Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship

A science fiction spaceship is a lot like a house party. When I see one, the first thing I want to know is what’s going on in the kitchen. Interior designers are the unsung heroes of sci-fi worldbuilding, and a bit of carefully dressed set can do the work of a dozen dramatic exposition-filled voiceovers […]

The post Why the Kitchen Is the Most Important Room in a Sci-Fi Spaceship appeared first on Den of Geek.

Take a look at your own kitchen. What appliances have you got? A kitchen-bound time traveler could quickly determine when they are with a look at your microwave and fridge. A look at how much the dirty dishes have stacked up tells you about the routines and temperaments of the people who live here. A glance at the fridge will tell you how many kids are here, or show you the nearby takeout favorites.

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But more than that, the kind of food available will tell you about the world at large—how far the supply chains reach and how quickly produce can be moved along them, and what kind of cross-cultural pollination this setting is subject to. You can learn about water, power, and heating infrastructure, how much room the people who live here have access to in the rest of the home. The kitchen is a microcosm of everything else that is happening in a place or time.

When I was writing the Fermi’s Progress series—four novellas about an FTL ship that vaporizes every planet it encounters—the spaceship’s kitchen became a key setting for the story due to all of these reasons mentioned above. And in mapping it out in my head, I thought a lot about how kitchens have worked on other well-known spacecraft.

Nostromo (Alien)

We have talked before about the enormous influence the Nostromo’s kitchen and otherwise has had on spaceship set design in general. Alien’s impact on sci-fi aesthetics as a whole is incalculable, sometimes to the detriment of the genre, but that influence is felt strongest where movie spaceship crews eat.

And with good cause. The meat of the action in Alien does not take place on some bridge or control room, or in a laboratory or Star Trek-style space conference room. It doesn’t even take place in its many spacious air shafts. It all happens in the kitchen. This is where we meet the Nostromo crew for the first time arguing about percentages. This is also, of course, where John Hurt has the worst case of indigestion in film history. It is where plans are suggested, argued over and agreed on. It is where Ash attempts his brutal and terrifying murder of Ripley and the crew overpowers, interrogates and ultimately, cooks him.

The set for the Nostromo’s kitchen might also just be one of the most intricately designed film sets in movie history. It still places the bar for environmental storytelling, from Ron Cobb’s now legendary “Semiotic Standard” to the cereal station, the wall of cups neatly ensconced in their little cupholders. Everything has its place, its premade slot.

But the gap between its intended and actual use is also clear—the stark white is everywhere covered in grime; the walls plastered with pin-ups, stickers, and notes. It is not just the room where the story action takes place, it is the room where the characters live, often despite the wishes of the employer that put them there, and that is visible in every detail.

One of the most illustrative elements is the food itself. There are no ovens or hobs visible, and certainly no fresh meat or vegetables. This is a place for out-of-the-packet living. The Nostromo crew drinks canned beer and scoop food out of Tupperware containers, eating big bowls of what looks like cheap noodles, although the crew “don’t know what it’s made of.” Frankly, the food tells you how much the crew’s well-being is valued by their employer, foreshadowing what will become of them.

Serenity (Serenity)

The kitchen aboard the workhorse spaceship of the series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity is probably the second best known spaceship kitchen out there. Before we go any further it is important to also acknowledge we’re not here to celebrate Joss Whedon (who by many accounts is a shit), but Firefly’s impact on the sci-fi genre is undeniable (even if arguably that impact is recycling a bunch of stuff from the Millennium Falcon and throwing in some ideas from Cowboy Bebop and Southern Revisionism of the American Civil War).

The Serenity has a lot in common with the Nostromo. It is a blue-collar spaceship in a setting so retrofuturistic that it borders on being just plain retro. The kitchen of that spaceship is in many ways its hero set. But Serenity’s kitchen is not your workplace cafeteria; it is the dining room in the homestead. As much as Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds might seem like a salt of the earth working man, he is a salt of the earth working man who can afford an entire working spaceship.

Comparing the two, the differences are immediate. Instead of pin-up posters, the walls have flowers painted on. There are warmer colors, wooden furniture, a hob for cooking on, and a sink for doing the dishes in. This is a domestic space as much as a workplace. People here tell stories and celebrate birthdays as much as they argue percentages on the latest job.

When it comes to food, every meal is “protein,” reflecting a universe where food has to travel for longer than fresh produce can be expected to last. But that protein is prepared with care, with spices used to improve the flavor—and when they come by fruit, it is a delicacy.

But what Serenity most illustrates about the role of the kitchen is that it says a lot about who a space belongs to. The Nostromo’s kitchen belongs to the Company, its crew just eats there. The Serenity’s kitchen is ostensibly the property of its captain, but it is maintained and occupied by its crew, and their personalities shine through in this space.

Icarus II (Sunshine)

The kitchen and dining area in Sunshine will not pass the “Definitely Not the Nostromo” smell test. Alien’s design aesthetic is felt strongly here. Yet once you start looking for differences they start to mount up. The lighting is softer, and the crew’s well-being is more of a concern. There is room for personalization in the form of bookshelves and personal storage spaces, but unlike the expansive Nostromo set, here everything is packed in closely, bringing to mind the weight and space restrictions that are a concern on any real-life space mission.

