One of the frustrating aspects of this ever-changing world in which we’re living is that no sooner does one become accustomed to paddle-wheelers than bang!—less than a century into the golden age of modern paddle-wheelers, some bright chap invents screw propellers and renders an entire class of ships virtually obsolete overnight.1
SF authors have gotten a lot of milage imagining transitions like the ones from sail to steam or from paddles to screw propellers…but in the context of starships. Consider these five vintage examples.
The Shattered Stars by Richard S. McEnroe (1984)
Independent traders with older starships, traders like Moses Callahan, are uncommon because the economic realities do not favour them. Modern ships can charge less money to move goods. Large corporations have the financial resources to weather setbacks that would bankrupt Moses. The question isn’t if Moses will go under, but when.
Faced with bills he cannot pay, Moses does not investigate the prospective client when he is offered a suspiciously conveniently well-timed commission. Bankruptcy would have been the more prudent choice. The cargo on board Wild Goose could kill a world, and if the psychopath whose cargo it is gets his way, it will.
The Shattered Stars somehow isn’t a Traveller tie-in, but it does serve as a very nice illustration of one of Traveller’s core elements: how economic desperation in the form of ongoing operational expenses facilitate terrible decisions, also known as “adventures.”
“The Big Night” by Henry Kuttner (1947)
Atomic-powered hyper-ships provided access to the stars to those who cared to risk the dangers inherent in riding the hyper-tides. Matter transmission provides the same access, without risk and with the added benefit of immediate gratification. Overnight, hyper-ships found themselves consigned to economic extinction thanks to Transmat’s superior technology.
There are always people who refuse to modernize. The crew of La Cucaracha are stubborn hyper-men, determined to hold on to their traditional way of life until their aging starship falls apart around them. Given the condition of the ship, they might not have to wait all that long.
There are a number of SF stories where it turns out that the old technology has an application new technology cannot match2. This is not one of those stories. This is a story about people whose way of life is almost over, people whose only comfort is knowing that someday Transmat will suffer the same fate.
All the Bridges Rusting by Larry Niven (1973)
Launched in 2004, the Lazarus was a triumph of early 21st-century interstellar propulsion technology. With a cruising speed of one seventh the speed of light, it spanned the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri in a generation. Too bad the planets waiting for it were not habitable. Too bad that a technical mishap meant that they could not decelerate.
Launched in 2018, the Lazarus II delivers more convenient crewed interstellar travel. It’s not needed for reaching Alpha Centauri; that’s a matter of hitting transmit in a teleportation booth. But it could possibly rescue the Lazarus. Possibly if a few pesky technical problems are solved. Perhaps this is a job for … creativity.
The characters in this novel spend a lot of their time complaining about how the government, which by 2018 had funded not one but two crewed interstellar missions, is run by a bunch of penny-pinching so-and-sos who cannot see the value in non-commercial space efforts. It just proves that no matter how good your space program is, you can always imagine one that is better.
Seetee Shock by Jack Williamson (1950)
Having claimed the moon for America, the United States did not hesitate to sign the 1987 Treaty of Santa Fe, allowing rival nations to claim the other planets of the Solar System. Only the Moon was within reach of atomic rockets. Who cares who owns planets nobody can visit? It was a brilliant diplomatic gesture. Too bad Maxim-Gore invented paragravity in 1988, opening an age of affordable interplanetary colonization by other nations (depicted in the book as a bunch of broad national stereotypes3).
Lifetimes later, a new innovation may free humanity. The asteroid belt is rich with contraterrene matter. What is now a hazard for space travellers could provide humanity with the Fifth Freedom, that is, energy too cheap to meter … if some genius can work out how to safely manipulate antimatter. (And if the powers that be do not manage to strangle the Fifth Freedom in its cradle.)
It’s no coincidence that the asteroid belt is rich in antimatter. The intrusion of a contraterrene world into the Solar System and the events that followed is why this Solar System has an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter instead of the planet that formerly resided there.
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (1981)
There being no known life-bearing worlds to settle in nearby systems, the Earth Company constructed space stations instead. Lacking a means to exceed the speed of light, the Company established a sub-light trade network. Company coffers filled until three unforeseen developments ended their domination: the network of stations grew beyond the point lightspeed communication centered on Sol could control it; a life-bearing world was discovered orbiting Tau Ceti; and finally, superluminal jump was developed out in the colonies.
