Books with spaceships are about people really

This was the title of a blog post I saw on social media this week.  It was the headline to a reading list of Autumn SF book releases, but the title has much wider application.  

I think the reason so many women say they don't read SF when they know nothing about the genre is the misconceived Idea that SF stories are all about tech and grand, galaxy-spanning ideas.  Space opera stories certainly do span galaxies, as does much military SF, but they're about people and the human condition.  That might mean stories of people engaged in power struggles, or they might be stories of rich individuals pursing their own personal (and often somewhat morally dubious) value systems to achieve something.

War in space is like war on planets: started by humans attacking others of differing ideologies.  Or taking over planets they don't own with in-demand resources to exploit them.  Corporate and personal greed is likely to remain a major driver of human activity even when we have the knowledge and technology to travel the universe.

People build AIs too, and it is people who programme them, and give them their morals and ethics.  I have a short story I'm about to turn into a novella which deals with destroying a murderous AI.  And it was humans who programmed that intelligence to kill other humans, humans who told it the rules for  who to kill and who to spare.

The Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh follows the adventures of a trading starship captain.  The stories are very definitely about people.  Alien people called the Hani, and especially the ship's captain, Pyanfar Chanur.  She must navigate the complexities of inter-species, interstellar politics, and the details of her struggles are what bring the book alive.

The other spaceship I love is Becky Chambers' Wayfarer from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.    The ship makes wormholes In space, but the story is about the zany, diverse, muilti-species crew.  Their beliefs, their religions, their love affairs, are what form the core of the narrative.

Spaceships are handy vehicles for collecting characters together, but unless the story is about the ship's AI, it's what the people aboard do that drives the story.