Gregory Benford - Essays and Short Stories Part 2

Amazon.com:In what way?

Benford:Well, Iam from Alabama. My father was a career military officer in j.a.pan, and that was where I stumbled upon science fiction, the standard estranged literature. I lived on the outpost of the American empire, in j.a.pan and then in Germany, and that was a shaping experience. I went to the University of Oklahoma, not to an Ivy League school. I had to change my accent when I entered the academic world.

I chose a black woman as the lead character because I wanted to do something different. Alicia can be irritating, she can be a bit odd, and she's allowed to, because she's a black woman. She's figured that out, and she uses it, which isn't good for her character. She is not a swell person, as you probably noticed. She says acerbic things, and she doesn't get along with people. But creative scientists are not like bank clerks. Society hardly gives them any lat.i.tude. Artists are expected to be strange, but scientists are expected to be like ordinary office workers--and they aren't.

Amazon.com:I loved the way you satirized that in the anecdote about the scientist who wanted to get married so he wouldn't have to have a social life. That rang very true.

Benford:Yes, and I even dropped in that old joke about the scientist who impulsively goes home with a gorgeous woman he meets in a bookstore, and then when he explains to his angry wife where he's been the last few hours, she says, "You're lying! You were in the lab!" I love writing about the social quirks of scientists. It's a mirror of the cultural problem. Scientists don't know how to speak to the public.

The posthumous annunciation ofFeynman is all about that. He was a charismatic figure--the best public speaker I ever saw, better than any politician--and now that he's dead, all his books are back in print.

We're looking for that kind of identifiable scientific figure, because the guy in the lab is not making it in the popular culture. And we have lost all our advocates. Carl is dead. Isaac is dead. Who have we got?

Amazon.com:No more PR people.

Benford:We desperately need someone.

Amazon.com:It's interesting thatCosm has been picked up by Book-of-the-Month Club, which indicates that they see it as something that breaks out of genre.

Benford:I think so. Or perhaps that they've finally gotten rid of their reflex reaction to science fiction.

Amazon.com:It's a book that works on a lot of literary levels. There's the scientific suspense: what is this object, what is it going to do next? Then there's the commentary on the whole academic and political circus that surrounds it. And finally, there's a very convincing, non-cloying romance between two scientists whose work is everything to them.

Benford:Thank you. I worked a long time to try to write ashort book with all of those things in it.

There's a transaction between the guy and the gal and there's some physics and there's some plot advancement, all of it in one scene. It's not like most conventional literary novels, where one scene only does one job.Cold Mountain is a very well written book but it's mostly a sentence level book. Great paintings are not made up of beautiful brush strokes, but of aesthetic concepts. Brush strokes are necessary but not sufficient. That's true in novels, too.

Amazon.com:Do you ever imagine yourself turning to mainstream fiction?

Benford:My territory is the scientific subculture, and it's unexplored. Why should I try to do a novel of suburban romance, which everyone is doing, when I can write about a subculture that is more important to society? I think I'll stick to what I know. The conventional literary world has never understood the strength of the American genres. This is the culture that produced Broadway musicals, the hardboiled detective novel, ragtime, jazz, rock and roll, modern science fiction, modern fantasy, romance novels.

That's what we are good at. The literary world thinks that isn't important, but history will not echo that judgment. The literary world doesn't understand American cultural vitality--it keeps producing these nostalgic novels about Americans. That's a deep problem in the literary world; it's the reason that the literary novel has itself become a genre. It has its own cover designs and marketing strategies, its own clearly defined audience--it's a genre, folks!

Amazon.com:What are you working on now?

Benford:I've finished my next book,Deep Time , which is nonfiction. After that I have a novel--the working t.i.tle isUltimata . It's a bit hard to explain, but it's about a black hole in our solar system. It's set in the near present. I've got a lot of work done on it, but I still have to figure out the characters. Although I never figure them out completely until I actually write them.

Amazon.com:Would you call it a companion toCosm , the wayCosm is toTimescape ?

Benford:That's right. It's another scientific suspense novel. This time I try to explicate the astronomical community, which I've worked in. They're ripe for interpretation because they're so different. The most actively creative parts of their lives are spent on mountaintops at night. The contrast between the human scale and scientific scale is at its most extreme in astronomy. Even now a mission to the outer solar system takes one entire scientific career. To formulate an idea, get it funded, build the s.p.a.cecraft, launch it, get it there, get the results, and get it back is a career. We have reached the actual limit of the involvement of a single person. So the astronomical scale has a profound unspoken impact on astronomers.

