Clark Lindsey has done us all the favor of reviewing The Space Review today. Like him, I was struck by Tayylor Dinerman’s completely ignoring ULA in his discussion of the “burgeoning” commercial space industry. But even more, I agree that Dwayne Day’s broad conclusion about public interest in space and space settlement from a single stupid network program is absurd:
The paradigm that near-term space can only involve a small number of people in a small habitat doing technical and scientific tasks does not lend itself to great story telling. Conflicts are required for compelling stories and lots of different types of conflicts are needed to generate enough stories for a compelling TV series. I think the “nearest” near future space scenario that could generate an interesting diversity of plots with a diversity of characters would involve a couple of thousand people populating multiple LEO space stations and habitats at a Lagrange point and bases on the Moon. Commercial, government, and international activities of various kinds would inevitably lead to all sorts of conflicts.
Let’s ignore the fact that most television shows (and particularly Big (though becoming smaller) Three Network television programs) fail, often epically. Big media, like (apparently) Dwayne, remain stuck in the Apollo paradigm of space being about a few civil servants doing science and exploration, at great government expense. Here’s an idea. Try a show about real space pioneers and see how popular it is. IIRC, “Lost In Space” actually did pretty well back in the sixties, or at least a lot better than the schlock that Dwayne reviewed. It’s not the sixties any more, but let’s give it a try anyway. It’s not like LIS was based on the NASA paradigm, so that wouldn’t explain its sixties success, right?
Strangely, there isnt a lot of recent near-future near-earth space sci-fi around in writing, that would be worth the paper its written on.
There are usually one or two short stories set in farther reaches of solar system in each annual collection i buy, but no good novels.
I dont recall a good space pioneering story that would sound authentic …
reader, Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress has to be the place to start. Man Who Sold the Moon is campy, I couldn’t get through it but the plot seems to be what you’re looking for. I think Farmer in the Sky has withstood the decades pretty well – although there are some snicker moments and it is a bit further out (Ganymede) than you seem to want, the story could just as easily be set on an NEO or the moon. Also, Red and Green Mars might suit, especially after all the characters branch out and it’s not just a government program anymore.
Hmm…I happen to know someone (me) who wrote an SF novel about near-term (ca. 2051) settlement of Mars. With capitalist themes, pioneer settings, and a few thousand settlers.
Anyone know a good agent?
Moon is a harsh mistress is rather dated now. Yes i have read it.
There has been good sf written about the subject in the past, but the recent field is rather bleak. One author that keeps going on the subject is Ben Bova, but while the subject is good, his writing often leaves quite a bit to be desired.
Good modern and prolific hard sci-fi writers ( Like Alastair Reynolds, Baxter, Gregory Benford ) mostly stay away from near-term and near-earth space themes.
Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic, of course, however the idea that the Moon will export rice and grain to Earth certainly can’t survive the test of time.
Part of the difficulty of near term realistic science fiction is depicting a plausible commercial reason for people being on the Moon or elsewhere.
That recent He3 mining movie (“Moon”) vanished from theaters before I saw it – awaiting the DVD.
People have always gone to frontiers for independence, sometimes the big ideological type, more often for the small personal type. They do whatever economic activity that is available, for the most part. Most frontiers didn’t actually export resources out of the immediate region for decades after settlement; they were consumed locally. Aside from the gold rushes, which are a small percentage of frontier settlement events, people didn’t go to the frontier for the specific resource. Even in gold rushes, the people who stayed as settlers were the people who sold things to the miners. The miners were actually for the most part capital importers, who brought their savings and gave them to the real settlers. You probably can’t think offhand of the name of one successful Forty-Niner prospector, but you probably wear Levi Strauss’s name on your clothes at least once a week.
I suspect the settlement of space, if it happens, will be like that as well. The ultimate resource of space itself is, well, space. Space to be independent. Resources are secondary.
I have to agree with Jim Bennett. The discussion of space exploration used to be about exploring space out of curiosity and scientific interest; but it’s become all about just finding out how we can either exploit other planets and asteroids and such for materials to bring back to Earth, or how we can turn places in space into imitation Earths or pieces of it. As for space colonization, we seem to have left all thought of frontiers and independence back where we put our scientific curiosity; it’s all about setting up new sources of goods to send back to Earth. Earth, Earth, Earth, dreary, mundane Earth. Why is space talk so Earth-centered? I find it terribly boring — “We’ll move production off into space so the Earth can become a cleaned-up leisure planet!” — and I want nothing to do with it.
Fallen Angels, the TV series.
Damn right, Andrea. To hell with all this Marxist pseudo-history claptrap, wherein everything men do is pure economics. I sure don’t think of myself as a profit-maximizing robot.
Go to space to see the rings of Saturn up close, to have a tale that will hold your 20th reunion classmates spellbound, or for the sheer panache and joy of planting the flag of the species on the north pole of Mars — Ha! take THAT, you Creator with your miserly gift of threescore and ten years! Watch out! The yeast are climbing slowly but surely out of the petri dish…
Or for the dusky voluptous green-skinned Martian babes, of course.
Heinlein. Campy?
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If you didn’t finish it, how would you know it’s ALL campy?
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I guess it follows then…”Jaws”, fishy, not scary, but I don’t know, I walked out when the teen agers shed their clothes…it seemed “nudey”.
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…can’t stand the test of time?
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I guess that you’ve thrown out ALL your H.G. Wells books or stories wholesale?
