signalling device. Before they leave the base, they also disable the captured scoutship. Soon after Mia and Jimmy return from Trial, a Shipwide Assembly debates what to do about Tintera. The Tinterans are Free Birthers, possibly slavers, and a potential danger to the Ship itself. As Mia hears the Assembly's debate, however, she understands that her views have changed. Her moral world has broadened to include the Tinterans as people, rather than faceless spear carriers to be used and discarded. Thus she cannot bring herself to condemn the Tinterans en masse. However, under the leadership of Mia's father, who perceives the Tinterans as beyond re-education, the Assembly votes by an eight-to-five margin to destroy Tintera in the name of 'moral discipline'. Mia and Jimmy, as adults, prepare to settle into their own living quarters on board Ship. Jimmy offers the hope that they will someday be in a position to change their society. Reception Algis Budrys praised Rite of Passage as an "intensely believable, movingly personalized story," saying that "each of the little, perfectly realized steps" in the story "is so perfectly done that one feels a real shock as one realizes that Panshin after all has never been a girl growing up aboard a hollowed-out planetoid." James Blish also received the novel favorably, saying "[T]his is not just another starship book, but a fully realized, lived-in world. I found the novel a little long and slow-moving for my taste, but I was charmed by its heroine. . . . [E]ven the slow slow sections were a pleasure to read". Aldiss and Wingrove, however, declared that the novel "lacks the spark of life which might have fired its interesting subject matter . . . For all its craft and its attempt to create an intelligent updating of a Heinlein juvenile, it proves tiresome rather than inspired." Themes The theme of generational conflict was timely in the novel's year of publication, 1968. Long-lived adults form the overwhelming majority of the population aboard Mia's ship. Although they are generally benevolent and trustworthy, the society they have created appears complacent and aimless. Just as Mia must escape from the self-imposed limits of her shipboard “quad” if she is to survive Trial and achieve adulthood, it seems that the society of the Ship will have to escape its comfortable routine of drifting from planet to planet if it is ever to make use of