Learning the World

Learning the World is a science fiction novel by the British writer Ken MacLeod, published in 2005. It won the 2006 Prometheus Award and was nominated that year for the Hugo, Locus, Clarke and Campbell awards, with a BSFA nomination in 2005.

A human generation ship called But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is approaching the star it calls the Destiny Star in order to make first contact, and the crew find an industrial-age alien species in the system, the first that human beings have ever encountered. The discovery upsets the protocols the ship has been run by, and a good deal of social unrest follows it.

The novel moves back and forth between the humans on the ship and the people of the world below, and treats both sides as equally complicated rather than telling the story only from the arriving ship. On the planet the civilisation has its own difficulties to manage, among them a servile species whose members have begun to behave differently from the way they have always been expected to.