Asimov's SF, February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  That there is a strong flavor of James Branch Cabell in Vance's style is beyond question. Consider this, from Cabell's Jurgen:

  "All this,” said Jurgen, “seems regrettable, but not strikingly explicit. I have a heart and a half to serve you, sir, with not seven-eighths of a notion of what you want of me. Come, put a name to it!"

  But I see the influence of Lord Dunsany here too, and several critics have convincingly shown the impact of Clark Ashton Smith's fantasies and John Ruskin's writings on painting and architecture on Vance's style. About 1964 I asked Vance about the literary antece-dents of The Dying Earth, specifically citing Dunsany, and he brushed the question aside so effectively that I never raised it again with him.

  His use of color: how wonderful!

  Most strange, however, was the sky, a mesh of vast ripples and cross-ripples, and these refracted a thousand shafts of colored light, rays which in mid-air wove wondrous laces, rainbow nets, in all the jewel hues. So as Turjan watched, there swept over him beams of claret, topaz, rich violent, radiant green. He now perceived that the colors of the flowers and the trees were but fleeting functions of the sky, for now the flowers were of salmon tint, and the trees a dreaming purple. The flowers deepened to copper, then with a suffusion of crimson, warmed through maroon to scarlet, and the trees had become sea-blue.

  The courtly dialog:

  "Willingly will I aid you,” said Pandelume. “There is, however, another aspect involved. The universe is methodized by symmetry and balance; in every aspect of existence is this equipoise observed. Consequently, even in the trivial scope of our dealings, this equivalence must be maintained, thus and thus. I agree to assist you; in return, you perform a service of equal value to me. When you have completed this small work, I will instruct and guide you to your complete satisfaction."

  The sardonic wit, as in this passage, which seems a foreshadowing of the sort of answers one gets from computer support lines today:

  "I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak to a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."

  * * * *

  The dying Earth itself, so vividly evoked:

  A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live....

  Over six decades it has lost nothing for me; gained in power, perhaps. The characters are sharply delineated. Each section sets forth a challenging plot problem and ingeniously resolves it. Its prose is measured, taut, controlled, mesmeric. One reads carefully, trying not to let the imperatives of the plots rush one forward, because one is fearful of skimming past some passage of wondrous beauty. And the reward is the vision of a complete world of the imagination, irresistible, unforgettable.

  Copyright (c) 2006 Robert Silverberg

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS: ME AND DEKE AND THE PARADIGM SHIFT by Michael Cassutt

  Michael Cassutt lives in Los Angeles and has written extensively for television (e.g., Max Headroom, Eerie, Indiana, and The Dead Zone). Mike is also the author of a pair of SF-fantasy novels and numerous short stories. His last tale for Asimov's, “Generation Zero,” appeared in our October/ November 1996 issue. In addition, Mike has published non-fiction and fiction about the space program. He is currently working on a new novel and a new non-fiction project.

  So I popped open a can of Labatt's Blue and said to Deke Slayton, “Deke, old buddy, what was it like being part of that big old Paradigm Shift back in the 1960s?” We were sitting on lawn chairs outside an R.V. parked in front of a hangar at the Reno Air Races. Scott Grissom, Gus's son, was there, too, helping push Deke's Formula One airplane, a Williams 17, out of the hangar. Gordo Cooper had just driven by on his way to the viewing stands; he hadn't stopped to say hello, but maybe he hadn't seen Deke. Or maybe he'd heard the words “Paradigm Shift” floating in the air and decided to be elsewhere.

  Or am I thinking of Tom Stafford at the Cape? No, it was Deke who liked Canadian beer and flew Formula One in retirement. On the other hand, you could say “Paradigm Shift” to General Tom without getting one of those looks in return.

  Either way, this scene of a laid-back, rat-shack-style encounter with the guys who flew Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo is not solely an attempt to drive Allen Steele green with envy ... it's to establish my bona fides. To make you trust me as we consider that moment when sending human beings into space ceased to be Buck Rogers craziness and became the real deal or the Right Stuff.

