Cool spaceships
Okay, first, here at Bookriot is a suggested list of four extra-cool spaceships in SF novels. Just four! I’m sure there are a million cool spaceships out there, but I must agree that the spaceship that apparently is a major feature in Anathem by Neal Stephenson sounds extra-cool.
The Daban Urnud is a massive habitat ship shaped like a polyhedron with 20 faces. It contains 16 spheres, each half-filled with water, which spin around the center to create gravity. The population lives in these orbs, in houseboats with gardens on them.
Really? Because . . . wow. I have never been smack dab in the middle of Stephenson’s target audience . . . I barely finished Snowcrash . . . but I’m almost tempted to look up Anathem based just on what A.J. O’Connell says about the ship in this post.
Second! The first thing I stumbled on when I googled “cool spaceships in sf” was this amazing, amazing graphic: almost every spaceship from Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc, in one massive chart. If you click through and then click on the picture, you can get a blown-up version that is *almost* not painful to read, though the text is still small. I had to blow it up and then scan it carefully to locate the Enterprise type of ship, which for me is an important point of reference since that’s definitely the SF ship I’m most familiar with. All the really impressive ships seem to be from something called Eve. Is that a game or a movie or what? Wow, those are some ships.
My favorite ship . . . eh, I have no idea. My LEAST favorite SF ships are all the biological ones. That is such a cliche. How to make an alien ship look alien: paint it with goo and declare it is a living organism. Because that is so different and innovative!
I am actually working . . . now and then . . . on a SF adventure kind of novel. Got about 70 pp or so and a basic, basic notion of where it might be going. Sociological SF, that’s what I like! But with enough stuff blowing up to make it interesting and fun. My agent really wants me to prioritize that, write it quick before I work on the third Black Dog book. Because hey, maybe the sudden Ann-Leckie-produced-window for sociological SF will close in a month. Or maybe it’ll still be open in three years, who knows? Well, we’ll see. I want *both* a third Black Dog book AND this SF novel finished by the end of 2016, at least, and then we’ll see. It’d be good if THE WHITE ROAD turns out to be quick to write, one month instead of three months. Hard to judge until I get back into it.
Anyway, in my SF novel, we do in fact start off on the bridge of a spaceship. No goo! And yet it is not supposed to look like the bridge of the Enterprise either. I think I pulled it off. Hopefully you’ll all get to take a look at it in the not-too-tremendously-distant future.
