Two (ok four) very compelling, very hard sci-fi books and one equally compelling movie in a span of a two weeks. Plus there was that big red moon not too long ago. And now, for a review of those recent novels which made me despair, and the counterpoint book which inspired me to catalog stuff and spend an inordinate amount of time buoyed by faith in all things good about people in space.
The Rifter Trilogy
An unfortunate cultural bias becomes apparent when the idea that astronauts need to be sociable, stable, professional and down to earth (pun intended) seems far-fetched, that the inevitability of human failure, emotionally and intellectually, is a given. Take for example, Peter Watt's deadly depressing depiction of life in earth's most proximal deep space - the ocean. The specter of the unknown abyss, primordially eerie and ferocious, plays a huge role (Starfish particularly) in establishing the idea that people can only survive deep space conditions, or perhaps persevere in anything, through shitty experiences. The rest of the series proceeds to devil's advocate that fallacy by exploring the superheated Darwinist fallout of relativistic morality through biological and digital global apocalypse. Watt pursues the chilling logic of self defeating interpersonal chaos to an uncomfortable, unsparing dystopia of potential transcendence.
The Martian
In the same way that Moon returned a sense of wonder to the potentiality of space travel, Andy Weir's near future survival story, The Martian, expresses incredulous awe for the ingenuity of man to traverse the universe despite the frankly terrible, horrible, no good odds. Written as a Murphy's law solution handbook for Mars, Weir's elegant and sometimes desperate problem solving exercises are utterly compelling on their own. But consider this...Science-ing the Shit out of something is also an evolving story written daily act in the act of research and building stuff - from particle physics to the bridge that straddles the San Francisco Bay to the water that comes out of the tap. In the mundane context of daily life, a celebration of scientific accomplishment is often forgotten but no small miracle.
The truly remarkable idea embedded in the Martian's hopeful, exuberant expression of love for all things geeky - engineering, biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, astrophysics, and daunting capital-m Math - is that all of it is accomplished by capital-p People. Qualified people that somehow didn't make it onto the crew manifest of the ill-fated Nostromo. In some ways, Weir's portrayal of the scientific community is an ode to all the individuals - even all those pesky admin party poopers - who come together to get things done, like I dunno, designing the perfect bolt so that the soft, squishy biology of a human being is able to propel like some suicidal shooting star into the inhospitable terror of outer space and penetrate a resolutely unfriendly world for the purpose of nothing more than something bigger than themselves.
Increasingly, I'm convinced that making interesting positive art is more difficult than painful existential and material drama. Certainly, happy endings are more difficult after painful existential and material drama in most of life. So if my promotion of all things positive and happy and generous towards the human spirit sounds fantastically and idealistically old fashioned, just a silly Tomorrowland Disney hallucination for children, then consider the dreary, soul-sucking alternative.
Bonus:
Sean Bean on the Council of Elrond. Twice, you geeks...