  Also known as the Paradigm Shift.

  Without really intending to, I have become an expert on America's astronauts. I have co-authored two autobiographies (Slayton's and Stafford's), written the biographical encyclopedia Who's Who in Space (three editions, none of them short) as well as contributing odd bits of journalism and even historical papers. Oh, yes, there are the three novels dealing with manned space flight—Missing Man and its sequel, Tango Midnight, and Red Moon.

  In thirty years of ... well, in Hollywood we'd call it schmoozing ... I have met, and, in some cases, talked at length, with eighteen of the twenty-two surviving members of the first three groups of NASA astronauts, as well as an untold number of those who followed, not to mention a good dozen Soviet cosmonauts from that era.

  Tom Stafford wanted to title his autobiography Higher and Faster; mine would probably be Closer and More Personal.

  Why this obsession? I was a total child of the Space Age. My first book was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet—not the first of the Grosset & Dunlap novel series by “Carey Rockwell,” but a picture book. Nevertheless, it launched me as a consumer of science fiction, especially SF about rocketships and flights to other planets. Further damage was done by the Winston series of juveniles by Lester del Rey (under a variety of names), Andre Norton's books, and, of course, Robert A. Heinlein's Scribner novels.

  It was my mother who introduced me to the Heinleins, unquestionably the stories most associated with the Paradigm Shift. She was an English teacher at John Glenn Junior High School in Maplewood, Minnesota. After Glenn's Mercury flight in February 1962, it was the first facility named for him. One wintry Friday in 1965 she brought me Red Planet. Reading it, at age ten, was the closest I will ever come to a transcendent experience. Heinlein's portrayal of colonial life on Mars was so real, so engaging, that it struck me as more realistic than Tom Sawyer or Robinson Crusoe.

  On each of the next nine Fridays, she brought me a new book in the series, from The Star Beast to Tunnel in the Sky to the wonderful Have Space Suit, Will Travel. (For some reason, the library didn't have Starman Jones—I didn't read it until I found a paperback edition a couple of years later.)

  Inspired, I began to collect astronaut stories from Life magazine and other publications. I built lunar module and Gemini and Saturn V Revell models. (Well, unlike Allen Steele, I never actually finished that monster Saturn V.) Having seen the fictional side of space travel, I couldn't wait to see the reality.

  Which was this:

  * * * *

  It was almost forty-eight years ago that seven American military test pilots were put on stage in a house in downtown Washington, D.C., and introduced to the press and the world as “America's Mercury astronauts.” Not one of the first seven had any idea what was in store—they expected to be treated like Scott Crossfield or Capt. Bob White, the test pilots who had been chosen for the X-15 high-altitude research program a year earlier ... fodder for a day's worth of newspaper articles, then fading back to happy obscurity while they got on with their jobs.

  Not the Mercury Seven. From the day of that pres
s conference, they became household names, as famous as movie stars or baseball players. People wanted their autographs, wanted them to pose for pictures, wanted to have drinks with them, wanted to have more personal encounters.

  Scott Carpenter would later describe it as “more fun than you can imagine,” but at another level, it made the men incredibly uncomfortable. As Deke told me, “We hadn't done anything but show up!"

  That's what happens with Paradigm Shifts. You don't get to volunteer for them. You can't escape them. They roll over you like a cultural tsunami.

  Prior to Project Mercury, which itself followed closely on Sputnik, space flight was equated with science fiction: Buck Rogers stuff, theoretically possible, but impractical, unlikely, unaffordable.

  This attitude wasn't limited to middle-class Americans—President Eisenhower was extremely reluctant to commit the nation to a space program. (To be fair to Ike, this reluctance stemmed more from financial prudence than some lack of vision. He had a pretty good idea of what a space program would cost, and he simply didn't want to burden the next generation with huge bills ... especially knowing that Cold War military needs would force gigantic expenditures.)

