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This is a lovely paper. However, I was disappointed to not see any mentions of Iain M. Banks's Culture universe, which means it misses out on what I think is the most novel approach to spaceship design in literature. First, The Culture's spaceships are enormous. The largest type we encounter, the General Systems Vehicle, is 200 km long and can house up to 6 billion people; while these serve as habitats for a civilian population, these are still spaceships, capable of moving at great speed. Secondly, the ships have no physical hull. Instead, their structure is maintained by field manipulation. Banks doesn't go deeper into how this works, but it's clear The Culture has technology to manipulate physical reality similar to classic science fiction "force fields" that allows ships to maintain an atmosphere and protect against physical damage. Notably, in several books, the ships modify both their interior and exterior structure while traveling in order to optimize themselves for some purpose. Thirdly, an important part of The Culture is that the ships are, in a sense, alive. The Minds, which are the AIs that control them are largely inseparable from the ships they inhabit. Clearly we've had AI-controlled ships before (HAL, Alien's Mother, and so on), but these have always been subservient to humans. With The Culture, a human boarding a ship is a guest of the Mind, and ships don't have captains or comamnders. The only other author I know about who has done anything similar is Anne Leckie. |
Most emphasis is on the little details like the pipes on the hull and how they contribute to the general idea, for example small windows make the ship appear bigger, bigger thrusters will evoke a fast ship. The opposite as with books where the attributes tend to be given first and it is up to you to imagine the details.
A kind of ship that I found interesting was from "étoiles mourantes", a weird (the "Dune" kind of weird) french novel. In the novel you have animal-cities, huge extraterrestrial beings living in deep space, hosting other life forms inside them, including humans. They allow for hyperspace-like travel.
I liked the idea of living creatures as spaceships, but the book doesn't give much detail about how they look, therefore being out of scope of the paper. Organic looking spaceships are mentioned though, as a sure-fire way of making them look alien.