I can remember seeing Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the theatre (as we spell it in Canada) and bawling my eyes out when Kirk and Spock surveyed the new Enterprise for the first time. We then spent a good minute just looking at the ship in dry dock. In what other genre would you do such a thing? Was it just nostalgia because Star Trek had returned? No, there was more. I love the Enterprise. Whether it is A, D or E. She is my ship. Seeing her destroyed in Star Trek: Generations (1994) shook me up. (The death of Kirk, meh.)
Spaceships have an importance in SF that transcends the mere love of machines and technology. Spaceships are often silent characters all on their own. The word “spaceship” was coined by John Jacob Astor IV in A Journey In Other Worlds (1894). Like the early Jules Verne novel From the Earth to Moon (1865) and the slightly newer The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells, early SF told us of how men might travel in space. The vehicles had to be logically explained (with the Science of the time) but there was no real affection for the vehicle itself. We begin to see this change slowly in George Griffith’s A Honeymoon in Space (1901), where the newly married couple travel the solar system in a ship called the Astronef. The cigar shaped rocket also begins to become prominent:
It was pointed at both ends, the forward end being shaped something like a spur or ram. At the after end were two flickering, interlacing circles of a glittering greenish-yellow colour, apparently formed by two intersecting propellers driven at an enormous velocity. Behind these was a vertical fan of triangular shape. The craft appeared to be flat-bottomed, and for about a third of her length amidships the upper half of her hull was covered with a curving, domelike roof of glass.
It would take the Pulps to really make a ship a character. A Honeymoon in Space is considered by some to be first Space Opera novel. Another, truly famous example of that sub-genre, would give us the SF novel titled after the spaceship. The Skylark of Space (Amazing Stories, August September October 1928). It’s three sequels would all have “Skylark” in their titles.
… she caught her breath in amazement as she stood up and looked about the brilliantly-lighted interior of the great sky-rover. It was a sight such as had never before been seen upon earth.
…she saw a spherical shell of hardened steel armor-plate, fully forty feet in diameter; though its true shape was not readily apparent from the inside, as it was divided into several compartments by horizontal floors or decks. In the exact center of the huge shell was a spherical network of enormous steel beams. Inside this structure could be seen a similar network which, mounted upon universal bearings, was free to revolve in any direction. This inner network was filled with machinery, surrounding a shining copper cylinder. From the outer network radiated six mighty supporting columns. These, branching as they neared the hull of the vessel, supported the power-plant and steering apparatus in the center and so strengthened the shell that the whole structure was nearly as strong as a solid steel ball. She noticed that the floor, perhaps eight feet below the center, was heavily upholstered in leather and did not seem solid; and that the same was true of the dozen or more seats—she could not call them chairs—which were built in various places. She gazed with interest at the two instrument boards, upon which flashed tiny lights and the highly-polished plate glass, condensite, and metal of many instruments, the use of which she could not guess.
The Skylark of Space is a clunky, mostly unreadable classic (in the Mark Twain sense) but it set all the major tropes for SF to follow, including the obsession with “space drives”. It is not enough to make the ship fly, we have to know how the damn engine works. (Think of how many episodes of all the Star Treks involve a plasma conduit, spore drive or warp core breach!) E. E. “Doc” Smith was no different, wasting massive amounts of story on the creation of a space drive. Smith will also invent the idea of the airlock, pressure suit, vacuum suit, shields, the visiplate, the face plate in a spacesuit, the tractor beam, radio-controlled torpedo, lifeboats, the visiphone, the concept of deep space, traveling beyond the solar system and many others.
Edmond Hamilton was creating the idea of an Interstellar Patrol around the same time as Smith. Despite being Space Opera, Hamilton doesn’t have an attachment to his ships (or even his characters). It was Sewell Peaslee Wright who became more ship-focused, using Hamilton’s ideas when he created the Space Patrol with John Hanson remembering his days in service. John fondly recalls his ships, the Tamon and the Ertak. We move closer to the ship as character. Wright explains how the ship navigates:
The navigating room of an interplanetary ship is without doubt unfamiliar ground to most, so it might be well for me to say that such ships have, for the most part, twin charts, showing progress in two dimensions; to use land terms, lateral and vertical. These charts are really no more than large sheets of ground glass, ruled in both directions with fine black lines, representing all relatively close heavenly bodies by green lights of varying sizes. The ship itself is represented by a red spark and the whole is, of course, entirely automatic in action, the instruments comprising the chart being operated by super-radio reflexes.
