The “living ship” genre of starship is pretty common across sci-fi. But why are they always animals?? I want to see a living ship that’s grown.
As in, a massive, still-growing plant starship that photosynthesizes with raw, unfiltered starlight and drifts through the universe. The bigger the starship, the older it is (and likely, assuming a sci-fi universe where everyone wants everyone else dead), the better it is in combat.
If you still want to keep the whole color/smooth lines and weird shapes vibe that so much of the living ship genre loves, then just make it a fungus. Those things are terrifying. (And the concept of starfighter spores ejecting from gills along its sides or something is cool as hell.) or maybe the fungus takes over destroyed ships and you get these massive fungi-covered ships drifting through space and killing things.
I don’t know. Point is, spaceships that are living but they’re plants.
I was talking with some friends about the concept of “space as an ocean” and wound up writing this world-building piece that turned out like a poem. Anyways, the overarching concept is that space is like an ocean but it’s like the ocean on earth, which means that no one uses it, it’s overly commercialized, and it’s full of trash.
(Long poem concept thing below the break)
Space is an ocean
and it’s totally obsolete.
If you want to get anywhere, you teleport there and get there in half the time. The only ships travelling across the cold, dark void of interstellar space are corporate haulers, gilded star cruisers, and military carriers in the middle of nowhere with too many guns to count. It’s too expensive to transport that many goods via teleporter, customers love the nebula cruise, and the system governments won’t say what the carriers are for.
Space is an ocean
And it’s a mess.
Interstellar space and local space is filled with junk no one wanted to keep in their system. Black holes swarm through the galaxy, mindlessly eating the garbage created by the thousands of star systems. And growing. Deep space is mined constantly. Valuable gasses are extracted from the hearts of nebulae and rogue exoplanets are mined until there’s nothing left of them but a few worthless rocks drifting in space. Already, nebulae are starting to run dry of valuable gasses.
Space is an ocean
And it’s a mystery no one wants to solve
Deep space is slowly being explored and categorized by dedicated scientists, but the dangers of going out so far keep most of the big discoveries at bay. They’re sure something is alive out there, but it slips from shadow to shadow and hides deeper and deeper in the darkness. Some people survive catastrophic disasters on starships, and their stories of drifting across space are well-known. They speak of dark things in the shadows, worlds we could never dream of, and an endless black void
Space is an ocean
And no one leaves the coastline.
The space within a system is full of activity. Private starfighter clubs, massive yachts of starships, and small asteroid and gas mining ships dot the safe sectors of system space. No one goes out past the far reaches of the planets, if they don’t want to get stranded.
On the one hand, characters who can truthfully state they've never lost a fight are terrifying. Especially villains. (Example: Melania from Elden Ring.)
But as a cooler thought, a character that knows the exact number of times they've lost is so much scarier. Especially if they then proceed to list them and what they learned from them, finishing with why the person they're about to fight is going to die painfully.
Example under the break: (Oh my god it was longer than I thought)
"Do you know how many times I've lost a fight, Dawnstar? I don't think you do.
I have lost 7 fights in my life.
The first four were hardly fights. Bullies at my school saw me as a target, someone easy to hurt and belittle. They kicked me, punched me, made me bleed. 4 times they did that. Until one day I decided I had enough. I showed them what real power was, and they never touched me again. Do you know what I learned from that, Dawnstar? I learned that the world hurts. The world is cruel and careless and only through more hurt can you make it better.
The fifth fight I lost was when I joined the Hero Coalition. I had just arrived and I thought I was on top of the world. I went to the training arena and was knocked flat on my back within seconds. From that I learned that only when you learn to control power with precision, wield it like a knife that you can begin to change things. Power is everything. But only with precision can it really be used. I went back after that, weeks later. I used my power like a knife and I taught the man who thought he could beat me every time what I'd learned and he never touched me again.
The sixth fight taught me that the system was broken. I was at the Coalition again, fighting against Powersteel. I was winning. This was a fight to fill a spot of the top 5, the council of heroes that runs this city. Finally I could stop all the hurt across this city. Finally I could wield the true power of the Coalition to strike out against injustice. And Powersteel shot me. Right then and there, in the training ring, he shot me. When I regained consciousness in the hospital, Gigaman told me that Powersteel would be filling the role in the top 5. His resourcefulness in breaking the rules and shooting me showed an 'ability to think outside the box' and that if I truly wanted to be a top 5 hero I should be able to take a bullet. When I heard that, I realized the truth. Even though we're the heroes, the Coalition is broken. We are just as capable of hurt and injustice as the rest of this city. So I went back. And I taught him what real power is. How to use your power like a knife. How to fix the world, for the better.
The last fight I lost, Dawnstar, was my fight against you. There I learned two things. First, I understood how the system that the Coalition created stays in power. Because heroes like you won't look through their golden lies. They want to change the world for the better and will accept any lie or handicap given to them if they can be convinced it would be better. The Coalition told you I was out of control. That I wanted revenge and nothing more. And that by defeating me, you could ascend to the top 5 and be a force for women like us, to show the world we can do it. And you were so desperate to please, so desperate to change that you fought me without hesitation. I tried to tell you what they were doing but you wouldn't see. You couldn't see past their pretty lies.
But do you know what the second thing I learned was, Dawnstar? I learned how you fight. I learned how you think, how you act, how your powers work. I spent years in prison teaching myself how to defeat you. I've learned from my losses, Dawnstar. I've taught myself what power is, how to use it, how to kill. How to never make the same mistake twice.
So. Are you ready?"
Also, because I hate AI and this is an art blog now, here's my godawful illustration of this concept!
