If there is one constant in the history of seafaring, it is that from time to time ships misplace their entire complement of crew and passengers, which leaves the empty vessel to drift unattended. This is a perfectly natural process. One should never hesitate to board and salvage one of these mysteriously empty craft. After all, it’s not as if whatever happened to the previous occupants will affect you!
This is as true for starships as it is for sea vessels, as these five works will show.
The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper (1963)
Whereas the origin of many derelicts is a matter of conjecture, the many such drifters in the Trisystem are easily explained. Their history is well documented.
The Federation established forward supply bases in the system during its war with the secessionist System States Alliance. Having crushed the upstarts, the Federation deemed the war material in the Trisystem not worth transporting. The facilities were simply mothballed and abandoned in place.
The Trisystem’s one habitable world, Poictesme, has until now been eking out a meagre living salvaging the Federation’s trash. Conn Maxwell believes the Trisystem has all it needs for prosperity…if only Conn can somehow convince Poictesme to embrace more productive uses of Federation relics. What better way to persuade the gullible rubes of Poictesme than to tell them a lie they desperately want to be believe? Surely the Merlin supercomputer will have all the answers they need. Conn believes Merlin is only a myth…but a useful myth. Why ruin a beautiful dream with the truth?
Points to the Federation for the depraved indifference demonstrated by leaving so much war material behind in the Trisystem. This war material isn’t limited to firearms and shipyards filled with half-constructed vessels; it included such delights as hellburners and planetbusters. I am as astonished as you are that the Federation collapsed soon after the end of this novel; see Piper’s Space Viking for more details.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit it took me decades to notice the significance of the duplicitous protagonist’s given name.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977)
Half a million years before humans ventured into space, the Heechee briefly occupied the Solar System. The aliens are long gone but they left a wealth of relics, not least of which is an asteroid base, Gateway. Within the asteroid, a fleet of starships. The Heechee built well. Many of the craft are still fully functional.
Unable to recognize or read Heechee user manuals, humanity has fallen back on the tried and true method of simply poking starship controls to see what happens. Many human pilots have ventured to the stars. A much smaller number returned alive and well. Luckily for Earth’s interstellar prospects, there is no shortage of people like Robinette Broadhead, whose desperation far outweighs caution.
Gateway serves as an example of another sort of book, the kind that raises questions to which the reader is better off not expecting an answer. The first novel sold well and was followed by a number of sequels, each expanding the setting in increasingly disappointing ways. The original, however, is still a classic.
Sarcophagus (Blake’s 7, Season 3, Episode 9), written by Tanith Lee (1980)
The crew of the Liberator are no strangers to mysteriously derelict alien starships, having commandeered the abandoned alien starship Liberator very early in Blake’s 7’s run. Current commander Avon prudently regards the latest derelict as inherently suspicious. Why would a powerless hulk be adrift in deep space? How is it that Liberator just so happened across it? Is it a trap? Avon doesn’t want to board the hulk but is outvoted by his crewmates.
Avon and the two crewmembers he distrusts least1 venture into the derelict. Among the curious instruments still functioning on the craft is a timer counting down to some no doubt unpleasant event. The explorers manage to escape with their lives. The catch? Three people set out for the derelict but four returned.
Much like Alice’s Restaurant, Blake’s 7 is the name of the show but not the name of the ship or the collection of morally flexible people inside. In fact, at this point in the long-running television program’s run, Blake isn’t even the name of any of the characters on board the Liberator, Blake having been lost to the Liberator in the final episode of Season Two.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds (2005)
Saturn’s moon Janus is ostensibly a natural moon. Its sudden acceleration out of orbit towards deep space is unexpected, inexplicable, and demands investigation. The ice miner Rockhopper is the only human spacecraft in a position to investigate. Nobody in the Solar System will ever see the Rockhopper or its crew again.
Among the unforeseen alien mechanisms hidden within Janus is a space drive fully capable of sweeping up unfortunate visitors like the Rockhopper. When Janus exits the Solar System en route to Spica, Rockhopper and its crew are carried along. Relativistic travel to a star 250 light years away dooms the crew to temporal exile. That is only the first step of the journey that awaits.
Among the challenges facing the crew is the fact that their story has been written by Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds generally hews to science as we know it. Ergo, to cross interstellar gulfs is to cross expanses of time as well. Rockhopper’s crew isn’t as unfortunate as the characters in Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, but they won’t be seeing home again.
Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (2019)
The Synarche provides its citizens with a guarantee of life’s basics, in return for which citizens are expected to be productive members of society. Through no fault of their own, Haimey Dz and her partners have been coming up short in their chosen occupation, salvaging derelict starships. Unless Dz and company can turn their luck around, they may lose their government subsidy.
A seemingly abandoned starship appears to offer hope. Close examination reveals that the ship is the scene of a brutal war crime. Nevertheless, Dz returns to her ship in possession of a valuable treasure, one she didn’t ask to upload directly into her head. It’s a treasure that the Autonomous Collective Republic of Freeports, AKA the Republic of Pirates, will cheerfully murder to possess.
The Synarche may appear to be something of a nanny state, what with its regard for citizens’ individual and collective wellbeing, while the libertarian Republic, where freedom of choice is limited only by the defensive abilities of one’s chosen victims, is portrayed rather negatively. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the various types of government depicted in SFF lately (so, of course, watch this space for the upcoming essay).
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Derelict spacecraft are popular plot facilitators. These five only scratch the surface. No doubt you may have favourites not mentioned above. I have favourites not mentioned above because I wanted to include no more than one book per decade. Feel free to mention the heretofore unmentioned works in the comments, which are, as ever, 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 and 2022 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]That’s a bit unfair. Cally is Avon’s friend, to the extent it makes sense to describe any relationship with Avon as friendship. The sniveling thief Vila isn’t particularly trustworthy but he is extremely predicable and keenly invested in remaining alive. Good enough for Avon’s purposes.
I’m immediately reminded of Andre Norton’s All Cats Are Gray.
All Judgement Fled by James White
The Diving Universe series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
There is also Andre Norton’s Galactic Derelict. It does show it’s age with the alien ship’s computer being run by a tape, though one could hand wave this by saying Hyperspace is not kind to advanced electronics… but one won’t.
And the fact that the characters had no choice in where the ship went, maybe one source for Pohl’s Gateway stories.
The Star Trek episodes ‘Space Seed’ and ‘For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky’ both deal with derelict spacecraft, one of which doesn’t appear to be a spacecraft at all. Neither, of course, are actually abandoned.
I have read Pushing Ice and remember somewhat enjoying it but the details of it for some reason are escaping my memory. I think there were more alien megastructures involved?
Stanisław Lem’s The Invincible is his entry in the “investigate what horrible thing happened to the derelict ship and hope it doesn’t happen to you” subgenre. For many years, the only available English translation of this novel was very bad, but there is now a decent one by Bill Johnston available as an e-book.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama may or may not count as a ghost ship, but I think the Discovery in 2010: Odyssey Two definitely does. I enjoyed that one.
Per the Little Black Rule, ghost ships show up in Traveller material now and then, from the early Annic Nova (which badly breaks the physics of the universe and will never be allowed at my table), to the Deepnight Endeavour, to (possibly) some ancient Terran sleeper ships currently in the Great Rift and soon to arrive in the Spinward Marches.
Dune has the Ampoliros, a Flying Dutchman-esque ship mentioned once in passing and then again in the appendices. The should-be-canon Dune Encyclopedia goes into more detail.
@5: Interesting you mention those two works, as I like to describe Pushing Ice as “Rendezvous with Rama, except written for grown ups”. And yes indeed, there are more megastructures.
Spoiler perhaps, but the ship to… let’s say salvage… in “All Judgement Fled” is overpopulated, if anything.
Star Trek novel “The Galactic Whirlpool” is another with an interesting large piece of nonfunctioning spacegoing technology being met by the USS Enterprise.
“The Neutral Zone” is a “Next Generation” episode where a ship with frozen twentieth century humans is discovered on a crash course towards… something. Data, being curious, investigates the ship. I think I remember that Riker makes an interesting implicit 24th century argument that there’s no moral duty, almost the reverse, to revive dead people. He seems to be disgusted by the idea. I suppose it makes sense or they’d revive everybody who dies in the show, by transporter cloning if necessary.
Samuel Delany: Ballad of Beta 2 (Hale SF) https://amzn.eu/drhLeFZ
Ghost ships abound in horror-inflected science-fiction film: the Space Jockey’s ship in Alien (an absolute classic) is one, and the Event Horizon in Event Horizon (a movie I hated, but many differ) is another. The Cygnus in Disney’s hot mess The Black Hole is halfway between ghost ship and Nemo’s Nautilus.
