Many suffer feelings of loneliness and powerlessness that lead to depression and sometimes suicide. Social pressure can be intense in a community with no physical escape valve – no hills to head to, no rivers to cross. The voyagers may fear the new, but they also fear for the future of their ship. We ought to just stay right here.”Īs the meeting continues, other voices rise. If they are seriously thinking about dismantling their ship to reuse its elements on the new planet, why not stay in the ship and save the trouble? “I don’t see why we need to come out into the sunlight,” says one resident. In the crucial meeting for business, speakers voice practical concerns about the new planet and, simultaneously, their comfort with the familiar – all in ways that echo the caution with which a comfortable meeting may approach any new venture. A decision will have to be made before the ship’s trajectory carries it past the planet. The ship encapsulates and protects its inhabitants, but at the expense of creating a quietly mounting sense of unease and dissatisfaction. Like a cozy, ingrown meeting, the Dusty Miller has become a mental cocoon through its familiarity. “Lately it was the same dozen or so who would stand and offer their voices, people not known for the weight of their judgment, but for not being timid.” With the momentous decision about the ships’ future before them, however, seventy or even eighty people have been turning out, leading to rambling meetings that the clerk can’t keep from straying into debates about details. Attendance at Alaudo Monthly Meeting is usually fifteen or twenty people, out of two hundred adults, everyone else being willing to leave things up to the few folks who either like to talk or to get things done. The housing in the spaceship clusters into eight neighborhoods with regular monthly meetings. Another gets flak for sitting atop a table so she can see everyone: Isn’t she putting herself above everyone else? One lets the opening silence at business meeting stretch longer than many prefer. A committee meets to deal with some practical matters and goes around in circles. Members of the Ministry and Counsel Committee, responsible for sensing the time to close meeting have been “erring on the side of inaction.” One character likes their “inefficient spiritualness” better than the approach of earlier committee members who “were without sufficient silence.”Īs the story proceeds, Gloss reproduces other familiar aspects of Quaker process. Over several pages, the meeting’s participants offer a series of disconnected messages. We first sit in on a First Day meeting for worship, attended by half the adults in what amounts to a small co-housing community. The book introduces Quaker practice gradually. Not herself a Friend, Gloss also studied a variety of meeting minutes stored in the George Fox University and Northwest Yearly Meeting archives. For Dazzle of Day, she put in research time at the library of George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Gloss is a meticulous researcher, as her historical novels demonstrate admirably. In The Dazzle of Day, women are the glue that keeps their supremely isolated community functioning. Set in the American West, her historical novels – including The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses – highlight strong, independent women. Molly Gloss is a Portlander who writes both science fiction and historical fiction. In the meanwhile, successive generations live in a massive ship-world that is large enough to maintain a fully functioning ecology. Only their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will see a new world. The generation that launched the ship will die before it reaches its destination. Without wormhole or warp drive as a convenient work-around, a ship will take decades or generations to reach even moderately close star systems. In a universe that respects Einsteinian physics, the speed of starships is limited by the speed of light. Being steeped in Quaker ways, they will engage in a lot of talking before they decide – and a business meeting will mark the point of decision. The passengers will have to decide whether to risk adapting to a cold, windswept environment or to continue their search in an aging and slowly deteriorating ship. The body of the novel then jumps 175 years ahead, when the ship is nearing a star system with a planet that is habitable but far from ideal. Residents are trying to decide whether to join the interstellar journey of the starship Dusty Miller, which is about to embark on a multi-century voyage in search of a habitable planet. The story begins in a Quaker community in Costa Rica. That’s the challenge that Molly Gloss meets in her science fiction novel The Dazzle of Day. Here’s a challenge: Write a novel in which a Quaker business meeting is the dramatic pivot point.
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