![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Anne McCaffrey |
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Cover artist | Jack Gaughan (first) |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Walker & Co. |
Publication date | 1969 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 248 |
OCLC | 1663679 |
The Ship Who Sang (1969) is a science fiction novel by American writer Anne McCaffrey, a fix-up of five stories published 1961 to 1969. It is also the title of the 1961 novelette which is the first of these stories.[1][2] The series started by the book, the "Brain & Brawn Ship series", is sometimes called the "Ship Who Sang series".[3][4][5]
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.[1]
McCaffrey dedicated the book "to the memory of the Colonel, my father, George Herbert McCaffrey, citizen soldier patriot for whom the first ship sang".[6] In 1994 she named it as the book she is most proud of.[7] Subsequently, she named the first story her best story and her personal favorite work.[8][9][10]
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.[3] They share a fictional premise but feature different cyborg characters.