QTL March Madness 2025: Coolest Science Fiction Ships

Welcome back to another year of the Quill to Live’s Sci-Fi Fantasy March Madness! Every year in March, I find myself roped into all sorts of fantasy and sci-fi fight conversations. “Who would win in a fight between X and Y?” is a constant topic among fans, as everyone wants to make an inane argument about who would win in fisticuffs. Boring. Last year, 2024, we decided to get to the bottom of which of our favorite characters would get the last laugh. This year, we decided to be more scientific and find out once and for all what is the coolest ship of all of science fiction literature.

Below, you will find a list of all of the spaceships the Quill to Live team put forth as being super rad. We decided to remove spaceships that are primarily featured in visual science fiction, as we didn’t want Star Wars and Star Trek, with their many very cool ships, overrunning the brackets. Instead, we decided to flex our memories and imaginations and focus on the ships that are primarily described in the text of books alone. The goal of this competition is to determine which ship has the objective (subjective) coolest design and concept. Due to the limit of our collective reading (great as it may be), we obviously couldn’t get every baller ship in the bracket, but we have some real powerhouses in play:

Heighliner – Dune – An enormous galactic freighter that transports spice across the universe by folding space
Justice of Toren – Ancillary Justice – A Ship AI that was ripped out of its cruiser and stuffed into a human shell and handed a gun
Heart of Gold – Hitchhikers Guide – A Magical ship with an improbability drive that is always doing something unpredictable
ART – Murderbot – A transport ship with an incredible personality and a love of bad media
Warmoths – Ninefox Gambit – Grown moth fighter ships that make up the foot soldiers of the empire
GSVs – The Culture – The varied and chaotic planet-sized ships of the Culture with their many personalities and quirks
Yggdrasill – Hyperion – An interstellar tree-ship with many self-contained biomes that serves as a shepherd for its passengers
Rocinante – The Expanse – A ship that has grown and changed with its crew over a 9-book series
Heart of the Tempest – The Expanse – A Laconian capital ship with insane and bizarre protomolecule weaponry
The Nauvoo – The Expanse – A generation ship that has gone through many incredible roles in its storied life
The Harrow – Salvagers – A legendary ship that lies at the end of a galaxy treasure hunt with a terrible secret
The Capricious – Salvagers – A cargo ship that combines magic and technology to move quickly and ward off foes
Nostalgia for Infinity – Revelation Space – A gigantic modular adaptive ship that vulturizes itself
Heaven’s Sword – Shards of Earth – A Partheni warship stuffed to the gills with genetically enhanced valkyrie
The Profundity of Depth – Children of Ruin – An enigmatic water ship piloted by octopi and colors
Aurora – Aurora – A ship with 12 biomes with several different cultures inside each biome
Outlaw Star – Outlaw Star – A sleek grappler ship with mechanical arms on the outside that wield a pistol and an axe
Gloriana Class Battleships – Warhammer 40k – One of the biggest, coolest classes of imperial battleships that were built during the great crusade and function as mobile headquarters for space marine chapters
Weight for the Wheel – Desolation Called Peace – Aztec/Asian/Byzantine super ship that brings the weight of its culture to rewrite reality around it
The Great Ship – Marrow – A ship believed to be forged out of jovian supermass that contains a planet inside it
Astron – The Dark Beyond The Stars – A ship that is over 100 generations old built out of a nanomachine system
Theseus – Blindsight – A ship that transforms and adapts using highly reactive technology to its circumstances
Light of Berossus – Velocity Weapon – A WMD with the mind of a child and the keys to the universe
Earth – The Wandering Earth – Strapped engines onto our planet, turned it into a spaceship, and shot it into space
The Wayfarer/Lovey – Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – A tunneling ship with a lot of personality and a heart full of love
The Wheelships – Unconquerable Sun – They are metaphorical horses for space Alexander the Great, what’s not to like? Also, piloted by electronically enslaved supersoldiers
Solar Flare – Half-Built Garden – A ship built out of a destroyed planet
Chindi – Chindi – Giant museum ship floating through the stars
The Tzadkiel – Book of the New Sun – You think you are in a castle, jk, you are vaulting through a hard vacuum in a spaceship
The Third Fish – Binti – Who doesn’t want to fly through space on a sentient shrimp ship
Slugships – Sister of the Vast Black – Who doesn’t want to hurtle through space in super biomes contained inside nature’s ugliest animal
Brainships – The Ship Who Sang – Children with medical debt get fused to enslaved ship AI’s in order to profligate capitalism

