shipmind n.

an intelligent entity (alien or computer-based) that helps control a spacecraft

  • 1975 B. W. Aldiss Year by Year the Evil Gains in K. Bulmer New Writings in SF 27 86 page image Brian W. Aldiss

    But Shipmind was assuring them that the sun ahead had only eight attendant planets, and not nine…. ‘The readings all point to my initial assumptions being one hundred percent correct,’ said Shipmind.

  • 1979 S. Sucharitkul Web Dancer in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Dec. 66 page image S. P. Somtow

    They’re navigated through the overcosm…by an astrogator who is in communion with a delphinoid shipmind…. Delphinoids are giant creatures who are all brain…. They’re cybernetically implanted into ships.

  • 1980 S. Sucharitkul Darktouch in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Jan. 30 page image S. P. Somtow bibliography

    The shipmind can think us home readily enough…. It’s learned where the two anomalies are.

  • 2004 F. Pohl Boy Who Would Live Forever vii. 101 Frederik Pohl bibliography

    I wouldn’t have even noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is programmed to notice things that I don’t, if she thinks they might interest me.

  • 2009 J. Berman Pelago in Asimov’s Science Fiction Feb. 73 page image Judith Berman

    To transit truespace, Pelago would need a shipmind. Pelago’s shipmind could only be a wayfinder’s—an intelligence that could generate any door at all, for any ship at all.

  • 2014 G. Benford Shipstar xvi. 125 Gregory Benford

    He had the shipmind call up readings on this from the ancients available on the ship’s database of all human cultures.

  • 2020 E. Bear Machine i. 5 Elizabeth Bear bibliography

    ‘Sally,’ I asked my faceplate, ‘how’s our telemetry?’ ‘Pretty good, Llyn,’ the shipmind answered. ‘We’ve matched velocity and vector, and we’re stable. Can’t do much about that spin.’ Ibid. 11 Most of the generation ships had shipminds of a sort.


Research requirements

antedating 1975

Earliest cite

Brian Aldiss

Last modified 2021-04-16 18:16:48
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.