Amazon.com:Do your colleagues look forward to appearing in your novels?

Benford:(laughs) I don't think so, but the reaction toCosm has been positive by the people who are portrayed in it; there must be a dozen real people in there under their own names.Faulkner said that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of grandmothers-- in other words, art is more important than people's likes and dislikes. Of course, that's a cla.s.sic example of artistic arrogance.

Amazon.com:How do you organize your mental energies between science, writing, and personal life?

Benford:I stay home and write on weekends. During the evenings I do the thinking, note-taking, things like that.

Amazon.com:You don't usually do book tours--is that because you've got a day job, so to speak?

Benford:Well, yes, but I've just never cared much about them. This one is different, more organized. If you go on National Public Radio's book review show, you have to go to Madison, Wisconsin. And that's effective. I hadn't really realized that until this trip. Tours used to be just a bunch of book signings, which are nice enough, but you just meet people you've already sold the book to. Other than getting your book onOprah! how do you reach a larger audience? Publishers really don't know. Well, now the smart bunnies try to get on Amazon.com.

Amazon.com:There's always Hollywood.

Benford:I've done a bunch of pitches in Hollywood in the last couple of weeks. I've met several directors who thoughtCosm was a movie plot. I never realized that, but then, who would have thoughtMy Dinner with Andre was a movie plot? So I was pitching it to these guys who were very heavy hitters, and they say they couldn't make it for less than $80 million.

Amazon.com:Gee, all they really need is some lab equipment and a big steel bowling ball.

Benford:But they don't want to save money! They want a big special effects finish, so they would redesign the whole back end of the story. The secret reason they're interested is that Lucas has the deep s.p.a.ce epic locked up for the next three years, and no one wants to go up against him. So they're looking for special effects plots set on Earth in the near future, not the far future--just right out of his ballpark.

An Introduction to Gregory Benford by Peter Nicholls Greg Benford is the sort of man you can (and do) meet anywhere. I was not at all surprised in 1997 to run into him unexpectedly while he was holding forth on the deck of theQueen Mary . As he talked with typical animation, in my mind's eye I saw the Greg Benford I had originally met almost a quarter of a century ago--I think it was 1976--and mentally superimposed the past image over the present one.

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, he had hardly changed at all from the youngish man I'd met while he was working in Cambridge, UK.

It's true the greying beard is a rather pepper-and-salt affair now, but he hasn't become overweight, and still looks youthful though he's in his late fifties-born 30 January 1941--and still holds a gla.s.s of something alcoholic as he gestures, while he talks nineteen to the dozen. His conversation is knowledgeable, argumentative and good-humoured. He's a good man to talk to (though he doesn't suffer fools gladly), and a good friend of mine, though I suppose we've only got together twenty or so times in three decades.

In appearance, he looks intellectual but tough. He looks as if he might have been a sportsman once, maybe a football player, but he probably wasn't. (Footnote: Greg told me when he read the above that he gave up quarterbacking in Junior High, getting tired of being knocked down, but has suffered around ten broken bones from surfing, baseball etc.) Most famously, of course, he has combined two complementary careers, academic physicist and science-fiction writer. (He must be the only writer in the world to have published both novels and scientific papers on the galactic centre: one of the novels isFurious Gulf , 1994, and one of the papers is "An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center",Astrophysical Journal , October 15th, 1988, pp 735-42.) But he was already active in science fiction long before either of these careers took off.

Benford has been a Californian for several decades now, but his childhood was in the Deep South, in Alabama, plus years spent in j.a.pan and Germany because his army-officer father was posted there.

Benford has a Texas connection too. An interview tells us "I have the weird distinction of having been an instigator of the first Con in Texas and the first Con in Germany." The Texas con was the Southwestern Con, July 1958. The German convention was even earlier, WetzCon (for Wetzlar, Hesse) in 1956. Not bad going for a teenager.

Like so many other sf writers, Benford began life in the science-fiction world as a fan, and rather a notable one. He was, for example, co-founder in 1955 of the celebrated fanzineVoid with his identical twin James, at the age of fourteen; subsequent co-editors included Ted White and Terry Carr. (Carr's experience here stood him in good stead; he went on to win a 1959 Hugo for his later fanzineFanac , co-edited with Ron Ellik, and later became a distinguished writer also, and editor of the Ace Specials.) By now Benford was moving westward, and he did his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Oklahoma, graduating in 1963.

