James Hutchinson

horton_jrhutch@hotmail.com

Generation Jail

Inspired by the real-life proposed concept of a generational spaceship, where a large colony of people will live and die aboard a self-sustaining spacecraft that will travel to faraway planets over the course of hundreds of years and generations, my story follows the multi-generational family of the Graves, who struggle with existential dread over their lack of a sense of purpose in life, and grief over their eternal fates as captives of their metal rocket prison, who never got to see Earth in all its beauty. As the mission progresses, and new harrowing discoveries rear their ugly head, the ship’s freedom-starved crew start to fear that the life architected for them by the mission’s creators may be one of authoritarian control, all for the sake of interstellar colonisation that the majority of the crew - the children born of the original crew - never had a choice of being a part of.