Rite of Passage
by Alexei Panshin
Summary
Earth was destroyed in 2041 by its own overpopulation, and the survivors are divided between a handful of enormous generation ships built from hollowed asteroids, which kept the scientists and the technology, and the colony worlds, which got everyone else and have been left to manage.
The Ships trade knowledge to the colonies at rates the colonies resent, keep their own population under strict control, and require every fourteen year old to undergo Trial: thirty days alone on a colony planet with a horse, a weapon and no assistance. Many do not come back.
Mia Havero is twelve when the book opens, small, argumentative, the daughter of the Ship's Council chairman, and entirely certain that the colonists, whom everyone she knows calls Mudeaters, are barely people. The novel is her training, her friendship with a boy called Jimmy, her ethics tutor's uncomfortable questions, and then Trial itself on a planet called Tintera, where she finds slavery, a functioning tyranny, and people.
She comes home with an opinion, and the Ship's Assembly then votes on what to do about Tintera, and Mia loses.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, briskly told in Mia's first person, and much sharper than its shelving as a juvenile suggests.
Her ethics tutor Mr Mbele does the work the plot cannot. He asks her questions she cannot answer and declines to supply the answers, which is how she arrives at her own position rather than his.
Best for readers who want a coming of age story in which growing up means noticing that your own society is doing something monstrous, and a heroine written in 1968 who is nobody's love interest.
Historical Context & Significance
Rite of Passage won the 1968 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo.
Alexei Panshin was as well known at the time as a critic, and had already published Heinlein in Dimension, a book length critical study written while Robert Heinlein was very much alive and reportedly furious about it. This novel is often read as a reply to Heinlein's juveniles, using their structure, a competent young person tested by a hard universe, and arriving at a far less comfortable conclusion about the society doing the testing.
Panshin wrote comparatively little fiction afterwards and turned mostly to criticism, sharing a Hugo with his wife Cory Panshin in 1990 for The World Beyond the Hill, a history of science fiction. He died in 2022.