I’ve recently been talking up the near-forgotten works of Raymond Z. Gallun; his 1935 short story “Derelict” is an excellent entry to this discussion. Amazingly, it has aged remarkably well.
And it would be awkward at least to omit David Brin’s Startide Rising (and, indirectly, its sequel The Uplift War) as the whole Uplift War is triggered by the discovery of a derelict armada by upstart Earthclan.
Andre Norton liked ghost ships- i believe one shows up in Plague Ship, which almost became a ghost ship itself.
The online first-person shooter game Destiny 2 has some ghost ships: the deposed Cabal Emperor Calus’s meddling with eldritch dark forces has tended to produce them. There was the unfortunate Glykon and more recently his opulent, moon-sized Leviathan has become one. Environments controlled by the Hive, such as Oryx’s Dreadnaught, also tend to resemble horrific ghost ships even when they’re just in active use by Hive, because that’s how they roll.
Unto Leviathan Richard Paul Russo.
Dawson’s Christian probably counts.
In the slightly different category of “haunted spaceship”, there’s C. J. Cherryh’s Rimrunners…
More recently, there’s Dead Silence by SA Barnes and The Ghost Line by Andrew Neil Gray and J. S. Herbison. They both feature crews trying to salvage luxury space liners, only to discover weirdness afoot. Dead Silence is more horror, and Ghost Line’s more of a mystery. Of the two, I think I prefer The Ghost Line.
@15: Cherryh’s Port Eternity has a derelict ship that is trapped in hyperspace. (Being in the Union/Alliance version of hyperspace is very bad for many species’ heads, and it’s worse for humans than for most – though Port Eternity seems to have been written before Cherryh nailed that detail down, as the human characters survive the second chapter.)
Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars starts with a crew of salvagers/bounty hunters finding an (apparently) derelict “Goldilocks*” ship drifting in the outer Solar System.
* a fleet of STL sleeper ships sent to stars that had planets in the “Goldilocks zone,” launched because humanity believed they had finally rendered Earth uninhabitable.
GRRM’s Haviland Tuf stories come to mind. He helped get a Ecological Engineering Corps ship that was abandoned but recovered centuries later.
Tagon’s Toughs took over an abandoned warship which they christened the Post-Dated Check Loan. They bought it cheaply because it was haunted.
(Puts on my James D Nicholl hat)
What’s the name of the book where humans are living on a planet-sized spaceship they don’t understand and can’t control, until some intrepid explorers find a long-hidden control room?
Extending the Cherryh theme: the primary ship in Tripoint makes a living by being the only one to know a code to get through the automated defenses of an abandoned ship.
I remember a Stanislaw Lem short story (maybe from More Tales of Pirx the Pilot?), in which the pilot is traveling on an old space ship and keeps hearing tapping (in Morse code) in the pipes. Turns out, on a voyage years earlier, several crew members had communicated that way when they were trapped in different parts of the damaged ship. As they slowly ran out of oxygen and died. Creepy.
@21: Robert Reed, Marrow?
That must be a very limited extent.
In Star Wars the Thrawn Trilogy has an entire ghost fleet.
I’m not sure The Cosmic Computer is really about a ghost ship as such. It’s more in the Cargo Cult genre. Merlin certainly has the possibility of being an eldritch-adjacent horror
Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes – if not a ghost ship, at least a ship with ghosts…
The recent Netflix show 1899 features what appears to be an old-fashioned ocean-going ghost ship. As the plot unfolds, however, it becomes more clearly a core SF story. It didn’t quite work for me, but there was much that was done well.
If we’re going to talk wet navy ghost ships, we should start with World War III in a can the USS Montana, from the woefully underappreciated The Abyss.
Another Alastair Reynolds masterpiece:
short story “Beyond the Aquila Rift”
Highly recommend. Really captured the idea of the yawning empty (?) gulfs of space being far too much for the puny terrestrial primate brain to handle without going insane..not a haunted ship per se…a haunted, broken human mind.
