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January 2004
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Aside: A Note About Content. (2022) A few of the editorial comments by JTC during the early 2000s were political in nature. Those represent purely my own opinions stated at the time, and may not have agreed with the opinions of my esteemed team members. Explanation follows. Click for more INFO.
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As 2004 Dawns On Us...
Notices Books
Received
Publisher's
Note: The personal views of the publisher, expressed here, do not
necessarily mirror those of other contributors to this magazine. This is strictly
my personal rant.
The Pearl
Harbor Syndrome (continued), or: The Space Race is back, and this time it's
racial! As I predicted in this column for over a year, the U.S. administration
will soon react to Chinese, Indian, and other space programs with a new
initiative to return to the Moon. The White House has been leaking warm-up
rumors about a new space initiative for weeks now, and can anyone help but
wonder if it's not a lame and opportunistic response to the recent orbiting
by China of their first taikonaut? More importantly by far, is it real or
is it hemorrhex?
Don't get
me wrong (one has to quickly offer this disclaimer for fear of being accused
of a lack of patriotism) I am proud of U.S. accomplishments on so many fronts
over so many years, not just being the first people to put a man on the
Moon. One has to however take all this with a strong dose of reality. I
call it the Pearl Harbor Syndrome, whereby we only react to outside stimuli
(Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, 9/11) and then react by crushing the other guy—so
why can't we ever just take the initiative? We only reacted in 1958, putting
Vanguard I up, a few months after the Soviets sent up Sputnik. Until then,
you could pick up a typical U.S. almanac or similar gazette and find nothing
but ridicule about a proposed space effort from the unimaginative and austere
haters of imagination, the gray men in their flannel suits, who populated
American culture with their draconian vision, or lack of vision. I probably
only remember all that because as a young kid, afire with the imagination
and vision of SF, I was amazed at the culture of disparagement. I saw that
the editor of every SF anthology, from Damon Knight to August Derleth to
Judith Merrill to anyone you can think of, had to start their book with
an apologia of some sort, praying that one day imaginative literature would
be acceptable to the general public in this ultra-conservative society.
After I stopped being amazed by that, I became amazed that intelligent people
would allow dumb people to dominate the discussion that way. Then I was
no longer amazed, because I realized it was a numbers game, and the dodos
had more votes in putting neo-Confederates in office. What we have today
is nothing more than Jefferson Davis's revenge on the Union, and God help
us all—it's like saying that maybe the Japanese and Germans did win
World War II after all. Even today, the imaginatively challenged speak disparagingly
of "sigh-fie" as in The Sci-Fi Channel (okay, okay, they have some great
old movies and they show Twilight Zone re-runs, so I'm not bitching too
much).
President
Kennedy reacted to the Soviet space triumphs of the late 1950s/early 60s,
including the Soviet launch of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) and
the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova) in the early 1960s, by promising
to put Americans on the Moon. Not American women, mind you, although a set
of women astronauts were being trained along with the early Mercury 7 men,
but the female program had to be kept secret and was shitcanned because
of the reactionary politicians who were more interested in spending our
hard-earned tax dollars on worthless pork barrel re-election slush fund
projects. Such worthwhile projects include roads to nowhere, bridges over
nothing; e.g., unwanted Navy ships in Lott's Pascagoula while real military
folks were in harm's way without the proper gear the admirals requested;
same with Air Force, while Lockheed had to relocate its HQ to Gingrich's
district in Georgia and get tons of unwanted C-130s while the real planes
the generals wanted were falling apart in the sky; price tag, $1 billion
a year and $360 million a year, respectively; anything to buy votes. Then
again, what can we expect from these super-patriots who never served in
the military, which is okay until they open their hypocritical little mouths
and, like that mean little twit Tom Delay, denounce a much decorated Vietnam
paratroop combat veteran like Wesley Clerk as unpatriotic and a "puffed
up Napoleon;" or that Fox fascist talking head Anus Cauterizer who was fired
from network TV (a real network, not the Fox tabloid cesspool where she
now plies her poisons) because she told the head of the Veteran Admin, a
man who lost two legs, one arm, and one eye in Vietnam, that we lost the
war in Vietnam because of scum like him?). That's how the budget process
works, amid such a debate in our nation's capital, folks. And you want to
keep voting for these biblical exemplars of honesty and saintliness who
have seized power in this Tush Limbo Generation? Yes, in the final analysis,
it won't kill us to spend that five billion a year on NASA, and I don't
mean the part that's wasted on pork barrel projects by politicians who privately
laugh and think space is a waste of time.
For the past
20 years, admittedly we've been able to get miracles in unmanned projects
(Hubble, COBE, Galileo, etc.) but we've basically been stuck in pork barrel
mode with the International Space Station that has been sucking up NASA's
relatively tiny budget. Luckily, we've managed to come a long way forward
despite it all. Who knows? Maybe one day we'll have an openly gay astronaut
or even an atheist--the ultimate insult in a conservative culture. Once
the Soviets lost the Moon race, there was little reason to continue the
U.S. effort.
