Who doesn’t love a crashed spaceship? There is always a mystery, the promise of—what? Treasure? An alien monster hiding in wait? Maybe both! Something, at any rate, is there, in the ruined grandeur of a vast technological marvel. Who can resist it?
Not me, that’s for sure. I put one in Neom, my new SF novel from Tachyon, set in the world of Central Station. This one’s “the Compassionate Heaven, a cargo ship out from Mars on an Earth run,” which somehow crashed deep within the Sinai Desert, stories of treasure swirling round it for years. But when we find it, it has long been empty.
It’s one of those fun tropes, cropping up everywhere. I have a love of old SF, so these ships have been abandoned for a while! What’s your favourite? Here are five of mine.
The Nomad in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination
Is The Stars My Destination the greatest science fiction novel of all time ™? Does it matter? This Dickensian, extravagant nightmare of a future begins on the wreck of the Nomad, floating in space with one sole survivor, the notorious Gully Foyle, clinging on for dear life. But what crashed the Nomad? Why was Foyle not saved by the passing Vorga, piloted by the ruthless and beguiling Olivia Presteign? And what exactly was the precious cargo the Nomad was carrying? Foyle transforms himself into an engine of revenge to track down the culprits in a headlong rush that draws on The Count of Monte Cristo while serving as the blueprint for countless cyberpunk novels to come. And that doesn’t even start to scratch the surface.
The Martian starship in Richard K. Morgan’s Broken Angels
The follow-up novel to Morgan’s explosive debut Altered Carbon sees Takeshi Kovacs hired for a battlefield mission to first open up an alien portal, then take possession of a mysterious miles-long starship filled with winged, dead Martians. Which is all in a day’s work for Kovacs, of course. It’s such a tantalizing promise—will it open the galaxy up for humanity? Will it make life better all around? Not in a Richard Morgan novel it won’t. The recent Netflix adaptation skipped this one, which was a shame–but with anime versions in the works maybe we’ll still get to see it on the screen.
Progenitor Fleet in David Brin’s Startide Rising
Brin doesn’t really do small. Why one ship when you could have, I don’t know, fifty thousand moon-sized alien ships drifting in an abandoned cluster and possibly left there by the first sentient race in the universe? A dolphin-crewed ship, the Streaker, discovers exactly that in the opening of Startide Rising, only to raise half the galaxy after them in pursuit. It’s so briefly seen—the rest of the novel deals with the dolphins’ escape and their attempts to get out of trouble—but it’s all the more memorable for that. A classic example of sense of wonder science fiction.
Stranded Heechee ship in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway
Another contender for the greatest sf novel of all time ™? The unnamed Heechee ship is not so much crash-landed as still in the process—as it is slowly descending down into a black hole. On the hollowed asteroid known as Gateway, Heechee ships depart to unknown destinations and it is up to the human explorers reckless or desperate enough to ride them, finding either untold riches or death along the way. Pohl’s celebrated novel is haunted by Robinette Broadhead’s guilt over abandoning his crewmates on the cusp of the event horizon, as his early days on Gateway come to vivid, unforgettable life on the page.
Marrow in Robert Reed’s Marrow
Ok, Marrow isn’t technically a spaceship, but… in Reed’s novel, the Greatship is a gas giant sized intergalactic ship, and humans and aliens live on it as they slowly travel the universe. Only, some hardy human explorers discover the ship hides a secret—more precisely, they discover an entire planet in the core of the Greatship. Which they then get stranded on. Leading them to build a five thousand year old technological civilization from scratch in order to escape, only to discover the planet, which they name Marrow, is a prison to a particularly hostile group of aliens. Who were also keen to escape. It’s one of those great SFnal conceits, and an underrated novel.
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Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.
All these sound great, but I personally still find the greatest spaceship to ever crash anywhere to be M-Bot from Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse. M-Bot is simply the best.
Andre Norton had crashed ships in multiple books, and I imprinted on those early in my SFF history. For one example, there were the alien spacecraft at various points in Earth’s past in The Time Traders.
@2 Andre Norton got a great deal of fun out of crashing space ships, shuttlecraft, and other flying artifacts. I kept a tally for a while.
Drukboat astronaut crashing form space3.
Does the Golgafrinchan B-Ark count?
Admiral by Sean Danker is all about surviving a ship crash on a hostile planet, and a whole bunch of things that can go wrong.
Not crashed but alien spaceships without living crews can be found in SK Dunstall’s Linesman series.
Bone Rider by J. Fally is a science fiction romance that features a crashed spaceship.
