We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde
I figured out what inspired me to write science fiction on a dark and lonely afternoon in the New Haven Public Library. I was in Connecticut to research a mystery novel set in 1969 (eventually published as the award-nominated War at Home, under my pen name Kris Nelscott).
I was going through microfiche of the New Haven Register from July of 1969 and I found an article titled: “Science Fiction A Jump Ahead; Space Journeys Already Forgotten.”1
The article had come through the Associated Press, and it was a glowing account of how science fiction had predicted space travel long before the Apollo program started. The article starts like this:
“To the science fiction writers who predicted it in the first place, the [upcoming] moon flight of Apollo 11 is old hat.”
I’m sure it wasn’t; I’m sure the SF writers quoted in the article, from Isaac Asimov to Arthur C. Clarke, were as excited and worried about the upcoming moon landing as the rest of us were. That they had predicted it didn’t mean they weren’t nervous about it.
But none of that nervousness showed in the article. Instead, what the article dealt with in a very serious way was the then-current trends in science fiction. My former boss and editorial predecessor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Edward L. Ferman, was quoted as saying that stories with “space travel as their central theme” were “getting harder and harder to find.”
John Campbell, the influential editor of Analog, said that “modern” science fiction “ranges even beyond the soft sciences [to] explore concepts the sociologists wouldn’t touch.”
The article is upbeat and interesting. I was so happy to see it that I spent the five cents to make a photocopy and I’ve kept it on my desk ever since.
But my story of inspiration doesn’t stop there. My journey into 1969 was only beginning in New Haven. From there, I went to New York City and spent hours in the Paley Center for Media. And there I watched a Charles Kuralt television special called, “The Day They Landed.”
Kuralt and his team spent July 20, 1969, traveling from first light on the East Coast to sundown in Hawaii. His goal for the show was to “to stop time for history, to show 2069 what the world was like the day human beings landed on the moon.”2
I clearly needed this for my research into 1969. The piece started with the moon landing itself and surprisingly, I found myself in tears as I watched it, listening to the remembered voices and seeing the film that got filtered back to Earth.
A little personal history: In July, 1969, I had just turned nine. My life was punctuated with weird outer space moments—broadcasts interrupted as astronauts orbited the Earth or were blasted in tin cans that sent them out into the darkness of space to achieve President Kennedy’s dream of a moon landing before the end of the 1960s.
Each pronouncement by NASA was news, and each astronaut was famous, celebrities for which we have no modern equivalent. In those days, people talked about real-life heroes—and they meant the explorers who risked their lives to expand our vision beyond the boundaries of Earth.
We all believed that by the far away future of 2008, we would have bases on the moon. We would have landed humans on Mars and we would be conquering the rest of the solar system.
But more on that in a moment.
In my 1969 research, I learned a few things. Such as the fact that more than three thousand bombs blew up in the United States. Most were created by domestic terrorists, often college students associated with the SDS. So many bombs exploded that they weren’t national news. They were local news.
Like the riots, like the anti-war protests. The press couldn’t keep up. A bomb going off in a department store, such as the one that went off at Goldblatt’s in Chicago in April, didn’t receive coverage outside of Illinois.3 Now a story like that would be front and center of every national newscast.
In 1969, there were thirty-seven airplane hijackings, and that was just within the U.S. Nine thousand three hundred Americans died in Vietnam that year. I couldn’t find the figures for the Vietnamese and Laotian dead. Or the number of people killed or injured in the various protests across America.
The upheaval and divisions in this country in 1969 make what’s going on in the world right now look like a respite.
Which made that moon landing even more spectacular. America stopped its war on itself for a brief moment, and everyone looked up. Here are my notes from Kuralt’s special, taken while I watched:
Showed people all over, including army officers, people in their homes, people outside, people in a trailer park watching on a TV. They watched at the commune; showed a priest and altar boys watching; Cronkite and others crying; elderly people in a home watching, along with the nurses, dressed traditionally. They’re crying too. And there is applause.
Kuralt said, “Seventy-five million Americans watched TV that day—pushed by fear, led by hope.”4
I was one of those seventy-five million. It was a hot summer afternoon—a rarity in Superior, Wisconsin—and I was a little nut-brown tomboy, playing tag with my friends. My mother called me inside to see the landing, something I’d said I wanted to see, and I remember complaining about it. The game seemed so much more important.
But in the unairconditioned house, the curtains drawn to keep the day’s heat at bay, the television showed something magical. I can still recall the scratch of the couch beneath my bare legs; my father leaning forward in his easy chair, his elbow on his knee and his hand tucked under his chin as he stared; my mother sitting beside me in her bright yellow sundress, her arms crossed as she worried that the landing would fail.
A lot of the images I saw in my review of that day so long ago were familiar to me. Some I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, and others had been shown over and over again until they had become meaningless.
