Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  No, he hadn’t, and what did it matter? What did one loser have to say to another?

  “She couldn’t win, because she’s only got half the answer,” Culpepper said. “You have the other half. Someone like you could colonize the asteroid belt. Not people like me. But someone like you. You’re the future, Meek. And it’s possible that we are the past.” He paused, and then smiled. A good, warm smile. Like Grandpa’s.

  “So …” Meek said slowly. “No Disney Observation Platform …?”

  “No,” Culpepper grinned. “But have you ever heard of Clarke Station?”

  It was all a dream. His roots sinking to an impossible depth. His branches and leaves and tendrils extending an impossible reach. And the most beautiful dance he had ever known. Meek awoke in his cot, lying there among his verdant comrades, yawning and stretching and thinking of the wonderful fantasy he’d had. But it was a dream, even now sloughing away like sweet syrup.

  He’d had it before. Hoped he would never stop. It was too easy to forget the good things.

  He got up from the bed, trying to remember where he was. Who he was, what anything was. He should write the dreams down so he could remember them. Maybe he’d write a book. Someone might want to know about this, one day.

  When he reached, he dislodged the pen from its magnetic clip on the planter beside him. It spun into the air, bounced off the wall. He watched it bouncing between the rows of tomatoes and ferns, still not tired of the sight. He dressed without unsnapping his sleep cocoon, and then plucked the pen out of the air and pressed it to the paper of his leather-bound journal, the one that his grandfather had purchased and given to him for his birthday. Oh, Grandpa. If you could only see me now. See me in the observation room with the other tourists.

  He had not noticed, but Kathleen Chang had joined him in the observation room. She was even tinier than she’d appeared at the contest. Unlike the other passengers, she didn’t keep her distance. She smiled up at him. “Take off those sunglasses,” she commanded.

  “My eyes are green,” he said.

  “So are mine.” She smiled. The back of her hand brushed his.

  He slipped off his shades. So that’s the world, he thought, watching the Earth recede in infinitesimal stages. It isn’t all concrete and desert, I knew it wasn’t. It’s green.

  He shifted to watch the approach screen, the Moon growing every larger, a dream expanding to fill the space before him. Luna. Not dead after all. More alive every day.

  Like me.

  All either of us needed was the right dream.

  Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Greg Bear for his encouragement and support in the development of “Mozart on the Kalahari.” He was a lifesaver. And additional thanks to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, for a lifetime of mentorship.

  Past Empires and the Future of Colonization in Low Earth Orbit

  by William K. Storey

  Science fiction stories that envision the future exploration and colonization of space are often grounded in domestic debates about the proper ordering of public and private interests. In Stephen Baxter’s Titan, published in 1997, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian takeover of the United States undermines NASA’s efforts to locate life in our solar system, plainly a cautionary tale about the “culture wars.” And the long-lived Star Wars series began its life in the mid-1970s, shortly after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, when political analysts wondered about the future of liberty in a world where China and the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union seemed to be robust and menacing. The stories in this volume are grounded in contemporary skepticism about politics as well as concern about public-private partnerships and for the future of Earth’s environment. These plausible fictions about the colonization of space resonate with U.S. and world history, in that they extend ideas about technology, business, and migration that are deeply rooted in our consciousness—including our fears. I like how the stories articulate just how bad things can get when government services go into freefall and corporations are allowed to run amok, dark possibilities that will certainly concern NASA and members of the public as they visualize a future for the space program. As Sheila Jasanoff observes in her book about science and democracy, Designs on Nature, public skepticism about science and modern politics has produced newfound anxiety about the capacity of the modern nation-state to provide order in the midst of new technological challenges.[1]

  Escaping to Space: Privatization, Inequality, and Pessimism

  As the line between corporate influence and public policy continues to blur, there are strong reasons to explore, in science fiction, what it would be like for capitalists to be in charge of space exploration. The most provocative thing about “Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz is how it imagines a future for Low Earth Orbit that would be dominated by grasping high-tech capitalists. The propulsive capitalist in Scholz’s story, Gideon Pace, fueled by Kobe beef and California cabernet, is on a mission to collect a historical artifact, the Vanguard satellite, still orbiting the Earth after decades of neglect. Those of us who are historically conscious are horrified at the thought of a private entrepreneur collecting historical artifacts for himself, rather than sharing them with the public. When Pace grasps the satellite, the author makes a larger point: “Know anything about space law?” Pace asks Sergei. He continues, “Once upon a time the sky was ‘free’” and “space was beyond national boundaries. I want this little guy hanging in my office to remind me how elegant that strategy was.” This warning—about how new technologies influence the trajectory of the new laws—is consistent with most understandings from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Technologies pose benefits and risks that societies regulate, in such a way that the law may be said to co-evolve with technologies. Automobiles became safer—with seat belts, airbags, and mandatory seat-belt laws surrounding them—even as the safer cars became faster and more agile. And the development of nuclear weapons ushered in an era of international rulemaking through treaties.

