The Ship Who Sang

This is a weird one to review. On the one hand, it's foundational to my love of science fiction, one of the first I ever read. For its time, it has some incredibly progressive points on feminism and disability. McCaffrey created an ahead of its time book on what it means to be a human, and what a life without a body could be.

On the other hand, it's still rooted in some deeply problematic misogyny and throws around the R-word as a casual insult, so judging it by modern standards, lots of issues. And also by those modern standards, the ending just doesn't super hold up.

So I'm going with a 4 because it's a legendary book by a legendary author, but like most legends, we need to look at them through the lens of the present and proceed accordingly.

This has been on my to read list for a few decades. I probably should have read it back in the '80s when the 1960s scifi/fantasy misogyny wouldn't have bothered me so much.

The book is a series of vignettes. Some are better than others. Some are a little hard to follow because of the dated style of the writing. Interesting concept that doesn't really get into the moral decision of how Helva came to be wired into the mainframe of a ship and encased in a titanium tube. I really liked the world building in the first vignette. I found the vignette involving the actors extremely hard to follow - this section really dragged for me.

Happy to check this one off of my to read list. Enjoyed it... I was entertained...but I'm not going to continue with the series.