The Ship Who Sang

The Ship Who Sang

first edition cover
Author	Anne McCaffrey
Cover artist	Jack Gaughan (first)
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction
Publisher	Walker & Co.
Publication date	1969
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	248 pp
OCLC	1663679

The Ship Who Sang (1969) is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey, a fix-up of five stories published 1961 to 1969. By an alternate reckoning, "The Ship Who Sang" is the earliest of the stories, a novelette, which became the first chapter of the book. Finally, the entire "Brain & Brawn Ship series" (or Brainship or Ship series), written by McCaffrey and others, is sometimes called the "Ship Who Sang series" by bibliographers, merchants, or fans.

The protagonist of the 1969 novel and all the early stories is a cyborg, Helva, a human being and a spaceship, or "brainship". The five older stories are revised under their original titles as the first five chapters of the book and the sixth chapter is entirely new.

McCaffrey dedicated the book "to the memory of the Colonel, my father, George Herbert McCaffrey, citizen soldier patriot for whom the first ship sang." In 1994 she named it as the book she is most proud of. Subsequently she named the first story her best story and her personal favorite work.

During the 1990s McCaffrey made The Ship Who Sang the first book of a series by writing four novels in collaboration with four co-authors, two of whom each later completed another novel in the series alone. By 1997 there were seven novels, one old and six more recent. They share a fictional premise but feature different cyborg characters.

The Brain & Brawn Ship series is set in the future of our universe and in McCaffrey's Federated Sentient Planets. The parents of babies with severe physical disabilities — but fully developed and exceptionally talented brains — may allow them to become "shell people" rather than be euthanised. Taking that option, physical growth is stunted, the body is encapsulated in a titanium life-support shell with capacity for computer connections, and the person is raised for "one of a number of curious professions. As such, their offspring would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual service for Central Worlds."

After medication and surgery, general education, and special training, shell children come of age with heavy debts which they must work off in order to become free agents. They are employed as the "brains" of spacecraft ("brainships"), hospitals, industrial plants, mining planets, and so on, even cities – in the books, primarily spaceships and cities.