Cowboy Bebop lasted twenty-six episodes in 1998 and people still go back to it. The setup is plain. A handful of bounty hunters, who call themselves cowboys, live aboard a battered ship, chase small fortunes across the Solar System and rarely catch them. Spike, Jet, Faye, Ed and a dog named Ein have little in common except the fact that each of them is running from something.

The jazz helps, and so does the noir. What stays with you is the debt. Nobody in that crew is ever square with anyone. Everyone aboard owes somebody, and the ship keeps flying anyway. The three novels below take that situation and push it in different directions.

Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1989)

Seven pilgrims are sent to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, where a creature called the Shrike waits. Among them are a poet, a soldier, a priest, a scholar, a consul and a private detective, Brawne Lamia, who would have fitted in well on the Bebop. Simmons borrows the structure of The Canterbury Tales: on the road, each pilgrim tells why they are there.

The result is a book made of six novellas in different registers, from war story to hard-boiled mystery, held together by a journey. Every character carries a past that cannot be paid off, and that is the Bebop engine at a much larger scale. It won the Hugo Award in 1990. The story continues in The Fall of Hyperion.

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester (1956)

Gully Foyle is a merchant spaceman with no skills worth mentioning. When his ship is wrecked he survives alone for months in a sealed compartment, and a passing vessel sees his flare and does not stop. He decides to find that ship and the people on it.

Bester wrote a revenge story set in a world where people teleport with the power of the mind, and he gives the plot a speed that still feels modern. Gully is closer to Spike than to any hero from the same decade: damaged, obsessed and not very likeable. In Italy it was published as La tigre della notte, also known as Destinazione stelle. In France it is Terminus, les étoiles.

Nova, Samuel R. Delany (1968)

Captain Lorq Von Ray wants to fly his ship into the heart of a collapsing star and bring back a fuel worth more than anything else in the galaxy. He needs a crew, and he gets one: a musician with an instrument that plays light and smell, a would-be novelist, a few misfits who each have their own reasons for signing on. Against him stands a rival family with a grudge that goes back to childhood.

Delany writes the crew as people with jobs, debts and ambitions that do not align, and the grudge between Lorq and his rival gives the book its tension. Nova is also the one of the three that sounds most like a Bebop episode, with its improvised music and its crew held together by obligation.

And then

H.O.M.S., the space opera trilogy I wrote for Demy Publishing, works the same ground. The novels were written in Italian and are also available in English translation.

The Blue Whale is a freighter on the Earth-Mars run, with a record of zero incidents and a crew of two: Rey commanding and Ampy as copilot. The story had no plans for them. They are pulled in because they are in the wrong place when an attack destroys Internodal Station Three, and from that point the ship becomes home to a group nobody assembled. Marvin Hale, an Inclusive Police officer called back to investigative duty after years on ordinary patrol. Asad, of the Arab Consortium secret service. Blondie, a second-generation Homs who was running a shift in a lunar mine a few days earlier.

The Homs, Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, are humans modified with physical or aesthetic capacities well outside the normal range, and the Solar System of the novels is colonised and stratified around them.

The trilogy is complete and available on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited: Phase One: Space Conspiracy.

If this list was useful, the blog also has books like Firefly and books like Old Man’s War.

Background photo in the featured image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute