also on Trial on Tintera, who has been clapped into jail by the colonists when he was spying around one of their military yards, and who, conveniently, still has a working homing beacon. But she still says and does things that hurt him and offers little in the way of apology.