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''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.〔("The Ship Who Sang" (story) ). ISFDB.〕 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 Ship Who Sang (series) ). ISFDB.〕〔''(Partnership (The Ship Who ...) )''. Amazon. Confirmed 2011-07-27.〕〔(Anne McCaffrey ). ISFDB.〕〔Footer to ("Dragonsong/Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey" ) (for discussion 2005-03-23). Denver Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club. Confirmed 2011-07-27.〕 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.〔(The Ship Who Sang (book) ). The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB).〕 McCaffrey dedicated the book "to the memory of the Colonel, my father, George Herbert McCaffrey, citizen soldier patriot for whom the first ship sang."〔Anne McCaffrey, ''The Ship Who Sang'' (1969), New York: Ballantine, paperback edition, 25th printing, Dec 1993. Front endpapers.〕 In 1994 she named it as the book she is most proud of.〔("An Interview with Anne McCaffrey" ) (1994-05). By Richard Karsmakers. Gouda, NL: karsmakers.net. Retrieved 2011-07-21.〕 Subsequently she named the first story her best story and her personal favorite work.〔("Interview with Anne McCaffrey" ) (2000-05-08). Science Fiction and Fantasy World ((SFFWorld.com )). Confirmed 2011-07-12.〕〔("An Interview With Anne McCaffrey" ) (2004). By Lynne Jamneck. Writing-World.com. Retrieved 2011-07-21.〕〔("Anne McCaffrey: Heirs to Pern" ) (2004-11). ''Locus Online'' excerpts from an interview published in ''Locus: The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field'', Nov 2004. Confirmed 2011-07-27.〕 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. ==Fictional premise== 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."〔Anne McCaffrey, ''The Ship Who Sang'' (1969), New York: Ballantine, paperback edition, 25th printing, Dec 1993. Pages 1–2.〕 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. A brainship is able to operate independently but is usually employed in partnership with one "normal" person called a "brawn" who travels inside the ship much as a pilot would. A brawn is specially trained to be a companion and helper, the mobile half of such a partnership. The nickname is relative: the training is long and intense and the brawns must be brainy people in fact. Commonly the brain and brawn are paired at will and, for a fee, a brainship may terminate an assigned partnership. McCaffrey explained the origin of the brainship premise to SFFworld in a 2004 interview. "I remember reading a story about a woman searching for her son's brain, it had been used for an autopilot on an ore ship and she wanted to find it and give it surcease. And I thought what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships? So that's how ''The Ship Who Sang'' was born."〔 ==The short story== Anne McCaffrey had published two stories when she attended her first Milford Writer's Workshop in 1959. Afterward she worked on "The Ship Who Sang", which was published in ''The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'' (Apr 1961) and included by editor Judith Merril in the anthology, ''7th Annual of the Year's Best S-F'' (1962).〔 Helva scored well on encephalographic tests and her parents chose the shell option. She would be a brainship, an elite of her kind. "Brainships were, of course, long past the experimental stages" in her time. Supposedly, "the well-oriented brain would not have changed places with the most perfect body in the universe."〔 The story closes with brainship Helva singing "Taps" at the funeral service for her brawn Jennan. Decades later, son Todd McCaffrey called it "almost an elegy to her father".〔Todd McCaffrey, ''Dragonholder: The life and dreams (so far) of Anne McCaffrey by her son'' (1999). New York: Ballantine. ISBN 0-345-42217-1. Page 13–14.〕 About that time, she called it her own favorite story, "possibly because I put much of myself into it: myself and the troubles I had in accepting my father's death () and a troubled marriage."〔 She has also called it "the best story I ever wrote", one that still makes her cry.〔 She chose it to read aloud as Guest of Honor at the annual science fiction convention Eurocon 2007.〔("Anne McCaffrey reading at Eurocon 2007" ). YouTube. Uploaded 2007-09-27 with the caption "Clip of Anne McCaffrey reading The Ship Who Sang at Eurocon 2007 in Copenhagen september 2007." Confirmed 2011-08-31.〕 ==Reception== Joanna Russ noted the steady increase in McCaffrey's command of her craft over the writing of the stories, saying "one of the pleasures of reading ''Ship'' is watching it progress from some rather awful gaucheries through the middling treatment of middling ideas to the final two sections in which the author at last begins to dramatize scenes with ease and some polish." Russ concluded that while the book suffers from a failure to rewrite the earlier work into a coherent whole, "Even at its silliest the book has a contagious joyfulness."〔"Books," ''F&SF'', July 1970, p. 40-2.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Ship Who Sang」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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