THE SHIP WHO SANG

'''The Ship Who Sang''' (1969) is a short story cycle by science fiction author Anne McCaffrey. In an interview with SFF, McCaffrey claims that ''The Ship Who Sang'' is her favourite story, "possibly because I put much of myself into it: myself and the troubles I had in accepting my father's death and a troubled marriage."^[1]
When asked how she came up with the idea, McCaffrey says, "I remember reading a story about a woman searching for her son's brain, it had been used for an autopilot on an ore ship and she wanted to find it and give it surcease. And I thought what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships? So that's how ''The Ship Who Sang'' was born."^[2]

Contents

Plot summary

Stories in the collection

Miscellanea

References

Plot summary

''The Ship Who Sang'' takes place in the distant future, when parents of children who are born with severe physical handicaps but highly developed minds are given the option of allowing them to become "shell people"; encapsulated as children in a titanium life-support shell and specially trained for tasks that a "normal" human would be unable to do. These children, after coming of age, are employed in various manners (in the books, mostly as interstellar spacecraft or as the "brains" of cities) to work off the debt of their creation and training. They are all partnered with "Scouts" or "Brawns", humans specially trained to act as a companion or helper. The title derives from the fact that they are the mobile half of the partnership; their inability to go where "soft-shells" can is occasionally annoying to shell people, but not something they would exchange for the added abilities they are granted.
''The Ship Who Sang'' follows the adventures of one of these children, Helva, who when installed in her ship becomes XH-834. The stories recount her early infatuation with her first Brawn, Jennan, her period of mourning after his death, and her mature relationship with another Brawn, Niall.

Stories in the collection

★ ''The Ship Who Sang'', 1961

★ The Ship Who Mourned, 1966

★ The Ship Who Killed, 1966

★ Dramatic Mission, 1969

★ The Ship Who Dissembled, 1969

★ PartnerShip

★ The Ship Who Searched, 1992

★ The City Who Fought, 1993

★ The Ship Who Won, 1994

★ The Ship Errant (by Jody Lynn Nye), 1996

★ The Ship Avenged (by S.M. Stirling), 1997

★ Brain Ships, 2003

★ The Ship who Saved the Worlds, 2003

★ The City and the Ship, 2004

Miscellanea

There are several short stories also set in this universe, continuing the story of Helva.
The books published in 2003-4 are reprints/collections of earlier volumes printed.
This series is occasionally seen as being controversial because of the creation of "shell people" out of handicapped individuals. As with some other McCaffrey literature, her treatment of the subject becomes more nuanced as the series progresses.
The series addresses issues typically associated with cyborgs in literature, such as embodiment and mortality.

References

1.
2.



★ Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in ''Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature''. New York: Routledge, 1991: 149-181.

★ Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman." In ''Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace'', edited by Jenny Wolmark, 157-173. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.