Florida 4: Tourist Trap.

Although I do most of my travel reading on my iPhone, I always pack some paper books to fill in those gaps when the airline may request that I not use my electronic devices, or in case of battery exhaustion on flights without recharge sockets.  Because the highlight of my Florida trip is a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre at Cocoa Beach, I thought it would be appropriate to bring thematically suitable reading material:  The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, and A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke.

I've started my reading with A Fall of Moondust, which is a conveniently short read at 215 pages.* I chose this novel for a very simple reason:  it tells the tale of an accident involving tourists - tourists on the Moon.

The cruiser Selene offers a unique experience for lunar visitors: a boat excursion on a world without water.  Except it's not really a boat, and the Sea of Thirst is aptly named -  it's not made up of water, but of moondust, a powder so fine as to be almost liquid.

As the latest group of tourists embark on their tour of this unusual ocean, a moonquake opens a sinkhole in the dust beneath the cruiser and swallows it, marooning the 22 passengers and crew of two beneath a blanket of metallic powder that blocks all radio communication and diffuses its heat signature.

The book alternates between the trials faced by the trapped travellers and the efforts by their rescuers to locate the ship, discover its fate, and then invent some way of reaching the people on board before lack of oxygen renders their efforts irrelevant.  As it turns out, there are more subtle perils to threaten the lives of the buried sightseers...

To be honest, Clarke is not at his best working with romantic subplots and personal drama, and as a result that part of the story never quite rings true. However, that's not really what interests him.  The key to the story is the battle between the ingenuity of the rescuers and their relentless opponents:  vacuum, the dust, and time.

The most astonishing thing about Clarke's tiny perfect tale of disaster and rescue is that no one dies.  I strongly suspect that in a movie adaptation, the irritating spinster reporter would be lucky to make it to the end of the first act, let alone be the first one out of the boat when they open the escape hatch.

- Sid

* It's interesting to compare the length of SF and fantasy novels from the 50s, 60s and 70s with the current offerings, there's been a definite upward slope in terms of page counts.  I remember when The Lord of the Rings was viewed as epic not only in concept but in length, with 481,103 words in the story  - not including the appendices - and now we have things like The Wheel of Time series, which clocks in at almost ten times the length at 4,410,036 words.

Florida 3: "Research at beach resorts".

Welcome to Cocoa Beach, and its somewhat faded memorial to the first American in space, Alan Shepard.  Hmmm...come to think of it, what did they name after Neil Armstrong?

- Sid

Florida 2: Does anybody really know what time it is?

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.

Cooper, Interstellar

I'm just starting the first leg of my Florida vacation - I'm en route to Toronto where I'll be joined by my friend Colin, aka Cloin of the Campbell Brothers, and we'll fly down to Miami together before heading for Key West in the morning.

It's a big full plane, which would make the Civilization Game quite playable, but I'm more intrigued to see that Interstellar is on the list of options for in flight viewing.

I ended up just not getting to Interstellar in commercial release, but it's been on my list of catch-up movies.  It generated a lot of geek buzz when it debuted, with physics luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly weighing in regarding the accuracy - or lack thereof - of the wormhole and black hole science involved in the plot.

Interstellar presents us with an Earth which is no longer on the edge of starvation but past it, with a reduced population living in a global dust bowl à la The Grapes of Wrath. Widowed spaceship pilot manqué Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey*, grows corn and drinks beer while mourning the loss of the pioneer spirit in favour of survival.

Enigmatic messages from an unknown force point Cooper and his daughter Murphy toward a hidden NASA base which is covertly planning a trip through a mysterious wormhole in hopes of finding a habitable planet.  Cooper decides to abandon his family and pilot the mission, even though time dilation makes it impossible for him to tell his family when he will return.  Elderly physicist Michael Caine promises to have solved the mysteries of gravity manipulation before Cooper's return so that mankind can emigrate to their new home in space - once Cooper finds it.

The other side of the wormhole is a sort of physics playground, with a black hole causing all sorts of peculiar problems for the explorers. 

Even as an amateur physicist**, there were aspects of those problems that I found to be questionable.  For example, at one point the crew visits a planet which is orbiting a black hole closely enough that time dilation has slowed time to a crawl: seven years pass on Earth for every hour spent on the planet's surface.  They leave one crew member in orbit and take a lander for a hit and run visit to the planet in order to determine the fate of previous explorers.  Of course problems ensue, and when they make it back to the ship 23 years have come and gone for the solitary crew member***, and Cooper's distant daughter is now the same age that he is.

But...if the ship is in orbit, it would have to be orbiting in line with the plane of the planet's orbit so that it wouldn't get any closer to the black hole at any time, or else it would suffer from fluctuating time dilation effects.  Actually, why not get the ship into a position so that exactly the same amount of time passes on the ship as on the planet? Or less time?

Similar moments of fuzzy logic continue throughout Interstellar, and the climax is a confusing mix of 2001: A Space Odyssey and arbitrary, illogical deus ex machina intervention by future versions of humanity.  A little advice to our distant descendants:  if you need to twist time and manipulate space so that information crucial to the survival of humanity is transmitted, maybe do your twisting and manipulating so that the information goes to a scientist instead of a pre-teen girl's bedroom?

- Sid

* It used to be that if you wanted to cast someone as an archetypal American, you picked Kevin Costner.  In the fullness of time, Mr. McConaughey has taken over the job.

**  Reading science fiction is like getting a really strange education in the sciences.  With aliens on the side.

*** Who is a little quiet for the rest of the movie, not a huge surprise after more than two decades of solitary confinement.