Severance by Chris Bucholz (Apex Publications, 326 pages, 2014) It’s been over two hundred years since the Argos, a generation ship, left Earth, bound for a new home (Tau Pruis III). Now, you might suppose that the people on board have somehow progressed beyond the violence and intolerance and hatred practiced on Earth in order to have survived for this long on a ship in the middle of Nowhere, Space, right? Yeah, well, not so fast…
In Severance, Bucholz takes us on a roller-coaster ride of spaceship technology, genetic manipulation, and politics as dirty and shameful as anything you can find in the news these days. Although we’re never really told why humans left Earth, or even how they decided who would get to leave, we do know that by the time the story begins, many of those on the ship are either listless, really dumb, or both. They form vomiting clubs, dress up as horses, and do all kinds of other “interesting” things to stave off the intense and mind-numbing boredom that comes with shooting through space on a pretty uninteresting ship.