But watching the old tapes and reading the old articles, I remembered something—something important.
I remembered the hope.
To those of us who were young in 1969, the moon landing was a formative experience. All of my little friends and I wanted to be astronauts. It didn’t matter to me that “girls can’t,” as a boy in my neighborhood so rudely told me. We wanted to take part in the glory, to be explorers, to have the chance to look at the Earth from outer space and to say to someone else, “Look! I was born on that blue and white ball down there.”
It’s no accident that director Ron Howard (born 1954) has made a film about the Apollo program and has sponsored several others. No accident that Tom Hanks (born 1956) was in that film and narrated From The Earth to the Moon, a history of the space program, for HBO.
In 2007, late night talk show host Craig Ferguson (born 1962) interviewed Alan Bean, one of the twelve men who walked on the moon, and acted as if he were interviewing a god.
To someone in the baby boom generation, the astronauts were gods. And even now, for those of us of a certain age, those Apollo astronauts represent our best hopes and our dreams.
A few nights ago, I heard a commercial on a local radio station. The sounds of the moon landing played as if they were happening now. Then a news announcer cut in, “We interrupt this broadcast for an important news bulletin” as if what they were already playing wasn’t important at all. The breaking news was about cheap toner at Staples.
By the time the commercial ended, I was furious.
As a former broadcaster and a woman who once wrote commercials, I know what happened. The advertiser wanted to juxtapose a real-life news event with something silly, to show how our sense of the important had skewed.
And I have a hunch the lawyers got involved—or maybe the politically correct police: You can’t use something like the fires in Southern California or the Iraq war as your back- ground news story. People got hurt in that and no one would see the humor in the commercial. Let’s use something no longer important. Let’s use the moon landing.
To entire generations, the moon landing is as distant as World War I. To some Americans, the moon landing isn’t as important as the American Civil War.
But to some of us, the moon landing was the one of the central events of our young lives.
It inspired me to become a science fiction writer because it taught me several important things: It taught me that human beings can do anything if we but try; it taught me that hope can interrupt the world’s mayhem if only for a few hours; and it taught me to look up.
Whoever designed the catchphrase for the current documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, defined this feeling best for me:
Remember when the whole world looked up?
I do.
Quite vividly.
And I want us to look up again.
The world is very different now and yet startlingly the same. It is still full of mayhem. People die in senseless wars and children are starving. Poverty hasn’t been eradicated, and we’re still earthbound.
Science fiction is different, too. It’s no longer the genre of miracles. Science fiction writers don’t get interviewed when some grand scientific event happens, mostly because grand scientific events happen all the time.
For example, here are the stories from the science section in the Oregonian newspaper the day that I started this article:
•An astronaut from Eugene, Oregon, will go up on the next shuttle.
•Scientists are working on a gravitational “tractor” to deflect asteroids
•Biologists are altering the composition of trees to create biofuel
•Geneticists have started cloning redwood trees to recreate ancient forests
•Within the year, huts built for survival on the moon will be tested in Antarctica.
That’s the science section. The business section has articles on Verizon’s decision to open its “walled” coverage to other media—which reminded me that my Verizon phone has more memory than the computers that handled all of the Apollo missions combined. And, to top it off, my phone looks like—and has more features than—the communicators used by Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in the original Star Trek.
This morning, I listened to a podcast of “Nightfall,” on my iPod.5 This afternoon, an e-mail group I’m on spent the entire day discussing whether or not authors should blog. Striking writers in Hollywood are asking for a piece of the internet downloads of television shows.
An international space station orbits the Earth. The Chinese and Japanese have developed their own space programs. Russia is reviving its program. People in the private sector (most of them in their forties and fifties—no surprise there) are experimenting with new vehicles to get humans into space.
We live in a science fiction world. Not the world we imagined in 1969, but one in which I—a huge fan of the space program once upon a time—can’t tell you the name of a single modern astronaut. When the news announces that the upcoming night will be so clear that we’ll be able to see the shuttle, I sometimes forget to look.
I’m used to shuttle launches and expanding computer power. I use satellites all the time. My favorite television programs reach me via satellite. The GPS in my phone tracks me from moment to moment—using a satellite. When I’m researching areas I haven’t been to for a while, I go to websites that feature real-time satellite photos of the area and zoom in, until I can see the license plates on the cars parked in the street.
I have gotten used to the changes. I no longer marvel at things that would have caused my jaw to drop fifteen years ago. Until I went to New Haven and saw that article on the great imaginers—the people who envisioned what this world would become, the SF writers whose bold vision had eventually made the moon landing possible—I had forgotten one of the grandest and most glorious aspects of science fiction.
In one of the darkest times this country has ever known, science—and science fiction—gave us hope. It distracted us from the ugly events on the ground, and made us look up.
For a brief shining moment, it made us forget the gutter—and dream of the stars.
