The New Fan.

(Contributed by Dorothy Hatto)

 
The other day I was talking to one of my friends who is into science fiction and was amazed to discover that she had never heard of Andre Norton, one of the founders of modern science fiction/fantasy.*

Now, my friend is going to Australia, and she takes books rather than her tablet to read. They weigh less in carry on and it's easier to read half a page or so if you have to wait. She suggested that I lend her one of my books to take along.

My brother Sid might be the only one to really empathize with the decision of which book to choose.  Andre Norton or Alice Mary Norton was writing science/fantasy books before it was popular for women to be in the genre. (Ergo the "Andre" of her name.) She wrote under a few other pseudonyms, all male - I don’t think she ever used her actual name in print, although I may be wrong about that.

She was born in 1912, started writing science fiction in the 1940s, and died in 2005, still collaborating with other writers.

So, which book do you choose out of the 300 or so titles that she wrote and co-wrote?

I took a couple of days to think about it and finally chose the same book that I think I read first. My mother owned Daybreak 2250 A.D. as an Ace double and I believe it was the first Andre Norton story I ever read. My current copy was printed in the 1970s and was 50 cents at the time. I have replaced it twice** and also inherited my mother's Ace Double for my collection.

I will have to wait till my friend gets back to see if she liked it, but she does like Anne McCaffrey books and their styles are similar. 

- Dorothy

* Along with H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Hugo Gernsbach, Arthur C. Clarke, and a few I have probably forgotten.

** I always like to get the used copies as the story has changed a bit every time it was published.

Postscript
I completely agree with Dorothy: anyone with a serious interest in science fiction or fantasy should be aware of Ms. Norton's contributions to the two genres.  Andre Norton was one of those rare authors whose mastery of tone and vocabulary was complete and flawless.  Her writing style was formal and dignified, and matched itself perfectly to the stories which she crafted with such consummate skill.

Hmmmm...but which one to lend to a first time reader? Daybreak 2250 A.D., with its outcast post-apocalyptic hero (and his cat) is certainly a good choice in terms of a characteristic novel.  I might have gone with The Time Traders, or Witch World, or Year of the Unicorn (which starts a whole series of connected novels).  The Beast Master?  Star Rangers? Sargasso of Space?  The Crossroads of Time? As my sister suggests, a difficult choice due to the uniform excellence of Andre Norton's writing.

Thanks very much for the posting, Dorothy!

- Sid

“There’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.”

 “What’s the most dangerous thing that you’ve ever done?  And why did you do it?”

Chris Hadfield, TED 2014

If you want to get a really good idea of what’s it’s like to climb into a rocket and leave the planet, I strongly recommend that you watch Chris Hadfield’s TED Talk from TED 2014, held here in Vancouver.

Commander Hadfield evocatively describes watching the Earth “roaring silently with colour and texture as it pours by...” while holding onto the outside of the International Space Station with one hand – and then going blind during his spacewalk. It’s an intimate window into the experience of being in space, and into the relationship between danger, fear and preparation.

For viewers who can’t imagine watching something as long as 18 minutes on the internet, you may prefer to read his book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. It’s a readable combination of autobiography, motivation, and insight into the nuts and bolts of space exploration.

- Sid

"Would you ever sign up for a trip to Mars?"

The arching sky is calling

Spacemen back to their trade.

All hands! Stand by! Free falling!

And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,

Far drives the thundering jet,

Up leaps the race of Earthmen,

Out, far, and onward yet--

We pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave us birth;

Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth 

It used to be that I depended on television for weather reports, but thanks to the Internet I just check online with The Weather Network whenever I need information more explicit than what I can determine by looking out the window. The Weather Network website does its best to be more than just a list of temperatures and weather predictions by adding in things like trivia, photos from users, videos of extreme weather, and surveys – which often have nothing to do with weather. As an example, a recent survey asked visitors to the site if they would be willing to “Sign up for a trip to Mars” with four possible answers.

I was pleased to see that 31% of the respondents would be willing to go into space, but a little surprised to see that 3% would sign up exclusively for a one-way trip. (Just for the record, I fall into the “Sure!” group, and I honestly can’t say that I thought about it in terms of whether it would be impossible to return.) I realize that this small percentage probably viewed the Martian odyssey as a chance to leave behind the petty concerns of earthbound existence for a life on the frontier, without ever looking back.  That aside, would Martian colonists have to accept that it was a one-way ride with no chance to return to Mother Terra?

Depending on the relative orbital positions of Earth and Mars, and how much fuel you’re willing to burn on the trip, going to Mars could take as little as 130 days or as long as 300. Let’s pick a median and say 210 days, or about seven months. That doesn’t sound like a one-way trip to me. It’s a long haul, admittedly, and 130 days sounds a lot better, but provided that there’s adequate living space, entertainment, and perhaps even work of some sort to fill the time, not a deal-breaker in terms of a round trip.

However, this is the sort of schedule that NASA has used for pieces of technology not bothered by boredom, claustrophobia or lack of gravity. If we do a one-G burn to midpoint and then decelerate at the same rate for the second half of the trip, apparently the trip could come in at less than a week. (With some variance in the exact times - see above re: relative orbital positions.) You need a lot of fuel to pull this off, but I’m willing to bet that there’s some kind of compromise between the two extremes of zero and one gravity* that would make this practical in terms of both time and fuel.

This solves two problems - keeping the trip time to a minimum, and reducing the effects of extended exposure to zero gravity.  Given the various health issues suffered by astronauts returning to Earth after 146 days in the zero-G environment of the International Space Station, anything that either reduces the time line or creates the illusion of gravity through acceleration is a good thing.

In the short term, astronauts get their “earth legs” back fairly quickly, but the long term effects will not be known until, well, the long term – retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield will probably be the subject of regular medical scrutiny for the rest of his life in order to determine whether or not his natural span was reduced by his extended exposure to lack of gravity.

As it turns out, we may have already begun the process of colonizing Mars in some small way, albeit accidentally. A recent study conducted by the American Society for Microbiology revealed that there are 377 strains of bacteria that can make it through the sterilization process used on the Curiousity Mars rover before its departure.** This is probably a non-issue: between exposure to vacuum and high UV levels on the Martian surface, it would be a very determined organism that survived the entire process. On the other hand, there are bacteria that thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions, so it wouldn’t take a lot of shelter for a bacteria to make it to Mars alive.

Hmmm…do bacteria mutate? Anybody remember The Andromeda Strain?  Now that I think about it, maybe it is a good idea after all if no one comes back from Mars - just in case.

- Sid

*And if you do a 2-G trip, I bet you can bring it down to a day or two, but first, that would be really fuel intensive, and second, it may not be a great idea to subject the human anatomy to two gravities for that long.

** There is actually a mandate in the UN Space Treaty that stipulates that space missions "shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”