A Maze of Stars

Brunner, John. A Maze of Stars. NYC: Ballantine-Del Rey, 1991. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for other editions and translations; as of 4 September 2022, available here (but with a note of changes coming later in the month):[1].

From "stub" on Wikipedia: "It tells the story of a great sentient ship charged with protecting human settlements on other worlds."[2]

From publisher's blurb, back cover, "First paperback publication" (in CAPS in original):

Among the six hundred thousand stars in the vast Arm of Stars, over six hundred planets had been seeded with human stock by the greatest feat of technology every achieved, the Ship. And on each of these worlds, the memory of the Ship had faded into legend over the years.

The Ship, however, still endured, watching over the colonies on a cyclical and seemingly endless journey through time and space. But in its long odyssey, the Ship had somehow been damaged — it had become as conscious, and lonely, as any human being. And as it visited, again and again, each of the worlds it had seeded, it found tragedy in its wake. For the humans of the Arm of Stars were becoming more and more alien. [...]

And that alienation, so to speak, is paralleled by changes in the Ship.

Note for theme of a sentient/sapient spaceship, as in the ship Minds in The Culture (novel series); for similar sentient beings, cf. and contrast such works as Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, J. McElroy's Plus, and K. O'Donnell's Mayflies — or HAL 9000 and his figurative descendants in A. C. Clarke's 2001 series and associated films.

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At 326 pages in the Del Rey edition, Maze has space to give a number of impressions, including coming across at times like a fix-up or omnibus: a number of linked stories, held together in ways like the stories told by Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, with the travels of the Ship like the conceit of the pilgrimage. But very different: the Ship is the protagonist of Maze, the focus of our various concerns, and the central subject of the book's philosophical conclusion.

See for the foregrounding of issues of "the human/machine interface" and potential for merger, plus merger with other species, including an extreme and rather spectacular one in the Ship. Note issues of Ship's consciousness in relation to emotions and imagination and Brunner's thoughts on traditional SF issues of biotechnology, the possibility of free will in humans and machines, and the promise and threat of human comfort — and decadence — and individuality vs., or balanced with, "the reality of a human body as a colony organism" (p. 255; ch. 13) and human societies as potential hive entities. For many readers, these will be familiar and rather abstract speculations, given artistic resonance so far as we come to identify with the Ship as a character, sympathize with him/her/it, and wish this character well.

RDE, finishing, 4Sep22 f.