Episode 62: Transcript
Episode: 62: Help! I’m in Love with My Starship!
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I’m Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:12] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] Today, we’re going to be talking about people, humans, falling in love with starships. Why do we have this fantasy and what does it say about our relationship with our ships and our technology in general?
[00:00:26] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:00:54] So we’ve been personifying our ships for a really long time in the west. I mean, there’s a tradition in English-speaking countries of calling ships “her” and “she.” And now, when we think about spaceships, they often seem to turn into characters and I’m wondering, is this a really common trope, Charlie Jane? Do we see it a lot, and why is that?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:19] It’s a very, very common trope and it’s one of the main ways that, I think space opera in particular interfaces with the idea of AI and the idea of artificial and non-human intelligence that’s not biological. And I think that it’s a very common fantasy because it’s a way that we can have a relationship with these ships that feels so personal already that are kind of part of the family, often, and that take us from place to place and that we couldn’t have these adventures without these ships. And so, the next logical step, maybe, is to fall in love with the ship or to want to have an intimate, maybe even sexual, relationship with the ship.
[00:02:01] And, you know? We see it across a lot of recent space opera and scifi in general. In Andromeda, there, the AI gets a humanoid body named Rommie. In Legends of Tomorrow, Gideon, the ship’s computer on the Waverider has a female voice and has some kind of ambiguously flirtatious relationship with Rip Hunter, the original captain of the ship, which culminates in this thing where in some kind of dreamscape, Gideon actually takes a human body.
[00:02:30] And we’ve got a clip of that where basically this is the moment where Rip and Gideon make out.
LoT Clip: [00:02:36] [inaudible] Gideon.
My captain… you can’t. I will always be here.
[swelling dramatic music, as you honestly should expect when making out with a starship]
Annalee: [00:02:49] I love that. It’s so true. It’s often the captain that has this kind of secret special relationship with the ship.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:59] Yeah!
Annalee: [00:02:59] And it’s funny because when you were talking about the way that we form relationships with our spaceships, I was thinking of the fact that often ships are like wombs. You know, they’re really protective—
Charlie Jane: [00:03:13] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:13] So there’s a kind of parental feeling there, too. So it’s not… I mean, mostly, we’re going to be talking about romantic relationships in this episode. But I definitely think we have to acknowledge that there’s also many stories where it’s kind of… you know, for example, the ship’s computer is called Mother in the Alien movies. And so I think there’s that, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:35] Interesting.
Annalee: [00:03:35] It’s a loving, protective feeling that these ships give us. And when they don’t, well, that’s pretty bad.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:43] Yeah, you don’t want a ship that doesn’t want to protect you. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:48] Yeah. There’s, in fact, so to go back to romance, but leaving aside the whole parental thing, although, that probably should inform the way we’re thinking, a little bit, about these romances. I just can’t stop thinking about that one Short Trek, which is… there was a series of web-only Star Trek tie-in, sort of mini-episodes called the Short Treks and one of them, written by Michael Chabon, who’s now working on Picard, is all about a guy who falls in love with his ship. And, which he’s been stuck on, sort of wandering in space for a really long time—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:25] Yeah, it’s actually the Discovery, like a thousand years in the future, or something.
Annalee: [00:04:29] Oh, right! And of course, yeah. And the Discovery is already kind of weirdly sentient. I guess it interacts with mycelium so maybe the ship isn’t sentient but it hangs out with lifeforms. But anyway, the ship becomes a woman who dances with the guy who’s basically her captain. And it feels a lot like that Rip and Gideon moment.
[00:04:53] But what are some other examples of ship romances, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:55] Yeah, I mean, there’s one of the most famous Doctor Who episodes of the last several years, is The Doctor’s Wife, written by Neil Gaiman. It was Neil Gaiman’s first Doctor Who episode and in it the TARDIS becomes basically a woman, gets a female body and there is kind of a romance between the doctor and the TARDIS. And it’s sort of, you know, implied that that’s always been the case and that we’re finally able to see them kind of have a physical romance to go with their emotional romance.
