Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance - Tobias S Buckell

 Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance - Tobias S Buckell

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance by Tobias S Buckell was first published in John Joseph Adams’s anthology Cosmic Powers in April 2017. The story was nominated for Locus, Eugie, Sturgeon and Hugo Awards. It was also collected in year’s best anthologies by Allan Kaster (The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 10), Jonathan Strahan (The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve), Neil Clarke (The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3), Gardner Dozois (The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (The last completed by this remarkable anthologist)) and N K Jemisin (as guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018), as well as the Long List Anthology 4, the collection of the Hugo long list. 

Tobias S Buckell is one of the more interesting contemporary writers of science fiction. His stories are worth reading for the best reasons. He is a skillful writer, he pays close attention to themes of hard science fiction and he has a clear interest in the social implications of the changes that technology and expansion may bring. He seems particularly interested in the workers in future societies and how they might organise to protect their interests. He also frequently visits ways in which discrimination might continue to affect societies in possible futures.

In Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance, Buckell very rapidly sketches a remarkable vision of a starship, an enormous and complex structure, in the aftermath of a space battle. The central character is a consciousness uploaded into an inorganic robotic body, one of the maintenance workers of this future starship. The story explores questions of individuality and the parameters of humanity, and discrimination arising from those parameters. It is also a rich imagining of a future world and of the functioning of Asimov’s laws of robotics in the face of an ethical dilemma. It is, in short, a really good and thought provoking story.