As always, to make this as fair as possible, we randomized all of the matchups and slotted them into a bracket. We then had QTL members who were familiar with both ships in the match-up go through a very scientific, meticulous, and objective (subjective) system to determine the true, unarguable winners of each match-up. I jest; we mostly went off vibes. This is extremely objective (subjective), sorry if one of us shot down your favorite cruiser. To save us all some time and real estate, here is the completed bracket so you can react to it from start to finish.

Our grand winner is The Heart of Gold and its incredible Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But the interesting part of these dogfights is less who the grand winner is and more certain matchups and how we think they would play out. So, instead, for the rest of this piece, we want to talk about a bunch of specific throwdowns and why we think they are super cool.

Slugship vs. Warmoth – You have heard of flying space whale ships, but what other animals can we cram passengers into and shoot into space? There are a lot of very cool bio-organic animal hybrid ships in science fiction that we like a lot. Two that stand out from the pack are the disgusting (and neat) slugships and the elegant and beautiful mothships. This decision could have gone either way, but after some heated debate, we decided that the idea of flying around on interstellar moths was slightly cooler than flying around in the slimy insides of slugs. However, this raises the question of what would be the coolest animal to carve out the insides of, climb inside, and launch into space to explore the stars. I am partial to jellyfish with lightyear-long trailing tentacles, but that’s just me.

Outlaw Star vs. Heighliner – The Heighliner is among the most iconic science fiction spaceships. It’s an enormous spacefolding freightship that drags its enormous mass across the Dune universe, transporting spice for the intergalactic empire. Herbert designed the Heighliner with a lot of thought for its thematic representation in the series, and I love how well it encapsulates all the thought-provoking and amazing ideas of Dune. Unfortunately, I think strapping a sword to the side of a spaceship is unfortunately cooler. The Outlaw Star does that incredibly powerful thing where it introduces an idea that’s so incredibly stupid but leans into the bit so hard that it somehow loops around back to supercool. Coming up with contrived and convoluted reasons for spaceships to need to be right next to one another so they could punch the shit out of another is a lot, but the Outlaw Star certainly earns a spot as one of the most interesting and unique ships on the list.

Gloriana vs. Yggrasill – The QTL members have read a collective ton of military science fiction over the years, and one of the most consistent features of these stories is bigger and more badass ships with untold numbers of guns slapped on their hulls. We wanted these ever-present staples of written Sci-Fi to be represented, and what could be a better poster child than the Gloriana Class Battleship from Warhammer 40K? The Gloriana’s are satirically large space aircraft carriers with enough guns to have their own gravitational pull. They are headquarters for the various spacemarine factions (also super cool), and they were the staging points for an intergalactic crusade. All of this is cool, but there is only so much road you can give to increasingly destructive warships. The Yggrasill, on the other hand, is a huge tree hurtling through space with its protective biomes. It feels more imaginative by its very nature, and I want to dig into all of its floors to see what wonders it is carrying. I am more curious as to how the ship works, and it feels like there is a lot more space to be explored with the Yggrisill.

Light of Berrosus vs. Earth – I am a big fan of a ship so powerful that it becomes the plot destabilizing McGuffin that everyone is scrambling to control. Light of Berrosus is a bomb with engines strapped to it. It is a device that can destroy reality and time, and its very existence sends sweeping anxiety throughout the cosmos for any being that has achieved sentience. Yet, while this is both very cool and very scary, it is hard to beat the absolutely insane idea of just strapping thousands of super engines to the side of our home planet and then just shooting it into space to find a new star. Converting our cradle of life into a bootstrap spaceship and then just smashing a doomsday button to hurtle everyone into deep space is one of the most insane and ballsy moves I have read in science fiction. This absolutely takes the medal for sheer gumption. Unfortunately, while I do absolutely love the chaos of this ‘ship’, I do think that some of our competitors from other sides of the bracket do embody the idea of coolest better.