Thanks to Smith, space heroes now had ships. Hawk Carse had The Star Devil, the fastest ship in the universe. His roguish activities and bravado should seem familiar to any film goer these days. This is where the character of Han Solo begins, and of course, “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.” With the Space Opera hero, the spaceship goes from being the pride of the fleet to the equivalent of a street racer. No matter who flies the Falcon, Han, Lando Calrissian or Chewbacca, she is a hero all in her own right.
Iapetus’ atmosphere was left behind; in minutes the light blue wash of her sky changed to the hard, frigid blackness of lifeless space. The Star Devil’s lighting tubes glowed softly, though Saturn’s rays, coming through the wide bow windows, still lit every object in the control cabin with hard and dazzling brilliancy. Inside, light and color, life and action; outside, the eternal, sable void, sprinkled with its millions of sparkling motes of worlds. And ahead—shown now on the visa-screen only by the light dots of its ports—was the brigand craft. (“Hawk Carse” by Anthony Gilmore)
Anthony Gilmore (Harry Bates and Desmond W. Hall) spends little time describing the ship. This was November 1931 and the ideas around spaceships were firmly established in only three short years. Heroes could do the daring-do that they do so well and leave ship mechanics to the mechanics.
In 1940, Edmond Hamilton returned to Space Opera for over a dozen or so novels for younger readers with Captain Future. Curt Newton had to have the best ship, The Comet:
OUT beyond the orbit of Mars, out past the whirling wilderness of the asteroidal belt, flew a queer little ship. Shaped oddly like an elongated teardrop, and driven by muffled rocket-tubes whose secret design gave it a power and speed far beyond those of any other craft, it was traveling now at a velocity that lived up to its name of Comet….There was silence, except for the droning of the cyclotrons in the Comet’s stern, and the muffled purring of the atomic energy they produced, as it was released by the rocket-tubes. (Captain Future and the Space Emperor)
Like his previous stories and those of adventure SF writers after him, not that much time was spent on describing the wonders of the vessel. It was enough that the hero had the best ship to take on the bad guys of the universe.
Science Fiction would evolve in many ways after these early writers. Spaceships were now standard practice like robots, time travel and worlds beyond the Solar System. New writers could build on these ideas without having to explain them over and over. Novels about space craft and structure would appear in Ringworld by Larry Niven (1970), Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973) and Orbitsville (1974) by Bob Shaw. These gigantic ships become vast environments and not mere craft.
Despite this, there have been stories that continue an affection for ships even further. Anne McCaffrey made her debut with a series collected in The Ship Who Sang (1969). The first novelette that formed this book was also called “The Ship Who Sang” (F&SF, April 1961). It has a woman named Helva who has her brain placed inside a “brainship”. Ever the romantic, McCaffrey has one regular human, a “brawn” piloting the craft, and ready for the ship to fall in love with. Each new story in the series began with “The Ship Who….”
Television shows have followed in SF’s tracks with Farscape and its organic, living spaceship, Red Dwarf with its humorous ship computer, Holly, and even Doctor Who spent an episode humanizing the spirit of the T. A. R. D. I. S. (not the best episode). TV watchers expect a connection between ship and crew, one that harkens back to Navy fiction I suppose. The cowboy-esque crew of the Serenity on Firefly (a show named after at type of ship), the rebellous crew of the Rocinante on The Expanse, Zoie Palmer embodying the ship’s AI on Dark Matter. Producers understand this connection for SF watchers and find ways to strengthen it.
Just a final thought here. The names of spaceships are usually very important. The Astronef is French for Spaceship. Kinda obvious. The Skylark made a comparison between a bird and space flight. The Star Devil and Comet are just cool. But consider The Enterprise. Bringing free enterprise to the Federation (remember it was a Cold War show. Those Klingons look and act like evil Russians….) The Serenity, a state of peace that Mal Reynolds needed after the war. Rocinante has two meaning in Spanish: work horse but also a rough, illiterate man. That ship has a lot of work to do but it also defies its betters and refuses to stand down. And the Millennium Falcon, another bird, but more than just that. It sounds like The Maltese Falcon, drawing in some Noir cool into the spaceways, just as Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore did thirty-forty years earlier.
