Brainship

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A brainship is a fictional interstellar starship from the the Brain and Brawn Ship series of stories by Anne McCaffrey.

In the McCaffrey universe, brainships begin from the brains and nervous systems of human beings who have been born so severely disabled that the best medical treatment would still not allow them to live independently. These people are given the choice to train as shellpersons, to eventually be hardwired into a life support system with their sensory input and motor nerves connected through a computer to a surrounding ship. Shellpersons can actually "feel" the various ship systems, wings, engines, etc, as if they were part of their own body, and react with the speed of a computer, but still use their human brains to make intelligent decisions based on their computer calculations.

Brainships serve as starship pilots while paying off their debt for education and hardware - and then in whatever capacity they choose, as free agents. The brainship is partnered with a "brawn", an ambulatory human who does the work that the immobile shellperson and ship cannot.

When asked how she came up with the idea, McCaffrey says, "I remember reading a story about a woman searching for her son's brain, it had been used for an autopilot on an ore ship and she wanted to find it and give it surcease. And I thought what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships? So that's how The Ship Who Sang was born."^[1]

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