Worlds Enough and Time

This story rambles a bit more than its prequel "Worlds" did, but it is still an interesting story that moves along at a good clip and leaves one with some disturbing insights into human character. It is now time for O'Hara and other residents of New New York to move out beyond the Solar System, this in an attempt to mitigate any future potential of war and war's ability to render Homo sap extinct. The main theme is still there, only magnified now across light years: Human cultures keep dividing into tribes, which ultimately come in conflict with each other. Human history has already proved that tribal fanaticism and the desire to prevail often overshadows a more basic instinct, which is to preserve the species. Through a light-years-long journey, Haldeman explores how even rational human beings divide themselves into tribes, first between the residents of New New York and Earth, New New York and other "worlds", New New York and its starship to Epsilon, and then between the passengers and crew of the starship itself. Society has already divided itself into career "tracks", engineering and policy, and these "tracks" are further muddled by multi-spouse family lines, those in and out of suspended animation, an emergent fundamentalist religion, and finally, those who prefer to remain aboard the ship and those who migrate down to the new planet below. Once planet-side the humans follow an all-too-familiar pattern, which is, attempting to wipe out a threatening species before that species is fully understood. The species turns out to be not only sentient, but omniscient as well, and O'Hara must play the role of Job, brutally tested in order to save her own species from annihilation. The Old-Testament God/Aliens have power over time and space, have wiped out undeserving species in the past, and appear a little bored as they put O'Hara through her trials. In the end, people tighten up a bit, become less aggressive toward each other, and look toward a more sensible sociological future. All of this seems to reinforce the messages of philosophers from Plato to George Washington to Karl Marx: Plato, who believed that the masses could only be governed by a ruling elite, George Washington, who added "so help me God" to the oath of office in hopes of unifying the scattered interests of the nascent United States, and Karl Marx, who called religion the "opiate of the masses" and was partially correct, at least in that observation--which leaves the reader to wonder if human beings can ever remain peacefully unified, given worlds enough and time.