Living History

The Smithsonian just came out with a book called The History of American in 101 Objects. They also had a full issue of their magazine devoted to said objects, if a bit more briefly than the book clearly does. Flipping through the magazine, I got caught up a moment on how many modern things were there. "How can it be history," I thought, "if it's modern?"

Well, silly me. Just because we're living it doesn't mean it isn't history.

Years from now, something that happened today will be history. Hell, something is history as soon as it's happened. Whether it's important history is to be decided later, obviously.

Some things are apparent. When Buzz Aldrin et. al. were on the Moon missions, it was history. They knew they were making history, living it. Funny thing: one of the 101 objects is Neil Armstrong's Space Suit. Another member of my household left the magazine folded open to that, and I happened to lay the book I'm reading, Moondust by Andrew Smith, on top before I took notice. I'm not very far into it, but the introduction was fantastic, and the first chapter is also delivering. I scored it in the library book sale for $1 the day after I decided I was writing a Moon novel. How's that for the universe taking notice?

I actually met one of the Moon landing astronauts, when I was 6 or so. He came to the Jersey Shore Medical Center, where my grandmother was a secretary in the Pathology department. I'm not really sure why the astronaut came to the hospital in 1989 or so, but whatever. The program was supposed to be for children 8 and older, but my dad lied so I could go. I didn't realize the importance, not really, but he realized for me. I'm thankful.

It was Charles "Pete" Conrad, and I have an autographed photo of him that my grandmother framed for me. He died in 1999 due to injuries from a motorcycle accident and is buried in the Arlington Cemetery. He was the commander of Apollo 12, and he was one of the first people to board Skylab.

One of the things I learned from American Gods, which I'm able to generalize a great deal, is a quote from Herodotus: "Call no man happy until he is dead." The notion being you can't take stock and make decision of an entire life until it is over (I may have paraphrased. I don't think it changes the point of the quote if I did.) I have, in the course of dog message board discussions, said "Call no man healthy until he is dead." Because that's the thing: if people are breeding dogs for health, they don't exactly know the "final results" until after a dog has lived his or her entire life. Some Dobermans drop dead as early as 2 or 3 from DCM. Others don't until they're 6 or 8. Some live a great deal longer. Some get cancer, some get bloat. But you don't know, not really.

But you don't know about anything. You just try to do the best you can.

 

More Realistic Space Travel for a Brighter SciFi Future

I've mentioned numerous times (though not enough for them to give me money, apparently) that I'm a reader of Cracked.com. Their articles tend to be well (or at least amusingly) written, they give lots of links, there are pictures. I don't watch the videos, or look at the fan photo things. No, I look at the list posts. In the past, Snopes.com has also filled this sort of "fascination niche" for me.

Though I'm not currently writing any kind of SciFi space offering, I intend to one of these days. I sort of did, for the NaNo of 2008. I'm pleased with parts of it, though not really the scale, and it's hung on enough of an Atlas Shrugged framework that the Ayn Rand institute would not appreciate my homage, I daresay.  What does this have to do with Cracked? Well, they have articles on space, as one might imagine. One in particular that caught my attention and my writerly focus is 6 Reasons Space Travel Will Always Suck. In science fiction, the concerns this article brings up aren't typically addressed, with few notable exceptions. The Cold Equations is one of them.

Also  (and I'm surprised at myself that I didn't talk about this here at the time. I meant to, certainly), I'm probably one of the only people in the world who, when they saw Chris Hadfield's "Space Oddity" cover, wondered if he smuggled that guitar onboard because I knew weight was such an issue with packing for space (though it occurs to me as well that I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, in which I'm sure she addressed these rules and their more recent changes). On December 16, 1965, the guys in the Gemini 6   in Earth's Orbit played "Jingle Bells" on their contraband sleighbells and teeny tiny harmonica, which you can see in this Smithsonian article.

Another Cracked article is the 6 Weirdest Dangers of Space Travel, including things like static electricity and being unable to stop. Less glamorous aspects of the Space Opera, certainly, and by "less glamorous" I mean "nobody in Star Wars once had a problem getting zapped by a random thing they touched." Or, for fun, draw your own comparison.

So, while Science Fiction I write is still going to be far more fictional than sciencey (that's just the way it goes), I'm still a big fan of using enough factual material to lend reality to the story I'm building. It's easier to suspend one's disbelief if there are facts in the mix; it makes the falsehoods a less bitter pill to swallow.

I'm still pretty sure I'll leave out the unicorns, though.