Annalee: [00:05:23] Yeah, that was an insane episode, but yeah, I think you’re right that it’s—
Charlie Jane: [00:05:27] It’s very sweet and very weird. And like, there’s a famous novel, The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey, features basically a human whose brain is put into a ship and becomes the AI of the ship. And she has a bunch of men who come on the ship who are referred to as her Brawn, I think, her Brawns.
Annalee: [00:05:45] Right, and she’s the brains.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:47] Yeah. And so finally she finds a Brawn who is really obnoxious but also really hot and they have a romance. And it’s like, yeah, she finally gets to fall… and we get that story from the point of view of the female character and the point of view of the ship a little more than we normally do in a lot of these other shows and books and things. I feel like there’s just tons of, space adventure, in particular, where people have a really romantic relationship with the ship’s AI.
Annalee: [00:06:15] So we also see a really great ship romance in Becky Chambers’ novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where one of the issues is that in fact, there is no way for the ship to really be embodied and so the character who is deeply in love with her. I mean, the ship and this humanoid character, they figure out a way to kind of snuggle and kind of have sex using light and kind of going into this special private room. But there’s no embodiment and other stories, for example, like in Andromeda, Rommie gets embodied. In a lot of Iain M. Banks’ novels, which have sentient ships that are controlled by minds, the minds have avatars. Tons of avatars, and they’re just humping everybody all the time, like, in parallel.
[00:07:05] And then there’s stuff like Ann Leckie’s brilliant Ancillary trilogy which is almost turning the trope inside out. So, instead of it being a human brain stuck in a ship, like in The Ship Who Sang, it’s that the ship functions by taking over the bodies of thousands of people on the crew and so every single person in the crew is referred to as an ancillary because they’re basically just a little fragment of the ship’s consciousness and of course the entire trilogy is about what happens when a ship is destroyed and only one ancillary survives. And so they’re just this kind of sliver of what used to be this glorious, wonderful hive mind, and they really miss that feeling. But also part of what motivates the ship, in that first novel in the series, is that they did really love one of the members of their crew. One of the members of the crew who wasn’t turned into an ancillary, who was actually an officer, so they were still a person. The ship kind of wants revenge for the death of that person.
[00:08:06] So there’s a lot of different ways that these relationships with ships play out, and all of them, it seems to me, are kind of toying with the idea of what is a body? Do you need to have a body to be in love? How do you have love with a creature that has a body that is much bigger than you and flies through space?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:29] Yeah. I mean, that’s a tough situation. And actually, Annalee, I have a question for you, which is, how does this trope relate to the trope of people falling in love with, for example, personal assistants, like on their phone? Like in the movie Her, you have a dude falling in love with his phone, basically, which is played by Scarlett Johansson. I feel like that’s a very common trope, recently. And how is this the same, or how is this different?
Annalee: [00:08:52] Yeah. It’s a really good question. I was also thinking about Blade Runner 2049, where the character has a relationship with kind of a personal assistant. It’s a woman who’s a hologram who lives inside of a little box or a little stick. I can’t remember. But anyway, she’s basically a USB drive. As personal assistants become more ubiquitous, we develop relationships with them that kind of resemble a relationship with a ship because just like a ship protects us and helps us and kind of extends our bodies, personal assistants also kind of care for us in some ways. They help us answer questions. They remind us about appointments. They talk to us. They can even have pretty profound connections to us in a way, especially if you’re trying to find sensitive information and really the only thing you can turn to is your personal assistant or your device.
[00:09:52] Also personal assistants, for a very different reason than starships, kind of also question that mind-body barrier a little bit because as many people now say, your phone is your third hand. There’s… when you wash your hands during the ‘rona, you always have to remember to wash both of your hands and your third hand. Always disinfect your third hand, your phone. And I think that they really do feel like extensions of our bodies and extensions of our minds and so that’s why we’re seeing a rise in these kinds of stories.
[00:10:29] I mean, the whole TV series Upload is in some sense about having a relationship, not with a personal assistant, but with a person who could literally live inside a phone and has no more corporeality than Siri. Yeah, I think that those are two parts of the same thing. It’s all about when our technology takes care of us or plays an important role in our personal lives, we want to anthropomorphize them. We want to feel like they’re our friend. But we also, we don’t want them to be too much of a friend. We don’t want them to be calling us on our shit, really.
