Arkwright

Arkwright is a science fiction novel by Allen M. Steele, published in 2016. Its title belongs to Nathan Arkwright, a writer whose best-known work belongs to an earlier generation and who has spent his last years refusing to appear before the readers who made him, and who is estranged from almost everyone except the family that will carry on after him.

Nathan is not finished, though. He is convinced that human beings cannot survive indefinitely on Earth, and he leaves behind a foundation with one purpose: to build a colony on an Earth-like planet several light years away, paid for and staffed by the family that carries his name. The people who inherit that instruction inherit a career, a duty and a loyalty test at the same time.

A colony several light years away cannot be built in one lifetime, so the book spans several, and each generation has to decide how much of its own life to spend on a result none of them will live to see. The strain is not only technical; it is the ordinary pull between a promise a family has made and the private lives of the people who have to keep it, and the novel stays in the long middle of that promise.