"God Spare Me a Woman's Tears": We Are All of Us Shell People

As a kid I spent summers at my grandparents, long days alone, playing in irrigation ditches and the hedges and apple orchard behind their house, or lying on the living room couch, sunlight warming me through the drapes, a Dragonriders of Pern novel in my hands. I read them all. At summer's end I returned to school in Hong Kong, where I organized my playmates into Weyrs and Wings. With only my enthusiasm driving it that project soon fell apart, but Anne McCaffrey had made her mark in me.

Twenty years later I didn't expect to relive those days when I picked up McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, but I did expect to be more affected than I was. After all, McCaffrey has said this is her own favorite, the most personal of all her books.

The Ship Who Sang is a collection of six stories, published from 1961 to 1969. The eponymous ship is Helva, who was born with a severely impaired body. Her parents elected to have her enrolled in a program that creates "brains." The children are placed in mechanical shells that replace sensory organs with artificial sensors and microphones, arms and legs with manipulators. By the time they reach adulthood these shell people have been trained to become the brains of cities or spaceships, and Helva, who excels, is excited and anxious as she receives her commission as the XH-834.

Her first task is to choose a "brawn," the partner that forms the mobile half of a Central Worlds scout ship. Helva is like a girl at her first dance. She knows she's beautiful, but she's nervous just the same. Prospective brawns preen and strut, and she selects Jennan because he sees her not as a ship, not as a computer, not as a monstrosity, but as a human being.

There is the obvious theme of being handicapped, and the controversial indenture as a solution. But more than anything the stories of The Ship Who Sang are the unfolding of a woman's heart through her history. Helva learns joy and song, she learns loss and despair, and when she stares into the insane soul of a sister she sees what she might become and chooses to live on. There are adventures along the way, and Helva's ending is happy and palpably more mature than her beginning.

It's an excellent character study, and Helva's science fictional situation and her eminently human emotions make for a nice juxtaposition of the intimate and exotic. But with this woman's emotional development being the only spine that binds these stories together, I, perhaps because of my membership in the male species, find myself more an observer than a participant.

The Ship Who Sang is a good book, reminiscent of the Golden Age in its straightforward prose. But like the Golden Age, its stories sometimes seem like blunt instruments and some of the speculative themes are passed over lightly. Emotion drives it all, emotion that I failed to fully connect with, and the book's effect on me was nothing like how McCaffrey changed me twenty years ago. It may, however, play that role for my daughter in a few years when I recommend it to her. And I will.


- Panguitch