In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a shipment of young boys escaping the nightly bombardment of WWII England crash land on a remote uninhabited island and, left to their own devices, attempt to organize rescue and their own society. Reward and punishment is doled out with the knee-jerk brashness that would conceivably come with children-led governance and their laissez-faire island society quickly turns to brutish power struggles and, soon, murder. Neil Burger’s Voyagers borrows Golding’s premise and jettisons it into outer space, stirring in a rudimentary thought experiment about control, pleasure, and autonomy, to mixed results. Read More