A Product of Its Time

There are times when I look at an older story realize just how much that story is a product of the time in which it was written. Sometimes I'm going through my files, find a story that I never finished, and when I pull it out and try to bring it to completion, I find I just can't get back into the mindset that produced it. Or if I do, it goes in a completely different direction from where I was originally planning. But there are also the times when I decide to reprint a story that originally was published in an anthology, and I realize just how much it reflects the time when I wrote it. That was the case with Bringing Home Major Tom. I originally wrote it not long after the end of the Space Shuttle program, when SpaceX was still very much a bit player in the private space launch scene. It felt very much like we as a nation were turning our backs on space, and it was reflected very strongly in the beginning:

Evening cast long shadows across the old Starlite Motel. In the distance a stereo pounded out Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)." Dang it, but I haven't heard that song in years. Stacey squinted, blurring away the decades of neglect, the plywood covering the windows and half the doors. It might be harder to imagine away the chainlink fence around the building, or the stink rising from the scummy puddles in the bottom of the cracked swimming pool, but she could enjoy the soaring pillars like airplane tailfins, the streamlined bands of the roofline which once would've been lit with neon to match the sign in front. Googie, they called that style of architecture, the relics of a time when people still believed in a wide-open future full of rockets to the Moon and Mars, of cities in orbit and ordinary families raising their children as space-dwellers. Stacey's gaze went to the slender crescent Moon hanging just over the tops of the long-dead trees around the perimeter of the pool deck. Nowadays those dreams of rockets were just as dead. Sometimes she found it hard to remember how her child self had dreamed of going to the Moon, back when the end of Apollo still seemed a temporary hiatus, not an abandonment.

It's an opening full of longing for yesterday's future, of regret at opportunities foreclosed by the choices of others. There's a lot of similarity between it and Mirrored Lives, which was written about the same time. It also colored the Chaffee Artilect stories, with its future in which the ISS was deorbited before Toni was born and she discovered the history of human spaceflight by accident, when she was bored and hunting around the attic of her grandfather's house for something to do while on vacation at his ranch north of Phoenix.