Today's tf classic is from the pen of SF writer Frederick Pohl: "Father of the Stars."

In this story, extraterrestrial worlds are colonized by sending ships traveling at sub-light speeds on multi-decade flights to their destination. The colonists are put in hibernation, but someone has to tend to them, control the ship along the way, and land when they get there. What to use? Robots? No. Very young humans who become very old humans along the way? Wrong again.

WHAT FUN WOULD THAT BE?

Pohl's bright idea is to transfer a half dozen or so crew members' consciousnesses into chimpanzee bodies, so they can make the decades long trip piloting the ship as apes, while in a state of isolation so profound as to make the COVID lockdown seem like Woodstock. (They get put back into their hibernating human bodies once they reach their destination.) Great idea. What could possibly go wrong here? Well, you and I have already envisioned a half-dozen possibilities, mostly involving the chimp people going native, screeching, running roughshod through the ship, throwing poop and banana peels everywhere, and generally making a shambles of the mission.

Not in Pohl's world. He is too fastidious to envision such an eventuality. No, what happens is, human progress continues to advance, and by the time the ships are three-quarters of their way or so to their destinations, faster-than-light travel is developed. Now, crews have to be sent out to intercept the original ships, and people have to climb on board and explain to the various crews that they have lived for decades all alone on a spaceship, as CHIMPS, no less, to no good purpose.

The twist is, the eponymous title character, the man who developed this whole crazy scheme, is at the blowing-bubbles-in-his-oatmeal stage of life. But when he finds out the situation, he volunteers to be put in a chimp body himself to go break the news. He is accompanied by another chimp-man whose human body died during the transfer, so HE'S stuck as an ape for the foreseeable future.

In the story, the chimp people on the colony ships take the news in stride. Really? "Tough luck, Bobo. Them's the breaks." I can imagine all sorts of outcomes, but that seems the least likely.

Great premise, though, Fred. I can think of a a lot of other possibilities in a world where it is possible to put people's consciousness inside apes, including some wild sex cruises.

But classic Sci-Fi is no place for such rudeness. Isaac Asimov would've plotzed!