It has been decades since I’ve read any science fiction. Roaming the dusty shelves of my memory’s recall, the last such cover I cracked was called, I think, The Way Station. Like the other tomes I’d read in the genre, it described a fantastic future implausible for the time.
The protagonist was named Enoch something or other, and an alien chose him to become the ageless caretaker of a backwoods cabin that was a way station for interplanetary travel in the vein of Beam-Me-Up, Scotty. It existed in prosaic world that could have been my home, had my suburb been more rural and wooded. (Ha! Wikipedia suggests that I’m holding dementia at bay. Clifford D. Simak published Way Station in 1963.)
After Christmas, looking for way to spend my gift card at Half-Price Books, I came across The Martian by Andy Weir. With none of the nonfiction titles of the shelves capturing my attention, I thought, why not? I really enjoyed the movie (so much that we bought the Blu-Ray), which starred Matt Damon. It was worth $7 to find out how closely the movie kept to the book.
The screenwriter did an excellent job of distilling Weir’s 369 pages into a 141-minute movie. The angel’s share was the more in-depth explanation of the science the planet’s sole inhabitant, Mark Watney, employed to survive. There were a few other points, like the rover’s emergency pop-up tents, whose excision really didn’t hurt the movie but really added to the book’s reality.
In both mediums, what really got my attention was the reversal of believability. All of the science, aerospace, or otherwise that described the Ares missions to Mars and the science that made possible Watney’s survival was available and possible today. Like Right Now! The movie suggests this, and the books more in-depth examinations make this indisputably clear.
The book never really touched on the underlying fantastic unbelievable circumstances that made the five-part Ares mission to Mars possible, and the movie added just a few lines of dialogue that hinted at it, when the program manager urged the NASA administrator to seek Congressional funding for a sixth mission to Mars.
The idea that our leaders would maintain their attention span for the time it took to plan and execute the Ares exploration of Mars is the fiction. Following this tangent I searched my mind for the last big thing America built that wasn’t promoted by some sort of conflict, like global war or conquest of space and the moon. The Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam were the first things that came to mind, and they were both public works projects with the ulterior motive of putting people back to work during the depression.
Another question I could not answer was when was the last time this nation had an approved federal budget in place before the next fiscal year started on October 1. I’m sure it has happened at least once since we declared our independence, but I can’t remember such an event in my lifetime, and I doubt I will see it in whatever time is left to me.
And given the increasing shortness of our national attention span and tolerance of ideas contrary to the one we hold to be “true,” it seems unlikely that this nation will ever again plan, build, and accomplish something big that’ not connected to the military. Pondering this sad reversal of achievable possibilities, one thing seems clear. I must read more science fiction. — Scott Spangler, Editor