The Justice of Toren vs. The Profundity of Depth – The Justice of Toren is one of the coolest ships in this entire bracket (as can be seen by how far it made it), but I would also argue that it was placed up against the strongest other competitors round after round. Justice has so many wild things going for it. First off, the actual literal ship contains a multitude of undead slave navigators that allow the ship to achieve parallel awareness in a way that feels like Walmart omniscience. But on top of that, you have the fact that this entire ship gets shoved into a meat puppet that has to imitate a facsimile of human life in order to get elaborate revenge. 10/10 perfect from conception to execution, an absolutely banger of a ship. However, the Justice was placed up against heavy weight after heavy weight and had to crawl its way to the top. The Profundity of Depth, which Justice only just beat in the votes, is a spaceship with a self-contained ocean that is controlled through color and interpretive dance and is piloted by uplifted octopi. It is absolutely insane that I have to say the previous sentence and then follow it up with “and it lost.” Profundity is one of the ships that feels like a Rubik’s cube when you are first presented with it. Tchaikovsky clearly designed the ship to challenge how we imagine a species might interact with the world around it, and this is reflected in the ship’s very imaginative design. If we had spent more time in Profundity, it might have edged out the win, but this round goes to the Justice of Toren.

The Rociante vs. Weight for the Wheel – Weight for the Wheel is a remarkable ship with a good run in the bracket. Its ability to manifest the full weight (hehe) of a culture’s beliefs as a physical weapon is dope, and it works as a powerful metaphor for the momentum of the Teixcalaanli civilization’s actions and decisions. However, Weight unfortunately got paired up against one of our top seeds, the Rociante. The Rociante is such an interesting ship both for its design/technology and for how it ages with its crew in the structure of the narrative. In the early books, this marvel of technology schools everything else flying. But by the end of the series, it is essentially a sputtering relic that is massively outclassed by the other ships around it. The Rociante’s constantly evolving identity makes it one of the most captivating and coolest ships in Science Fiction, and it will take a vessel oozing with coolness to outpace it.

The Justice of Toren vs. GSVs – After a legendary run, Justice has fallen by the skin of its teeth. The Culture has so many cool ships, ranging from the Limited Systems Vehicles (LSV) to the General Systems Vehicles (GSV). We decided to focus on the GSVs, and I expected the GSVs to win the entire thing. We eventually decided to give the crown to the Heart of Gold for reasons we will get into in a minute, but the GSVs are a very cool runner-up. These mobile cities in space with billions of passengers had a very cool technical design and some of the best personalities and characters out of any sci-fi book we have read. The AI of these various enormous ships often managed to feel both highly personal/intimate in one moment and extraordinarily vast and godlike in their intelligence in the next. They represent some of the most interesting artificial intelligences I have ever read about in the genre, and their way of thinking feels intricately linked to their enormous bodies and sense of responsibility to their passengers. There are many good reasons to read the culture, but one of the best is witnessing the myriad of very cool ships. They leave a lasting impact.

Heart of Gold vs. The Great Ship – Folks, this was a real tough one. The Great Ship, though only recently discovered, is a mammoth. It is believed to be forged from a Jovian supermass, hides a planet within its core, and is thought to have been built before life could be conceived within the universe. It holds billions of species, and hundreds of billions of life forms within its gravitational well as they work to keep it secure against the dangers of space. But then you have the Heart of Gold, a small ship that contains the power of everything possible. It’s an idea so profound that I can’t think of anything that matches it. A ship that uses the power of probability to explore every possibility with the hopes that you’ll arrive at the chance you’re looking for. It is powered by the improbable, the 0.0001% chance that something could happen, like a whale appearing in your office parking lot or a cannonball failing to fall to the ground. Neither of these ships carry weapons; they are both transport-oriented and are the pinnacle of their civilizations’ accomplishments. And though the Great Ship is almost a solar system unto itself, a small ship capable of literally anything, at the cost of reality, is just too hard to beat. The Heart of Gold is The Quill To Live’s coolest spaceship.