Following Domingo

I heard a science fiction writer speak a few years ago, and someone asked him about past dreams of the future.  Sci-fi has predicted or inspired a lot of inventions and developments over the years, the man in the audience said, but what was the biggest failed prediction to come down the line?  I’m sure he was thinking about flying cars or robot butlers.  I was thinking about the hover skateboard from Back to the Future Part II.

The author didn’t even have to think about it.  Without missing a beat, he said “That there is a future for manned space travel.”

The air went out of the room as if every sci-fi geek in attendance had just been punched in the gut.  I was only there as a volunteer to help with the event, not as a fan, but even I was staggered by the writer’s flat pessimism.

After all, it’s not like spaceflight is a mere science fiction accessory, like aliens or laser guns.  It’s the foundational idea of the genera.  I can think of a handful of works by Bradbury or Asimov that stay squarely on Earth, focusing on robots or time travel.  But none that discount space travel entirely.  A sci-fi writer who doesn’t believe in space travel is like a western writer who doesn’t believe in horses, or a romance writer who doesn’t believe in heaving bosoms.  Without that, what are you even writing?

Throughout the history of science fiction, the question hasn’t been “will there be humans in spaceships,” but “what will the spaceships be like?”  Generally, they parallel some form of technology we are already familiar with.  In Star Wars, for example, most of the spaceships are like airplanes, looping and rolling in aerobatic dogfights.  Or in Star Trek, spaceships are ocean vessels, pressing forward with a large crew to explore new territory, sinking each other with torpedoes.  Or in Firefly, spaceships are stagecoaches, a way for outlaws and other desperate folk to make their way across a dangerous, wild frontier. 

We as human beings and tellers of stories are drawn to these familiar dramas set among unfamiliar stars.  We take the technologies we have, and the science we understand, and project ourselves into space, because that is the next place we are headed.  And we have been doing it since before the enlightenment.

The reason more people don’t know about The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin is beyond me.  This book, written in the 1620s, is one of the first real novels in the English language, and (I would argue) the first true work of science fiction.  It tells the story of an adventurer named Domingo Gonsales who, shipwrecked on an unexplored island, discovers a new species of bird.  It’s a sort of large goose, and Domingo finds out that it can carry unusually heavy objects.  So naturally, he decides to create a machine, tie a handful of geese to it, and leave his island in style.  Domingo flies around in his goose-drawn carriage for a while, having adventures, until (twist!) the geese decide it is time for them to fly to the moon.

The fact that some scientists once believed that birds regularly flew to the moon is the subject of a wholly different essay (in fact, here is a good one on it).  Suffice it to say, in the 17^th Century, naturalists were still trying to figure out why certain species of birds disappeared for half a year at a time.  Some suggested that birds hibernated, others that they changed shapes.  One hypothesis, new to the scientific journals around the time The Man in the Moone was written, was that some birds just fly to the moon when the weather on Earth gets too cold or they don’t have enough food.  It was a theory that was so, so very close to figuring out how migration works, but was still deeply and exceptionally wrong.

The staying power of the science behind this book, however, doesn’t really matter.  The interesting thing is this: since the very dawn of the scientific revolution, for as long as human beings have had been discovering new things about the natural world and transforming those discoveries into technology, we have dreamed of leaving this world.  Francis Godwin lived at a time when the most advanced form of transportation he could imagine was “seat pulled by animals,” but damned if he let that stop him from hitching his wagon to something that could take him to the moon.  There are other, slightly older stories of humans visiting the moon by magic, or in dreams.  But The Man in the Moone is different.  Gonsales makes a discovery (a new, stronger goose), uses that discovery to create an invention (the goose-drawn carriage), and uses that invention to make more discoveries, exploring the lunar surface and chatting it up with the native moon-men.  I find that deeply beautiful, in ways that I am not sure I can accurately describe.

And I think it’s a powerful refutation of the pessimistic sci-fi writer I heard speak.  The problems inherent in manned spaceflight are deeply complex, that’s a fact.  But for 400 years, we have been daydreaming about ways to make it possible.  Love of adventure and exploration wasn’t a passing fad – I can’t imagine a future where technology continues to progress but nobody wants to use it to visit Mars.  We have always had our eyes on the frontier.  It’s just a matter of time before we find a big enough goose to take us there.