Whither Hope?
In the spring of 2019, I started writing a science fiction novel. I’ve spent most of my life steeped in fantasy, only dabbling in sci-fi. I certainly hadn’t studied many of the genre’s classics outside of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. But as any author knows, before you write well, you must read broadly.
To resolve my knowledge gap, I created a reading list that edged around the topics I planned to explore in my own work. My mother, grandmother, and I scoured used book stores for yellowed, dogeared copies of 20th century classics. Here’s an abridged list:
Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (1955)
Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956)
Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and Starship Troopers (1959)
Samuel Delaney’s Nova (1968)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974)
Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970)
William GIbson’s Neuromancer (1984)
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)
As I write this, tens of thousands of words into my novel, I still have a stack of books on my nightstand including titles by Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, C.J. Cherryh, among others. But curiously, one piece that I found exceedingly important came not from my perusing anthologies and best-of lists. Instead, it sprung from the chatter around a bit of exciting astronomical news named ‘Oumuamua.
‘Oumuamua is an interstellar asteroid first spotted in October of 2017 by Robert Wyrek, working at the Haleakala Observatory on Maui. I’ll say it again: interstellar. It came from outside of our solar system. An alien asteroid!
Its name is derived from the Hawaiian word for “scout.” By the time Wyrek discovered it, our rocky visitor had already furtively slipped into the solar system, circled around the sun, and sped past Earth on its way back out. Interstellar objects are fascinating on their own terms, but ‘Oumuamua possessed unique properties.
Like other asteroids, ‘Oumuamua is dark and speedy and hard to track, but current estimates suggest it might be up to 1000m long and 167m wide (though low-end estimates place it closer to 100m x 35m). To put that into perspective, regardless of size, it’s shaped rather like the long-handled Maglite flashlight I have close to my desk; ‘Oumuamua is a flying baguette.
Its unusual shape, so unlike the average lumpy snowball asteroids, created a stir in the popular press. Almost immediately, people speculated that it was an alien spaceship. With that unusual shape, it just had to be. This theory received an unusual boost when ‘Oumuamua’s already significant speed accelerated in the summer of 2018. Though a number of scientific theories offered explanations for the sudden burst of speed, I’m sure there are many that will cling to the belief that ‘Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft, cutting through our backyard for a little gravity assist, as it continues its trek through the galaxy. And this theory persists, I suspect, because that’s the exact plot of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973). Summary time. Limited spoilers.
Rama opens in the year 2077. An asteroid explodes over Northern Italy, destroying Venice, Padua, Verona, and devastating the region. More than 600,000 people die and damages soar into the trillions of dollars. To prevent similar disasters, the world’s governments establish Project SPACEGUARD, tasked with identifying and neutralizing world-ending asteroids. And about fifty years after that, SPACEGUARD detects something that doesn’t quite end the world, but certainly changes it forever.
In 2130, an unusual object entered the solar system. It’s given a boring name of numbers and digits until eventually dubbed Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu from Hinduism. Having exhausted all the Greek/Roman gods on other space objects, astronomers in Clarke’s vision of the future moved onto other fertile pantheons.
Rama’s cylindrical body stretches about 50km long and 20km across; it’s rather like a skinny soda can. Aside from the discrepancy in volume, the comparison to ‘Oumuamua is hard to avoid. Even their speeds are comparable. Rama is said to enter the solar system traveling around 100,000 km/h. Current estimates mark ‘Oumuamua’s speed at about 104,000 km/h, though it was traveling more than double that closer to its perihelion around the sun.
As Rama nears Earth, it becomes clear that it is alien in design. Its body is a perfectly smooth cylinder with a controlled rotation, unmistakably designed to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. As a final point of comparison, ‘Oumuamua is rotating wildly across all three axes judging by dips in its albedo. It’d be a wild ride inside our real world alien asteroid.
The United Planets and the ad hoc Rama Committee task the spaceship Endeavour to intercept the alien spacecraft, board Rama, and, if possible, make first contact with the crew. Rendezvous with Rama is a worthwhile read so I won’t divulge anymore of the plot. The Endeavour’s crew are hard nosed, by-the-book astronauts that approach (almost) every situation with a scientist's precision and care. The conversations held by the federation of United Planets provide a glimpse into solar system politics, while the Rama Committee explores some of the ethical implications of humanity’s first contact with an alien species. Again, not wanting to spoil anything, Rendezvous with Rama has three sequels where the reader learns how humanity’s relationship with the Ramans play out decades after the events of the first book.
