Recently, the entire world was rocked by an astonishing development, the consequences of which may well have global implications. The news services have spoken of nothing else1. I speak, of course, of the announcement that in order to secure the future of his creation, the venerable tabletop roleplaying game Traveller, Marc Miller has transferred all rights to Mongoose Publishing.
Traveller allows players around the world to create tales such as this: a baroness, an army major, a mid-grade bureaucrat, a non-commissioned marine, and this guy who somehow failed out of “criminal” who pool their resources to purchase a used freight starship none of them have the skills to operate, decorate it with the photos of their five friends (all of whom died in the Scout service), and live their dream of shipping, I don’t know, cheese from Rhylanor to Sabruse.
As previously discussed, independent traders are a rich source of opportunity—if not for wealth, then for adventure. Being independent, they may roam wherever they choose. Many have complicated backstories that could come back to haunt them. Starships being a hole into which one pours endless funds, independents are frequently more greedy than cautious. Writers have not overlooked the narrative potential of the tramp starship. Such tales abound, of which these are five classic examples.
“Milk Run” by Robert Sheckley (1954)
(Collected in Pilgrimage to Earth) The only flaw in the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service business plan is that nobody currently wants their planet decontaminated. Offered a lucrative contract to deliver an assortment of animals to the Vermoine solar system, AAA Ace owner Frank Arnold sees no reason not to sign the ominously forbidding contract. After all, Arnold won’t be flying the AAA Ace starship. Co-owner Richard Gregor will.
Time being of the essence, the pair barely have time to make rudimentary alterations to their ship before Gregor must set off for Vermoine. Once underway, Gregor discovers that his cargo has daunting life support requirements. Failure to rise to the occasion could doom the poor animals or worse, doom AAA Ace’s profit margin. Or, just perhaps, doom Gregor himself.
Sheckley wrote a bunch of AAA Ace stories. Did Arnold ever learn the value of due diligence? He did not. Did Gregor tire of his partner’s lack of common sense? He did not. It’s almost as though Sheckley saw no reason to interfere with a successful story formula.
Postmarked the Stars by Andre Norton (1969)
The Solar Queen’s past commissions have had a lamentable tendency to include undocumented, life-threatening complications. A simple mail run may not be the most profitable contract, but surely it is a safe one. Or so cargo chief Dane Thorson thinks, until he is drugged and replaced by a double shortly before the Solar Queen lifts for backwater Trewsworld. He manages to stagger back to the ship, where he finds his double…
Dead of a heart condition. What was the double’s nefarious plan? It soon becomes obvious. Among the goods being mailed to Trewsworld: animals. The double planted a device that induces reverse evolution. A distressing fraction of the animals are descended from aggressive carnivores. The Solar Queen is now delivering monsters to a world ill-prepared for them.
I honestly don’t know if AAA Ace or the Solar Queen had the worse track record of fulfilling contracts successfully. In the Solar Queen’s defense, nothing they ran into could have been avoided with a little research. Who expects a smuggled monsterizing ray?
Space Angel by John Maddox Roberts (1979)
Experienced spacer Torwald has no difficulty securing a berth for himself on the independent trader Space Angel. Torwald even arranges a position for chance-met poor orphan Kelly. Torwald’s timing is perfect. The Space Angel has only just secured a contract for which success is assured: a quick run to Alpha Tau Pi Rho/4 to retrieve diamonds of unusual size, diamonds whose location is known only to their client Aleksandr Strelnikov.
The malevolent alien Sphere who has been hiding on Alpha Tau Pi Rho/4 is a complete surprise. Recognizing that the humans could be a useful asset in its plan to conquer the universe, if only to provide the mobility that Sphere otherwise utterly lacks, Sphere tempts the humans with the promise of ample compensation. It’s another can’t-lose proposition, just as doomed as the first one.
Space Angel’s star drive causes uncontrollable diarrhea. That’s a bold creative decision. So is Roberts’ decision to write a book whose meandering plot reads as if it were generated by dice rolls on a tabletop roleplaying game random encounter table.
Rimrunners by C.J. Cherryh (1989)2
The Company War is over. Alliance and Union won. Conrad Mazian, commander of the Earth Company Fleet, rejected the peace. Now Mazian and his loyalists prey on Alliance and Union shipping as despised pirates. Bet Yeager defected from the Earth Company Fleet years ago, but fear of exposure haunts her every day.
After a string of bad luck, Bet is willing to gamble on joining the crew of intelligence ship Loki. Unlike most starships, Loki’s crew aren’t family but strangers who can barely work together. This is too bad, because they will very soon encounter a Maziani ship. Survival demands unity. To achieve that, Bet will have to do something she has not done in years: trust her crewmates with her darkest secret.
It’s been years since I read Downbelow Station (which documents the end of the Company Wars) so I don’t know if Union and Alliance offered a general amnesty to Company Fleet service members who switched sides or at least surrendered. Given that one of the central players was ex-Fleet, it seems logical that they would. Bet’s situation suggests they didn’t—or if they did, she didn’t feel she could take advantage of the amnesty.
Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer (1979)
Charming raconteur Medrano Trafalgar entertains his friends with amusing tales of his adventures trading on alien worlds, rambling accounts told over endless cups of coffee. His starship is but a clunker and from time to time Trafalgar’s exuberance overcomes his caution, but Trafalgar excels at running away. Thus far, this has been sufficient.
His friend might ask “where did a 20th century Argentinian businessman get his hands on any starship, clunker or not?” Readers might ask as well. That would be rude. Worse, it might bring an end to the tales, and those are so very amusing.
There are many stories I could have mentioned, even after excluding ones mentioned in previous essays3. If particularly glaring examples come to mind, feel free to mention them in comments below.
- I assume. Maintaining my grueling writing schedule (reviews, essays, and bon mots), not mention frequent animal-petting-acceptance testing, keep me busy. Let me just check the news… Great Scott! Someone shot the Archduke Ferdinand! ↩︎
- This is another Cherryh novel whose in print status is oddly ambiguous. Publisher Grand Central Publishing seems to think it is in print. Various booksellers disagree. I have a Cherryh project slated for 2025 and I expect this problem will keep on being bothersome. ↩︎
- Witches of Karres is excluded due to Schmitz’s unfortunate decision to provide the protagonist with a nine-or-ten-year-old love interest. Nothing happens but still, what the hell, Schmitz? ↩︎
And this is why I skipped Traveller in a previous essay.
Merchanters Luck (another Cheeyh) is extraordinarily Traveller-esque.
I think that was mentioned in an earlier column; that’s the only reason that occurs to me to pick Rimrunners instead.
Rimrunners also has the random people thrown together aspect, where in Merchanter’s Luck everyone on the ship but the protagonist is from one family.
His mostly unrecorded previous trips holding the ship together with hired crew could have been more Traveller-like, but pretty much no one but him stayed aboard more than one trip. (Maybe it reflects a pickup game with one regular. :-) )
Anyway, in that universe the merchanters are very, very firm in enforcing a cartel of family ships on all interstellar trade. (For the benefit and safety of all, of course! Cherryh’s most recent pair of books are all about how they initially set it up.) A typical Traveller crew would be about as welcome as Superman carrying a scuttle full of coal into a DeBeers trade fair.
Joseph Wesley, writing as LJ Stecher, Jr., had a brief series about the captain of the Delta Crucis, who had a habit of taking on delivery jobs that were far more than his ship could handle.
These hard-luck tramp traders might prefer to pick up priceless verga leaves at Jubbulpore, seat of the Sargon of the Nine Worlds. But that story might be disqualified here because the section for the Free Trader Sisu is only part of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, and partly because of the subtheme in this collection: in CotG, the ship captain is the deceiver, not the deceived.
From distant memory, Bet Yeager had been left behind on a station after a raid and managed to dump her armour and mingle with the local population which already had other undocumented refugees on board. After the war ended, Alliance issued new identity papers to anyone who could get 10 or so others to vouch for them being who they claimed to be. The destruction of several stations made it impossible to verfiy claims, and apparently nobody had heard of off-site backups.
The fact that information sufficient to rewire a human brain is stored on tape in the first decade or so of stories says something about the state of IT in that world. And with the stations being essentially city-states (with Earth Company sovereignty nominal for a long while), it’s not that shocking that they wouldn’t have been loading their doubtless bulky demographic record tapes onto freighters regularly on the off chance someone would blow a whole station. An escalation which, after all, seems to be entirely new when the problem arises circa Downbelow Station, even though the war has been going on a long while.
(Cherryh does later have current events, commodities data, etc. loaded into black boxes on the merchant ships and sent by radio as soon as they drop out of Jump in the system, Maybe they should have added ID databases, or maybe that just gives the unscrupulous something to hack for identity theft.)
Bet Yeagar didn’t defect from the Fleet, and she never surrendered either, which is the source of part of her legal difficulties. (The murders are the other part, of course) She didn’t make it back to her ship in time when it left the station precipitously and has always been trying to get back to it. If she’d formally surrendered instead of pretending to be a refugee and utterly refusing to abide by local law, she probably could have got some kind of deal or amnesty, but she refused to.
Wasn’t she off Africa, the worst (or at least worst-reputed) ship of a bad lot?
Bit like “abandoned but unrepentant Unit 731 member”.
Poul Anderson had a number of stories involving interstellar shipping. Seem to be collected in The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volumes 1-4?
I came across one of the stories in some anthology or other, and the solution to the problem was to heavily arm only a percentage of the ships being predated by pirates.
I think you mean his Polesotechnic League stories, involving David Falkayn and Nicholas van Rijn. The Psychotechnic League was something else.
You are correct. I regret the error.
