Robot Spaceship Week

Spaceships and SciFi go together like peanut butter and jelly, and robots are like the chunky artisan peanut butter that elevate the childhood favorite to foodie ecstasy. Many memorable spaceships are sentient, making the spaceship a bona fide robot, starting in 1968 with HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey). Of course sentient spaceships don’t have to be spaceships or robots, or at least not anymore, like Breq in the Hugo and Nebula award winning Ancillary Justice. Sadly most of the time robot spaceships just get a mention, like Mother in Alien. This week is devoted to the sentient spaceships that serve as central characters in books and movies. It starts with a review of Arthur C. Clarke’s OTHER robot spaceship, Rama, in the classic Rendezvous with Rama. Later in the week, look for a slideshow of the top robot spaceships including Ian M. Banks Culture universe and Becky Chambers Wayfarer series. A bonus movie of Passengers is in the works too. But in the meantime, make yourself a PB&J, pop 2001 into the DVD player, and ponder that it’s been 50 years since the premiere.