There Ain't No Livin' on Planetside

 I admire the hell out of Tom Smith.  He's got a fastball brain and a sense of humor that unerringly grabs the good stuff out of the big roaring datastream. He's funny and incredibly inventive, and has written at least one magnificent killer song.

The one I'm thinking of is called Rocket Ride. You should go  over to his site and download it (and anything else you can afford.) I recommend the Homecoming Marcon 2005 set: it's live, and so not all the lyrics are that clear, but the energy is far superior to his studio version. It's a paean to Science Fiction, and just about nobody has shouted out the dream like Mr. Smith.

The thing that's really remarkable about the song is that it's both about Science Fiction as something we watch and, yes, read--but it's also about--and charged by--the Science Fiction that is the dream of real life. The defiance, the ecstasy, the hope and belief that's in the song doesn't come from our preferred viewing habits. 

Now you should really go and download his stuff and all, but I'm not going to go on doing in-depth analysis of a song you still haven't heard. but Tom expresses the thing that is peculiar to Science Fiction better than I can describe. Because Science Fiction is not just entertainment, or even art by which myth explains our dreams: it's also, at least potentially, the Future. Our real no-shit future.

And lately I've been contemplating things about that mixture that give me a deep sad twinge when I listen to Tom's song.

One of the things that defined my childhood was Mankind's move out into space. I remember with trembling excitement sitting on the school bus and listening to the other kids talk about the launching of Sputnik. I was so excited I could barely contain myself. We  were actually doing it--and it didn't matter that 'we' were the Russians. I memorized every American launch vehicle. I subscribed to Space World magazine at its inception: one of its features was a datadump from NASA of all the satellites in orbit, named and unnamed, and I pored over it eagerly every month. (The magazine took a weird turn when Ray Palmer (publisher of Fate magazine and  real-life inspiration for DC's The Atom (he was real short) took it over. Ads started appearing for all sorts of occult stuff--and it was my first introduction to John Uri Lloyd and Marie Corelli. But I digress.) I remember being glued to the screen as the brief series of TV images from Ranger 7--after 6 heartbreaking failures--broadcast back to earth right before it crash landed on the Moon. 

It made it OK to be a nerd, because it was the nerds that were going to take mankind to the stars. It was both the clearest most scientific vision and the most romantic, all at once.

And I remember standing out in my driveway, in the years before sodium lamps, looking up at the stars and picking out Orion and Pegasus and Andromeda, and feeling sick with despair about the limitation of the speed of light. How could God have put all this in front of our upturned eyes, I thought, and left so much of it out of reach. I wanted ftl only a little less than I wanted not to die. 

That's not a feeling that would have possessed someone without the knowledge that we were going.

Science Fiction had, of course, been chugging away long before Sputnik, but it changed the way SF thought about itself, and the way SF fans thought about themselves. Not only were stories simply about getting into space more than enough to get our hearts pumping, there was that miraculous discovery that our dreams were coming true, which not only made us love our dreams, but made reality bigger and more beautiful, and closer to our hearts' desire.

And that's all right there in Tom's song. He blithely invokes bad old movies and spends an entire stanza in praise of Charles Middleton--but he's also talking about really going out and exploring the universe. He flips back and forth from movie to reality--"A rubber jumpsuit and a freeze-dried meal"--until the dream and the reality are blissfully wedded by rock and roll. (Have you bought the song yet?)

But--

What does this mean for those for whom the Age of Space began in 1977 with the launch of a bunch of big Corellian star cruisers across the screen? (Marie? Is that you?) What does it mean to a youngster half of whose fictions are set in a magnificently realized outer space we could never have dreamt of--but is no more real than the Super Mario Brothers? What does it mean for someone who lives half their lives among the stars--but for whom the real thing only shows up as DirecTV junk mail?

To be sure, we continue to explore--but in keeping with James Van Allen's vision, it's being done by washing-machine-sized robots with no personality, searching for scientific answers rather than adventure. The Hubble has sent back pictures of the sky that nobody except Jack Kirby could have envisioned--but how far into a young person's heart do they go? I don't know.

For a kid in high school, the last step on the moon was when his or her parents were kids. I don't know what that feels like: as a geezer, I'm disappointed and angry at the diminution off the vision. It's hard to imagine what it's like for someone who loves science fiction for whom that dream never lived. 

I no longer live in the house where I grew up, but neither there nor here can I look up from the driveway and see the stars. And if I drive halfway to DeKalb and turn out the lights so I can make out Pegasus and Andromeda and the little blur of the Pleiades, I don't feel the deep poignant romantic despair that God put all that wonderful stuff out of reach. No, I feel like a fat old white guy with an illusion.

I'm just not sure that living without the illusion would be better.

So rave on, Tom Smith.