INTRODUCTION
Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio
Big Ships. Blowing Things Up.
The big spaceship. Armed, looming, dangerous.
The leviathan.
There’s an allure to the battleship, the destroyer, and other big ships of war, going back to the earliest days of science fiction. It matches (and is probably derived from) battleship nostalgia in the world’s saltwater navies. The allure goes beyond sheer power and gets at the intricacy of men inhabiting what amounts to a small world—a world dedicated to one purpose.
Blowing things up.
Herman Wouk states it beautifully in his World War II masterpiece, The Winds of War:
“Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships—a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea.” *
The tradition of reverence for big vessels equipped for war is not limited to battleships, of course. The massive cities that are aircraft carriers qualify, as do those silent traversers of the deep, pregnant with death on a planetary scale, the ballistic-missile submarines. They don’t call them “boomers” for nothing, after all.
It is not only the sheer power of such ships that speaks to the warrior soul, however. These things are also intricate. They are the first cyborgs in a very real sense, for men are a component of the weapon. Battleships are organic. When manned by a trained crew under skilled officers, they are not mere objects. They are beings.
This may be part of the connection big ships have to science fiction. For to travel long distances through space, it often seems a given that a device that is advanced, intricate, and intimately bound up with human survival in a harsh environment will be required. Which, in turn, is practically the definition of a ship. Perhaps humans will one day travel to the stars via quantum gates, space-time folding, redefining our perception of reality by learning alien tongues (or, what amounts to the same thing, by wishing really hard, ala John Carter of Mars), but for those who like their science fiction scientifically sound and plausible given what we know now, it’s difficult to beat a big ship as the most likely transport into the galaxy and beyond.
It isn’t so much that they destroy stars, as that when such a ship speaks with her guns, the stars themselves might be seen to quiver.
So all aboard—for a sea of stars. These are the big ships of the future, the powerful ships that will allow us to face a harsh universe toe-to-toe. And if there are ancient alien intelligences out there who seek our doom, it will be the big ships that marshal the power to stop them, defeat them, and—should they not agree to go quietly into that good night—blow them to Kingdom Come.
But it isn’t just ships. It can’t be.
There are people inside these monsters.
The battleship breeds a certain sort of sailor. Here’s how Wouk describes his hero, US Navy officer Victor Henry, in The Winds of War:
“If he had a home in the world, it was a battleship. . . . It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man.” *
At the center of every story in this volume is a man, woman, or child whose fate is intimately linked to the star destroyer he or she lives within and, in most cases, serves aboard. A “battleship man” blows things up, but blows them up for a reason.
It may not be a good reason. He or she may be misguided by fate, luck, love, or sheer misinformation.
He or she may have the best reason in the world.
But we guarantee that for every human reason, there’s a story.
Here they are.
—The editors
* Herman Wouk, The Winds of War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 158.