November is #SciFiMonth, hosted by Imyril @One More and Lisa @Dear Geek Place. Today’s prompt is Sentient Spaceships, which I initially read as Living Spaceships, and was coming here all ready to talk about my favorite living space ship from Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden, and how excited I am for its sequel next year. Then I realized that’s just animal-level alive, giant spacefaring animal big enough for a colony to live inside, but not really chatty as you’d expect a sentient spaceship to be. So, you can read my review of that here, and I’ll move on to today’s actual topic: ART from Murdebot
Artwork by Tithi Luadthong from 123RF.com
ART is amazing /post
ART stands for Awesome Research Transport (ok, Murderbot uses a much ruder word than awesome, but I’m not gonna dignify that) and it’s a big, smart and fun spaceship in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. It ends up helping Murderbot, and their interactions are just so great. ART’s got a lot of brainpower over MB so he keeps a patronizing attitude that plays off great on MB’s snark. And they also have things in common like they enjoy watching shows together.
Looks like ART and Murderbot did an Instagram Q&A session, which is available to read here on Tor.com
This next part includes spoilers for Network Effect, the full-length Murderbot novel that came out this year.
View Spoiler »
Another series with A LOT of sentient spaceships is The Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor. I’ve 3/4 books, and found the 3rd a bit of a letdown, but I might still read the last one to see what it adds. It follows the Bobs, clones of a nerd who’s been turned into spaceship/robot things that are humanity’s last hope as the Earth is becoming uninhabitable. The parts I loved about the series were exploration related, in which different Bobs study distant planets, some of which have life, and the different Bobs interacting, their similarities and small differences.
Still on my TBR is Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie, which everyone seems to have read except me.
Other than these 3, I really don’t know many sentient spaceships, have you got any recommendations for me?
Header spaceship image by 2458221 from Pixabay
I’ve read lots of sentient spaceship stories, but i can’t remember them at the moment. Although one that sticks with me is from Sisters of the Vast Black 😁 But yes, I love ART too!
Oh I’d never heard of that one but it sounds super interesting