Had a pleasant email exchange with Mr. Reynolds some years ago, no kidding! So cool how he answered my complimentary initial email and actually struck up an exchange. We discussed William Gibson’s “Hinterlands” short story, how it hit on the same themes as his “Aquila..” He said he hadn’t read it but now was intrigued to do so. I wonder what he thought…
@21, @24: Yes! I just spent 15 minutes searching for that because I couldn’t remember the title or the author but knew I would recognise it when I saw it. I could have saved myself the trouble just by scrolling a little further down the comments…
Anyway, yes, Marrow. Some great concepts in there. As Wikipedia puts it, “When a jovian-sized, artificially-created structure enters the galaxy, a society of technologically advanced humans (capable of interstellar flight and functionally immortal) are the first to intercept and investigate it. Finding it to be an intergalactic ship, they decide to convert it into a cruise ship, inviting alien races to join them in its massive, uncharted interior as it makes a slow circumnavigation of the Milky Way.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrow_(novel)
(You can imagine all the alen races sniggering behind their hands/ tentacles: “They’ve found a huge alien artifact so they’re turning it into a cruise ship? Of course they are. Humans, eh? What can you do with them?”)
I remember enjoying it at the time, though it got increasingly baffling towards the end.
Currently I am in the muddle of E. Bear’s “Machine, (A White Space novel)”. There are two derelicts encountered thus far albeit both with crews in stasis. Even the AI’s are suffering from a form of shock induced amnesia. The larger of the two is a sub-light generation behemoth from old Earth before the reconstruction and subsequent development of FTL via a “warp” type drive. The second is a smaller more current vessel that uses the FTL drive but adapted for a specie of methane breathing members of the synarche. The fact that both craft have suffered some sort of incident that resulted in both crews entering stasis is the source of the mystery that drives the plot to an, as yet, unread conclusion. The protagonist is a trained salvage/rescue specialist who is dispatched from “Core Central”. A kind of multi-species hospital and cultural exchange station in the form of the largest manufactered space habitat in the galaxy along the lines of Jame’s White’s “Sector General” series.
@23
The story you’re thinking of is ‘Terminus’, the last story in Stanilsaw Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot and I can confirm that it is very creepy.
One more Alastair Reynolds plug – the short story Nightingale (in the Galactic North collection) features a ghost ship and has a suitably Reynoldsian gothic sci-fi tone. One of my favorites of his stories.
Salvation Day by Kali Wallace is my recent (2019) pick.
Tom Holt’s Flying Dutch has what is a ghost ship in some ways, though still crewed by living beings.
Also, Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict books are pretty good, and mostly about ghost ships being salvaged for items for collectors.
The whole plot of the movie Alien proceeds from an encounter with a derelict ghost ship, one that is most definitely haunted.
The Better Part of Valor (Valor Novel Book 2) by Tanya Huff.
Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space (Terran Trade Authority #3) by Stewart Cowley although this is not strictly a story type book. Sort of alternate future history reference book.
There is “Quatermass and the Pit” – “Five Million Years to Earth” – which involves the finding of a long-buried alien spaceship in Central London, at a place called “Hobb’s Lane” – as one of the characters points out, “Hobb” was a medieval nickname for the Devil – which was long “notorious for weird happenings”, including appearances, at odd intervals, of visions of supposed “imps ” and “demons” and culminates in the appearance of the “Horned Beast”, with accompanying pandemonium.
The scientist, Phil Plait, praised the film highly, in his “Bad Astronomy” column:
“This movie has it all: aliens, spaceships, ghosts, cavemen, telepathy, telekinesis, weird science gadgets, the devil (yes, the Devil)”.
The ship in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” is at the end , crewed by dead men animated by angelic spirits.
One of my favorite series is Linesman by SK Dunstall. The ship that is found in the first book does have a crew that is either dead or in stasis.
I thought it was amusing that in the book 2010: Odyssey Two the crew who has taken over the abandoned ship watch the old film Alien.
There is a book in Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden series that fits this category, with the apt title of, “Ghost Ship.”
The inner novel in S. (Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka) is crewed by maybe-dead men who were horribly mutilated. That’s all I remember about the actual novel, apart from the unrelenting dreariness.
Multiple Star Trek Enterprise episodes handle this
– “Fight or Flight” = Season 1, Episode 3 – encountering an Axanar vessel (they’ll find out that’s their name later) that seems to be drifting, and isn’t responding to hails, though there are bio-signs.
– “Future Tense”, season 2, Episode 16. Enterprise comes across a pod floating in space
– “The Crossing” , is Season 2, Episode 18 , although the ship was populated by Wisps, the ship was doomed
The wreck of space ship The Three in the Peach Gardens, in : The Tea Master and the Detective (2018), by Aliette De Bodard