ROCKET DREAMS

Whatever happened to those dreams, wonders freelance journalist Benjamin, those “utopian, escapist, and conquistadorial hopes” once fueled by the American space program?

When the exigencies of politics and the limits of engineering combined to send NASA begging, its legacy, the alternative history of the Space Age, was the launching ground for the deep space of strange ideas. Benjamin (Living at the End of the World, not reviewed) selects a handful of these spinoffs to see how the future unfolded for them. Though she freely admits to wishing she could have told the story of vacations on Ganymede and Callisto, having been a space nut as a child, she has to content herself with forays into New Physics and cyberspace and Noetics (astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s sweeping, holistic, teleologic cosmological story of the interconnected universe), into the organic flux of James Webb’s adaptive society and the utopian visions of space colonization. None of them light the fire under her as the first space flights did, none of them sign any meaningful covenants with the celestial realm that she can get behind, nor can Roswell, upon which she casts a long and skeptical eye, nor all the latter-day Jacob’s Ladders: angelic intermediaries, ecstatic transports, and astral planes. On the other hand, she believes, the lasting impact of seeing Earth from afar helped to focus our energies on environmentalism and the notion of Gaia. The most exciting post-Apollo development for Benjamin is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program, scanning the sky for beacons, pulses, leakages, or any other telltale signs of artifice; she sees SETI as both the keeper of the flame and the embodiment of popular participation in the quest for knowing something more about space.

Many befittingly spacey ideas here, but a few prizes as well.