[00:11:07] So I think it’s like, they’re sort of half-way between friend and slave.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:12] Right.
Annalee: [00:11:12] So… that’s the sort of relationship that people tend to have with their ships, especially. Because you don’t want your ship just deciding, oh, I’m going to go to another place, sorry. You wanted to go to Planet Beta circling around this red dwarf star, but I have decided I’m only interested in red giants.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:33] Yeah, I mean, I think that’s part of why this trope is kind of weird and a little bit problematic at times, because it can’t be an equal relationship. It can never be a relationship between equals because you basically have one party who is in control and one party who has to obey orders or else it doesn’t work.
Annalee: [00:11:51] And of course it has to be artificially maintained because who really has the power when you’re a starship versus a person? Like, the ship is the one with all the power. The person is literally a smear of water a little bit of fat.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:10] Right.
Annalee: [00:12:10] It can’t survive without the ship, and a lot of people probably feel that way about their personal assistants, too. I definitely, if I lost my phone, that would be, I lost a third hand plus a part of my brain, you know?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:23] Right. But yeah, it’s sort of like if you fell in love with your gut flora. Like, if you were like, oh my God, my gut flora is so amazing and brilliant and smart and just shiny and I want to hang out with my gut flora all the time. I don’t know.
[00:12:36] So, I mean, it’s really interesting.
Annalee: [00:12:37] Charlie Jane, you need to write that short story.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:41] Ah, man. That’d be so…
Annalee: [00:12:43] I really want to read a story about someone who falls in love with their gut flora.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:47] How would you write that? I’m going to have to think about that.
Annalee: [00:12:48] I don’t know! The gut flora could have an uprising, too, so they could be like, we need to be acknowledged and then in the process of negotiations, they could have a romance. I don’t know. I’m interested in this. I’m very interested.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:03] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:13:05] But to return to a more important question. So do you think that this hierarchical relationship between person and ship, is that part of why starships are almost always women?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:16] I was thinking about this a lot and it’s interesting that when starships are gendered male they frequently try to kill you, like HAL in 2001. HAL is not a good friend. And you wouldn’t want to fall in love with HAL because HAL’s gonna try and kill you. Sometimes you have these relationships… obviously Knight Rider isn’t about a starship, it’s about a car, but it’s kind of a similar situation where Michael has this relationship with Kit, his car, and it’s kind of like they’re best friends. And it’s a little bit homoerotic.
[00:13:47] There’s this interesting thing in the original Star Trek, the ship’s computer is supposed to be neutral. It’s supposed to be like, basically they refer to the computer as “it” and the computer has kind of a female voice but it’s a very sort of [imitates robotic voice] computed! COMPUTING. [Stops mimicking robot voice]. It’s a very nasally kind of non—
Annalee: [00:14:05] It’s kind of a non-gendered computer voice, I would say.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:07] It’s kind of a non-gendered, and there’s this one episode of Star Trek, which we have a clip from, where suddenly the Enterprise computer starts acting like a woman and Captain Kirk cannot handle it.
Star Trek OST Clip: [00:14:17] Computer: Computed and recorded, dear.
Kirk: Computer, you will not address me in that manner. Compute.
Computer: Computed, dear.
Kirk: Mr. Spock, I ordered this computer and its interlinking systems repaired.
Spock: I have investigated it, Captain. To correct the fault will require an overhaul of the entire computer system. A minimum of three weeks at a star base.
Kirk: I wouldn’t mind so much if only it didn’t get so… affectionate.
Spock: It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:56] Yeah, and what’s interesting about that is, there’s… every episode of Star Trek, the main trope is that Kirk is in love with his ship and that he’s kind of married to his ship. And he can’t have a real relationship with another human being, like a romantic relationship with a human woman because he’s already spoken for because he’s in love with his ship. But when the ship starts flirting with him and calling him “dear,” and acting like they’re actually married or actually in a real romantic relationship, Kirk gets really freaked out by it. Because he only wants to be in love with the ship if the ship doesn’t love him back, kind of, in this weird way.
