The Ballad of Beta-2

The Ballad of Beta-2 is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. The book was originally published as Ace Double, together with Alpha Yes, Terra No! by Emil Petaja.

Plot

The book follows Joneny Horatio T'waboga, a student of Galactic Anthropology, who studies "The Ballad of Beta-2", a poem written by the passengers of generation ships. Some of the ships were broken and all passengers killed by some unknown force, only their broken shells arriving at the destination. In others the passengers survived, but by the time the spaceships arrived at the destination star system, it has long since been settled through the already developed FTL ships. The descendants were incapable of and uninterested in settling on the system's planets, showed themselves extremely hostile to any outsiders entering their ships, and were left alone – to continue living in the spaceships as an obscure backwater culture isolated from broader human history.

The degenerate "Star Folk" and their culture arouse little interest among the flourishing interstellar human culture. Only one researcher had bothered to record their songs, these being dismissed as "derivative" due to their repeated reference to "cities", "desert" and other Earth-bound concepts. However, an Anthropology professor charges Joneny to look deeper, pointing out that these were the only humans to ever actually cross the depths of space between the stars, since later FTL ships are able to simply bypass these depths.