Passengers & Spaceships

 

Since the first time I cracked a book about robots and spaceships I have had a sweet tooth for Science Fiction.  The first book was “Rivets & Sprockets” by Alexander Key in elementary school.  And over time there were the big three SciFi franchises of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica which took some of the images off the page and put them onto screens both big and small.  In those younger years I was particularly drawn to the spaceships as concrete concepts of wonder and imagination.

In my middle school years I had a grid paper notebook that I used to design my own spacecraft with pencil and ruler, from imposing battleships to the more diminutive fighters with all sizes and types in between.  In the corner of each page I drew a box in which I gave the name of the ship, its class, and all its “specs”.  I also remember having arguments with friends about things like which fighters were the best and why.  I was partial to the one from BSG, but my favorite (at least for a time) was the Draconian Marauder used by the bad guys in “Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century”.

Just in the past year I have discovered “The Expanse” on Netflix which is chock-full of spacecraft.  For me it has been a kind of comfort food, though I focus more on the storyline and character development than I did as a kid with the spacecraft as a kind of cherry on top.  My favorite from that show is probably “The Behemoth” which was repurposed from an intergalactic Mormon missionary ark, oddly enough.

Last night I watched the movie “Passengers” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.  The opening scene was absolutely captivating and reacquainted me with the wonder of spacecraft I felt most acutely as a kid.  In one scene later in the movie the ship slingshots around a star and the spectacle is breathtaking.  If I were to get into an argument now about the most elegantly designed spaceship in SciFi movies I’d probably have to stand solidly behind the Avalon starship from this movie.  

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