Professional writing came quite a bit later than fan writing. His first published story was "Stand-In", 1965, written while he was a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. It won second prize in an amateur writing contest held by theMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , but he wrote little more before 1969.

Much of his early work, and some later, was written in collaboration. These stories and novels included some written with his brother Jim, with his sister-in-law Hilary, and most importantly with Gordon Eklund. There were later novels in which he collaborated with William Rotsler, and subsequently with David Brin.

His earlier novels were usually based on stories previously published, sometimes by reworking three or four of them and putting them together in mosaic style. In another writer this could be laziness, or a mean-minded attempt to wring every possible last nickel from previously published work. With Greg, I think the motivation is quite different. He gets dissatisfied, he wants to work out the implications of ideas more rigorously and deeply. Like a terrier with a bone, he shakes an idea and tosses it about and buries it, then digs it up again to worry it still further. Or, as Greg put it another way in an interview, "Ideas come to me in a lapidary way, layering over the years."

For example, his first novel wasDeeper than the Darkness , published by Ace Books in 1970. It was based on a 1969 story, one of his earliest, and also called "Deeper than the Darkness". When he looked back on the book-length version later on he was dissatisfied, thought it "dreadful"; it was "hastily written".

So he expanded and rewrote it into a more sophisticated version,The Stars in Shroud , 1978.

But I've just re-read the original novel, having remembered that it excited me at the time. Sure, there are infelicities, and the ending is ill-plotted and rushed, but it's still pretty good. It's obvious why I liked it: it came out in the middle of the rather phoney debate between "hard sf" on the one hand, and "New Wave sf" on the other, and with extraordinary dexterity it reconciles the warring factions. It's about both inner and outer s.p.a.ce. It sees value in and uses the soft sciences sociology and psychology, but it also includes tachyons, gravity waves, and some rather nifty orbital calculations. The story is indescribable and rather ugly--telling the effects of an alien "plague" weapon on a human race, scattered through the galaxy, whose dominant mode of living is a form of collectivism based on oriental philosophies. The plague takes the form of its victims suffering acute agoraphobia, and burrowing into s.h.i.+t-lined tunnels where they lie coc.o.o.ned, straight from the collective into stinking isolation, and ultimately die. It is a memorably telling image.

Before leaving this novel, I should refer Australian readers to the following: "...my father a truly rare specimen: one of the last pure Americans, born of the descendants of the few who had survived the Riot War. That placed me far down in the caste lots, even below Australians."

Deeper than the Darknessforeshadows Benford's later work in many respects: a love of anarchic individualism which is interpreted by some as a version of right-wing Californian libertarianism (though I'm pretty sure Greg wouldn't go along with that); a melding of psychological studies (linguistics, the nature of intelligence, the nature of sentience, the function of emotions) with hard physics (Benford's real-world specialty is plasma studies, especially as they relate to astrophysics, but he has worked in other areas of astrophysics as well); an extraordinary breadth of theme. He works on a broader canvas than almost any of his hard sf colleagues and with more colours on his palette.

Benford became well known quite quickly. After a couple of previous award nominations, he quickly won a Nebula in 1974 for a fine novelette he wrote with Gordon Eklund, "If the Stars are G.o.ds". This was one of the four pieces that were woven together to make the collaborative novel of the same t.i.tle,If the Stars are G.o.ds (1977). This first-contact story tells of aliens in our solar system, who regard our Sun as a sentient being, and treat it as a G.o.d. It is one of the most interesting 1970s stories that use religious themes in sf. (It was around this stage of his career that I first met Greg, when he was a Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, in 1976.) Benford won his second Nebula, this time for best novel, for the 1980 novelTimescape . It remains his best-known work, and has deservedly become a cla.s.sic, but I think it has had an unfortunate side effect in somehow shadowing his subsequent career. Perhaps readers expected more of the same, which Greg was not really prepared to give them.Timescape is the definitive time-travel-through-tachyons story, and is set in the world of scientific research, a world that Greg of course knows intimately, and he makes vivid use of his insider knowledge. The plot involves a vital, panicky message sent by future scientists to present-day ones via tachyonic coding. The book was so powerful that one publis.h.i.+ng house, Tor Books, named an entire sf line the Timescape line. Few novels become logos.

I had vaguely a.s.sumed that Benford had won Hugos as well as Nebulas, and it was only while researching this introduction that I found I was wrong. He has never won a Hugo in any category.

Benford's absence is arguably the major omission in the list of Hugo winners over the last three decades.

