One of the excellent folk I follow on Twitter is UK SFF author, Gareth L Powell, who last week wrote a The Guardian article featuring his Top 10 Spacehips In Fiction.

If you want to check it out, it’s right here:

Gareth L Powell — Top 10 Spaceships In Fiction

However, as is often the way, it immediately got me thinking of Spaceships I Have Loved, mostly in SFF over the years — and I really do like spaceships A Lot! 😉

Eagles in Space 1999

Many of them are in TV and film, for example:

• the Eagles in Space 1999;
• just about all the spaceships in Babylon 5, although the White Stars and the Vorlons’ sentient ships are “probably” my favourites;
• I think Dr. Who’s Tardis has to count right as a spaceship, right? (Right!)
• The Millenium Falcon (Star Wars, of course!)
• Serenity! (Firefly)

Plus a raft of others — some, like the USS Enterprise and the Discovery One in (the film) 2001 A Space Odyssey are almost too famous to mention, while other films such as Alien (plus sequels), Deep Impact, Interstellar, The Martian (again to name only a few) have a wonderful supporting cast of spaceships.

But as with Gareth’s post, the spaceships I encountered in literature are my first love, possibly because in books you feel as though you’re really inside the ship. And although I did a big high five to the ships included in his Top 10, here are another few I thought of straight away that will always be on mine:

1. Helva in Anne McCaffrey’s classic The Ship Who Sang: I loved the idea of human brains in ship’s bodies (the Shadow ships in Babylon 5 are a darker version of this idea) but mostly I loved the character of Helva and her interactions with others, particularly her human crewmember. It’s certainly one of the few books, too, where the ship is the or a protagonist — Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and Iain M Banks Consider Phlebus (and Culture novels generally), both of which are mentioned in the Guardian feature, are among the others.

2. I was really torn when it came to CJ Cherryh because she has so many spaceships-of-awesome, in a list of so many great SFF books that NASA named an asteroid after her ( 77185 Cherryh). I can’t list them all but here are a few of my favourites:

• The Pride of Chanur in the book (and subsequent series) of the same name. First contact and swashbuckling space opera at its best
• The spaceships of Downbelow Station, chiefly the warship Norway (Norway…Norway…Norway…) and its captain, the indomitable Signy Mallory; the merchanter, Finity’s End; and the ghost ship, Estelle.

3. I’ll always have a place in my heart, too, for the Solar Queen of Andre Norton’s series called Time Traders . Early SFF but seminal, especially for YA and younger readers.

4. More recently, I particularly enjoyed my encounter with the spaceship Perhonen in Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut The Quantum Thief (and Jean Le Flambeur series.) Perhonen is another sentient ship, with a complex and intriguing relationship, chiefly with her pilot, Mieli, but also with the thief, Jean Le Flambeur.

Other space ships of note include the luxury yacht, Sweet Delight, in Elizabeth Moon‘s novel Hunting Party, also Big Yellow in the Valor series by Tanya Huff, and Lady Macbeth in the Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton.

I’m sure you have many more suggestions to share, so please do! 🙂