When I left high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Randomly, I spent a year in a harbor town, learning to become a ship's captain. The class continued after that year, but I didn't because I realized halfway through it wasn't the life for me. As part of the first year's program, however, there was a six-week trainee period on a ship. Mine happened on a small container ship running between Oulu, Finland, various ports in Germany, and sometimes Sweden. That experience left me with the best two truths and a lie, and also an annoyance with cargo ships in space opera. In this essay, I want to explain that annoyance, entangled as it is with the love that I will always have for space cowboys and big damn heroes. I am mostly going to be talking about the books that deal with shipping cargo (with the sole exception of Becky Chamber's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet). I am purposely excluding military SF as well as SF that mostly takes place on station or planet side, as well as space opera that doesn’t deal with the workmanlike aspects of cargo, such as Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. Mostly because otherwise, we could be here forever.
Whenever the story is happening in a place that isn’t the international space station, even writers striving for realism have to make leaps of imagination. Writers have been moving towards as much realism as they can. Part of that is giving a lot of attention to the problem of faster than light travel, FTL. I am not a physicist, but my understanding is that according to physics as we know it, it is not possible to go faster than light in space. And space opera as a genre has answered that challenge in various ways. Some, like Hannu Rajaniemi, solve the problem of faster than light travel by not having any. Many others, like Becky Chambers, C.J. Cherryh, Valerie Valdes, and Nathan Lowell opt for gates between solar systems and then other, less theoretical, means of travel from the gates to the planets or space stations their characters visit.
But one thing that seems constant in these stories is the merry band of troublemakers who stand as one, at all times, a chosen family against the unfeeling universe that always seeks to ground them from their cargo-running ways. And I am here to carry away that bit of unobtainium. My problem with the tropes involved are two-fold: the ship and the crew. Let's explore the human factor first, shall we?
Take your colleagues home days
When I worked on the containership, I had a colleague who, out of the 4 weeks we worked together, spent about 26 days being either drunk or hung over. He was an amiable drunk, but we spent a day in the harbor once, doing repairs and painting the ship. Three out of the four of us were tired and sore from having done manual labor all day, and this guy comes in at the end of the work and sits down complaining about the difficulty of getting through his hangover. In that moment, violence seemed imminent.
A lot of especially modern space opera circles around the trope of the chosen family. Becky Chambers, in her Wayfarers series, but especially in the first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, talks a lot about how one of the characters, Artis Corbin, is an insufferable asshole, but his skills are necessary for the ship to function, so he stays, regardless. But even so, the way the people in the book talk to him is more reminiscent of the treatment one gives an annoying cousin than an exasperating colleague.
The unfortunate thing about being stuck on a ship, surrounded by an inhospitable environment, is the fact that it's impossible for you to get away from the people that annoy you. The fortune of that fact is two-fold. First, everyone on the ship, whether it's in space or at sea, is constantly, viscerally aware of the fact that their life is in someone else’s hands. It’s not something you get away from, and you just have to trust the crew.
The second is that most people will be on their own schedules. Once a containership is on the way, everyone keeps to their own watch. On the ship I worked, we were divided into four-hour increments with each day divided into two 12-hour segments. If I remember correctly, my watch was from 2 to 6, both AM and PM, and since I was a mere intern at that point, I stood my watch with the only deckhand and the most junior member in the officer section. The officer stayed on the bridge, and I would either sit at the bridge or in the small ready room and periodically go around the ship, making sure that nothing was on fire or visibly leaking, that the engines were running normally, etc. Whenever we approached or left a port, though, everyone, regardless of watch, was up and doing the work of coming or going. That and mealtimes were pretty much the only time I saw most of my colleagues.
Most space opera has everyone keeping the same kind of schedule they would in a 9-to-5 job, but when your life very much depends on someone being able to pick up on and react to a fire, for example, that's not a schedule that is possible. So, no matter if you have an AI buddy in the ship's systems, like in the Wayfarer books by Becky Chambers, you still need someone awake, and ready to physically start fighting fires, if necessary. Because even automated systems fail.