By 2352, the Company Wars are almost over. Earth Company must acknowledge that the Union and not the Company now dominates interstellar space. This leaves the unfortunate matter of the surviving Company Fleet. The Company has no desire to pay to repatriate this symbol of Company failure. Union will never forgive the fleet for its war crimes. Small wonder the fleet takes a third option: return home to comparatively defenseless Sol to stage a coup d’état.
Readers specifically interested in the Company War itself, rather than the endgame, might want to track down Mayfair’s venerable Company War board game. Surprisingly affordable used copies may be had on eBay and no doubt elsewhere.
***
Technological obsolescence is a running theme in modern life and fiction as well. No doubt many of you have your own favourite examples, many of them more recent than the ones above. Feel free to regale us with titles in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]An odd coincidence: both of my grandfathers were involved in unrelated projects involving obsolete nautical technology.
[2]For example, you couldn’t warm your hands over a solid-state amplifier the way you can with a vacuum tube amplifier.
[3]I cannot emphasize enough how convenient characterization by nation of origin was for Williamson in the Seetee series. Convenient yes, convincing no.
My novelette “Twilight’s Captives” (Analog Jan/Feb 2017, collected in Among the Wild Cybers) involves a conflict between the Nocturne League, an alien trade network that had been operating at sublight for centuries, and the humans who introduced warp drive to them. The League had a nice system set up that managed cultural differences between worlds through the cushion of time and distance, and FTL travel has brought more direct contact and created new conflicts and tensions, which the League is inclined to blame on human influence.
Incidentally, the new board software here has added a green circle over the lower left corner of the browser, for accessing the cookie management menu, which covers up the first seven characters in the footnotes (counting the numbers, colons, and spaces), making them harder to read. The site tech people should be made aware of this design problem.
To expand on 1: Just after WWI, my maternal grandfather served on the Red Rose, a sailing ketch that was raised from the bottom of a harbor, assigned to an excessively successful mine-sweeping project, then encountered a storm. Long story short: he got the Navy Cross out of it.
My other grandfather was engineer on the Eppleton Hall, a paddlewheel tugboat, during its 1969 Transatlantic voyage from the UK to San Francisco. It wasn’t designed for such a voyage but that was the least impractical way to get it to the Maritime Museum.
I don’t think my grandfathers met (Grandfather O’Neill was dead from 1945 to 1976 and from the mid-1980s onward so there wasn’t a huge window in which to meet), which is a pity because I think they’d have had interesting conversations.
There’s The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn, though the titular ship is already obsolete rather than imminently obsolete.
About that annoying palette: using Firefox, I can scroll up or down to see what’s covered. Is that not true for other browsers?
(I’ve run into other people seeing entirely different things depending on their browser, but not here)
@@.-@ No, the footnote and the palette both stick to the bottom of the screen.
“was dead from 1945 to 1976 and from the mid-1980s onward” ?! You are just going to leave that there? Until someone asks? OK, I’ll ask. In what sense was he dead from 1945 to 1976?
We were all assured my grandmother was a widow, that he died in WWII, and then in 1976 he turned up alive in a retirement home in another country. Until his kids found letters from him in his wife’s effects, all the documentary evidence said he was dead, and I know some of them checked. It seems to have been a cunning arrangement to get around the fact good Catholics don’t divorce.
I never saw the letters. I’ve always wondered what name was on the return address.
5: That’s really annoying. English needs a word for upgrade dread.
For this kind of story, I think I like the ones that focus on traders and cargo carriers. I mean I recognize that for sailing, innovations can propel exploration, or social interaction between cultures, but I think there is more drama in exploring the tradeoffs between cargo size versus delivery time, riskiness of different cargoes, maybe some smuggling etc.
(re: the cookie icon in the bottom, I take care of that using browser extensions [which allow excluding different elements of web pages] after I had confirmed my cookie choices. But yes it did obscure the first few letters on each line of the footnotes for me too)
van Vogt, “Far Centaurus.” An STL exploratory ship arrives at its destination, only to find that the newer FTL drives have been there for years.
Star Trek episode, “The Ultimate Computer.” No comment.
re: cookie button
I usually read Tor.com on my desktop which has a big monitor using Chrome. I have to reduce the browser width a lot to cover up text and it blocks the beginning of all text line, not just the foot notes. Scrolling works.