Annalee: [00:15:34] Yeah. It’s funny because when I listened to that clip before, when we were talking about this episode, I was like, oh yeah, it’s all about how he’s weirded out that his ship’s computer is giggling and being girly. But it struck me this time, listening to it, that it’s also kind of homoerotic. Like, I wondered if it was that it wasn’t so much about the ship becoming a woman as it was just that the ship was becoming femme. And that was what was really upsetting. And you can read femme in a lot of ways. Like you could read it as oh, the ship is becoming a gay guy. Or, the ship is becoming a girl. Either way, it’s unacceptable.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:12] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:16:12] The ship must be manly and neutral because if it becomes femme, it suddenly has a personality. And that robs it of its kind of neutrality. Which is funny because as we’ve been talking about, so many other science fiction stories really revel in having ships that have personalities. They really, they like them to sometimes get a little saucy or make a little joke, or especially make dad jokes.
[00:16:39] LEXX, which we never hesitate to bring up, the great Canadian satirical scifi show, that ship is like, sentient and kind of hilarious. And of course, in the Murderbot series, there’s a couple of different ships, but The Asshole Research Transport, ART, is also snarky. I mean, so is Murderbot, right? And I think most science fiction seems to enjoy this idea that something about the ship that gives it a little personality. And in Star Trek, that just seems like it’s upsetting, unless it’s in Picard where the ship manifests its personality in a bunch of different holograms that look exactly like the captain so it’s kind of okay, because it’s really just more about the captain’s personality. Who is, by the way, a guy. So, again… everything is fine. There are no girly things going on in the ship.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:37] And Picard is actually interesting because in that case the ship is really an extension of that dude and he doesn’t… there’s no division between him and the ship. The ship is him. And there’s no way that he could be in love with the ship except that he’s in love with himself, kind of.
Annalee: [00:17:52] Yeah, or he’s like, having different… he’s having conversations with him, different aspects of his own personality and stuff like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:00] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:18:02] So yeah, it is really interesting and I think you’re right that male ships tend to be the ones that feel more dangerous. Like, HAL is such a great example because he’s such an iconic representation of a spaceship, of what it means to give a spaceship sentience and why that’s dangerous.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:20] Yeah, and in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you have male starships and they’re usually kind of not very helpful. They’re kind of rubbish. They’re having their own personal issues, they’re neurotic, they’re weird. Like sometimes they talk to Marvin the Paranoid Android and end committing suicide.
[00:18:36] In Red Dwarf there’s a male ship AI who’s also kind of just a weird dude and it’s like, it’s the difference between having a male friend versus having a woman who’s either your mom or your love interest or a little bit of both.
Annalee: [00:18:51] Yeah, it’s like the… it’s sort of the mother / wife role. Which, again, gets back to wanting the ship, or wanting your personal technical assistant to be a girl and to be subservient and be slavish. And these things get smooshed up together into a trope that just reiterates what we already are dealing with in the status quo.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:15] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:19:16] And on that note, let’s take a quick break and when we come back we’ll talk about whether starships can be sentient without getting creepy.
[00:19:25] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:37] Annalee, what are some of the main tropes that we see when a starship is sentient and self-aware?
Annalee: [00:19:42] I mean, we’ve already been talking about a lot of them. And a lot of it has to do with what kind of a story you want to tell about your human characters, right? Because the human characters and their relationship with the ship are really what most writers and creators are interested in. So there’s a lot of different ways we see the ships becoming sentient. So some of them are like the classic Ship Who Sang, where it’s basically a human brain that’s been implanted into a ship, or maybe, if you’re reading Pat Murphy’s There and Back Again, it’s a cat brain, which I fricking love. God, Pat Murphy is so great.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:21] I love Pat Murphy.