There are two books or series that I think do this especially well. C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter's Luck, and the series Golden Age of the Solar Clipper by Nathan Lowell. Firstly, Cherryh's Sandor Kreja is essentially operating his Lucy on his own. But it's a ship that is designed for a family and he's been running himself ragged trying to run it on his own or with random crew members that need to go wherever he's heading. And that's no way to live, right? Secondly, and especially in Half Share, the second installment in his series, Nathan Lowell focuses on the way that shifts affect the shipboard life. Lowell's universe seems more inspired by sailboats or possibly even military ships, and the ways those work, than by the modern cargo ship. No matter, life aboard the ships felt really familiar to me, and that was really interesting. It’s a lot of little things, like securing the mess for maneuvering (coming to and leaving port), setting up watches, making sure your station is manned at all times, and in one of the books, how you put your life in crew mates’ hands. And even though Lowell's books have an element of the found family, it also has interpersonal conflict among the crew because frankly, not everyone is just going to be best friends.
Something that I've seen only a few times are the ships that are specifically crewed by families, which I actually would like to see more of. Especially considering how much less careful you are of your family's feelings than you may be of your colleagues’, this dynamic has so much to give. C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter's Luck has two prominent examples of this in different ways. First is the previously mentioned Lucy with its family killed by pirates (that weren't really pirates). The second example is in the form of the Reillys, aka The Dubliners, from the ship Dublin Again: they are a large and established merchant family with an opposite problem to Kreja's; because the family is rich, the older generations aren't ready to retire, leaving newer generations without good positions and forever stuck in positions that have no hope of promotion. The family ships are also mentioned, though never explored in depth, in Lowell's series. Two of Lowell’s protagonist’s crew mates in the early books come from family ships, and that is as far as the main series explores the matter.
Even though I love the trope of the found family, I think that it has been over used, leaving so many other possibilities unexplored. It gives us, as readers, deeper connections and a more inherent set up for drama, but we also lose things. We lose the ordinary drama that we all experience in our work day to day. The need to get along with that coworker whose very breathing annoys you but you have to treat them professionally, because you still want to or need to keep this job for reasons. Maybe you love all your other coworkers or the job has so much more to offer you than anything else you've looked at. Perhaps this loss is a worthwhile trade-off for you as a reader, but to me, it doesn't always feel like picking a found family situation is a conscious trade-off on the part of the writers. Myself as a writer included.
The other thing that rarely comes across in these books is the boredom. Which is fair enough given that no one wants to bore their readers, or their viewers. But spending long weeks in a limited space just watching the same 6 or 7 faces day in and day out tends to get boring. On Finnish ships, you'll generally have pea soup and pancake on Thursday and steak on Saturday, and that is the only way to tell that time is moving or what day it is. Of course you can always check what day it is, but beyond your 4 weeks to 6 months tour getting close to being over, it doesn't actually make a difference. Of course, there's maintenance to be done that has to happen on a schedule and for that you have the calendar, but the actual job is pretty similar day to day. Even when the scenery is something other than the blackness of space.
Now, the second issue: the economics of spaceship ownership.
A spaceship is not a minivan
The thing that goes hand-in-glove with the roguish captain is the ship they need to fill with crew. The captain lines up the cargo and decides the routes and all that good stuff. Valerie Valdes does this especially well in her book Chilling Effect. Captain Eva Innocente is the unquestioned captain who absolutely owns her own ship. She grew up struggling for money, wound up working on some shady stuff, and then accepting a ship from her shady father. As captain, she lines up the jobs, she decides where they're going, she holds all the cards.
But – and you knew one was heading your way – ships, at least in the here and now, are really expensive. Even really old, run-down cargo ships cost multiple million US dollars. And that's just the ship. Not the fees associated with certifying it as sailable, docking fees or any of the other associated costs of actually running the thing. While it's conceivable that you could get a loan for some of that cost, you would need a massive amount of collateral in order to make that loan itself happen. And that's just a boat – humans have known how to make boats for millennia, although the actual technology to make a cargo ship has changed quite a lot in that time. However, there are people alive today who saw the first space ships happen. Let’s say we’re working with space opera that’s happening hundreds of years in the future. At that point, space ships are still going to be a younger technology than boats are today. And they’re definitely going to be a more complex technology than boats, ships, are today. And as anyone with a smartphone can attest, newer, more complex technology costs more.
It’s safe to say that no matter how many or few people or aliens the captain employs, they are at the very least a small business owner. Usually, given the assumed costs of spaceship ownership, the revenue involved in any given setup needs to be pretty big, bringing the captain up to at least to the level of a medium-size business owner. Fun and sexy, right? But not really working-class.
Often, the people in the books involved in hauling cargo are spacers, people who have spent their entire lives in or around space, so there’s no ready comparison to modern day. However, there’s always a certain amount of worry about the paycheck-to-paycheck-life. They’re skilled in the ways of manual labor, and not ashamed of it. And that, at the very least, is absolutely reminiscent of reality. Mostly, the people on containerships are manual laborers, or at least trained to do some maintenance, fight fires, perform CPR, and do all kinds of literally dirty work to keep the ship going.
