Bummed about Space

Ever since the end of the Space Shuttle program last July, I've been feeling glum about America's space future. Right then, I was so bummed out that I couldn't even imagine a future for American space flight, to the point that I was imagining a scenario in which aliens arrived and told us that our status in their polity would depend on our ability to travel to another world. We point at the Apollo moon landings and are told no, they don't count, because we no longer have the capacity to do it.

Although my initial idea was unpublishable (other than as Real Person Fanfic), I realized it could be done as steampunk. So I jotted down some ideas for a Gilded Age version of Apollo, with the UK as our adversary in an alternate Space Race, and some decades later the elderly moonwalker is visiting the Smithsonian before testifying to Congress, only to have the aliens arrive and announce that no, that decades old landing doesn't count unless they can replicate it Now. So our aging moonwalker, after his initial outrage, buckles down to lead the new effort to get back to the moon -- but where does the story go and how? Is it a short story, or a novel, or a whole series?

But even as the effort peters out, I begin to see the possibilities of the Lanakhidzist timeline. I'd made some cursory mentions of there being US and Soviet space stations and a moonbase at the time of the Lanakhidzist Revolution, but had never really developed it, because my interest was on terrestrial events. However, even in my earliest versions of the Lanakhidzist universe, I knew that America's slip-slide into dictatorship was ended with a confrontation between the Administration and America's permanent space settlements.

So since then I've been working on the rocketpunk side of the Lanakhidzist universe, how the moonbase grew into a full-fledged lunar settlement, and how others developed, how the first expeditions to Mars led to a personal base, etc. It's interesting to see a completely different side of that world -- although frustrating that most of these stories are bouncing around from one market to another, and the one that has been published is the one that has no obvious alternate-historical content, and is recognizable as part of the Lanakhidzist universe only if you read other stories in which those characters show up, and in which clearly Lanakhidzist elements like human cloning as a Cold War secret project are mentioned.

And now I get the news that Neil Armstrong has passed away, and I'm even more bummed about the future of space exploration here in the Primary World. And worse, I feel weird about writing Lanakhidzist space stuff, because in that world Gemini VIII went very differently, and as a result Neil Armstrong isn't the icon he is in this timeline.

Being a Perfect Stranger

A while ago a book was published entitled How to Be a
Perfect Stranger. It's aimed at people who need to
attend a religious service in a faith community with
which they are not personally familiar, and provides
information on what to expect and how to behave during
the service.

Thinking of it got me to thinking about how we as
authors handle faith in our fiction, and particularly
when we move outside the faith community to which we
belong or at least were raised in. Obviously we don't
want to misrepresent other people's religions, whether
in blatant ways like repeating vicious slanders
against a religion or mocking it with caricatured
images, or in subtle ways like perpetuating
misapprehensions about the faith's doctrine.

But are there other things we should take into
consideration when we as outsiders write fiction that
involves a faith to which we do not belong, no matter
how thoroughally and carefully we research the facts
of that religion? Do we have a special responsibility
to justify our fictional use of a religious tradition
not our own, above and beyond the sense in which every
element in a work of fiction needs to be justified?

For example, in my current short-story project, I'm
seriously looking at the possibility of a Catholic
priest providing some important moral guidance near
the climax of the story, which helps lead my
protagonist to the resolution of the storyline. I feel
confident that I have done enough research to portray
this character accurately as well as sympathetically,
and have several friends who are Catholic and who
would be willing to read the story with an eye to the
accuracy of my portrayal of the padre and any Catholic
dotrine he brings up. But the question comes back --
why a Catholic priest? Why not a minister in the
Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, the tradition in
which I was raised?

Beyond the issues of name recognition (Protestant
denominations are so varied that only the largest and
most prominent are familiar to the average reader),
there is also the advantage of perspective. Namely,
when you look at something from a different or
unfamiliar angle, sometimes you can see elements of it
you'd never noticed it before. Simply because the
padre isn't giving her the same old song and dance,
Vicky will have to listen closely to what he's saying
in a way she wouldn't if it were the minister of
whatever Protestant denomination her family belongs to
-- and thus can obtain insights about the moral
aspects of her situation that might completely pass
her by if she's only politely nodding along to a
message she's heard a dozen times before.