The Dazzle of Day

As soon as I finished reading this book, I wrote the author a fan letter. That has happened only once before in my long years as a reader, when I had read Mary Doria Russell's "Sparrow." I would not have known about "The Dazzle of Day" had it not been for a passing reference to it by Ursula K. LeGuin in an introduction to one of her novellas. I discovered that the book is out of print, which amazed and saddened me. It needs to be rediscovered and reprinted and to have the widest possible readership. The quality of the writing beggars description. There is not one false note. Each word is precisely the right word, each sentence is perfectly constructed, each character--and there are many--is presented in all of his or complexity and with profound sympathy, and the story takes the form it must and begins and ends as it must. The book evokes deep feeling without the least tinge of sentimentality. It is a story with hard edges, a sweet story about community, about faith, hope, and love. Oh, yes: It is a chronicle of "generational" space travel. It made me fall in love with Earth all over again and it stirred up my long-lived dream of the stars.

This must be one of the more unconventional approaches to SF in general and generation ships in particular.The story is slow-moving. We get into the heads of about five different viewpoint characters of different ages, sexes and professions, and stay with them for large parts of the book. In the end, I have a pretty good idea about life on the generation ship; how it works, how they reach decisions, what they eat, how they marry, how they date and how they simply live together. Nothing really exciting ever happens, it's a very calm, steady story.This feels very different from most other SF I've read, where something *happens*. Here, I came away from the story with an understanding of life on the ship, but not much more. I don't know if there IS more to take from this book and I just haven't found it yet (that's what I suspect), or if that's actually what the story is about.I liked the use of Esperanto names and phrases, it made for a nice background. The technological background seemed okay to me. It blended nicely into the general framework of the story.Only four stars, because the ending left me musing over the story and what exactly it all meant, and I still haven't made up my mind.

Science fiction fans might find this book hard going at first because it spends so much time on the daily lives of the Quaker farmers aboard a multigenerational colony ship. For long stretches, it doesn't feel like a sci-fi novel at all, but when the sci-fi elements appear, they are well worth the extensive groundwork. There is a trek across a harsh planetary landscape, for example, that makes other sci-fi descriptions of harsh environments seem either pedestrian or cartoonish by comparison. (Not because it's harsher than any of these other terrains, but because the writing is so much more realistic and vivid.) And the final scene, a snapshot of the future society these colonists eventually found, is a sight that every inhabit of this weary world should see. It will do your spirit good, even if it's only glimpsed in fiction.Read my full length review at http://www.freemanng.net/blog/2014/11/30/review-the-dazzle-of-day

The story was interesting but not compelling. I liked reading and understanding a bit more about Quaker values and beliefs.

_The Dazzle of Days_ is an sf book full of extraordinary happenings--it's starts with a suicide out on a solar sail and has shipwreck and life altering decisions in it--but it's not an adventure story. The people in it--Utopian Quakers, felt right to me since they are the kind of idealist who mirror the Puritans in New England and the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania, and so many other groups who decided to settle a new land--and the Mennonites today who are settling in South America or the Japanese in Brazil. There's no leader in this story, no bright shining person or anti-hero. This is more like my life. More the way that things seem to actually get done in my experience. But full of delightful touches, of wild birds and ants and complicated marriages.I wouldn't have liked this book when I was twenty-five, and it's charms are not perhaps for every one. But this was, for me, one of the finest books published in the last couple of years.

A beautifully written book--serene yet exciting--about a future when mankind has left the Earth to search forsomewhere else to live. The twist is that the "pioneers" are Quakers--a group known for valuing simplicity and silence. After generations of travel in their space ship- a beautifully integrated "planet" where nothing is wasted and everything is valued-- the travellers, who never knew the Earth in its last days of decline, have to decide whether or not to start a new life on a seemingly inimical planet. Wonderful!

Bien que The Dazzle of Day ait été écrit en 1996, il est encore plus pertinent dans le monde d'aujourd'hui. La langue est tres précis et élegant, et les personnages s'animent à travers les détails de l'auteure. J'aime beaucoup cet livre!

A generation ship travels between earth and the stars. The crew are Quakers, they deal with various issues and come to land on a new world. It's a strange book - hailed as literary in that it concentrates on the relationships, but the different POVs and century plus make it hard to bond with any character. There's action, deaths and sexual assaults, and technical detail where I didn't want it, and not enough description where I did. It is nice to have a generation ship story where humanity doesn't slide into barbarism or tyranny. But it's just an odd book to categorise. As a Quaker, though not from this particular branch, the Quaker bit might just baffle you. Somewhere between four and two stars

The book is not complete. There are missing pages. It jumps from page 21 to 57. What am I supposed to do with this?