I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Cherchez la Femme, is an ode to spaceships and what they come to mean and represent in the Future. This review contains spoilers.
In this story, Ejoq winds up in jail over a holiday weekend for some minor infraction in the Jarden system. It's unclear what happened, and Ejoq claims it's not his fault, but it's a holiday weekend and nobody's around to hear his plea right now, so he settles into his cell.
Sharing his cell is an old man. The man shares his story with Ejoq. It seems that the man spent his entire life on a spaceship, and that ship's being decommissioned. His home, his whole life, is literally being torn apart. And he feels it deep inside. He tries to drink it away, but when he gets brought in to cool off in jail he doesn't have access to drink, and so he just has to sit with his pain.
I have to admit that I find it hard to identify with the sentimentality of "home". I moved every 2 or 3 years as a kid, and even as an adult rarely stayed in any one place more than 5 years. I understand in a sort of academic way that people feel sadness when a familiar place changes, but I don't understand it on an emotional level. So in a way, this is the least effective Stardrifter story for me.
And yet, the older I get (which I make sure I do every day, and when I achieve it 365 times in a row, I celebrate with cake), the more I understand that change is a heck of a powerful force in the world. Your favourite café goes out of business, a website goes away, a community wanders away from its usual hangout, culture changes, politics shift, landscapes alter. You look back five, ten, twenty years into the past, and you realise that the world isn't the same world that used to be. And not only has your environment changed, but you've changed. Your perception of the world, and the world you used to know, has changed. It seems every moment in your past, instead of being preserved in your memory, constantly changes.
That helps me somewhat understand the sentiment.
What I really connect with in this story, though, is beautifully subtle homage to space opera. In space opera, spaceships are anthropomorphized to the extreme. I get that in real life, people use the feminine gender when referring to ships, for whatever reason. But in space opera, a captain is dedicated to a ship as if it's literally his wife. There's no room for human relationships in space opera, because the machinery is just too important. It occupies not just the hero's time, butthe hero's every thoughts.
This story is the emotion of that space opera trope. Space ships in Stardrifter are sanctuaries and places of ultimate solace. And not insignificantly, they're escapes from the troubles of humanity. And when one gets taken away, it's painful. It can be soul-crushing, and incongruously the correct way to handle that is to find comfort in the very thing you were running from on that space ship: other humans.