Anyone remember James Hogan’s Inherit the Stars (1977)? There’s a 50,000 year old dead guy on the moon AND an abandoned alien ship on Ganymede. The smoking and chauvinism are dated, but keeping the main focus on researchers working the problems is really well-played.
Come to think of it, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series has a crashed spaceship. And, yes to the ubiquitous crashed spaceships of Andre Norton.
Perhaps an honorable mention for the titular ship from Michael Crichton’s Sphere? It may have been more of a time ship than a space one, but it carried the same level of mystique and intrigue, and got me firmly hooked on the author.
There are lots of stories with a crashed spaceship somewhere in their past rather than in the story proper, e.g. Vance’s The Blue World or the early Darkover books (Bradley later told the story of the crash in Darkover Landfall).
There are also a number of books like Marrow, in which the ship isn’t necessarily wrecked but the people inside have forgotten how to control it — or even whether they’re in a ship; see Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, or Bryant & Ellison’s Phoenix Without Ashes (the novelization of the pilot for The Starlost, a lamentable TV show satirized in The Starcrossed by Ben Bova, who was appointed and ignored as science advisor for the show).
The Saga of the Exiles series by Julian May starts with a crashed starship in Europe, six million years ago.
Joanna Russ, “We Who Are About To”
Launched in September 1961, the German Perry Rhodan series starts with the discovery by the first human astronauts to land on the moon of an alien spaceship that has crash-landed on the moon. Most of the alien crew can’t be bothered with doing anything about their precarious situation because they all prefer to sit in front of screens for hours on end in a mind-numbed state playing essentially what are video games.
Here is another good entry: Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained mention a crashed empty alien space ship, called the Mary Celeste, one of of mankind’s many settled planets. It is a tourist attraction now. It becomes gradually more and mire important in the plot of this duology.
What about the Tommyknockers by Stephen King? I know he’s put it down as one of his lesser works, and it’s a bit jangled in tone, but it’s still a fun read about a crashed spaceship exerting a powerful influence over a town. Definitely a mix of sci-fi and horror that’s a fun if slight read.
James Blish’s ‘Seedling Stars’ colonising crashed ship: “He sat by himself at the far end of the ledge watching Tau Ceti go redly down, chucking pebbles into the nearest pond, wondering morosely which puddle was to be his Lethe. He never found out, of course. None of them did.”
The Tommyknockers
I enjoyed Poul Andersons Tau Zero about a FTL starship that’s out of control.
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers has my favorite crashed ship. I love the superb owl
Surely the best “crashed alien ship” is in Douglas Adams’ “Life, The Universe and Everything” – I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read all the Hitch-Hiker’s books but it leads to the galaxy-wide Krikkit wars.
Shipwreck by Charles Logan is the first and most memorable shipwreck story I ever read. It was Logan’s one and only novel.
It’s strange that such a sparse book can have such a huge impact. It’s all of about 190 pages long, there is no dialogue and it’s all told in the third person. Whilst some technological elements of the book are obviously dated (it was first published in 1975), the problems faced by Tansis a man lost and alone on a hostile planet with no hope of rescue would be the same whether the technology was dated or not.
Logan’s description of the mental health problems that Tansis suffered as one alone with no hope of rescue was very perceptive; it’s not often that sci-fi from this period addresses mental health. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Logan was a mental health nurse so obviously had a good insight into the way the human mind acts under pressure.
Tansis’ initial struggles with his situation upon arriving on Capellan and his then reaching equilibrium for a while was actually very satisfying to read. How one person put in an untenable situation makes the best of it was really interesting. The pleasure that he took in the company of the sentient sea-creatures was a demonstration that people need company of some sort, just to acknowledge that you are alive, that you exist.
The end when it comes is inevitable, but no less devastating for that.
I read Shipwreck as a 14 or 15 year old and it had a major impact on me. 35 years later I can remember my distress on finishing the book, having to go out and take a walk on my own to grieve for the brave man lost 62 light years from home.
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Heinlein’s Space Cadet since that’s the book that sparked my love of sci-fi books.
Finally an opportunity to tout a childhood favorite: “The Mind from Outer Space” by Eando Binder (my young self learned the word serendipity). The Binder brothers are greatly underrated.
Also, not exactly a spaceship crash, but Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Fall of Moondust” is an interesting disaster.
See also Sanctuary by Allen Steele. Would-be Earth colonists arrive at a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Their scouts return from the surface bringing with them some environmental factor that causes plastic to disintegrate. They barely manage to make landfall before their ship in orbit and landing craft fall to pieces, and settle among the native inhabitants, whose technology is at about 18-century level. After generations, the circumstances of how they got there have become more a matter of myth and folk-tale.
