#plague ship

[spockvarietyhour]

Tarellian vessel, "Haven"

[ltwilliammowett]

The Plague Ship, by Bernard Finnigan Gribble (1872–1962)

[the-golden-vanity]

Ahoy, shipmates!

Over the course of several delayed flights this weekend, I devoured a paperback copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I found it enjoyable, if not a Great Classic Work Of Literature.

My question to you now is, there's a chapter in the middle of the book where our castaway hero encounters a plague ship. It moves erratically through the water before them, with what appears to be a smiling, nodding sailor at the rail, acknowledging Arthur and his fellow castaways.

However, as the ship approaches, the stench of death washes over our hero and his companions, and as it passes under their stern, they can see that all aboard the ship are dead of some terrible, unknown disease, and that the smile and nod they perceived were the rictus of death and the movement of a seagull feasting on the dead sailor's flesh.

This is my first time reading this book, and yet there's something viscerally, intensely familiar about this imagery. I feel like I've read this somewhere else before. Perhaps it was in a graphic novel, because my mental image of this scene appears in a sort of comic-book style.

Does anyone have any ideas where I might have encountered this before? Any help would be appreciated.

@clove-pinks @benjhawkins @ltwilliammowett @saranilssonbooks

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Plague Ship Cover Art by Ed Valigursky

[johnmurphysreddit]

Can we talk for a minute about the fact that there are 100 people gathered for the All Must Attend resurrection of All The Primes and between the 20 who are guards and allowed in the skeleton lair and the other 20 who are servants in the palace and have seen Russell stomping around and fretting over body snatching, 40% of the town already has strong reason to suspect that something hinky is going on and has been going on for quite a while.  If Delilah’s parents told just 10 people that’s 50% of the town who can smell the BS even before Pria does the big reveal or Russell yeets the gas.   

[a-themockingbirdsings]

Plague Ship

@beerisanemotion

In the end, she had hauled the mutant into the bathtub.  “Can someone send the other Bobby?  Bobby Drake,” had been her call over the radio.

She had been in her bathroom when she got the word, Tony and Logan had returned, and Logan had been bitten.  Usually that wouldn’t seem like a major issue, but it was told to her as if it was the most urgent matter she would deal with all year.  She flushed away the contents of her stomach, hauled herself off the floor, and washed her face and mouth.  In under thirty seconds she was rushing out of the door, zipping up her jeans as she went.  

Now she was on another bathroom floor, dressed this time, sitting beside a mutant in a bathtub full of ice.  He could kick this, she just needed to keep his fever down until whatever was suppressing his healing factor failed, and his own abilities kicked in.  Still feeling nauseous, she took the cloth off of his head, soaked it for a few moments in the ice bath, and placed it back on his forehead.  She was keeping the hands she had bandaged out of the water.  She smoothed down the cloth, finding herself praying for him to wake up.  She didn’t want to know what would happen if he turned.

[pulpscifi]

[paullovescomics]

Plague Ship, by Andre Norton (Librivox edition, read by Mark Nelson: https://librivox.org/plague-ship-by-andre-norton/ )

I had no plans to post about this book, but i was just reading a description of a fantasy novel, and found myself wondering, yet again, why so much fantasy is about kings and other special important people, and where can i find fantasy that's about working class people? (Or, you know, the fantasy world equivalent, at least.) Then i remembered that i'd just finished listening to an old sci-fi book about working class people.

Plague Ship was published in 1956. It's about the crew of the Solar Queen. They're a group of free traders who seek out new markets on alien worlds. "Free trader" here means they are a small operation (one ship, one crew) as opposed to the large corporate trading companies (many ships, many crews, big resources, big connections). In this story, they've landed on a planet of cat people (it's an old trope, folks) who are roughly medieval in terms of society and technology. No Prime Directive here. A group from one of the big trading companies is trying to undermine them. After leaving this planet, the crew of the Solar Queen get sick, and it might be a new plague, hence the title. Aside from the sickness itself, being identified as a "plague ship" could doom for good. Other human settlements want nothing to do with an alien plague, so the Solar Queen faces the possibility of wandering the stars forever, cut off from all other humans, or even being destroyed on sight. Things play out in a fairly straightforward, but satisfying, way. There's the kind of sci-fi problem-solving that Star Trek made a multi-decade franchise out of, though with some legally questionable tactics that most Starfleet officers wouldn't consider (at least not from TNG forward).

The reason I'd consider these characters to be more like working class people is because they're mostly employees, and the business they work for is just a bit more than a mom and pop shop. The main character, Dane, is young, and one of the most recent hires. He's got to worry about losing his job if he messes up too bad. He's on a free trading ship because his test scores weren't high enough to garner a spot on a big corporate crew. Not just the corporate traders, but the infrastructure of Terran spacefaring society is rigged against them because the big guys have the bucks to call the shots. Our heroes succeed because of grit, daring, and the kind of know-how that comes from long and/or hard-won experience. There's lots of talk about "boards" that govern industries, and these seem to be part unions, and part regulatory agencies. That would track with the time it was written, when unions were stronger, and regulatory agencies were growing -- before all that stuff was so thoroughly spun as inherently bad and socialist.