6 Books with Living Spaceships

The Night’s Dawn, by Peter F. Hamilton
You want living ships? This is about as alive as they get. About 600 years from now, mankind has finally colonized planets across the galaxy and is developing unique cultures suited to the new worlds. Genetic engineering has kicked into overdrive, allowing us to manufacture creatures born in the vacuum of space. These ship-sized beings live out their lives in the black, which means they do everything in zero-G. Including mate. An early chapter in the first book in the series, The Reality Dysfunction, describes the whole process in detail, just in case you were wondering how living ships get their funk on.

Lightless, by C. A. Higgins
A one room sci-fi tale that takes place on board Ananke, an experimental military vessel that’s one part machine, one part living creature. The ship has an intimate connection with the story’s protagonist, Althea, who spends most of her time interpreting Ananke’s sensations so she can act on her behalf. Of course, something screwy is happening, and at first it isn’t clear what that is. (Hey, you try making sense of a living spaceship’s feelings!) As it turns out, terrorists are on board, and they’ve uploaded a virus into the ship’s systems. Althea has to play engineer and doctor while the rest of the skeleton crew deals with the baddies and the greater evils they represent.

Warhorse, by Timothy Zahn
An ecologically-aware science fiction novel filled with warnings modern humans can (and probably should) carefully consider. The Warhorse universe is populated by living starships with telekinetic abilities. These “space horses” have been tamed and are controlled by an alien species that keeps tight rein over their wrangling tech. Human poachers are determined to capture one of these living ships and learn how to pilot them. As you can imagine, that puts something of a strain on peaceful relations with the Tampy. Can the two species learn to work together, or are space horse jousting wars a future inevitability?

The Unreasoning Mask, by Philip Jose Farmer
Although living ships aren’t front and center in this futuristic morality tale, The Unreasoning Mask couldn’t take place without those non-breathing creatures. The story follows Ramstan, captain of al-Buraq, one of the few living ships that can travel between two points of space in an instant. The vessels were created long ago to allow sentient races to tour the universe and meet. (Kind of like a Popemobile in space.) Unfortunately, someone’s using one of them to destroy sentient life across the universe, which is totally not cool, and something Ramstan is going to put a stop to.

Boojum, by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
A short story featured in the September 2012 issue of Lightspeed Magazine, Boojum is about Lavinia Whateley, a.k.a. Vinnie, a complex living ship that’s essentially a mobile, self-contained ecosystem, complete with algae growing in her hide. Vinnie has a crew inside of her, but she also has wants and needs of her own, including the desire to hunt for prey. Imagine being in the ribcage of aa gigantic dog flying through space as it chases a squirrel around Venus. That’s what it’s like aboard Vinnie, and the tale touches on some surprisingly interesting facets of living in a creature you can barely communicate with.

Farscape
OK, so it’s not a book, but I wouldn’t feel right creating an article about living ships without mentioning Moya. The darling of the Farscape TV series and comics, Moya is a member of the Leviathan race whose habitat is the empty void of space. Peacekeepers capture these Leviathans and bond them with Pilots, members of an entirely different species whose neurological systems form a symbiotic relationship with the ship. Leviathans have thoughts and impulses just like any living creature, though with the help of the pilot, they’re tempered, so crews can use them to travel and do useful science fiction-y stuff.
What living ships are we missing?