“Do you think, Herr Professor, that there will be a need for rockets carrying a load of mail over five hundred kilometers?”
Oberth looked at me with the smile which old-fashioned pedagogues reserve for people whom they call “my dear young friend” and said after a while: “There will be need for rockets which carry a thousand pounds of dynamite.”
And this was, indeed, the killer app. Goddard’s project was not obviously military; he attracted money from various sources, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Guggenheim family. Goddard was introduced to the Guggenheims by Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and fascist sympathiser who had become fascinated by talk of a rocket that could reach the Moon.* But during the 1930s the armed forces were his biggest sponsor. At the same time, with the rise of the Nazi Party, the VfR saw many of its leading lights transfer themselves to the Wehrmacht. Rocketry, which had hardly contributed at all to the carnage of the First World War, was of such little account that the Treaty of Versailles had neglected to forbid or even mention it, meaning it was an area of weapons development where Germany was unconstrained.
The VfR’s counterpart across the North Sea, the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), founded in 1933, suffered an opposite regulatory fate: Britain’s Explosives Act of 1875 meant it could not build rockets at all. It thus found itself taking rather more of an armchair approach to the subject than the VfR or the American Rocket Society, founded as the American Interplanetary Society in 1930. The first time the BIS’s members got a true experience of what a rocket could do was when a V-2 hit near a London pub where some of them were drinking in late 1944. They raised their glasses to their comrades overseas.
One of those drinkers was a young Royal Air Force officer called Arthur C. Clarke.
IT IS COMMON NOW TO THINK THAT SCIENCE FICTION IS ABOUT the future, but this was not always the case. The 19th-century works most often discussed as science fiction—Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds”—do not take place in the future. They take place in their own presents, but with something new and unsettling added: a creature created by man, a cannon that can break the boundaries of the Earthly realm, an alien imperialism capable of doing to London what London did to others.* The disruptive novelties with which the books challenged their readers relied for their power on their eruption into the present. Verne’s only novel explicitly about the future, “Paris au XXe Siècle” (1863; “Paris in the 20th Century”) was not published in his lifetime.
As the long 19th century drew to its end, though, a new notion of the future started to come into its own. This modern future differed from the way the future had been thought about before. For one thing, there was more of it. Religion had, until fairly recently, held a firm grip on both time future and time past. Geology’s Deep Time, and Darwin’s, had loosened its backwards grip; physics was breaking its grip entirely as it opened up even greater past depths—and looked forward to a deep future, as well. Christianity had said the world would come to an end; thermodynamics promised the same thing. But the amounts of energy that had been discovered in the atomic nucleus promised relief. By 1906 Frederick Soddy was able to talk of a universe lasting effectively forever thanks to the near infinite powers of radioactivity. Whichever way science looked, the depth of field was rushing away from the present in a sort of doubled-up cosmic dolly zoom.
This expansion in time had a correlate: a shrinking of the world in space. The smallness of the Earth is a long-standing trope. People imagined the Earth as small long before “Earthrise” showed it as such—Thomas Digges, England’s first Copernican, imagined how small it might look from space even before Galileo did. But the smallness was felt ever more strongly as the century of the railway and the steamship drew to a close. America, it was claimed, had lost its frontier. There were no uncharted oceans in which to locate that archipelago of deep thought and high jinks where tales of the fantastic used to live, less and less terra incognita in continental interiors for lost worlds to be lost in. The poles themselves were about to be conquered; soon men would fly through the air in powered machines, not just balloons.
In 1969 Norman Mailer would tellingly describe the way in which landing on the Moon changed the world as feeling like a sort of geometrical inversion, a pocket being turned inside out. The same is true for time and space at the beginning of that century. Space closed down; time opened up: what could no longer be contained in the former was pocketed in the latter. In cinemas, lamps and shutters turned physical lengths of film into stories told in time. In Einstein’s physics, time and space were traded off relative to one another, with only the speed of light remaining constant. Indeed, speed was to become a frontier in itself, as the century saw record after record fall to the motor car, the aeroplane, the rocket. “Speed,” the writer Aldous Huxley would remark, “provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
The changing geometries of time and space made it almost natural that fictions or satires which until recently would have been set elsewhere were instead set elsewhen. They opened a new geography for the mind. And it was not just for fancy. As H. G. Wells put it in 1902, in a talk entitled “The Discovery of the Future”:
I believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility. I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future.
Wells intended his work, both fiction and non-fiction, to be part of that exploration. Countless imitators and followers were to claim the same mantle, and the basis on which they did so was to reshape the way the future was thought of. The future became scientific, and science fictional, in three related ways. Science was, in itself, predictive, and its remit was steadily spreading through society. Science felt increasingly tied to technology, and technology was coming to define both modernity and futurity—as manifested, for example, by that fixation on speed. And to socialists like Wells, science also shaped what the future should be, defining both the proper human relation to nature, and the proper human attitude to social control—that of the white-coated technocrat. Through such men, the scientific facts of the world would impose harmony on society.