  Even SF writers like Robert A. Heinlein—author of those inspiring Scribner juveniles—could postulate a grim view of the inevitability of space flight when he wanted. His classic novella, “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” portrayed a near-future world in which “antipodal rockets” routinely made sub-orbital flights with cargo and passengers ... while only one man showed any interest in actually flying to the Moon.

  In stories like Ray Bradbury's “R is for Rocket,” it was even suggested that being a “spaceman” was beyond the ability of ordinary humans, that likely prospects would have to be scouted and selected by mysterious great minds by the time they were twenty, or forget it.

  The Mercury Seven changed that. They were recognizably the guys from down the next street, from the gas station downtown, or maybe the new junior college. Who could look at the freckled face of John Glenn and not see middle America? If he thought going into space was possible, then who was going to argue the point?

  Yes, their lives had been formed by the Depression, by the rise of aviation (both Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton spoke reverently of the magic of standing in their front yards and watching aircraft fly overhead), and by World War II, Korea, and the Cold War. Some of them had become warriors, but, in 1961, so had many American men.

  (And, yes, they were all white males. The race-and-gender Paradigm had yet to shift.)

  Chosen in 1962, the second group of astronauts—which included Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Tom Stafford, and John Young—did have some idea of their fate. For one thing, they knew they were going to fly missions in Apollo, a program intended to “land a man on the Moon by the end of this decade, and return him safely to Earth."

  Tom Stafford, who, on that September day in 1962, had the pleasure of being introduced to the press on his thirty-second birthday, says he looked around at the group as the flashbulbs popped, and thought, “One of us is going to be the first guy to walk on the Moon.” (Had history changed slightly, it would have been Stafford, not Armstrong. Had it changed even less, it would have been Borman, or McDivitt, or Conrad.)

  In 1963, a third group arrived, chosen, like the first two, from the pool of skilled military and civilian jet pilots, all of them hardened by combat or risk, seemingly more interested in carburetors and cocktails than space medicine or the origin of the Moon.

  But only on the surface. Deke admitted to me that even before he'd heard of the Mercury program, he would pick up the odd book or magazine on astronomy. Scott Carpenter grew fascinated by aerospace medicine. Tom Stafford was already a student at the Harvard Business School when NASA grabbed him. Jim Lovell actually built rockets and knew their history as well as anyone. Frank Borman and Jim McDivitt had studied aerospace engineering and helped found an Air Force program specializing in the subject.

  Later waves of astronauts included genuine scientists, like Jack Schmitt or Ed Gibson, or men with wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that belied their images as test pilots.

  Take Ed Mitchell, for example, the lunar module pilot on Al Shepard's Apollo 14. If the average American can differentiate Mitchell from the other moon-walkers, it's that he was the guy who did E.S.P. experiments in space.

  He was a Navy pilot who had taken part in tests of the delivery of nuclear weapons from jet aircraft, who had helped develop a manned spy satellite program.

  And yet ... he had a Ph.D., he had grown up in America's land-based Bermuda Triangle—the town of Roswell, New Mexico—where he a) witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity as a bright light on the northern horizon one July morning in 1945, b) walked home from grade school past the residence of Robert H. Goddard, and c) knew the family whose farm was the location of the supposed “saucer” crash of 1947.

  To this day, Mitchell writes and lectures eloquently on any number of subjects, speculative science that could easily be labeled SF.

  Buzz Aldrin also had a Ph.D., and in recent years has worked tirelessly for the private space industry.

  I suspect there was another flavor to the Paradigm Shift ... that astronauts made it cool to be smart. They, and their short-sleeved, white-shirted, pocket-protected colleagues from engineering and mission control (who were also present at those raucous beach bashes) inspired the generation of computer geeks and nerds who currently rule the world from Seattle, San Jose, Bangalore, and Shanghai.

  And yet ... this Paradigm Shift is history. Apollo ended in 1972. As Gene Cernan jokes, with some bitterness, he thought he was the latest man on the Moon, not the last.