  Sadly, the future domination of Low Earth Orbit by grasping capitalists is all too easy to imagine. We are already seeing national space programs like NASA scaling back, while private entrepreneurs like Richard Branson scheme about the future of private space travel and of modifications to the Earth’s atmosphere. With privatization comes perils, as Scholz warns us. The story is useful for NASA and its publics, in that Scholz articulates a dystopian scenario that is easy to imagine in the absence of NASA. In his view (and mine) space is a commons for humanity that ought to be developed by public organizations, not by uncultured corporate buccaneers.

  Dystopian themes provide the background for “Mozart on the Kalahari,” an unusual and suspenseful story by Steven Barnes. The story’s main character, a teenager named Meek, yearns to travel in space, in part to escape a land that has become dreadful. The “L.A. Quake” has apparently ravaged things quite badly, to the point where city services have been turned over to greedy corporations. The corporations employ robots, while ordinary people struggle to find decent jobs. But Grandfather Prouder’s optimism pushes Meek forward: “I still believe that if you use your mind, you can go anywhere you want.” This sounds like a bit of a cliché, but in fact, as the story progresses, we learn that Meek’s grandfather is right. Meek enters a national science competition. Under scrutiny, the validity of his project appears less and less likely—his calculations are wrong and he is revealed to be stealing things and using drugs. Yet after Meek flees the contest in shame, the observations of Culpepper, the M.C. of the competition, bring to notice Meek’s ability to photosynthesize. The story raises a fascinating question. Science fiction writers have created many cyborg characters—technologically modified humans—ranging from Darth Vader in Star Wars to the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Technically speaking, a cyborg can be any technologically dependent human. Some have argued that even people with pacemakers or cochlear implants can be considered to be cyborgs. Be that as it may, STS scholars have been fascinated with cyborgs. Do cyborgs
have the same rights and responsibilities as non-cyborgs? Do cyborgs highlight, better than anything else, the interdependency of people and technology? Does an Olympic “blade runner” compete following the same rules? In this story, we do not have a human-technology cyborg, but something else, a kind of plant-dependent human. The story’s penultimate scene is more reminiscent of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book I, when Daphne escapes the unwanted advances of Apollo, the sun god, by becoming transformed into a tree. Here is the key moment of the poem, in the translation by Samuel Garth and John Dryden:

  A filmy rind about her body grows;

  Her hair to leaves, her arms extend to boughs:

  The nymph is all into a lawrel gone;

  The smoothness of her skin remains alone.[2]

  The transformation of Daphne into the laurel tree freezes her, but the hybrid plant-dreamer, Meek, has more potential for the future.

  The story raises multiple future possibilities. Will plant-people be able to have progeny? Will their intelligence or strength be enhanced or diminished? Will Meek and Kathleen be able to remain independent, especially if they become superior, in some ways, to people? Will governments and corporations take control of them, their progeny, even their DNA? So many questions are left open by this story.

  Both stories contrast a bleak future on Earth and the possibilities of exploring in Low Earth Orbit. With things going badly on Earth, I wondered how anything was being produced or paid for by these large corporations that are said to be running things. I also wondered how a government or corporation could raise enough revenue to support a space program, given the state of things. In fact, both stories point up the difference between our own era in U.S. history, with its budget-conscious, polarized government, and the era of the space program’s founding, when U.S. citizens in the midst of the Cold War felt confidence in the state’s ability to solve problems by spending taxpayer resources on major technological projects—even if those projects may have eroded democratic practices in favor of technocracy, as Walter McDougall argues in his classic history of the early space program, The Heavens and the Earth.[3] The stories by Scholz and Barnes highlight our own era’s pessimism, in which collective optimism has been replaced by skepticism of authority, be it state or corporate. The choices of the authors reflect today’s national consciousness.

  Colonization and Governance in History and in Low Earth Orbit

  The U.S. has never been entirely comfortable with colonizing or dominating other societies. While it did dominate other societies since its origins in the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the U.S. aspires in the direction of egalitarianism. The enslavement of Africans was countered by abolitionists. The wars with Mexico and Spain produced demonstrations of conscience, like Henry David Thoreau’s, and biting satire, like Mark Twain’s. The Vietnam War tore the country apart. The skepticism of some U.S. citizens about Manifest Destiny has to do with our origins in an anticolonial revolt as well as the egalitarianism of our political culture, a tendency that was first described by Alexis de Tocqueville, who published Democracy in America in 1835.[4] The stories by Barnes and Scholz chart a course for space colonization, focusing on Low Earth Orbit. As a historian of colonization, I am struck by the presence of a number of historical issues in these stories. These choices reflect the times that we live in and the aspirations that we have, rather than being problems that are somehow inherent in the stories.