The younger you were, the more of this thrilling future there was. Science fiction provided such readers with both thrills and, as it came into its own, reassurance. As they grew up with it, it told them that if they understood science, they could understand the often-baffling world as it would be and should be. They could look forward to societies that made sense because they had to, a world in which things had their rightful place, and the rightful place for smart people was an honoured one.
As publishing became a business of creating and maintaining identifiable genres, this future became for science fiction what the West was for the Western—a settled substrate out of which writers could carve distinctive landscapes as they played with the tropes the readers had paid for. The foremost of those tropes was the spacefaring rocket, as central to science fiction as the horse to the Western. It embodied the underlying transformation of distance into time; the worlds it visited were, by definition, the worlds of the future.
The pioneers of liquid-fuelled rockets, inspired by fictions from the 19th century, set about creating real machines in the context of this 20th-century futurity. Oberth was said to have reread “From the Earth to the Moon” so many times as a child that he knew it almost by heart. As an adult, he was delighted to act as an adviser on Fritz Lang’s “Frau im Mond” (1932; “The Woman in the Moon”), advertised as “the first utopian film based on scientific fact”. The film provided a new concern for realism to the cinema of rocketry. Lang showed that a rocket to the Moon would have to be built of several stages: only if empty fuel and oxidant tanks were discarded would the spacecraft proper be light enough to get into orbit. He also imagined a mission to the Moon which resulted in something like settlement, rather than just an adventure in which the
outcomes were either death or return, and in which the conflict that drove the plot was entirely between humans, not aliens: his Moon was uninhabited. In a lasting contribution to the drama of real spaceflight, he had a character count backwards to zero to increase the tension as the launch approached, a custom which the German rocketeers adopted from then on.* Most important of all was the innovation right there in the title: his travellers included a woman.
Goddard, for his part, was first seized by the possibility of spaceflight shortly after he read H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” (1898) and Garrett P. Serviss’s unauthorised sequel, “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” (1898), in which the great American inventor and his comrades create a vast, very expensive fleet of spacecraft with which to take the fight back to the Martians. Goddard was, he would later tell people, pruning a cherry tree when a reverie came over him; he imagined a rocket ship ready for Mars on the meadow beyond the garden.† The people who followed in the slipstream of Oberth and Goddard—members of the VfR, the BIS and the American Rocket Society—were science fictioneers all but to the man. Robert Heinlein joined the American Rocket Society in 1932.
The Second World War was crucial to the development of both liquid-fuelled rockets and science fiction. At the V-2 development site in Peenemünde, on Germany’s Baltic coast, Wernher von Braun and his colleagues achieved advances in the state of their art similar in magnitude to those made at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was created, and the MIT Rad Lab, where radar technology was developed. The peroxide-powered turbopumps and temperature-resistant combustion chambers of the V-2 allowed its engine, only 1.5m long, to produce more power than a battleship. The rockets could achieve altitudes of 100km or more.
At war’s end, America, Britain and the Soviet Union all rushed to get their hands on the hardware and the people who had designed it. Hence, three years later, the experiments at White Sands of which Shoemaker read at his campsite in the pines.
Rocketry was only one of the mainstays of the science-fictional future. Superweapons were another. Devices capable of projecting genocidal slaughter had been part of the futures imagined in pulp magazines and elsewhere since “The War of the Worlds”; how else would a fictionalized Thomas Edison have conquered Mars? Such weapons were not only, nor even mostly, used on aliens; they were frequently and uncritically unleashed on other humans, normally of races other than white. John W. Campbell junior, who ran the world’s leading science fiction magazine, Astounding, was sure that the war would see such superweapons realised through the use of atomic power. In 1943 he fed one of his authors the technical know-how with which to write a story about atomic weapons accurate enough to earn the magazine a visit from the FBI, which had been tipped off by Astounding readers who were working on atomic weapons for real in Los Alamos. After Hiroshima, that FBI visit became a much-touted badge of validity for science fiction’s prophetic pretensions.
The potential for combining the power of the rocket and the power of the atom was obvious, and unnerving, to Campbell and the writers in his circle not least because, though America had the lead in nuclear weapons, Germany had demonstrated that other countries could have the lead in rocketry. In the months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Heinlein frantically tried to alert former comrades in the Navy to the risks; in May 1947 he put the idea into print in “Rocket Ship Galileo”. The book’s teenage heroes find Nazis who have taken refuge on the Moon planning to nuke America.