So now people
of color are launching their early tubs into orbit, and who knows what they'll
do next? No way the U.S. can allow a bunch of Third World noodle-twirlers
to give us a black eye! So, as I have predicted, the king of deficits and
delusions in Washington is about to announce some sort of a vote-getting
boondoggle that won't fly. It won't fly because there won't be any money.
It won't fly because his ultra-rightwing constituence don't allow it, since
they avowedly don't trust reason or science, which their faith-based culture
has sought to destroy at every turn (the endless skipping record and one-note
samba of the Scopes Trial, replayed at every snake oil stand and every cross
burning in the land). It won't fly because Bush I promised a similar initiative
that was cynically doomed to failure before the words left his mouth ("the
vision thing"). I am no longer amazed by these things. I am still amazed
that so many people are still fooled by all this.
In the end,
nobody cares why the Europeans required years to begin exploiting Columbus's
discovery of the New World. Certainly the Vikings didn't do a lasting good
job of exploiting Vinland, though they tried to settle Greenland and lasted
a few hundred years until the Little Ice Age froze them out. No such problem
in Nueva Hispania once the Conquistadores discovered gold. No such problem
once it became a cultural space race between the Catholic colossus of Ibera
vs. the Protestant upstart of Britannia—the futurians of another time,
whose descendants are today's Backwardians still fighting to replace science
education in our schools with 7,000 year old Babylonian creation myths.
Avanti!
Spumoni! Pasta e' faggioli! Excelsior! Turdi! And that's how human nature
works. Somehow the pieces all fit together, and humanity lurches forward.
It maybe be backward, sideways, or down the hill, but we're all going someplace.
Curious George is about to announce it. One hopes that the man with the
yellow hat (Cheney) will agree and let him. What a pale imitation of the
Kennedy speeches it will be! How forgettable and cynical and motivated by
petty short-term interests from a guy who, with all his wealth, never had
the intellectual curiosity to make a single trip to Europe to see the splendors
of the past, to inform a valid vision of the future. But who really remembers
the names of the courtiers who fought in smoky backrooms over the budget
of Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain in 1492? All history cares about is that
Columbus did return to the New World eventually. He was followed by armadas
of explorers both good and evil. In the same manner, humans will return
to the Moon and venture into Space. I know, because I have a dream. The
dream was put in my head by genuine dreamers like the Futurians of the 1930s.
We sigh-fie fans owe those early SF authors our lifelong gratitude for the
wonders we saw in our childhoods. Those wonders keep us dreaming today.
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Notices
Editor's
Note: We welcome books and announcements. Please give us at last 3 months
lead time so we can present your announcement in a timely fashion. We take
no responsibility for the content, format, contributors' editorial opinions,
or other characteristics of this information which we publish in community
interest.
Comic-Con
International: It's called WonderCon 2004 and will be held July 22-25,
2004 in San Diego, California. Read the full scoop at http://www.comic-con.org.
We'll be covering this story for the next six months, so stay tuned.
Clarion
West: June/July 2004. Pat Murphy, Larissa Lai, Geoff Ryman, John Kessel,
James Patrick Kelley, Kelly Link, and Charles de Lint will instruct at the
2004 session in Seattle, WA. Contact Nisi Shawl, nisis@aol.com or (206)
720-1008 or http://www.sff.net/clarionwest/ for info.
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Books Received
Received:
Nebula Express Science fiction novel by Terry Sunbord, author of
Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. (April 2004, Clocktower Books). You
are part of a work crew on a deepspace cargo liner headed for Triton, largest
moon of Neptune, in the near future. As your work day begins, you and your
seven team members of WorkPod01 leave your comfortable crew quarters for
a long shift of repairs on some impact damage from a drifting space object.
Each of the team members is a highly paid, dedicated, and mature man or
woman with strong family ties on Earth. You treasure your photos, your memories,
your daily video conferences with the spouse and kids back in San Diego
or New York or Shanghai, whatever your city of origin. As you step out into
a shattered hulk in the middle of deepspace, populated by sinister mudmen
and dominated by a staff of mummified officers overlooking the Eagle Nebula
far from where you're supposed to be, it soon dawns on you that something
is out of whack. An increasing number of things appear wrong, and you are
soon on the run for your life—such as it is. You must stay one step
ahead of a sinister conspiracy and keep yourself and the love of your life,
a tango-dancing and tragic beauty from old Buenos Aires, out of the mudmen's
deadly yellowish fangs amid the somber, lantern-dark, water-dripping wreckage
of the giant ship Nebula Express. Terry Sunbord's new novel is a totally
original and gripping new work that will remind some readers of such classics
as Alien and Dark City. Look for Nebula Express soon
from Clocktower
Books and Fictionwise.com.
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