Annalee: [00:20:23] Yeah, and The Ship Who Sang has lots of problematic elements to it because part of the reason why, or in fact, I think the entire reason why this woman’s brain has been implanted in a ship is because she’s disabled and we get this whole piece of worldbuilding which is not surprising to anyone who’s familiar with Anne McCaffrey’s weird political point of view. It’s this kind of idea that well, someone who’s disabled is useless except for their brain so we can put their brain in a body.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:50] That’s horrible. Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:20:51] That’s… in this starship body. So it is really crappy and there’s a lot of, I think a lot of weird politics in there that are worth unpacking in a lot of these stories where, you know, again, it’s all about thinking about what makes you count as a person. Is it having a body? Is it having a brain? Who’s brain do you really have?
[00:21:10] So in some stories, the ship is totally acknowledged to be a member of the crew, like on Blake’s 7. So it has a personality, it has its mind, we think of it as our buddy.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:22] Yeah, and actually we have a lovely clip from Blake’s 7 where Blake insists that Zen is part of the crew over Avon’s objections.
Blake’s 7 Clip: [00:21:30] Seven of us can run this ship properly.
Six, surely.
You forgot Zen.
You’re not counting that machine as a member of the crew.
Oh, what do you say to that, Zen?
Please state course and speed.
Very diplomatic. Set a course for Centero, speed standard by two.
Confirmed.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:50] That’s just so cool. It’s very progressive for a ship show from the ‘70s to just be like, yep, the AI, it’s not just our… it doesn’t just work for us, it’s actually part of the crew and it’s one of us, basically.
Annalee: [00:22:01] Yeah, so, and some starships start out as just a machine but slowly become self-aware, we see that a lot. Or parts of the ship become self-aware, like the holographic doctor in Star Trek. But also there’s starships that are partially organic or completely organic, and then they have kind of a different status. This is certainly the case in Farscape. We see it in—
Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] And LEXX, of course. We already mentioned LEXX.
Annalee: [00:22:30] And LEXX. And then there’s novels where we have semi-sentient or fully sentient ships, like Octavia Butler’s famous Lilith’s Brood series, where a sentient ship basically regenerates itself by eating the earth, among other things. And so that’s sort of its reproductive cycle.
[00:22:52] And actually reproduction winds up showing up in a lot of these stories. The ship in Farscape has a kid.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:00] Oh yeah.
Annalee: [00:23:00] And in Star Trek a bunch of baby creatures decide that the Enterprise is their mom because they feed on, I think, on antimatter or some kind of exhaust that the ship is emitting, so they’re kind of trying to nurse on the ship. And so, although the Enterprise itself is not organic… Later, in Star Trek: Voyager, the ship is partially organic.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:28] Yeah, they have those gel packs or whatever.
Annalee: [00:23:30] They have the gel packs, which actually they kind of drop after the first season. There’s a great episode in the first season where the ship gets sick because of bacteria from a piece of cheese and one of the characters utters the immortal line, “Get that cheese to sick bay!”
Charlie Jane: [00:23:44] I love that! Voyager—
Annalee: [00:23:45] Which I will never forget.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:48] Voyager just committed. And actually there’s an episode of Star Trek, the original Star Trek, which I had forgotten about until just now where they put a special super computer on the Enterprise so that the Enterprise can suddenly think for itself instead of just doing whatever Captain Kirk says, and it’s like, well, we might not need Captain Kirk anymore because the ship can think for itself, and when that happens, the voice of the computer is suddenly male and the computer, the ship’s computer becomes a rival for Captain Kirk because it’s another dude who’s trying to threaten his command.
Annalee: [00:24:16] Wow, so he’s going to be replaced with automation.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:20] Right. And that’s kind of what that’s about, but it’s also… he’s constantly, Kirk is constantly having male rivals that he has to kind of defeat and this computer becomes one of them.
Annalee: [00:24:29] Interesting. And then of course, there’s John Varley’s series which begins with the novel, Titan, which is about a giant sentient kind of a space station, kind of a planet, kind of a starship that’s in orbit around Saturn. And it cares for all of the creatures that live inside of it and helps to create them and has a personality and in fact, she’s like a grumpy old lady basically. And at one point… it’s a bit Wizard of Oz-like. The characters go on a quest to meet her because she’s known to grant wishes occasionally. So there’s that kind of thing, too.
