The Ballad of Beta-2
Cover of first edition paperback
|
|
| Author | Samuel R. Delany |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Jack Gaughan |
| Cover artist | Ed Valigursky |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Ace Books |
|
Publication date
|
1965 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 96 pp |
| OCLC | 4371489 |
The Ballad of Beta-2 is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany.
The book was originally published as Ace Double M-121, together with Alpha Yes, Terra No! by Emil Petaja. The first stand alone edition was published in 1971. In 1977 a corrected edition came out, in a hardcover edition published by Gregg Press with an introduction by Marilyn Hacker.
The story is about the history of an ill-fated multi-generational interstellar expedition of discovery. Some of the ships were broken and all passengers killed by some unknown force, only their broken shells arriving at the destination. In others the passengers survived, but by the time the spaceships arrived at the destination star system, it has long since been settled through the already developed FTL ships. The descendants were incapable of and uninterested in settling on the system's planets, showed themselves extremely hostile to any outsiders entering their ships, and were left alone - to continue living in the spaceships as an obscure backwater culture isolated from broader human history.
The degenerate "Star Folk" and their culture arouse little interest among the flourishing interstellar human culture. Only one researcher had bothered to record their songs, these being dismissed as "derivative" due to their repeated reference to "cities", "desert" and other Earth-bound concepts. However, an Anthropology professor charges a promising student with looking deeper, pointing out that these were the only humans to ever actually cross the depths of space between the stars, since later FTL ships are able to simply bypass these depths. The professor's intuition proves amply right.
The student, for his thesis, is charged with investigating the source and antecedents of a ballad which begins
She walked through the gates and the children cried,
She walked through the Market and the voices died,
She walked past the court house and the judge so still,
She walked to the bottom of Death's Head hill...
On arriving at the spot, the student finds the present day Star Folk in themselves just as much of an uninteresting dead end as had been supposed - but he still makes very startling and important discoveries. First, he encounters a kind of "child" with supernatural powers - teleportation, living in a vacuum, and more. Then he discovers the records left by earlier passengers, from which he pieces out the tragic history of these ships. This forms the bulk of the book, with the student being in effect just the frame story.
...
Wikipedia