"Papillon IV is a science fiction story about environmentalism. The story follows Ao, a 5 year old who gets in trouble for teasing her brother. Her father, an elder in the village, sends her to “Odom’s” library for education.
In the library, she is exposed to history, starting on earth, and visiting various parts of the galaxy. Odom, an AI, guides her through this journey.
There Ao learns about the history of the Papillon IV ship and its lasting impact. Pavilion IV was an ark ship, a pilgrim ship that takes generations to arrive to its destination. The first ark ship in this universe was a success, but the second a failure. As there was fear subsequent ships might face a similar fate, this ship was sitting unused.
The earth at this time was terribly polluted, requiring masks for everyday use. Ao is told about a young girl, Pauline, whose school room collapses and garbage floods in, killing some of the students. Pauline becomes an activist and wants the garbage blasted into space. They decide to use the ark ship for this purpose. Unfortunately, all the garbage doesn’t fit, and so a less scrupulous world leader decides to just attach a net to the ship to hold the remaining trash.
In a sense, the story of Papillon IV is the story of this trash. The ship and poorly packaged trash is blasted into space where it causes not one, but two incidents as well as leaving a trail of trash behind in space.
The book has a few recurring themes, for example, the book often features youth as agents of change, whereas oftentimes older people who are set in their ways pose problems. The book notably has an 8 year old girl saving an entire civilization of people. Call me a bit of a cynic, but the message is a little optimistic in the role that an individual can make to the universe. That isn’t a slight on the book by any means, if anything, it might be on me.
I think most of the sci-fi in the book is good and makes sense. Some of the ideas presented in the book stretch the imagination slightly. Like the idea of putting trash into space is a little questionable for me, at least with current tech it makes no sense. Granted this is in the future, so technology could have improved. In fact, maybe with one of those gravity elevators or something this could work.
The way the trash leaks from the net was also a bit of a problem in my mind, as it leaves a trail to Earth. The problem here though, is any trash that escaped the net, would continue moving forward at the same speed as the ship it escaped from, as there is no friction in space to slow the trash. Granted, depending on the acceleration of the ship, there could still be some trash left behind, as the ship begins to move faster than the trail. Still though, there is quite a lot of time between when the trash is left in space and when the trail is relevant again in the story. Perhaps with some kind of warp drive which alters space time in the front of the ship, the trash would be left behind moving incredibly slow and therefore maintain a trail over the course of the 100s of years from when it was left there.
In any case, I don’t think those potential issues/ non issues really detract from the book. I enjoyed the book and read it pretty quickly. The book has great profluence, I think mostly because you want to know what happens next in the narrative. Without spoiling anything, the ending really ties everything together. The book really comes full circle in a way I think is really neat. The environmental message of the book is poignant, although, perhaps slightly heavy handed at times. In any case the book is still most certainly worth a read and I highly recommend it."
