They have Cornish accents and say 'Arr!' a lot. 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. The other version does a Recycled In SPACE on every eighteenth century pirate cliche ever.That could be anything from the technology of the setting creating trade lanes (via a Portal Network, predictable Hyperspace Lanes 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). Done this way, piracy actually makes sense, provided there's an enabling factor. Once you have shipping between different solar systems/planets, pirates preying on said shipping are bound to show. The normal version are violent criminals with a spaceship, who attack other spaceships, just like present-day pirates-or, in fact, most pirates of any kind.Particularly since doing so would require working in a plausible means for the pirates to escape undetected after plundering their target.Īs with Pirates in general, there are two kinds of Space Pirates in science fiction: Sometimes, this is cleverly worked around and justified. On the other hand, detecting commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitude easier, just because it is so empty and clear. The challenge of catching commercial shipping in open space is orders of magnitudes more difficult than catching them on the open seas.

The major problem with space pirates preying on space commerce is that space is vast. Surely an established society in outer space with significant trade and commerce would suffer similar problems! After all, Ruthless Modern Pirates have made a Real Life comeback in Somalia and South East Asia, and it's a lucrative enough 'business' that it's taken a multinational military response to fight back.

It's not as anachronistic as it might seem. Thus, sci-fi authors will include Expies of modern and historic un/organized crime, be they space mafia, gangs, or-in our case- pirates. There's always going to be a shadier, nastier way of doing business, and that will almost certainly follow humanity to the stars. Space Is an Ocean, so it's only logical that it must have pirates as well.ĭepending how you view the future, lawlessness will always be present in society.

The pirate plague of the dead submarine