The spaceship has a lost property office

A reader wrote in last week to complain, kindly, that my starships are boring. Her word, and a fair one. She had just finished a book of mine in which the most dramatic event in the first fifty pages is an argument about a rota, and she wanted to know why, given that I can invent literally anything, I keep inventing paperwork.

It is a good question and it deserves a straight answer, so here it is. I keep inventing the paperwork because the paperwork is the part I believe.

Think about the last big building you were in. An airport, a hospital, a ferry terminal. Now remember that somebody has to clean it at four in the morning. Somebody orders the soap. Somebody argues about whose job the broken door is, and the argument outlives three managers, and the door stays broken. None of that is in the brochure. All of it is true. A starship is a building that cannot open a window. Multiply every one of those small human frictions by the fact that the nearest hardware shop is four years away, and you do not get less of the ordinary. You get more.

The future will not abolish the queue. It will just make the queue longer and put it in space.

When the alien finally turns up in one of my books, and it does, it tends to arrive into a situation where the crew are tired, underpaid and halfway through a shift. There is a form. Not because I think first contact would be dull, but because I think we would meet it as ourselves, and we are a species that brings a clipboard to the end of the world. That is not cynicism. I find it rather moving. Faced with the genuinely unknown, the first thing a human being reaches for is a procedure, a small handhold of the familiar, a way of saying we have done difficult things before and we got through them by being organised.

The other reason is trust. If I ask you to believe in a jump drive, I am spending a coin, and I only have so many. So I pay for the one impossible thing with a hundred true ones: the smell of a galley that has run the same three meals for a month, the specific misery of a bunk near the pump, the officer who is technically in charge and privately terrified. Spend the coin on the drive, earn it back on the rota. By the time something genuinely strange happens, the reader is standing on ground solid enough to be frightened on.

She is still right, of course. It is boring, in the way a real workplace is boring, which is to say boring for about ninety per cent of the time and then, without warning, the most important day of someone's life. I would rather write the ninety per cent honestly and let the other ten land like a dropped plate than build a shiny future where nobody ever has to find the lost property office.

So the rota stays. The broken door stays. The form the alien has to fill in absolutely stays. If the science is going to hold, and it is, then so does the person standing inside it, and the person, heaven help us, is going to want a receipt.