A few weeks ago, we engaged in our annual March Madness of books with this year’s focus being on neat space ships scattered throughout fiction. Most of the ships we included were in books that we had already read. However, there was one that caught our eye that I had not engaged in. And since it was way too interesting to pass up, I decided to pick up the book that featured it. Enter The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery of Dragonriders of Pern fame.
Helva is a scout ship. She’s also human. Her brain was saved at birth, transferred to a ship to be trained in the derring-do expected of her to pay off the debt of her existence. When she’s ready, she’s given the chance to select a brawn, a co-habitant of her ship, to carry out her missions. It could be a man or a woman, and she chose him. It isn’t long before she falls in love with her brawn, only to see him killed by a group of panicking colonists. And yet, as she mourns, she must continue shepherding those who require her services across the stars.
I’m happy to say I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the book, while also feeling my body coil into itself at some of its cringier aspects. But McCaffery’s prose is solid and stands out. The characters are fun, especially the more ephemeral ones. Helva is a great main character to center the story around as well. She occupies this interesting space where most of the folks she encounters have this pulp sci-fi feel to them, and she comes off as normal, despite her extraordinary circumstances. It pulled me in and pushed away my expectations with a gentle hand, implying they were unnecessary.
The structure of the book is a string of connected short stories that all center around Helva and the various missions she is tasked with. Each one has a central conceit, a small recognizable cast, and a moment for Helva to excel. Helva brought me a specific level of joy because she was able to recognize her place within the society she was born into, and play into the stereotypes, and then remind the folks she is working with that she is a person too, despite being entangled with a ship. I will say that some of the chapters didn’t work for me. I chalk it up mostly to differing views on the role of art, but it could also have been just a lack of juice for some of them. The nice thing about it, though, is that each of the stories was recognizably different. The way Helva had to help solve problems was different each time. The fact that she can sing, and does sing, only played a pivotal role a couple of times, and that felt right.
Where it connects on its themes, though, is why I wanted to write about my experience with the book. Helva very much comes across as someone who is seen as “disabled” within her society. She was born with a deformity that would prevent her from living a long, good, or productive life. So instead, she was raised to become a part of a living brain ship. She exists within a device that allows her to travel the stars at great speeds, aiding others in various missions. This is not out of the goodness of her heart; she is bound by debt (though I think in some of these situations she would have helped). That debt, of course, is not her fault. It was imposed on her by those who recognized her illness early and spent untold amounts of money integrating her within the ship, making her a productive member of society. Despite the widespread use of this technology, many travelers don’t recognize these ships for what they are: people who are augmented by technology to lead lives that would have been cut short by their illnesses.
So many of the conversations between her and the folks she interacted with have the peculiar flavor of someone trying to explain why they are no different than their peers. Yes, they are limited in some ways, but they have larger capacities to contribute in others. She is no less human for having been augmented. She is both human and the ship itself. And most of the time, she is able to convince those around her of her abilities, but each story reinforced that this is something she has to do constantly. And on top of that, she owes society a debt for finding a way to give her a long and healthy life. She has to take on missions that are dangerous to her well-being to pay off that debt. She just happens to be lucky enough to have a handler who respects her ability to handle things, despite his weird possessiveness of her, but he also sends her on the most dangerous missions with the highest pay so that she may experience some form of freedom sooner. And throughout it, she is offered ways to upgrade herself, upgrades that would make her life easier, but increase her debt.
Some of the cringe is just a difference of opinion. Not in a fundamental way about how people should be seen within society, despite their obvious differences. It was just more of a fundamental difference in worldview and the role of art in making radical statements. There is a whole section about a sect of musicians who call themselves Dylanists, after Bob Dylan, specifically focusing on his more political songs. They wander the universe stating their discontent through art. It’s fine, but why would a society hundreds of years into the future be obsessed with a single folk singer songwriter’s specific moment in their lives to build a movement named after him, who knows. Especially given Bob Dylan’s general trajectory, it just has some 30 year cycle nostalgia that can happen to anyone. Then there is Helva’s relationship with her handler, which is definitely weird and unfinished (there are several books in the series). This one is harder to explain because of the inherent relationships that they try to cultivate between ships and their cohabitants, but needless to say, there is a fun, but somewhat predatory and creepy dynamic between Helva and her handler that is lampshaded by Helva, but takes a weird turn at the end. Something that might work itself out in time, but just planting a flag on this one.
All in all, The Ship Who Sang is a good time with more depth than I expected. It’s not a screed against this kind of treatment, as much as it is an exploration of it. It points out something about Helva’s nature and her situation that I wish were more often engaged with in sci-fi. Too often, we are presented with strong-jawed, smart men dashing into adventure in stories like this, and we forget about everyone else. This isn’t a call for more representation necessarily – contemporary sci-fi has plenty of it. However, we should engage in imagining places for people our society would label as “disabled” or “unproductive” because they can’t contribute economically unless they are forced into a lot of debt to make them “able” and “productive.” And we should try to imagine both the harms and joys of finding places for people to be themselves.
Rating: The Ship Who Sang — A worthwhile ballad on the perils of space capital.
-Alex