  Deke and Al and Gus and Gordo are gone. Bill Gates and I are ... well, we're middle-aged. And I can't claim to speak for him, but I often wonder if the vision of humanity's relentless, remorseless expansion into the Solar System ... the inevitability of white-suited figures raising a flag on the slopes of Olympus Mons, or gazing in wonder at mighty Jupiter from the icy surface of Europa ... might not be wrong.

  Was the Paradigm Shift personified by astronauts the right one?

  Or did it send us into a technological cul-de-sac?

  * * * *

  That's what I've heard over beers at beach parties at the Cape ... at the viewing stand for a launch ... at autograph shows ... at charity dinners ... at lunch in the Johnson Space Center cafeteria ... standing in the cold on a street in Moscow ... via letters, e-mails, phone calls, and plain old conversation.

  I've listened to Deke's post-mortem on NASA's first major attempt to cut a clear pathway to the world of Heinlein's Red Planet—at least nine more lunar landings, orbital workshops, a Space Shuttle, and manned Mars mission in 1986. Proposed in August 1969, the program was dead on arrival, throttled in the crib. There was no money (the Vietnam War was then at its peak expense) and, worse yet, there was no clear mission—certainly nothing as clear as Kennedy's “man on the Moon by the end of the decade.".

  Deke assigned astronauts who expected to fly Apollos 17 and 18, but had to tell them there was a good chance the missions would be canceled.

  A second attempt to chart a path to Mars and the Solar System, the Space Exploration Initiative, was floated in 1989 ... and crashed within months. There were numerous other studies on either side of that, including one headed by Tom Stafford. The results? Lots of paper, no hardware.

  Now we are almost three years into a third program, the Vision for Space Exploration, which is already being squeezed by the Cold Equations of space flight.

  The U.S. operates a Space Shuttle that is at the end of its design life, servicing an International Space Station that is, to put it charitably, under-used. Russia flies the fourth generation of its forty-year-old Soyuz—and very capably—but the vehicle is severely limited in terms of the amount of cargo it can carry.

  China has dipped its toe into the piloted space business in the last few years, using their version of Soyuz. With two fli
ghts since October 2003 and a third not scheduled until the summer of 2008, it's a worthwhile program, but hardly ramping up for an assault on the Moon or Mars.

  What is on the drawing boards? China talks of a bigger booster and a small manned orbiting station that would be the size of a single ISS module. Russia is looking for the money and will to construct Klipper, a scaled-down Shuttle.

  And the U.S. has a program apparently known as Constellation (though you'd never know it from the increasingly confused NASA websites) with a Crew Exploration Vehicle (recently named “Orion") that has been described by no less an authority than NASA Administrator Michael Griffin as “Apollo on steroids."

  Orion, will, it is hoped, allow us to duplicate the achievements of Apollo beginning in 2018, returning to the Moon for longer missions (up to a month) with larger crews (four) and more cargo.

  All you need is a big new launch vehicle—the Ares I and V—which were supposed to use a lot of Shuttle-derived technology in order to save development time and money (which is actually the same thing). Just this past week NASA announced that instead of a Shuttle main engine, the Ares would use a Russian engine called the RS-68, originally designed in the 1960s. And that Ares's shape would change, because the plant that made the original Saturn V tankage was still available. Fine; it's not Shuttle-derived, it's derived from the 1960s.

  The launcher and spacecraft are also supposed to serve as the core of future interplanetary vehicles, capable of making visits to Near Earth Objects or Mars.

  This, by the way, follows an earlier decision by NASA to scrap a liquid oxygen-methane upper stage—a key element in any interplanetary vehicle—in order to get Constellation flying sooner, which is to say, more cheaply.

  But will Orion/Ares be affordable as the aging Shuttle and unwanted ISS continue to eat up billions of tax dollars every year? It all depends on the American economy and the Federal budget. Look at the projections for Fiscal Year 2009 and get back to me.