  One key element of colonization has always been migration, from Neolithic times to the present. Migration depends on a number of different factors—“push” factors and “pull” factors—as well as individual and group calculations about opportunity costs. How bad is it at home? How challenging is the process of migration? How good is the new area of settlement? On the subject of migration, both of our stories suggest a bleak future. One author is solving the problem of migration by imagining human characters who begin to take on the characteristics of plants. The other shows the domineering presence of a rogue capitalist, working with technically trained satellite operators. Ultimately it appears that very few Earthlings will participate in this migration because the opportunity costs appear to be astronomically high. The Gideon Paces of the world may be able to afford movement in space, but the billions of laid-off grandfathers at home will wither and die. If the future of humanity is to depend on the colonization of space, then we either need to develop the technologies to sustain mass travel and migration, or we had better pay closer attention to the ruination of our own planet and societies. NASA can figure in solutions to both problems, which are closely connected.

  Domestic transformations such as these are often related to the conquest and colonization of new territories, as Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper maintain in Empires in World History.[5] Imperial conquests, though based in the desire for domination, enrich the home countries with new commodities, ideas, and migrants. Empires bring resistance, too, and in the case of the British, French, and U.S. Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the credibility of cherished domestic freedoms was called into question. Even so, in world history, imperial governance has been the most widespread and stable form of governance, ranging from the empires of Rome and Han China to the European empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern nation-states are only a recent development and they, too, have been susceptible to engaging in their own empire-building. The stories in this anthology suggest the emergence of a significant corporate role in governance, but from a historical standpoint this is not new. There are many examples of colonial domination by companies, such as the British East India Company, founded in 1600. For a century and a half, it was mainly concerned with securing its trading posts, but during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it came to govern much of India. The Dutch East India Company established European settlement in Southern Africa in 1652, laying the groundwork for many subsequent racial problems. In both places, direct rule from home was thought to be prohibitively costly, but company rule was gradually found to be less than public-spirited. The British East India Company famously lost its mandate in the wake of the 1857 rebellion of its own soldiers, while the Dutch East India Company was replaced in Southern Africa by direct British rule during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Today these company-states might be called public-private partnerships. Entrepreneurs from the companies sought to undermine indigenous people and rulers who resisted their inroads. The companies created their own governments in overseas territories, with the sanction of their home governments through charters. The home governments, in turn, reaped the benefits of having friendly governments in overseas territories, while administration by chartered companies helped home governments to avoid the costs of administration. Unfortunately for those who advocate such public-private partnerships today, the history of colonialism contains famous examples of ways that such arrangements have tended to produce clashes between public values and private actions. The companies were set up to make money, not only for the shareholders, but also for their home countries. Making money came first, the common good came second. Chartered companies tended to become controversial when they started to become costly in terms of money and good will.

  The British East India Company began with trading posts in India’s port cities. As the company became rich and influential over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it expanded its territory to a great extent. The idea that underlaid the company’s expansion was mercantilism. Raw, unrefined produce would be bought in India, then shipped to Britain, where manufacturers turned it into goods that could be sold at home or even sold in India. The model worked to some extent, but there were problems inherent in this public-private partnership. Such arrangements would work best as monopolies, which were naturally resisted by competing merchants, as John Darwin points out in his magisterial survey, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. Darwin also explains that at home, imports were bought with gold and silver, which then flowed back to India and into
the pockets of company traders—in other words, the company profited not only at the expense of Indian competitors, but also at the expense of British consumers.[6] Company policies became unpopular in India, too. Cotton exports led to the decline of indigenous cloth manufacturing. Opium cultivation by Indian landlords tended to throw peasants off their customary lands and reduce them to rural proletarians. Even Niall Ferguson, a historian who is sympathetic to Britain’s imperial projects, points out in his book Empire that tension between the East India Company’s profit-seeking leaders, on the one hand, and Indian princes and peoples on the other, had produced a state of near-perpetual warfare on the subcontinent.[7] The company’s propensity to annex territory and to antagonize Indians led to the great rebellion of 1857, the abolition of the company, and direct rule from Britain.

  In fact, public-private partnerships in the form of chartered colonial companies helped to produce some of the worst cases of misrule in modern history. The most notorious example took place in the late nineteenth-century Congo. The constitutional monarch of Belgium, King Leopold II, became interested in trade in the Congo Basin. In the 1870s, he bought large financial positions in several companies that traded in Congo, but he failed to persuade the Belgian parliament to create a formal colony there. Under pressure from the British, French, and Germans, who were formalizing their own colonial boundaries in Africa, Leopold founded his own colony, the Congo Independent State. Leopold claimed that his private colony had a humanitarian mission, yet the colony, which was recognized by all the European powers, became a horror-show of colonial exploitation. To fill Leopold’s pockets, many of the people of the Congo were sent out as gang laborers to collect rubber and other raw materials. Failure to meet company goals resulted in torture, maiming, and killing. The best-known history of imperialism in the Congo, Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, quotes a Swedish missionary who recorded the following song from desperate Congolese people: “We are tired of living under this tyranny. / We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away / And dealt with by the white savages. / We shall make war …. / We know that we shall die, but we want to die. / We want to die.”[8] When the brutality of Leopold’s public-private partnership was exposed by journalists, the Belgian government was shamed into taking over the colony and ruling it directly from Brussels.