On my samsung android phone, I’m using the installed browser (not Chrome) and the same occurs–the widget/button covers all text as you scroll; footnotes are not stuck to the bottom of the screen. I am logged in. Does that make a difference for anyone?
Otherwise, can people start including which browser and type of device they’re using? Maybe there’s a way to fix the problem.
Oh, and while we’re discussing upgrade glitches, within the last few days the site has stopped allowing me to open a link in a new tab by holding down the Ctrl key while clicking (at least in Firefox). Right-click and “Open in New Tab” still works, but I keep reflexively trying Ctrl-click.
A favorite along these lines is Michael Coney’s 1976 short story “Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel,” which I can fairly describe as being about trainspotters, except with spaceships.
A narrator visits the spaceport where, as a boy, he and his pals watched all kinds of rockets leap thrillingly into the void, as they kept careful track of the types, and their comings and goings, in logbooks.
Morosely, he observes the obsolete spacecraft being hauled away by scrap dealers…
(Coney admits elsewhere that the story’s about steam locomotives, but he had to put spaceships in it instead to sell it to F&SF.)
Since The Wreck of the River of Stars has already been mentioned, I’ll point out that impending obsolescence plays into plot-relevant decisions made by pilots in a couple of Bujold’s earlier Vorkosigan books, Falling Free and The Warrior’s Apprentice.
I guess it’s not vintage enough yet, but the starship in Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder series becomes obsolete en route and finds colonists at its destination that already arrived there using newer tech.
@@.-@: I’m not seeing any palette covering anything (Safari on Mac). I do get the “Are you between 13 and 15” dialog using Firefox when I first go to the tor.com main page. I answer that randomly.
Chandler’s fabulously unreliable Ehrenhaft Drive-driven Gaussjammers were replaced by Mannschenn Drive starships, which more reliable about reaching destinations but whose failure modes were even worse than the Ehrenhaft’s. The parallel Chander had in mind had to have been sails to steam.
At the other end, you have stories where an advance in space travel destroyed interstellar civilization completely, like David Gerrold’s _Space Skimmer_ (a new super-fast ship topples an economy based on local scarcity) or the Dahak/Fifth Imperium books by David Weber (transmat doesn’t have time to make starships obsolete because it lets a plague spread and collapse the Fourth Imperium).
“Economic desperation in the form of ongoing operational expenses facilitat[ing] terrible decisions,” also known as “Firefly.”
#5 & following:
On the cookie-settings palette icon: as has been noted by others, the text-blockage issue (a) is a variable depending on hardware and browser settings, and (b) broadly, a bigger problem on mobile devices with smaller screens than on desktop monitors. I’m not fond of the specific positioning and stickiness myself, but it’s a lot less intrusive than having a cookie-acceptance popup show up Every D*mned Time I visit other news/commercial Web sites no matter how often I set preferences thereon.
I rather suspect that those popups, and the palette button, are a reaction to some of the legislation being proposed/enacted which is supposedly designed to (a) protect minors from being groomed/exploited and (b) prevent them from learning important things (not necessarily in that order) on the Internet. That may or may not also explain the 13-15 age query popup here, which also seems to be designed not to remember who one is from visit to visit, even though the site remembers one’s login status.
Christopher: On testing just now, Ctrl-click works for me [ETA: which is to say, yes, it opens a link in a new tab] (Firefox, Windows desktop).
Moderators/site staff: In light of this discussion and of my own personal experiences with other issues: please consider establishing a clearer and more responsive channel – and/or a specific FAQ page – for users experiencing technical issues with the Web site. At present, the only technical support resource we have appears to be the advice to “drop a line to webmaster@tor.com” on the site Contact page. On the infrequent occasions when I’ve done just that in the past, I’ve gotten only a brief auto-reply which says in part that “this address is occasionally monitored”, and no indication thereafter that my issue/question had been addressed.
@12 ChristopherLBennett, I usually click the mouse wheel to open a link in a new tab. That still works for me. I am using Firefox.
@19/John: When you say Ctrl-click is working for you, do you mean specifically to open the link in a new tab? Because for me, it opens the link in the same tab, the same as a regular click. Although it’s exclusively here on this site that I have that issue.
@20/Bladrak: I use a keyboard with a built-in trackpad, since my shoulder has tendinitis issues that a mouse exacerbates. There’s no wheel to click.
