Last Ship to Proxima Centauri - Greg Lam

. .

Résumé :

Mr Spock likely would have raised an eyebrow and proclaimed th[is] play 'fascinating.'

LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI zips issues of immigration, race, gender, ethnicity, genetics, demographics, history, politics and economics, to name just a few, into space suits for a dark comedy set in a not-so-appealing future. There's definitely a lot to think about in this highly imaginative and sometimes quite biting work.

The titular ship is one of several launched on a mission to save thousands of humans from a planet Earth that's no longer inhabitable. Rotating crews, who are otherwise suspended in a life-extending stasis, take the con as millennia pass. After an unexpected delay, the last ship gets a signal from planet Proxima Centauri, and the two on-duty crew members celebrate madly.

Not so fast. In author Lam's Clauder Competition-winning creation, the current inhabitants of the planet have several rather probing questions they'd like to ask before their committee decides if the new arrivals will be welcomed. For example, why is this ship from America populated mostly by privileged white people while the new world of Proxima Centauri is in the hands of people who came from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds?

Who takes on the role of outsiders in this new world? The planetary tables have been turned. But is the new order on Proxima any better? The author relentlessly pulls on these threads while the action of a hard landing on a distant planet plays out.

Steve Feeny, Portland Press Herald

...Greg Lam's dark-comic sci-fi drama LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI. A Clauder Competition winner, this [is a] pointed and very entertaining show....

Like all good science fiction, LAST SHIP provides a fantasy world of cultural inversions and alternatives, the better for us to consider our own reality.

In this case, Lam gives us an opportunity to rethink American culture by watching what happens when white Euro-Americans show up as refugees in a society that wasn't settled by white people, a society whose historical memory of white America includes some Frasier, but a lot more colonialist violence. LAST SHIP channels classic sci-fi tropes to pose challenging questions about race, immigration ethics and politics, the legacy of hegemony, and the plasticity of historical narrative....

In his storytelling, Lam deepens these genre hijinks with his rich world-building of the new planet, which is multicultural...but definitely not utopian-kind of like Hawaii under the rule of Chairman Mao....

LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI continues the sci-fi tradition of letting the last frontier take us back, however uncomfortably, to our own home-to seeing how it might look from a distance, and from the outside.

Megan Grumbling, Portland Phoenix