[00:25:06] What’s interesting about these stories is that they range from humans recognizing the humanity of their ship, as in the case where the intelligence emerges or the ship is intelligent but they still have to wait for the humans to kind of let them into the club of Blake’s 7.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:25] Right.
Annalee: [00:25:25] Or, there’s stories that begin like, say, the Lilith’s Brood series or the Titan series where this is a fully realized, sentient creature, and it’s going around and choosing its crew. And sort of choosing who it will allow to be inside it. And that’s also the case in Iain M. Banks’ novels as well. That to a large extent, the ships really determine their own crew. There’s… they kind of let humans feel like they’re in charge sometimes just to kind of give their monkey brains a fizz of excitement. But really they’re not at all in charge and so there’s a range of fantasies that we see there. There’s the mom fantasy of I’m being taken care of by this semi servant to a much more kind of militaristic fantasy where I have a giant war machine that is also my captain and my leader. And it’s like, you can kind of pick your thing. What do you want to hump? You want to fuck a war machine, or you want to fuck… oh God. Anyway.
[00:26:30] Let’s not keep with that line of thought, sorry about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:34] Speaking of a warship, we have this really great clip from Andromeda, the sort of Gene Roddenberry show in the ‘90s where the ship’s AI has taken a human body named Rommie, and is feeling really bad about having killed someone and basically asks to be disassembled. Like, the human body wants to be disassembled.
Andromeda Clip: [00:26:52] Rommie: You should get rid of this body. Chop it up into pieces and throw it out of the airlock. Or better yet, erase me. Just delete everything and start all over again.
Dylan: I’m not gonna do that.
Rommie: I killed him, Dylan. I loved him and I killed him.
Dylan: You had no choice.
Rommie: No, I didn’t, because I’m a warship, and warships only know how to do one thing, and that’s kill.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:21] And we just played a little snippet of that. The clip goes on to a part where Dylan, the captain, basically, says, “Look, you’re a warship, and yes, you’re designed to kill but you don’t have to make those decisions alone because I’m the ship’s captain and I will help to make those decisions, or really I will make those decisions for you. And I’m you’re heart.” And it gets kind of schroopy, and it’s this weird thing of like, Dylan is the heart of the ship, which is sweet, but it also means you don’t have any agency so don’t worry about it because I’m going to make the calls. I’m going to make the decisions. So it’s both sweet and a little bit weird, I guess, at the same time.
Annalee: [00:27:58] Gesturing at trying to get out of this scenario that we’ve been describing where humans develop these kind of, I mean, if it was two people we would call them toxic relationships, right? Where, you’re expecting someone to do a bunch of work for you and be your servant, tirelessly, but then you’re going to kind of treat them like a machine and not really make them… Or if you do make them part of your crew, they’re always kind of a little bit second best.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:29] Right.
Annalee: [00:28:29] And don’t necessarily get to kind of weigh in on decisions in the same way other members of the crew do. I think that idea of saying, like, well, I’m the heart and you’re welcome here and we understand why you did what you did. That seems like a kind of a therapeutic moment.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:46] It does, in a weird way. And like—
Annalee: [00:28:47] In this kind of story, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:50] And it’s interesting because military stories are full of things where someone is in love with their superior officer and it’s like, well, if we date and I’m your superior officer, I have to give you orders and maybe I have to send you to your death and how are we going to deal with that? But when those same people fall in love with a starship, which also has to obey their orders, it’s frequently never discussed of like, well, how can we be in a romance when I have to give you orders? It’s a thing that’s thought about much more distinctly when it’s two humans in a relationship versus a ship and a human.
Annalee: [00:29:23] Yeah, these kinds of stories become metaphors if you want them to, for lots of different things, right? It can be a metaphor for just automation, like we were talking about with Star Trek suggesting that the ship will replace the captain kind of thing. So… or it can be actually about human relationships between two people who are either long distance or who are just incredibly different and have different needs. If you have someone who is asexual dating someone who’s heterosexual and that’s… how are you going to work that out? How are you going to have a romance where people have different biological needs and different biological desires?