@7: We were all assured my grandmother was a widow, that he died in WWII, and then in 1976 he turned up alive in a retirement home in another country.
Yeah, there was a lot of that happening after WWII: it’s why we were surprised in 2017 to discover that my wife has Canadian birthright citizenship even though she never set foot in Canada before she was in her forties. Her paternal grandpa was supposed to have died in 1949. Turns out he actually died in 1992, and she has a bunch of cousins in Alberta. (Grandma was a war bride but really didn’t want to bring up a baby in Cadomin.)
There must be an SF story or novel somewhere that crosses the streams of obsolete spaceships and spacers with families in multiple scattered ports. (The Pusher by John Varley comes close, maybe?)
Vintage? I’ll show you youngstrers vintage!
The Skylark series:
Book 1: a small round spaceship that holds 2-4 people (the Skylark of Space)
Book 2: a bigger spaceship with the ability to blow up planets (Skylark III)
Book 3: a spaceship the size of a small moon that can take out a galaxy (The Skylark of Valeron—take that, Grand Moff Tarkin!)
The age of classic space-opera where every book had to have a bigger badder spaceship!
As I recall, the captain in Rendezvous with Rama has wives on different planets. Large swathes of his letters to both are duplicated, to spare him effort. Surely, if he is that lazy he could have one or fewer spouses?
Well, kind of? By the implementation found, transmat was never going to make starships completely obsolete – it was a sender/receiver system, so you have to have a way to get a receiver to a new destination first. I also wonder about energy requirements – if they’re moving something big enough around, it might be cheaper to send by starship. Not to mention the fact that I don’t see any way to fight a war with it – it might render civilian starships obsolete, but no military / exploration starships.
I got so distracted by site glitches that I forgot to mention my surprise that Doctor Who‘s use of “transmat” for teleportation was a Henry Kuttner reference (unless it was a coincidence).
Surprised no-one’s mentioned Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein. The near-light-speed torch-ships, after about three years of subjective time (about 80 years passing on Earth), are replaced by null-space ships that can cover the same distances in days. There’s a heartbreaking moment when a null-ship crewman tells the torch-shippers how they’ve discovered more inhabitable planets in a month than the torch-ship did in its entire voyage, when a torch-ship crewman, remembering all they had suffered, all the deaths they’d endured, to accomplish their mission, asks, “Do you mean what we did wasn’t necessary?”
There were lots of 1940s-50s American stories about old spacemen whose skills were obsolete for today’s space fleet. Probably by people whose family story had a big chapter about The Depression, or Robert A. Heinlein, or both. One of James White’s had interplanetary space travel, notably landing, captained or piloted by an extremely well trained human whose skills and reflexes were not transferable from one ship model to the next. A space accident left a ship with an incapacitated captain, and an obsolete pilot as passenger, who, of course, is asked (by the author) to save the day.
The “Dragonfall 5” series, for young readers, concerned a small, not very specifically driven starship in which a family made a precarious living transporting a few cargoes and eccentric people for which the convenience of interstellar teleportation was rejected. They also solved mysteries but I don’t think that was their job officially.
It’s not obsolete, but some people in-universe thinks it looks like junk: the Millennium Falcon.
“You came here in that thing? You’re braver than I thought!”
Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live In Vain” is partly about obsolete technology, and mostly about obsolete people. It’s unusual for this type of story, perhaps, in that the people and the technology are the same thing; Smith is explicit about how the scanners have been altered, and how unwilling they are to see their sacrifices become mere disabilities.
In “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke the space defenders were defeated by their SUPERIOR technology!
Andre Norton’s Solar Queen and similar independent spaceships appear to be a subset of this- still flyable, but not very economical.
Also Heinlein, Space Cadet. The cadets rescue themselves after being wrecked on Venus by refitting a 100-year old ship that was left when an earlier landing party died of disease. They get it ready to launch with the help of the Venusians, in part, because of the simpler technology in the older ship.
Traveller ships can have service lives measured in centuries (as long as player characters stay away from them), and some rulesets have random tables to assign the quirks they may have acquired along the way, from a hatch that won’t close right to a compartment that fills anyone who stays too long with a vague sense of dread.
Using the fantastic Brave browser (mobile & web) will rid you of the pesky green icon
The old grimy Weyland-Yutani company tug _Nostromo_ immediately comes to mind (Latin: “our raw meat”)..from the seminal 1979 film _Alien,_ obviously.
