138. (October 2024) The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey — The Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club

The Ship Who Sang 2: Hard and Soft SF

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:29:35 +0000

Hard science fiction this is not - Anne McCaffrey has little or no interest in, for example, how the ship drive works, except as a plot device when it is inefficient and could be improved. She has very little concern for the distances between planets, except insofar as they introduce unavoidable delays. She does have some interest in the human biology of how you get a human brain into a ship (or in other stories in the series, a space station or planetary base). But her interest is primarily relational. Did this work for you? How much hard science do you like in a book? Did the story suffer from the lack of (physical) science?

The Ship Who Sang 5: The Wider Context

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:31:36 +0000

The individual short stories in the series were written during the Apollo program, before the moon landing, during an era when minority rights and the traditional roles of women were becoming increasingly vocally challenged. Did this show in the content or preoccupations? How might a modern author treat the same subjects?

The Ship Who Sang 1: The basics

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:28:43 +0000

What did you think of the book? The characters? The various challenges and scenarios? Would you be inclined to read any other books in the series (which don't follow Helva any more, but instead involve other encapsulated brains, either in ships or static installations)

The Ship Who Sang 3: Stages of womanhood

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:30:13 +0000

Women's lives are often divided into three parts - maiden, mother, crone - with some women's groups advocating a four-part division into girl, maiden, mother, elder (to include an explicit child phase, and give the final stage a more appealing name). Did Helva progress at all through these or did the brain-ship encapsulation effectively close off her development? Did she come over as female? Young? Wise? Naive? Which female stage would you allocate to her?

The Ship Who Sang 7: Gaming

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:33:09 +0000

Would the setting and concept make a good game? Is there such a game already? Indeed, has Clash already written it (!) ? Does the blend between short-term episodes and long-term aspirations (eg paying off perinatal debt, or in other stories tracking down particular archaeological evidence for alien races) work in a game context? What primary features of the book would you borrow for gaming?

The Ship Who Sang 6: Serialisation and ring structure

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:32:21 +0000

The current novel was formed by stitching together short stories written over almost a decade. Did they hang together sufficiently for you to see them as a whole thing? The whole lot is tied together by the last story having many echoes with the opening one - an exploding star features in both, but moving from destruction to opportunity. and Niall is a (better?) replacement for the lost Jennan. The Helva story cycle is closed, and subsequent books explore different individuals within the brainship universe. Did this work for you as a neat and tidy conclusion, or would you have rather had an ongoing plot with future potential - for example the last story might well have treated Niall as incidental, and focused instead on getting hold of the upgraded ship drive?

The Ship Who Sang 4: Prejudice and disability

RichardAbbott — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:30:56 +0000

There's a lot of prejudice highlighted in the book - most obviously the reactions of some people to the whole concept of brain ships and severe disability, but also a mirror process where brain ships are dismissive of some humans. Indeed, the whole brain/brawn nomenclature is potentially inflammatory (with the similarly fraught shellperson vs softshell in other books). Did this ring true for you or was it too much of a plot device?

Disability and in particular birth deformity features heavily. Some of the time the brain ships are seen as weak and in need of absolute protection, other times as stronger and more capable than other humans around. Did you find this done sympathetically or not? How have other authors tackled this subject?

About Anne McCaffrey

RichardAbbott — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:53:02 +0000

From Amazon
Anne McCaffrey, the Hugo Award-winning author of the bestselling Dragonriders of Pern novels, is one of science fiction's most popular authors. With Elizabeth Ann Scarborough she co-authored Changelings and Maelstrom, Books One and Two of The Twins of Petaybee. McCaffrey lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill, in County Wicklow, Ireland.

From Wiki
Anne Inez McCaffrey (1 April 1926 – 21 November 2011) was an American writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (Best Novella, Weyr Search, 1968) and the first to win a Nebula Award (Best Novella, Dragonrider, 1969). Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2005 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named McCaffrey its 22nd Grand Master, an annual award to living writers of fantasy and science fiction. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on 17 June 2006. She also received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for her work in 2007.

(The whole article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McCaffrey is worth a quick look)

Cover Blurb for The Ship Who Sang

RichardAbbott — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:44:43 +0000

From Amazon
The brain was perfect, the tiny, crippled body useless. So technology rescued the brain and put it in an environment that conditioned it to live in a different kind of body - a spaceship. Here the human mind, more subtle, infinitely more complex than any computer ever devised, could be linked to the massive and delicate strengths, the total recall, and the incredible speeds of space. But the brain behind the ship was entirely feminine - a complex, loving, strong, weak, gentle savage - a personality, all-woman, called Helva...

From Wiki
The Ship Who Sang (1969) is a science fiction novel by American writer Anne McCaffrey, a fix-up of five stories published 1961 to 1969. It is also the title of the 1961 novelette which is the first of these stories. The series started by the book, the "Brain & Brawn Ship series", is sometimes called the "Ship Who Sang series".

The protagonist of the 1969 novel and all the early stories is a cyborg, Helva, a human being and a spaceship, or "brainship". The five older stories are revised under their original titles as the first five chapters of the book and the sixth chapter is entirely new.

McCaffrey dedicated the book "to the memory of the Colonel, my father, George Herbert McCaffrey, citizen soldier patriot for whom the first ship sang". In 1994 she named it as the book she is most proud of. Subsequently, she named the first story her best story and her personal favorite work.

During the 1990s McCaffrey made The Ship Who Sang the first book of a series by writing four novels in collaboration with four co-authors, two of whom each later completed another novel in the series alone. By 1997 there were seven novels, one old and six more recent. They share a fictional premise but feature different cyborg characters.