From SRP author Cameron Cooper:
The other day, I came across this CNN article about the Villa Vie Odyssey, a cruise ship designed for long-term living. We’re talking years aboard, maybe even more than a decade. Residents can literally live and die on the ship, wandering the oceans in style.
My first thought? What if this was set in space?
Imagine it: People booking passage on massive interstellar cruisers—not just for a holiday jaunt to the moons of Saturn, but for life. They’d pay their fare, settle into their private quarters aboard gleaming starliners, and live out their days among the stars. No home port. No fixed address. Just permanent motion through the void.
Then, reality intruded. Given the current economics of space travel, this idea feels as far-fetched as warp drives and gravity plating. Right now, even short jaunts to low Earth orbit are eye-wateringly expensive. The risks of long-term space travel are formidable. No matter how deep your pockets, today’s space tourism is no match for the fantasy of a stellar retirement aboard a cruise ship the size of a small city.
But if you shift the setting into a more robust space opera future—one where interstellar travel is safe, reliable, and relatively affordable—it starts to make sense. Space tourism is already a thing in the present day (though I, for one, have no intention of funding the plutocrats behind those private launches). In a future where faster-than-light travel is the norm, why wouldn’t some wealthy wanderers choose to live out their days on a starcruiser?
There’s an alluring concept at the core: what does it mean to live a permanently mobile life, untethered to any planet?
Practical questions spiral out from there:
- What are the logistics of living long-term aboard a cruiser? Supplies, community, medical care, waste management—how do you keep a floating civilization running without a fixed anchor?
- What happens when you no longer have planetary citizenship? Are you a citizen of the ship? Or stateless, like Tom Hanks’ character in The Terminal, caught in bureaucratic limbo but on a cosmic scale?
- What happens when someone dies? Do their remains get preserved for return to a homeworld they’ll never see again? Or do they receive a final farewell—perhaps a poetic drift toward the nearest black hole, like a cosmic sea burial?
The story possibilities here are vast. Conflict, romance, isolation, identity… There’s something deeply human about wanderers who never land, who are always on the way to the next stop but never quite arriving.
Have you read any SF that deals with this kind of professional drifting? Space nomads with bank accounts and concierge services? Aboard ships where passengers stay so long they become part of the crew, or maybe even something stranger?
It’s a seed of an idea I might have to grow into something one day. The stars, after all, make for a perfect horizon—especially when you call them home.
Cameron Cooper
SRP Author
Check Cam’s books here on Stories Rule Press.