Where’s Ice Planet Barbarians, tho :P
Crashed spaceships are the start of the marvelous novella Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear, made into the movie of the same title.
@20 — actually, the Leonora Christine was an STL ship, but (in the end) only just barely:
v > 0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 998 c…
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Poul Anderson won one of his many Hugos for “The Longest Voyage”, where a lone pilot waits (and waits, for decades, with dwindling hope) for someone in the local low-tech civilization who can even comprehend the notion of mercury, and then perhaps be able to bring him enough that he can finish repairing his ship and return home.
(The locals are the descendants of a colonization effort, whose tech level has deteriorated to (at most) 16th-century Earth levels.)
Funny thing about this article for me is that it wonders whether not one but two books described are the best SF book ever . . . and for me, one of the others is actually better than either of them.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like The Stars my Destination, and I think it’s an important book too. And Gateway I thought was good, although to be honest just good, not either amazing or significant.
But Startide Rising . . . holy cow what an SF book. It’s got so much in it, all packed in together. It has aliens that feel alien . . . lots of different aliens that all feel alien in different ways. It’s got amazing setting, with the whole Uplift-based galactic civilization. It would be an impressive book just with the desperate attempt to get away from multiple alien armadas with one little lower-tech spaceship. But then, on top of that it’s got some pretty cool characterization, including pretty cool characterization of dolphins, dolphins with totally different personalities from each other, plus it has human and dolphin politics, plus it has that whole thing with captain Creideiki (dolphin), having suffered a brain injury, seeking ancient dolphin/whale tradition to work around the injured bits. And then on top of that there are issues quietly weaving in and out of the whole thing, environmental, imperialism, stuff. It’s an amazing book, packed with action but also packed with ideas and a bunch of other stuff, and it holds everything together right through to the totally dynamite ending. Now Startide Rising really is a candidate for best SF book ever, in my opinion.
Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space is a fun one. It reads like a history book, so you have to piece together the story in your head based on the ships’ entries.
One that no one has mentioned is the stage for a major establishing sequence in Ian MBanks’s The Algebraist. Had to give it a shout as one of my favourite SF novels.
Monument by Lloyd Biggle. Absolutely superb.
I won’t feel safe unless I’ve hired Martha Wells’ Murderbot as my bodyguard first.
Not a book, per se, but “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” puts this trope in a DND (Old school AD&D 1st ed) context. It’s just as goofy as you would expect…
For recent, The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette, though it’s not till near the end that it becomes clear there really is a spaceship involved. But my all time favorite crashed spaceship story has to be one about a couple explorers whose ship has crashed on an alien planet and they are stranded there because they cannot explain to the natives what they need. The aliens have their own space technology but it is so different from human technology that it would take a lifetime of building the tools to build the tools to build the tools… to repair their ship. Unfortunately, I do not remember the title or author, just the story line.
Dirk Gently centers around an ancient shipwreck on Earth (Adams had two or three tropes that he recycled a lot, superintelligent evil computers being another).
Ringworld is about a starship that crashes on a “planet” descended into barbarism, and our heroes have to use their wits to get back to civilization (which is the basic plot of 95% of Niven’s stories).
Voyager didn’t crash as such, but was stranded in the Delta quadrant.
Iirc the Equoids were stranded here.
Hal Clement’s “Dust rag” and Niven’s “Wait it out” and Geoff Landis’s “A walk in the sun” are about the survivors, not the ship.
I guess you could make the case for Robinson Crusoe..
Katherine Kerr’s Snare. The descendants of the crew of a crashed colony ship go looking for their origins and find the ship.
Harry Harrison’s Spaceship Medic is set on a ship on the regular Moon to Mars run that has been hit by a meteorite leaving the ship’s doctor as the highest ranking officer and things proceed to get worse from there on. I was very fond of it as a child (it was published as a children’s book in 1976 in the UK) and should get round to reading again.
Per the Little Black Rule, wrecked and/or crashed starships show up in Traveller from time to time.
There is a vile slander circulating in some quarters that the Aslan obtained jump by studying the ruins of a wrecked Ancient ship. We know that this is false because the Aslan are one of the six races represented on Droyne coyns when they became fixed in their current repertoire 300,000 years ago. (Four of the six Major Races were not even sophonts at the time. How could the Droyne have known they would come into existence and independently invent FTL travel? It’s a mystery.)
The Martian ship under Hobs Lane in “Quatermas and the Pit”. 5 million years buried then it comes ALIVE.
Robert Reed’s Greatship stories and novels are exceptional. There seem to be a lot of novellas and short stories that are only available on Kindle, leading me to buy my first one of that device (actually, it was a birthday gift, otherwise I might not have taken the plunge).