[00:30:10] And then you have, kind of straight-up, what I would say is the more traditional and fucked up story, where it’s just literally like a romance between a person who wants a slavish, adoring, wife-figure to clean their butt and do their homework for them. And then, you know, hump them later on. And that’s been a huge fantasy for a long time. It’s not just men that have that fantasy, by the way. It’s just a human fantasy, but it is often a male fantasy about women. But I think now we’re definitely entering an age where it’s also a female fantasy about men, too.
[00:30:53] So all of this does sound kind of creepy now that I put it that way, so I’m wondering, Charlie Jane, what do you think the way out, is, of this trope where we put our ships, aka our mechanical friends in what’s arguably a creepy position?
Charlie Jane: [00:31:12] I think that basically it’s just like anything else involving artificial intelligence, where we want to have two things that are contradictory. We want Ais that are super smart and self-aware and have a personality and think for themselves, but we also want them to obey us and to do things for us and to not have a reciprocal relationship of any sort. And clearly, that’s not going to work, and if we ever, in real life, had self-aware AI, it would be morally indefensible to do that. And so, really, across the board, there has to be some kind of appreciation and understanding that when any kind of AI, especially a ship’s AI, which is flying into danger with us and helping us, and protecting us. When an AI of that sort reaches a certain level of self-awareness and ability to make its own decisions, we can no longer treat it as an appliance or something that has to obey us. It has to become more of a partner. And I feel like Blake’s 7 offers one solution to that where basically they just say, yeah, the computer’s a member of the crew and like other members of the crew, it will have to accept orders, but also like other members of the crew, it’s going to disobey orders all the time, which is a thing that constantly happens.
Annalee: [00:32:28] I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:28] And you know, it’s very creepy and weird in the final season of Blake’s 7 when they replace Zen with a computer named Slave who literally grovels and says, “Yes, Master.” And it’s like, it’s a really weird development that I’m not sure what they thought they were doing with that. But it’s a kind of a step backward in a way.
[00:32:46] And then, I feel like the Culture thing is the other way, where basically, the ship is kind of in charge. The crew get to be on the ship on the sufferance of the ship’s AI. And the ship’s AI can at any time be like, yeah, you know what? I don’t want you on my ship anymore, get the fuck off. And like, I think that those are the two models that seem to work. I think a partnership rather than a hierarchical relationship. And in general, I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that space opera and space fantasy and military science fiction have a problem with depicting hierarchical relationships and they’ve imported all of our militaristic ideas from life on earth into space and they think that we will just be able to have that same kind of hierarchy in space where people are traveling for years at a time. And where you’re dependent in a way that you’re really not on land mass. And so actually, I think it’s really interesting to think about ways to remove hierarchy from a lot of these stories.
Annalee: [00:33:47] I think so, too. And I think it’s a way forward for other tropes that are related to it. Like you said, this sort of militaristic tropes around how space crews should be organized. Around how space-going civilizations should be organized. What if we thought about this stuff in the context of democracy as opposed to a military.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:10] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:34:11] Or, you know, especially like truly representative democracy. What does that look like? And how does it maintain structure and not fall into chaos, and what role does the ship play in that? So, I love that. I look forward to more egalitarian relationships with our spaceships in the future.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:33] And romances with gut flora, which, you know, we’re going to just create that genre. That’s going to be a genre we’re creating.
Annalee: [00:34:37] You’re going to create that genre. I’m so into it.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:42] This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to support us more, we have a Patreon at Patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. You can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. We’re on Facebook as OurOpinionsAreCorrect. We’re in all the places. You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, and Libsyn and Stitcher and Google Play Podcasts and everywhere that podcasts are available.
Annalee: [00:35:06] Spotify…
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[00:35:15] Thank you so much to our heroic and valiant and brilliant engineer, Veronica Simonetti with Women’s Audio Mission. And thanks so much to Chris Palmer for the music. And thanks, again, to you for listening. We’ll be back in two weeks and we just really appreciate you so much.
[00:35:30] Bye!
Annalee: [00:35:31] Bye!
[00:35:31] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.