The Polesotechnic League is one of the more historically grounded trading series. Most of the captains don’t own their ships but work for larger companies like Solar Spice & Liquors. And the trading is in commodities like, well, spices and liquors: things that relatively primitive natives will have, that can’t be manufactured more cheaply somewhere else (Andre Norton’s traders look for these too).
When the aliens finally land, they will probably be looking for coffee.
Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales series, as well as sequels. Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta stories start out as this, but well….
A fine example of this subgenre also works as a tie-in to another of today’s Reactor articles, that regarding small presses: The Light Years by R.W.W. Greene (2020, Angry Robot Books) hinges on family-run, sub-light freighters. A fine novel and worth anybody’s time, sub-light or not.
For the unique take the short ‘The Pusher’ by John Varley deserves a mention. Yes, it won a Hugo but it’s not really a splashy tale . Rather than focus on the spaceships it deals with the consequences of mundane spaceship trading runs.
I’d also suggest ‘Halcyon Drift’ by Brian Stableford as a worthy addition to the curmudgeonly spacer genre. Although not flashy in the usual sense I never miss an opportunity to recommend it to those looking for something different. As a teen I spent some time failing to convince my Traveller GM that my crashed-and-rescued pilot needed a ship like the Hooded Swan.
How to have routine interstellar shipping of items like cheese AND have it be perilous: Because of automation a fixed-size crew can handle even billion-tonne cargo ships, taking advantage of fixed-cost economies of scale. Such a super-galleon carries all the trade between two star systems of billions of inhabitants at the rate of once or twice a standard year or so; by sheer volume it’s economical to ship low-profit margin items.
So it’s routine; but NOT safe. For Reasons*, starship freighter crews tend to have mortality rates comparable to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the Earth. The low absolute number of crew make it feasible to offer life-changing (if they survive) salaries to people desperate enough to sign up for quasi-suicidal runs.
*for just one example, a single ship with a handful of crew carrying a year’s entire trade between two star systems is eminently pirateable.
To expand on the program, if a single ship is carrying an entire year’s work of trade, then the obvious source of pirates would be the government of either the source it destination system. That easy they either get the money (or an insurance payout), and the goods.
Traveller’s Imperium has an ongoing issue with pirates, even though jumps seem to start and end 100 planetary diameters from trade worlds. That’s a comparatively small volume to patrol. If you assume it’s the navy itself collecting an unofficial tax, the inability of the navy to catch pirates makes more sense.
People keep insisting pirates would hang around in deep orbit or at a gas giant, while I point out the most effective way to catch a merchant is to hang out at the starport and launch immediately after the merchant. That would I imply at least some collaboration with the starport authorities…
The Liaden stories by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have plenty of space traders, not too mention tea, romance and cats.
Thanks for mentioning these! Intergalactic—and at one point even inter-universe traders—with a huge backstory and an ongoing conflict to address.
I’d have said that Rimrunners was less about trade than either Tripoint (which has both a complete interloper and a character whose affiliation is argued) or the works others have cited, but anything she does has enough threads that calling one thread key is begging for correction.
I can’t help thinking of the film Space Truckers, starring Dennis Hopper. It was made in Ireland, so I guess we owe the rest of the world an apology? Charles Dance is the cyborg villain and sports an ‘attachment’ that has to be revved up like a chainsaw. Not exactly a career high point…
I actually enjoyed this movie, which I rented out on video.
Space Angel was the first novel I ever read all the way through. I was 12 and loved it. I guess it was my gateway to SF. I reread it in my 30s and liked it then, too. Now I’m mid-50s, and wish I still had my copy so I could read it again. Ah, nostalgia.
I believe “Agent of the Imperium” was a traveller universe novel. I loved it. Anyone have any idea if Marc Miller will write another? Or does this transfer of rights preclude that?
Tuff Voyaging by George R.R. Martin.
Space trader on the spectrum finds a new career as an environmental engineer.
Late to the party, but I always like to throw some love toward eluki bes shahar’s [imho] almost criminally underappreciated Butterfly and Hellflower trilogy – naive & sheltered Butterfly St. Cyr escapes her Luddite pastoral home planet, planning to support herself as a small scale interplanetary trader, with the help of her intergalactically illegal AI sidekick – which her sheltered background failed to teach her to identify as the Source of All Evil in the Universe TM. Her (nearly) first move is to rescue the runaway teenage scion of a virulently antitechnological caste of humanity dedicated to the annihilation of said AI entities from the consequences of the brawl he naively starts, being out on his own in ‘normal’ society for the first time. Hijinks ensue.
No one in my IRL circle has ever encountered these, and they’re among my favorites to recommend if you can get your hands on a copy (probably OOP). Anyone who has:
wins the entire Internet. Along with my eternal gratitude.
*The Rolling Stones* centers entirely around a family living in a tramp freighter.
A recent (sadly short) series that is set on a trading ship but is more Interstellar spying is the spin-off from the Starship’s Mage series, by Glynn Stewart, Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon. I highly recommend both series.
Never mind.