Tag: space pirates 3c5q51

Depending how you view the future, lawlessness will always be present in society. There's always going to be a shadier, nastier way of doing business, and that will almost certainly follow humanity to the stars. Thus, sci-fi authors will include Expies of modern and historic (un)organized crime—be they space mafia, gangs, or—in our case—pirates.

It's not as anachronistic as it might seem. After all, pirates themselves have made a Real Life comeback in Somalia, and it's a lucrative enough "business" that it's taken a multinational military response to fight back. Surely an established society in outer space with significant trade and commerce would suffer similar problems!

... Well, maybe. The major problem with space pirates preying on space commerce is that space is vast. The challenge of catching commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitudes more difficult than catching them on the open seas. Sometimes, this is cleverly worked around and justified. Most of the time, however, it isn't.

There are two kinds of Space Pirates in science fiction. The normal version are violent criminals with a spaceship, who attack other spaceships, just like present-day pirates. Once you have shipping between different solar systems/planets, pirates preying on said shipping are bound to show. Simple as that. Done this way, piracy actually makes sense, provided there's an enabling factor. That could be anything from the technology of the setting creating trade lanes (via a Portal Network, predictable Faster Than Light Travel routes thanks to Negative Space Wedgies, or timed space flights between planets to reduce time spent between planets, as in Real Life), to using a variant of the method employed by modern pirates (say, smaller ships striking at commercial shipping in the orbit of a planet).

The other version does a Recycled In SPACE on every eighteenth century pirate cliche ever. Reasons for including this version will typically be along the lines of "Because Space Is An Ocean, it has to have Pirates" rather than making any meaningful attempt at justifying their existence. They have Cornish accents, beards, say "Arr!" a lot, have parrots (probably robot) and false limbs (probably cybernetic) and wear tricorn hats and eyepatches (or have cybernetic eyes). They may even have ships shaped like boats.

One of the best known space pirates is TV anime series.

Source: TV Tropes