NEW SAVANNA: Reading Spacecraft 3: Ships, craft, and the imagination

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Reading Spacecraft 3: Ships, craft, and the imagination

Let’s begin at the beginning: “Introduction: Ships and craft,” pp. 1-27, Tim Morton, Spacecraft (2021). Morton tells us that he saw Star Wars upon its initial release in December of 1977 (p. 2), when he was nine (p. 10). We will learn quickly enough that the Millennium Falcon is his prototypical spacecraft – mine was the flying saucer from Forbidden Planet, which I saw on its initial release in 1956, but then, for some reason, flying saucers fell out of fashion in the movies. He goes on to inform us that he “can’t count the number of models of spacecraft, real and fictional, that I owned.” Nor can I count the number I owned, not to mention the countless drawings I made, and a painting or two. I quote the sentence, not on account of the uncountability of his collection, but because he introduces the distinction between fiction and real. He’ll go on to say “this book is about the space vessels of our imaginations.”

However (p. 10):

This doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in Apollo or the Space Shuttle, or Soyuz, or Sputnik. Far from it. The whole point about those vehicles is that they also originated in some dream of a human being. The Space Shuttle bears a vivid resemblance to the shuttle as imagined by Stanley Kubrick in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And to design real spacecraft you need a big imagination.

Morton points out that “Imaginary ‘objects’ are also objects” (p. 3), and we’re off to the philosophical races for the next few pages as he flies through Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, philosophy, psychology, phenomenology, scientism, subjective and objective on his way to hyperspace, which he locates in African philosophy and the TARDIS and so forth and so on until the philosophical scaffolding falls away – you know what I’m imagining, don’t you? the moment during a satellite launch where the gantry falls away... – and we’re left with his core distinction, between a spacecraft and a spaceship.

One distinction is that spaceships are generally larger than spacecraft; think, for example, of the hulking vessels of the Empire or, for that matter, of the Starship Enterprise. But size isn’t the only thing. The Millennium Falcon is a spacecraft but it’s roughly the same size as the Altair IV, the saucer from Forbidden Planet. The Altair is clearly a spaceship, however. Why? Because it is run by a crew with a hierarchal structure headed by a captain and with a cook somewhere near the bottom of the staff. Craft aren’t crewed in that way. The crew is small and more or less equal. Yeah, the Falcon is Solo’s vessel, but he’s not Chewbacca’s boss. They’re buddies.

That distinction alone throws an interesting light on the long-standing discussion of the relative merits and demerits of the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. I believe Morton mentions it once or twice but doesn’t, so far as I remember, discuss it much. In this discussion Trek is generally seen as the more ‘progressive’ and democratic of the two. But Trek always takes place on a military vessel, except for DS9, which centers on a space station. There may be a democracy somewhere in the wings of the Trek universe, but what we see episode after episode, film after film, is a military hierarchy. (Yeah, I know, it’s about exploration. But those exploration vessels are equipped for battle.)

Getting back to ship vs. craft, we’ve also got “craft” as skill, and “craft” as in crafty (p. 13). These things matter in Morton’s thinking, but also in his style. And so he plays around with implications and connotations until we get a feel for the flow and then he offers a partial typology of space vehicles (p. 21):

The ark
The juggernaut
The frigate
The fighter
The explorer
The yacht
The machine cum dea
The coracle

First of all, I’m not going to attempt to explain what all those vessels are. You’ll have to read the book for that, as Morton gives examples of each.

He does note, however, that “none of them are exactly the Millennium Falcon” and that “the Falcon can become any of these types of vessel. Moreover, “each of these vessels can become other ones.” What? This is all seeming a bit arbitrary, yes? no? To cap it off (21-22): “But none of them can be the Falcon. That’s because the Falcon stands for the irreducible uniqueness of how things are.”

And again, what? Does it stand so in general and for everyone or is that standing limited to the scope of Spacecraft?

I’m reminded of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked which, as you may recall, is the first of four volumes in which he examines myths of South American peoples, with excursions elsewhere as well. He starts with one myth, which he calls the key myth. He describes and analyzes it, and then adds a second, comparing it to the first, and then a third and so on. Somewhere he tells us that there is nothing special about this key myth, it doesn’t hold a key to anything, its just where we start. And we have to start somewhere. It’s key but not special. It plays a certain function in the course of his analysis.

And so it is with the Millennium Falcon. Morton has given us reasons why it’s special, and will give us more. But it’s also the vessel Morton fell in love with as a child. That’s fine too. It’s where he started, his space-faring imagination that is. You may be in love with the Falcon. You may not. I’m certainly not. For that matter, I’m not particularly attached to the Altair IV, though I certainly covered pages and pages with drawings of it when I was young.

You don’t have to buy Morton’s attachments to buy his argument. But then “argument” isn’t quite the right word. For Morton isn’t building an argument in the ordinary, the philosophical, the academic meaning of the term. What he’s doing is more like world-building, as a novelist or a film-maker does it. He’s using the ideas of spacecraft, hyperspace, and the future as devices from which to craft a world, a world of and in expository prose rather than a fictional world in which one tells stories of Wookiees, tumbling phone booths, and of shoes and ships and sealing wax. A home for the imagination.

Do I believe this? How do I know, I just wrote it. See you next time.