Space pirates are a type of stock character from science fiction. A take on the traditional seafaring pirates of history or the fictional air pirates of the 19th century, space pirates travel through outer space. Where traditional pirates target sailing ships, space pirates serve a similar role in sci-fi media: they capture and plunder spacecraft for cargo, loot and occasionally steal spacecraft, and kill or enslave the crewmembers and passengers.
In science fiction
The archetype evolved from the air pirate trope popular from the turn of the century until the 1920s. By the 1930s, space pirates were recurring villains in the Buck Rogers comic strip. However, their dress and speech may vary; it may correspond to the particular author's vision of the future, rather than their seafaring precursors. On the other hand, space pirates may be modeled after stereotypical sea pirates. They may be humans who originate from Earth or a specific race of aliens. Space pirates are common in space opera and soft science fiction, including within Japanese anime narratives and erotica.
1920s to the 1960s
In 1925, Hugo Gernsback's science fiction novel, Ralph 124C 41+ featured a space pirate as a character. The book centers around a love story between the protagonist, Ralph and a civil scientist, with a space pirate from Mars also "vying for her affections," part of the scientific speculation of the novel itself. Around the same time, author Henry Edward Warner, who composed his poems which were assembled in a 1929 book, Songs of the Craft, began writing various poems, including some about the "so-called space pirate." Six years later, in November 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum's novella, The Red Peri appeared in the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories. In the novel, the primary character, Peri, is a space pirate who has a base on the Moon. The novel was praised for imaginative backgrounds, although its romance was considered to be at the level of "shopgirl pulps," and writing which leaves "much to be desired," David Bowman's helmetless spacewalk in 2001: A Space Odyssey was inspired by Frank Keene's escape from the pirate base in the novel. Following this, in 1940, Jack Williamson's story Hindsight, a space opera, included a character named Astrarch. He was a space pirate and dictator of the solar system, with the story focusing on an attempt by those on Earth to break free of his shackles.
The 1950s brought with it a blossoming of science fiction, including a focus on computers, space travel, and outer space in general. This included Murray Leinster's novel, The Pirates of Zan, which included a "space pirate much like his typical maritime counterpart in appearance." Alfred Bester said that it wasn't until Astounding Stories was rescued from an "abyss of space pirates, mad scientists" that he was able to go back to the publication.
By 1969 there was a turn to outer space on television, with heroes changing from cowboys to "Space-Pirate-Cowboys." One year after Turner patented his game, Stanislaw Lem published The Cyberiad, a book in which two constructors named Trurl and Klapaucius are "captured by a space pirate who pillages and hoards information." In order to be freed from him, they build something which interprets "the movement of air molecules as information" and the pirate underestimates how much information is within the movement, and he is buried in a "mountain of paper filled with useless information." Later in the 1960s, six episodes of the sixth season of the live-action television show Doctor Who featured a gang of space pirates, with the galaxy being described as spanned by a game between those who enforce the law and pirates like Dervish and Caven who will "apparently stop at nothing to continue their lucrative racket."