Spaceships!
The reason this is so late is because I wanted to read "Ancillary Justice" before and the delivery took very long for some reason. But now, the last question from the December meme, by 
melannen: Spaceships!
Sometimes I like to ask people I just met and who I want to get to know, or when I want to find out whether or not I would like to get to know them, random questions. "Robots, pirates, or dinosaurs?" was a recent one that worked well as an ice-breaker. (Many people look at me like I'm a bit weird after that, which, I am sometimes, so.) For a while I also asked people what their favorite spaceship was, which felt a bit like cheating because I don't have an answer for that question myself. I love all kinds of different spaceships: huge and small, ones meant for year-long travel and ones for short distance transports, new and shiny ones and old ones, ships and stations and cities, ones built by and for humans and those not, inanimate or alive. Different spaceships are suitable for different tasks.
If I HAD to pick one to live and travel in, the TARDIS would probably the most convenient, because she's huge and has very comfortable living spaces. Timetravel is a nice bonus.
bironic made a vid Starships; it's amazing and you should watch it. I left a comment saying "this is why I love spaceships", and that's still true. I'm not sure I can put it in words very well, the wonder and joy and possibilities...
What I love about spaceships is what they represent. Spaceships stand for discovery, things you've never seen before. For connection, to new places and new people and to those you left behind. For daring to go out there.
Space is scary. And yet sometimes somehow it can be comforting at the same time? But it's also scary, huge and unknown and with vast emptiness. Spaceships are little dots of life travelling through that dark and open up entire new worlds. A bit similar to ships on the ocean, and some say we know more about space than about our oceans, but spaceships seem more fragile. Probably also because in many if not most canons with spaceships, there are also battles, and some of them get shot at and explode. Spaceships being so fragile emphasizes how precious the lives inside are and how valuable the ship itself. I always thought Firefly's opening song, "you can't take the sky from me", has nice multiple meanings for a show with spaceships: because yes, you can, ships can be destroyed easily. What can't be taken away is "just" memory, and what the sky/space means.
And with all due respect to the weirdness and mystery of our oceans, space has more potential to be full of things we can't even comprehend. From weird radiation readings to other sentient races or lifeforms we don't understand - for all we know there could be actual spacewhales! Depending on the universe we're in, there are few to no limits to our imagination.
I asked this same question to
beatrice_otter and she wrote a great post where she said that one of the things she loves about spaceships is the stories that tend to accompany them, and that's definitely also true for me. Some fantastic stories, both canon and fic.
I'm especially fond of living ships. I'm not sure when that started, maybe with the TARDIS or Farscape's Moya - "a ship - a living ship". I was very happy when one appeared in Babylon 5, Wraith hiveships are very cool, and I enjoyed the ships/stations in Ancillary Justice. There are many different versions, from living beings who were enslaved to serve as ships to ships that were built and then outfitted with an AI, and everything in between.
I don't really know why I love them so much, I just do.
I talked mostly about fictional spaceships here. Real spaceships and -stations and -missions are fascinating as well, and I love to read about them when I stumble across something, but I don't follow them closely, or even know a lot about the history of Earth space programs. I'm not that interested in the technical details, and articles about space programs make me wish I was. I'm more interested in how fictional spaceships work than real ones ;)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
comments there.
melannen: Spaceships!
Sometimes I like to ask people I just met and who I want to get to know, or when I want to find out whether or not I would like to get to know them, random questions. "Robots, pirates, or dinosaurs?" was a recent one that worked well as an ice-breaker. (Many people look at me like I'm a bit weird after that, which, I am sometimes, so.) For a while I also asked people what their favorite spaceship was, which felt a bit like cheating because I don't have an answer for that question myself. I love all kinds of different spaceships: huge and small, ones meant for year-long travel and ones for short distance transports, new and shiny ones and old ones, ships and stations and cities, ones built by and for humans and those not, inanimate or alive. Different spaceships are suitable for different tasks.
If I HAD to pick one to live and travel in, the TARDIS would probably the most convenient, because she's huge and has very comfortable living spaces. Timetravel is a nice bonus.
bironic made a vid Starships; it's amazing and you should watch it. I left a comment saying "this is why I love spaceships", and that's still true. I'm not sure I can put it in words very well, the wonder and joy and possibilities...
What I love about spaceships is what they represent. Spaceships stand for discovery, things you've never seen before. For connection, to new places and new people and to those you left behind. For daring to go out there.
Space is scary. And yet sometimes somehow it can be comforting at the same time? But it's also scary, huge and unknown and with vast emptiness. Spaceships are little dots of life travelling through that dark and open up entire new worlds. A bit similar to ships on the ocean, and some say we know more about space than about our oceans, but spaceships seem more fragile. Probably also because in many if not most canons with spaceships, there are also battles, and some of them get shot at and explode. Spaceships being so fragile emphasizes how precious the lives inside are and how valuable the ship itself. I always thought Firefly's opening song, "you can't take the sky from me", has nice multiple meanings for a show with spaceships: because yes, you can, ships can be destroyed easily. What can't be taken away is "just" memory, and what the sky/space means.
And with all due respect to the weirdness and mystery of our oceans, space has more potential to be full of things we can't even comprehend. From weird radiation readings to other sentient races or lifeforms we don't understand - for all we know there could be actual spacewhales! Depending on the universe we're in, there are few to no limits to our imagination.
I asked this same question to
beatrice_otter and she wrote a great post where she said that one of the things she loves about spaceships is the stories that tend to accompany them, and that's definitely also true for me. Some fantastic stories, both canon and fic.
I'm especially fond of living ships. I'm not sure when that started, maybe with the TARDIS or Farscape's Moya - "a ship - a living ship". I was very happy when one appeared in Babylon 5, Wraith hiveships are very cool, and I enjoyed the ships/stations in Ancillary Justice. There are many different versions, from living beings who were enslaved to serve as ships to ships that were built and then outfitted with an AI, and everything in between.
I don't really know why I love them so much, I just do.
I talked mostly about fictional spaceships here. Real spaceships and -stations and -missions are fascinating as well, and I love to read about them when I stumble across something, but I don't follow them closely, or even know a lot about the history of Earth space programs. I'm not that interested in the technical details, and articles about space programs make me wish I was. I'm more interested in how fictional spaceships work than real ones ;)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth.
comments there.