The same month’s issue of Air Trails and Science Frontiers, a non-fiction magazine Campbell was also editing, published “Fortress in the Sky”, an account of the idea on a missile base on the Moon by another of Campbell’s Astounding writers, L. Ron Hubbard. In 1948 Colliers published the altogether more disturbing “Rocket Blitz from the Moon” by Robert Richardson, an astronomer who also wrote fiction for Campbell. It was chillingly illustrated with pictures of sleek missiles launching from craters on the Moon and of Queens and Manhattan under multiple mushroom clouds, all from the brush of Chesley Bonestell, a friend and collaborator of Richardson. The destruction wrought on the five boroughs deserved an artist used to the planetary scale; indeed, the pictures serve as companion pieces to one that Bonestell had painted the year before showing the aftermath of a meteor strike on New York.
As the Moonpeople’s self-destruction through nuclear war in “Rocket Ship Galileo” made clear, the idea of the Moon as a source of mass destruction resonated with its long-standing fictional deployment as a landscape of deathliness, a place of extinction sometimes dotted with ruins. In “Around the Moon” Michel Arden imagines the desolate plain beneath him as a giant ossuary. At the climax of C. L. Moore’s peculiar and powerful planetary romance “Lost Paradise” (1930), her hero, transported in time, sees the gods of the Moon kill their world by tearing off its atmosphere. The lunar landscape became a foreshadowing of what the Earth would look life if nuclear weapons were used again, whether those weapons came from the Moon or not. In an intriguing and disturbing reversal of this idea, in the 1950s the US Air Force studied the possibility of launching a nuclear weapon to the Moon in order to see what sort of crater it made—and to make clear to everyone else that the power to reach beyond the world and to end it were in the same hands. Wiser heads prevailed.
The possibility of moonbases as launch sites was not confined to science fiction. Aerospace companies approached by the US Air Force to design such a base in the 1950s included missile silos in their plans even though they were not explicitly asked to—it just seemed like the thing to do. But Earth-based nuclear weapons which popped up into space only long enough to fall back down half a world away were the more practical way to go.
The new emphasis science fiction put on the Moon was not limited to matters military: indeed, “Destination Moon” (1950), a film based to some extent on “Rocket Ship Galileo”, had the Nazi base removed. Heinlein wanted to make a Moon film that was more realistic, less “Buck Rogers”—part of his plan to make Americans believe in spaceflight. Writing the screenplay brought Heinlein joy—he got to work with Chesley Bonestell, who painted the background mattes for the film—and worry—the eventual producer, George Pal, apparently toyed with turning at least some of the piece into a musical. He brought on James O’Hanlon, who would go on to write “Calamity Jane” (1953), to punch up the script.*
No music or dance made it into the final cut. I rather miss them; the low gravity of the Moon might lend itself to dancing, and the rather tedious “Destination Moon” that was finally made could do with a lift, in every sense. But Heinlein wanted both his career and the prospect of near-term missions to the Moon to be taken more seriously. He was selling Moonstuff to as wide a range of markets as he could: “Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon” went to Boy’s Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America; “The Long Watch” went to American Legion magazine; “Space Jockey” went to the Saturday Evening Post, America’s biggest circulation “slick” magazine (as opposed to “pulps” like Astounding); “The Man Who Sold the Moon” was to be the never-before-published title story in a new hardback collection of his work. Learning that girls as well as boys were reading his stories, he wrote a particularly nice one just for them, “The Menace from Earth”. His aim was to write science fiction that would appeal beyond the narrow boundaries of the genre—which meant everyday stories of scouting, career choices and dating that happened to happen on the Moon.
Clarke, the other science fiction writer most interested in working to make spaceflight real, was doing something similar with stories that were intriguing and technically adroit but studiedly unmelodramatic. He was also writing successful non-fiction works such as “The Exploration of Space” (1959). Admittedly, his novel “Earthlight” (1955) does have a spectacular set-piece battle, but it is seen from the point of view of an astronomer and accountant who happen to be nearby, not from that of the belligerents.* Most of the book is about observatory life, which apart from taking place on the Moon a couple of centuries hence is much the same
as it would have been on Earth in the 1950s—complete with photographic plates used to record images and “computers” being young women with calculating machines.
Clarke’s “A Fall of Moondust” (1961) is the cleverly crafted story of a lunar “shipwreck”. It drew on the idea put forth by Thomas Gold, a brilliant and iconoclastic physicist, that some, at least, of the Moon’s dust might be so fine as to be effectively liquid. This turned out not to be true, and Gold’s insistence that it might be made him something of a bête noire for the astrogeologists, but it made for a good story. Clarke marries his expertise in lunar science and his grasp of space engineering to a puzzle plot in which the crew of the ship that has sunk in the dust and their would-be rescuers have to come up with solutions to an endlessly escalating string of problems. The combination of a tightly paced plot, well-handled pedagogy, an exotic frontier setting—the comparison to stories of the American West is archly explicit—and relatable characters—the ship is a tourist vessel, full of passengers to whom the Moon is almost as strange as it is to the reader—may have been what made it, in the winter of 1961, the first piece of science fiction ever to be run as one of the “condensed novels” in Reader’s Digest, something which garnered it a far greater readership than a science fiction novel could normally expect.
The Moon Page 10