No longer watch B & W space operas, Star Trek, any scifi already “proven” to be onsound by modern technology or knowledge, because they ‘…can’t stand the test of time”? Hmmm, I don’t think your comment will, “…stand the test of time”.
How do we know the moon can’t do this? We’ve ( quite literally) only scratched the surface. When we walked on the moon, there were no calculators, cell phones, PERSONAL COMPUTERS (of any stripe), no MRI’s, and a thousand other things I’m sure. So making your statement seems short sighted, given the limited access and total lack of attempt to grow anything in Moon gravity, with the amount of Sunlight the Moon recieves.
Do wheat or rice or barley (or HOPS!!) grow better, stronger, quicker, in 1/6 the gravity, with multiples of available Sunlight?
We can’t know yet.
I kind of liked Plymouth, but few people watched the pilot on TV and even fewer people today remember it. No aliens, no space battles, no death rays. Most unlikely element of all: a corporate accountant was a good guy. Pete Conrad was in it, as an actor and a technical advisor.
[…One of the human flowerings of today’s low-aiming high tech is the phenomenon of “gamers,” adolescents (some with graying hair) who amuse themselves with Game Boys and on Play Stations — a child’s garden indeed. At the Carnaval, where base entertainment and sports goofiness also samba along, feelings drown out reason and impulse elbows aside deliberation — a perfect repudiation of goal-oriented German self-discipline.
Social critic Neil Postman describes true adults as having “the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future.” These qualities are the nemeses of the self-centered consumerism that has colonized the American psyche….]
From: We’re not going back to the Moon
I’d dearly love for Plymouth to come out on DVD. So far, no luck.
@ Jim Bennett
I agree 100% with this:
You probably can’t think offhand of the name of one successful Forty-Niner prospector, but you probably wear Levi Strauss’s name on your clothes at least once a week.
I believe selling the story of going out there will be worth far more than anything we find out there.
Some international competition would also help to generate drama and interest and therefore if there aren’t any nations capable of competing with us maybe we should offer assistance and then race.
The NY Yankees need other teams – no one would pay to watch them do baseball drills by themselves.
Put differently – there could well be towns “too small” to support a lawyer’s practice but there are far fewer towns “too small” to support two lawyers in practice.
Maybe NASA needs someone to race against in order to generate interest.
I think Dwayne made two errors: 1) a category error (its was a bad TV show, not a commentary on space policy) and 2) most SF on TV (with notable exceptions that prove the rule) suck.
Stross summed it up well in “Why I hate Star Trek”.
Defying Gravity’s “tech the tech” was even worse than Star Trek’s because it was near future enough that most viewers understood they were being snowed by lazy writing. (A gravity on/off button? Seriously?)
I’m probably very very biased but with some good casting and editing the last week of the NGLLC would make a pretty good made for TV movie. And “Kings of the High Frontier” could be turned into a good movie with some work. Few writers understand that the constraints and capabilities of physics and accurate technology can become a character in its own right…
Jim Bennett makes a good point:
People have always gone to frontiers for independence, sometimes the big ideological type, more often for the small personal type. They do whatever economic activity that is available, for the most part. …
They tend to do what ever activity they might have that has a (perhaps small) advantage over their trading partners. In the case of space settlement, the advantage may be freedom; freedom from major taxes, rules and regulations.
Think Bermuda as an analog. Bermuda exports an economically negligible amount of physical goods, but a significant amount of non-tangible economic activity takes place there.
The dreamer in me sees Libertarian Paradise out among the O’Neills.
The realist sees bureaucratic quicksand, infinite in all directions.
One only need look at the FAA/TSA treatment of general aviation to get a feel for what government, in conjunction (so to speak) with liability lawyers, will impose on human spaceflight and space settlement.
“Few writers understand that the constraints and capabilities of physics and accurate technology can become a character in its own right…”
Exactly. Although there is a current generation of sci-fi writers that do it quite well ( again, look to hard-sci fi guys like Baxter, Benford, Reynolds, Simmons etc ) none of them has cared much about setting their stories in near-earth space ( http://www.sfsite.com/01a/ns263.htm )
When western countries have birth rates at or below replacement levels, I doubt they will be colonizing much of anything, even if the technology did support it.
Space opera isn’t hard scifi.
T. L. James – although temporarily closed for queries, the folks at JABberwocky Literary are pretty sharp and specialize in speculative fiction.
Andrea, most of what is termed as “new space opera” is actually hard sci-fi, and not much space opera.
Thanks, Chris.
Yes, thank you, Chris.
So, you think a TV drama about “a couple of thousand people populating multiple LEO space stations and habitats at a Lagrange point and bases on the Moon” would sell?
I think you’re right — because it DID sell, ‘way back in 1979, and it’s sill selling today. Mr. Simberg, ladies and gents, I give you Japan’s “Star Trek”, the biggest SF franchise in the world: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM.
B Lewis – thanks; you got to it before I could. The original setting is one of those hybrids that has a very hard feel (a lot of the visuals were taken from popular science writing of the 60s and 70s). Unfortunately, that’s before you poke around too much under the hood. The science depicted in the show is a bit off. Not egregiously, Star Trekkishly so, but it does put story over proper detailing. The spinoff “alternate settings” are painfully bad though, for the most part.
If people want something with a lot more hardness (and also more recent vintage), there’s Planetes, which one of the regular columnists at TSR reviewed when it first hit DVD a few years ago. It’s set in the 2070s, mostly in Earth orbit. And unlike most shows, it gets a lot of the details within spitting distance of correct.