A lot of space opera seems to treat buying a spaceship more like buying a house or, in these markets, a minivan. Like yes, it's a big expense, but The Captain is buying a home for life. And while that life is going to start eating away at you eventually, it does seem like something a person might do. But in reality it would not be an expense like a minivan. It's a millennial deciding to buy not just one, but multiple houses at the same time. And I have a hard time seeing why that economic reality would change. If anything, it seems like it’s going in the opposite direction, given how Homer Simpson has gone from a working-class schmo to well-off, just by having a one-income household living in a pretty nice house and staying the same age for thirty years.
There's a romance to the idea of the down-on-their-luck captain going out and buying, obtaining, a spaceship, using whatever means necessary. But even so, the math ain't mathing. Even if they stole the ship, the captain would not only need to have a crew ready to get the ship away immediately, they would need to get out of the system, or find a way to disguise the signifiers of the ship more or less immediately in order to hide the origin of the ship and avoid its actual owner. We are talking Mission Impossible levels of heist.
Even in Valdes' otherwise excellent book, the captain manages to talk her dad into giving her not one but two different spaceships. Sure, he's presented as (possibly) the owner of a shipping company that may or may not be shady, but even so. Even shipping companies can't just give away entire ships. Without knowing anything of the trade, a used car salesman might be able to give one to a daughter, but a ship is several orders of magnitude more of a gift. It's also a massive theft with a really slow getaway. And unless you're able to jump directly into lightspeed from dock, that's not going to change with spaceships.
One of the things that Lowell's series gets really right is that the main character, for almost all of the series, works for shipping companies that own multiple spaceships. The company does a lot of the hiring, with the captain having the last word about most of it. On some legs, the company sells the cargo slots, although the captain has some input there. While the captain is very much in charge while the ship is under way, the company ultimately owns the ship and pays the crew. The company has the power to fire the captain. While Alien shows us that it is not an optimal system by far, it is, however, something that has a basis in reality.
There is absolutely a certain libertarian romance related to owning your own ship and being able to take it wherever you please. That sense of escapist freedom is the trade-off to be considered between that option and the Weyland-Yutani model. But I would contend that there's a chance for interesting things to happen in fiction while chafing against the company limitations that come with running around in the endless dark in something with the equivalent cost of a whole apartment building.
Chilling memories to a small, angry planet
In these hectic days of phrase-coining, we offer one. Westerns are called "horse operas," the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called "soap operas." For the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer "space opera."
Cramer, Kathryn; Hartwell, David G. The Space Opera Renaissance, quoting Bob Tucker from a 1941 fanzine
The term space opera, according to Cramer and Hartwell, and also the people they quote, began life as a derogatory term. It was never meant to be concerned about reality, but an easy-to-consume escape from the normal, much like the soap operas Tucker references in the above quote. Space opera began life as something that doesn't force its reader to think. And it has certainly come a long way since then.
These days, space opera, much like speculative fiction in general, provides a lot of food for thought, even where it is at the same time rip-roaring action. Space opera has come a long way from the Spaceman Spiff days, and yet the spirit of that time is still there. The heroes are still big, even when they're working class. The aliens are strange and interesting and all kinds of cool in many ways. Space opera is, in a word, fun.
I'm not saying that I want space opera as a genre to become a sober genre filled with Marxist treatises, but I think there's some room outside of horror to make the working-class protagonists actually working class. The sky might not always be open to them, and I think that there's a way to explore that while still keeping it fun and rip-roaring.
Even though the things I've spent the past 3000 words discussing do actually bother me, they don't stop me from reading the books. I am here for Captain Eva Innocente and her crew, I am here for the crew of the Wayfarer, and all of the books that come later, inspired by, and in conversation with the books I've discussed in this essay. And while I may smirk at the provenance of any ships and yet another book where the crew talks about how they're all one big, strange family, I will absolutely still cry my eyes out when there's conflict of the emotional kind. Because ultimately, even though the tropes bother me, they don't detract from the story itself. And in the end, that's what matters to me the most.
Nina Niskanen writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She lives in Helsinki, Finland, with her partner, and her dog where she works as a computer programmer. She is passionate about space, language, textile arts, and creepy crawlies. She’s a graduate of Viable Paradise and Clarion UCSD. More at ninaniskanen.com.