More subtly, the _Argonos_from Richard Paul Russo’s _Ship Of Fools_ novel had an interesting post cyberpunk generation ship esthetic..
@24
Why wouldn’t the content of the letters have considerable overlap? He’s updating his loved ones on what’s been going on since they last saw each other. He’s going to have the same set of events to narrate to all of them. Indeed, if his parents are alive, he probably copies much of the same content into their letters as well.
@@@@@ 1, 2, et al:
So that’s what it is! I almost thought it was a virus. (I mean, even that pesky gray-green colour makes me think of viruses…)
I contacted “webmaster” to ask for a “clarification, please!”.
I wouldn’t click on that blob/palette as long as I don’t know what it is. I did, however, mouse over. That gave me the text “Do Not Sell”. I do wonder what that has got to do with anything… I mean, don’t sell your cookies…?
cheers!
Oops. I meant 4, not 2. Mea culpa.
In THE STILL WATERS by Lester del Rey, in older spaceships use ion-drives powered by fusion reactors. They have been rendered obsolete by the “blowtorches”, which are apparently some kind of fusion torchship. Tramp spaceship freighters with the old drives cannot compete and go bankrupt
Oh, I forgot. You can read Del Rey’s The Still Waters here
https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_078v26_1958-12
Macroscope by Piers Anthony has faster than light communication tying the galaxy together with a sort of information gift economy, and then faster than light travel is discovered, leading to war.
Yahtzee Croshaw’s “Will Save The Galaxy For Food” has a premise in common with Kuttner’s “The Big Night”. Instant transportation tech has rendered conventional space travel, and spaceship pilots, obsolete – most have exited the business, with a small contingent of middle-aged spacefarers plying their trade offering “space adventure rides” to tourists.
Iirc, Bistromathics made the Heart Of Gold obsolete…no need for all that tedious mucking about with Improbability…
Niven’s “Like Banquo’s Ghost” had an interesting twist…human beings are standing by for lightspeed-delayed transmission of our first interstellar slowship arriving at its destination planet…while the aliens from that planet who have traveled back to Earth in their FTL ship provide a running commentary on exactly how the human ship suffered its fatal accident.
A few others come to mind as well:
Warship by Josh Dazelle in which an about to be decommissioned, ancient destroyer is the last line of defense.
There was a book I read LONG ago and the only things I remember about it where the protagonist had a spaceship, which was very rare due to planet to planet transmats and he loved peanut butter. Oh, and an entire star system went missing.
Arguably, the sequel to Munitneer’s Moon by Weber would fit as well. The ship in Earth’s orbit, while unbelievably powerful to modern human standards is seriously outclassed by the most recent ships of its empire.
No mention of Heinlein’s numerous juveniles, including “The Rolling Stones,” with its old spaceship/junkyard on the Moon, a major part of the book (complete with great illustration by Clifford Geary)? For shame! Nor his other novels including “Time for The Stars,” with the obsolete pre-FTL spaceship-as-plot-element at the end.
More Heinlein: “Requiem,” which features a rickety old rocket, now part of a travelling carnival, being chartered by the man who made Lunar colonization possible so he can fulfill his dying wish to go to the Moon.
Regarding Downbelow Station, there are other books in Cherryh’s Alliance series that focus on vintage space vessels, Merchanter’s Luck being one of them. The owner/pilot is barely surviving, hoping that The Lucy won’t have an issue beyond his ability or finances to fix. It’s not Cherryh’s best work, but it’s one of my favorites because we get to see the poorer side of space. And even The Pride of Chanur could use some updates, but she manages somehow with a crackerjack crew!
The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons includes a lot of plot and thematic elements based around the high costs of both obsolescence and improvement.
The Wikipedia article on the Eppleton Hall is fascinating: “This attempt apparently failed when the police were called”, hah!
Wikipedia goes on to point out there is a book about that voyage, by Scott Newhall, but my local library doesn’t have it, and it’s quite pricey on Amazon. I wonder if Interlibrary Loan would have a chance. There’s some similarity between “soon to be obsolete spaceships”, and “obsolete or out of print books” I suppose.
Digressing further, I too emailed the webmaster about the very strange “Are you between 13-15 years old?” message and also received no response. Not daring to click on it, I’ve been pulling up Web Inspector in Safari and deleting the relevant code, but that gets old fast. It does appear to be legitimate to me, but very odd.