Before getting into why this book was important to my work, I’d like to praise one particular aspect of Clarke’s writing in Rama. Aliens, to me, are difficult to develop. So often, the aliens find an Earthly corollary. There are “buggers” in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, “pseudo-arachnids” in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and dog-like “tines” in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep to note a few examples. This gives the reader a handhold for the anatomy and, by extension, the psychology of the alien species. This useful and, at times, completely necessary shorthand aids both the writer and reader as they explore the universe within the novel.
This is not what happens in Rama. The aliens, their technology, and their interstellar craft are largely inscrutable to the human crew that crawls about the starship like ants trying to comprehend a flashlight. In my mind, Clarke uses a technique not unlike Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing. We see only the superficial features of their alien culture, the tip of the iceberg, and the astronauts (and the reader) are forced into making leaps of logic to guess at an extraterrestrial purpose. That scientifically-grounded guesswork is one of the reasons why the story is so enjoyable. I suspect Clarke spent a long time developing his ideas about the aliens, their anatomy and society, and left most of that in his notes and presented only what his plucky crew of space scientists accidentally bumped into. It was marvelously done.
But again, I started my sci-fi lit review to help me with my book which has very little to do with aliens and quite a bit to do with the future of humanity. If I stumbled across Rendezvous with Rama while building my reading list, I almost certainly ignored it because of the plot synopsis. But when ‘Oumuamua hit the news, many of the stories and subsequent comments mentioned Clarke’s work. Those moments when science collides with science fiction are always fascinating and that made Rama a necessary addition.
What I found was definitely not a story about buggy aliens and the square jawed Indiana Jones astronauts exploring trap-filled ruins of an alien spaceship. Instead, Rama is fundamentally a story about the future of humanity, and a hopeful one at that.
Here, in 2020, I feel like so much science fiction, or fiction involving the future, is bleak. It’s dystopian, apocalyptic. And there’s a lot to be worried about: the resurgence of fascism, the changing nature of technology (e.g Orwellian surveillance and the abuse of big data), the impending climate crisis and how perilously few governments seem interested in tackling it, a pandemic. I think there’s a lot in the world to be pessimistic about, and our contemporary stories reflect that. Everything is dark, gritty, and tomorrow is always worse than yesterday. The environment collapses, robots kill everyone, and viruses eat our brains until we’re zombies. Even in some of the optimistic futures where humanity isn’t directly threatened, corporations and capitalism have devoured the human spirit like in Blade Runner or Ready Player One. A sense of human dignity may win out on an individual level, but there’s little that shakes the pillars of corrupt, inequitable social systems destroying the environment one brutalist apartment block at a time.
But running through Rendezvous with Rama is a refreshing thread of optimism that perhaps Clarke and others truly possessed, written as it was so soon after the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was not alive to witness this monumental feat, but I imagine there was hope, a direction, a light guiding (some of) us into a brighter future. It’s a light that we’ve perhaps lost since the Challenger disaster or the shuttering of NASA’s shuttle program as the space race is taken up by private corporations for a profit or as a billionaire’s expensive hobby.
In Rama, humanity colonized the rocky bodies and perfected intra-solar space travel. They established planetary parliaments and, despite explosive in-fighting, came together as a cohesive species to greet humanity’s first visitors.
I don’t necessarily harbor any of the hopes that we as a people are going to be able to colonize the solar system on Clarke’s time frame, though we are ahead in some aspects. We do have the Space Mission Planning Advisor Group (SMPAG) that monitors our orbital neighborhood for threats and will spearhead any asteroid deflection missions. We have NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs and the European Space Agencies CLOMON, both also designed to watch the skies for world-ending hazards. They even hold yearly conferences where they work through possible scenarios to save the planet from an Armageddon-type asteroid impact. So, we’re sixty years ahead of Project SPACEGUARD.
But we’re so far behind in every other aspect of space flight, or even our approach to space travel. One billionaire says we’re going to Mars. NASA and the Chinese space agency are in a race to build a permanent base on the moon. Here, I see the influence of capitalism, an arms race in disguise, not the purportedly pure desire to boldly go. I certainly would not trust our world leaders with rocket technology as described in Clarke’s book written almost fifty years ago. The most realistic, and ultimately optimistic, vision of first contact I can imagine is probably Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, and that still devolves into a contest of competing nations, a war barely avoided by the intervention of a few individuals willing to take leaps of faith. Society’s future appears to be slums, pollution, resource wars, where survival on a burnt out cinder is the prize for victory.
But what I find in Clarke’s work is a core of hope that I think is worth emulating in the present, even if it’s idealistic to the point of naiveté. We have a lot of phrases: si vis pacem, para bellum; prepare for the worst and hope for the best, and the like. I want my fiction to be more hopeful than that, more than just preparing for the worst case scenarios. I want to imagine a future that has hope coded into its DNA. Because if a sci-fi writer can’t (or won’t) use their imagination to offer a vision of a brighter future, who will?