But the really revealing bit of worldbuilding here is the food. The crew of the Icarus II gets to dine on things that the Nostromo and Serenity crews could only dream about. This is not because their spaceship is any more luxurious, but because the crew are eating the vegetables grown in their own hydroponic garden—the same garden that recycles their oxygen supply.

It shows us how a spaceship can be many different things. The Serenity is hopping job to job, resupply to resupply. The Nostromo is a cog in a vast machine, equipped with the cheapest mass-produced components necessary for it to complete its job. Icarus II, however, is on a true mission into the unknown. It is designed to be a self-contained world because its crew is not sailing to the next port, they are sailing into a place hostile to life, and so need to take everything they need with them.

Rocinante (The Expanse)

Like the Icarus II, the Rocinante is a ship designed with the practicalities of space travel in mind. Where most sci-fi spaceships are laid out like a maritime vessel with decks running horizontally from the fore to the aft of the ship, the Rocinante is more like a tower, with its control room at the top and the engines at the bottom. In this way, acceleration draws everything toward the engine-end of the ship, creating a simulation of gravity.

That is reflected in the way the Rocinante’s dining and kitchen area is laid out—everything is functional and compact. The kitchen fittings and implements can tell you a lot about technology as well. Are the kitchen crowded with cups and jars, plates and sharp implements? Then this is a spaceship that has real faith in its artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Alternatively, is everything locked down and strapped into place?

That hob we mentioned earlier, is it electric or is this crew willing to light a naked flame in a highly pressurised environment in the cold depths of deep space?

Everything on the Rocinante has a place to be put away—nobody leaves knives lying around that might become projectiles if the ship has to perform a tricky manoeuvre. Fresh herbs for long voyages are grown in small centrifuges that will keep them growing properly even during periods of Zero G.

But beyond the fittings, spaceship kitchens also tell us a lot because of the kinds of interactions they facilitate. Is this ship’s kitchen a space where a family all eat together at predetermined times of the day, or is it like a student dorm, where people rotate through one or two at a time to feed themselves?

The kitchen is the room on a spaceship where we are most likely to see the crew when they are not working or asleep. It is the room where characters get downtime, showing us how they relate to each other out of crisis mode. It shows us if people are eating three square meals, or are just grabbing snacks on the fly. The Expanse’s Rocinante was also home to one of the all-time great space kitchen scenes where we see the Rocinante crew get to sit down and share a meal.

Unreliable (The Outer Worlds)

For fans of wandering around spaceship kitchens, poking into all the cupboards and nosing through the fridge, there are quite a few video games that scratch the itch. One of the best examples is the kitchen of the Unreliable in the video game The Outer Worlds. Clearly inspired heavily by Serenity’s kitchen, the Unreliable’s dining area tells stories through the detritus that gradually builds up over time, including scattered game pieces and cards, used dishes, and off-duty crew shooting the shit between missions.

The Millennium Falcon never showed us much of a kitchen (although expanded universe reference materials tell us Han Solo installed one as a wedding gift for Leia which is… a choice), but Star Wars games have proven an excellent hunting ground for space kitchen fans with the Jedi games’ Stinger Mantis and Outlaw’s Trailblazer both giving you a little kitchenette to sniff around. Mass Effect: Andromeda’s kitchen is pretty small and tucked away, but does give us the ability to watch the crew bickering through notes on the fridge.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds)

All of the kitchens we have looked at so far vary from the spartan yet homey to the grimy yet utilitarian. But all-out luxury can be just as revealing of a setting and its characters. Let’s thus take a look at the kitchen in Captain Pike’s quarters aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise.

This is a matter of opinion, but as a big fan of both spaceship kitchens and Star Trek, I think I am qualified to say that Trek does not normally do it for me on the kitchen front. Its ships are, first and foremost, a living room-centred environment. The ship’s dining areas are usually sterile and gray, the only appliance they need is a replicator, and even Neelix’s kitchen feels like an afterthought rather than a facility capable of serving approximately 150 people.

But Captain Pike’s kitchen in the newest series shows the culmination of what cooking can become in Star Trek’s space communist future, even before the invention of the replicator. It is a leisure activity and a luxury.

The kitchen is spacious enough to contain three sets of crew quarters from Kirk’s Enterprise (and I still harbor a theory that Uhura assigned Kirk one of the crappier upper deck cabins before repurposing Pike’s room as a Lower Deckers clubhouse). But as well as being a social location, it also serves a work function. This is not the “family table” we see aboard Serenity. Here people are expected to stand, and more importantly, to mingle. For all the friendly bonhomie it evokes, it is a networking space, and Pike is assuming as much authority as he stands over the grill as he does sitting in the bridge’s Big Chair.

And of course, on Pike’s Enterprise people eat whatever they damn well please, because we might be in deep space, but Star Trek is the definition of luxury space communism. Once, during a talk, someone asked the beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett what he first thought about when designing a fantasy city. Pratchett reportedly answered that you should think about how the clean water gets in and the sewage gets out.

When you are designing your spaceship there are similar concerns—thinking about when, what, and how your crew take in food and water is a good place to start.

Except of course as a genre, space fiction is usually a good deal more reticent about where the sewage goes…

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