Hi, all–for those asking about the green “Do not sell” cookie icon and the “age 13-15” pop-up, we just want to confirm that these have been added to all Macmillan sites in order to comply with the latest online privacy laws. Apologies for any confusion on that point—and now let’s get back to the topic at hand.
F.M. Busby had an interesting variant in 1991’s Slow Freight. Matter transmission has been developed, but it still follows the speed of light limit; if you’re going to a planet ten light years away, you’ll arrive ten years later than when you first went into the transporter.
While the change from slower-than-light to FTL spacecraft is part of the background to Downbelow Station, it’s not part of the story itself. All parties use FTL spacecraft exclusively.
I’ve heard of but can’t recall the title of a novel where an FTL spacecraft comes across a generation ship.
Same for a novel about a generation ship arriving at an existing colony built by people traveling in FTL spacecraft.
Too recent to be “classic”, all of the Earth-built and Mars-built warships in The Expanse series were rendered obsolete by the alien tech used by Laconia.
An interesting obverse to teleportation making spacecraft obsolete was in Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton where the use of teleportation discouraged the construction of the warships that humanity suddenly needs.
One of the people whom Miles Vorkosigan recruited/collected was a jump pilot made obsolete by newer jump tech (the old ‘color Superjumper’ tech was throwaway referenced in The Warrior’s Apprentice).
@57/Will: “I’ve heard of but can’t recall the title of a novel where an FTL spacecraft comes across a generation ship.”
There are probably a number of those. I can think of two that were both part of Bantam Books’s Star Trek novel line, less than two years apart. Joe Haldeman’s World Without End (February 1979) had the Enterprise encounter an alien generation ship, and David Gerrold’s The Galactic Whirlpool (October 1980), my favorite of Bantam’s Trek line, had the Enterprise rediscover a lost Earth colony that had started out as an orbital habitat but then become a generation ship. I think they both went the standard route of having the inhabitants not remember that their world was a spaceship. Of course, Star Trek itself had previously used that idea in the episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” (The Orville also used it in an early episode. It’s pretty common.)
James White’s “Contagion”, in collection “Ambulance Ship”, has a team from Sector General space hospital dealing with faster-than-light recovery of a generation ship from Earth, stated to be one of several such rescues in this universe. That summary of the story is very misleading; I’ll leave it at that, so that you are neither spoilered nor disappointed.
About the green spot: Am I now seeing space at the foot of Tor web pages, so that the spot can be not covering anything important? I assume that I’m seeing a United Kingdom version of this, and it hasn’t asked my age. Since I’m talking about a story of James White’s, it probably doesn’t have to.
@8 In the spirit of Douglas Adams:
Lisnamuck (n.) Of updates or upgrades, to mess up something that previously worked well as it was. Usually implemented by a Killigullib (q.v.) and resulting in Knockloghrim (q.v.).
Killigullib (n.) A person who believes that updates or upgrades must neccessarily be an improvement due to them being novel. “From the outset of his carreer, he was a true Killigullib in every sense of the word” – Roy Corden in “Steve Ballmer – Visionary of the other kind.“
Knockloghrim (adj.) Of persons, describing the irritation experienced during browsing when a Lisnamuck (q.v.) turns up.
I think Battlestar Galactica uses this, in reverse, as a major plot device.
The ship is 50 years old, and about to become a museum piece. Because its computers are not networked, its systems cannot be hacked.
Samuel R. Delaney’s Ballad of Beta-2 also used generation-ships-overtaken-by-FTL as a framing device.
@62, Jon Favreau uses the same idea in the first season of The Mandolorian. Din Djarin pilots a razor-crest, an old model starship that predates New Republic identification tech, allowing him to fly around and avoid notice. Of course, it doesn’t work for long.
And on the topic of things classic and obsolete, I love that the cover art for The Shattered Stars is a classic Vincent Di Fate painting (or a damn fine imitation). I always loved the look of his paintings, but I can’t remember ever seeing one that had anything to do with the novel it adorned.
@64 The cover of The Shattered Stars shown above looks more like a John Berkey (equally classic) to me — but I’ve been fooled before.
Now that my curiosity is piqued, I suppose I could do some research and resolve the question, but I’m getting ready to leave for work and so must leave this to someone else (or my future self).
It is indeed a Berkey.