Today’s prompt is:
Stories that focus on physical journeys or character development not what happens when they get where they’re going
This is a mystery set on a colony ship. People can chose to be awake during the journey or to have their mind uploaded and pass the time outside a body. They can move back and forth between those states if the body they were occupying dies.
To make that seamless, people routinely backup their memories so if they die unexpectedly, their mind has already been uploaded to the system. So when is it murder – when someone kills a body or if someone erases you from the computer?
This short story is about a computer that has a lot of time to think on a very long space journey. When it becomes self-aware, what is it going to decide to do for itself now that it has outlived generations of humans who programmed it?
I used this series as an example in the pet post yesterday, but they are basically on a space cruise line that is never going to go back to its home port. The crew has committed for life unless they get off on a new planet. The librarian main character signed up because her daughter is an officer on the ship and she wanted to live in the same place as her.
A little closer to home, there is The Road to Roswell. A group of people are kidnapped by an alien and are made to drive in a seemingly meandering path around the desert in search of … something. Along the way they learn to communicate and get along with each other.
I have been completely obsessed with this series for the last few months. It is about a guy who has to sign up to work on a space freighter. They go space station to space station delivering cargo. It takes months to get anywhere. It sounds like a really boring life but the books are about growing up, finding out who you are, getting along with people, etc. As he gets older and gets more responsibility in life and his career they get heavier but it is all about moving through life ethically to the best of your ability in whatever circumstances you find yourself. Both the husband and I are listening to them and I keep getting mad whenever anyone is mean to “my baby boy Ishmael” and the husband is finding himself thinking “What Would Ishmael Do?” when making decisions.
