Have Space Suit Will Travel.

"Not too late. No, suh! I goin' to Mars, yes I am, and I beat the Chinese, too. Even if I hafta make my own spaceship, me."

- Jubal Broussard, Red Thunder

Having just finished reading Red Thunder by John Varley, a guardedly acceptable little read in the home-made spaceship genre, my mind turns to the portrayal in SF of space exploration by individuals. (I describe Red Thunder as "guardedly acceptable" because it was a very light read, and other than the sex* would be an ideal read for a bright twelve-year old. But, to be fair, it's reasonably entertaining, well written and so forth.) 

The plot of Red Thunder is strongly reminiscent of one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies, the ones where someone says, "Hey, gang, let's put on a show!", except in this case it's "Hey, gang, let's go to Mars!" Instead of an uncle with a big barn, these plucky teens meet an alcoholic ex-astronaut whose idiot savant cousin has invented a sort of Rube Goldberg power source that will allow them to beat those nasty Chinese to Mars and to save some of the crew from a failed NASA mission. 

Similar (although perhaps more cynical) entries into the do-it-yourself spaceship category can be found in The Daleth Effect by Harry Harrison and The Mouse on the Moon, by Leonard Wibberley, both of which deal with small countries that trump the great world powers by discovering miraculous means of propulsion that they utilize in makeshift spaceships. 

As a sign of changing times, the Danish astronauts rescue stranded Russian astronauts in The Daleth Effect, written in 1970 - apparently the Chinese have replaced the Soviets as the people to beat, if Red Thunder is an accurate barometer. 

In science fiction from the 40's and 50's, the concept of the individually owned spaceship is a commonplace one, with oceangoing vessels providing the analogy. Obviously, the man on the street won't own the Queen Mary, but if he's in a high enough tax bracket, he might well have some kind of little sailboat that he can use for weekend trips. (If he's sufficiently foolhardy, he can even try to cross the Atlantic - or go to Mars - in his little ship.) 

Cargo haulers, passenger liners, luxury yachts and warships commonly ply the spaceways in the writing from this period, along with the occasional tramp freighter that will barely hold air, and even a few pirates now and then. And, to continue the analogy, private explorers seeking literal "new worlds" might obtain funding from corporations or governments, as did Columbus, but still maintain their independent status. 

The 60's introduced the world to a different paradigm: space travel is so expensive and difficult that it's impossible for anyone but a major global power. It's difficult to think of any other activity so completely elitist in its financial demands, as witnessed by the fact that the Space Race only had two competitors. (Full credit to the X Prize winners, but in the nautical analogy above, compared to NASA they're like people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.)  

Red Thunder provides an interesting comment on this phenomenon, one which I hadn't really given a lot of thought: the approach taken by the Soviets and the Americans was the least efficient way of doing things. In the course of the story, the ex-astronaut describes the method used by the USA to reach the Moon as being like Columbus sinking all three of his ships on the way to America, making the trip back to Europe in a lifeboat, and sinking that in the Straits of Gibraltar and swimming the rest of the way back to Spain with a life preserver. 

The spendthrift approach used by the Apollo missions is explained as being a side effect of American hubris: any expense or wastage was justified in order to win the race first, rather than winning the race efficiently. That distinction now in place, we'll take a look at efficient space travel in the next posting.

- Sid

*Come to think of it, I was a bright twelve year old and I would have thought that a book with sex was a fabulous find.

Childhood's End.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Harry Truman

The destruction of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 took science fiction from playful adolescence into a frightening, frightened adulthood. 

Suddenly the question of what the future might hold, the question of "what if", gained a horrible new importance. Suddenly, instead of looking a thousand years ahead, Mankind was looking at the hands of the Doomsday Clock edging closer to midnight. 

Until that morning, the word "atomic" had been nothing more than a convenient gimmick in science fiction, a buzzword that provided power for everything from cars to robots, from pistols to spaceships. Although Cleve Cartmill had mentioned a chain reaction-type atomic bomb in his 1944 science fiction story Deadline, which led to the FBI investigating him due to concern over a potential breach of security on the Manhattan Project, he and co-researcher John W. Campbell were in no way aware of what was to come. 

Once the Bomb had been used, Campbell's editorial response in Astounding was actually one of near-glee in having apparently anticipated this scientific leap forward. However, in the years that followed, the greater number of authors treated the situation more in the manner of Leahy's comment. 

Science fiction authors are almost unanimous in denying any role in predicting the future - as in my first post, the science fiction author begins with "What if..." rather than "When..." In the post-Hiroshima age, the spectres of the atomic "What if" in science fiction are innumerable, and rarely positive. 

 Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers has power-suited infantry blithely launching "pee-wee" atomic rockets as tactical weapons, but novels such as Nevil Shute's bleak masterpiece On the Beach with its inevitable creeping death by fallout is far more typical of the response to the atomic bomb and the Cold War which it created. 

Science fiction had gained an awful new authority as prophets of the end of the world. Hand in hand with the immediate perils of thermonuclear Death, science fiction introduced the public to the other horsemen of the new Apocalypse: Fallout, Nuclear Winter, and Mutation. 

The latter provided heady fare for the film makers of the 1950's, with screens filled with shambling monstrosities of every shape, size and species. Literary SF concentrated for the most part on the horrifying effects of radiation on human beings and the twisted parodies of humanity that might result. (Not all writers painted with such a large brush: Ray Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" quietly describes the exquisitely detailed silhouettes of a family etched into the side of their home by the flare of a nuclear explosion.) 

Over sixty years after the Enola Gay opened its bomb bay doors over Hiroshima, the thought of impending nuclear apocalypse no longer weighs as heavily. We live in a time of more subtle fears: terrorism, global warming, and AIDS. It would be ridiculous to claim that science fiction played any sort of real role in reducing the threat of death by "The Bomb", but the reality of that threat gave science fiction a relevance as a genre that it would never have achieved otherwise.

- Sid

(Insert Star Trek cliché here.)

 

I was having a beer with a friend when his cell phone rang. After reassuring his wife that he was certain to forget to buy milk on the way home, he hung up, looked at his phone contemplatively and said, "Do you think that cell phones would look like this if it wasn't for Star Trek?" 

 

Well, actually, no, they wouldn't. Apparently Martin Cooper, the chief engineer at Motorola who developed the cell phone in 1973, is on record as stating that Star Trek was his inspiration.

- Sid