Among his fellow hard sf writers who have won Hugos in the same period are Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, David Brin, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Sheffield, John Varley and Vernor Vinge. Naming no names, Benford surely writes as well as the best of these, and better than several of them. (Surprisingly few Hugo awards have gone to sf writers who use hard science, despite the mundane stereotype of the sf fan--the man or woman who votes for the Hugos--as typically a technonerd. This is, it occurs to me, a very significant datum.) As it happens I recently re-read the cla.s.sic works of many of the above writers including Benford (not Robinson and Vinge, but with the addition of James Blish from the USA, and Bob Shaw and Paul McAuley from the UK). I was researching hard sf, which I love, despite the reputation sf encyclopedia editors have for being New-Wave lit-loving aesthetes, who wouldn't know a Lagrange Point from a Punctuation Point.

I have to say that the results, perhaps because I'm getting old, were disappointing. Only three of the writers seemed as good or better on re-reading, and few of their books managed to renew the original sense of wonder I'd had when I first encountered them. The writers that most successfully survived this cranky, subjective examination were Larry Niven (a veteran), Paul J. McAuley (a younger writer) and Gregory Benford (two years younger than me). Re-reading Benford, I kept finding neat nuances and implications that I'd somehow missed first time through. It was an exciting voyage through Benford's weird but stimulating mind.

The Benford series I had just read again is the enormous Galactic Center series of six connected novels.

It consists of, as a kind of prologue,In the Ocean of Night (1977), followed by the series proper:Across the Sea of Suns (1984),Great Sky River (1987),Tides of Light (1989),Furious Gulf (1994) and Sailing Bright Eternity (1995). It would take thousands of words to describe the cosmic sweep of these novels properly; they consist of a swirling sea of characters and ideas, bubbling with manic energy, serving as venue for a heady narrative of conflict between organic (mostly human) intelligences, and machine intelligences. But it goes a lot further than that. The nature of sentience and the nature of the universe are only two of the series' ambitious themes. Benford must be the pre-eminent inventor of aliens working in sf today, and he really thinks them through. They do not just come from the standard alien template. Go and read the books. You may, like me, find them even better the second time.

This series makes utterly clear that to call Greg Benford a hard sf writer is only to tell half the story. For one thing, he has read a great deal, and a lot of what he writes has resonant allusions to other writers.

(Notably to William Faulkner. I always enjoy Benford's public controversies-there have been quite a few of them. But the Faulkner-homage scenario was the most enjoyable yet, with Greg receiving what looked like a knock-out uppercut from ace critic Gary Wolfe, only to bounce back off the canvas and bruise Wolfe with a series of well-judged left hooks.) As he foreshadowed inDeeper than the Darkness , Benford has continued (particularly in the Galactic Center series) to balance outer s.p.a.ce against inner s.p.a.ce, biology against physics, history against information theory. If you think this sounds daunting, well, yes it is a bit. But it's entertaining, too, every now and then to read books that rigorously exercise the mind, rather than feeding it the usual fast-food snacks. This quality of Greg's writing, together with his sporadic willingness to take experimental risks with ordinary English-language prose, means that he has never been able to seduce what I call theStar Wars audience. But then, where would movies likeStar Wars get their ideas from if it were not for the pioneer work of the Asimovs and Clarkes and Benfords and Bears? (No offence meant to movie fans here-I'm one myself.) No, Benford's secret, and from a certain point of view his failure, is that he writes for grown-ups.

This is a brief introduction, not a critical essay, so I'll not discussall Greg's books, though I must at least mention a few. There are two good collections of short stories, the first beingIn Alien Flesh (1986) and the second beingMatter's End (Bantam 1994, but the UK edition of 1996, Gollancz, has extra stories added.) Many stories, however, remain uncollected. There was much sometimes heated discussion of Benford's authorized sequel to Arthur C. Clarke'sAgainst the Fall of Night , ent.i.tledBeyond the Fall of Night (1991), and of his recent contribution to Asimov's Foundation sequence,Foundation's Fear (1997), when they appeared. I haven't yet read his most recent novel, which isCosm (1998), but it has had some great reviews.

It is a mystery to me how Greg finds the time for all this stuff. He does not generally seem stressed or tense when you meet him, and his relaxation can almost reach the point of leglessness, so to speak. He and I on one occasion in the 1980s got embarra.s.singly drunk, though this-for Greg at least-is atypical.

However, he obviously works very hard. In 1971 he became a.s.sistant Professor at University of California, Irvine. He became a.s.sociate Professor there in 1973, and has held this position ever since.

This research post is a real and demanding job, not just a sinecure like Asimov's post at Boston University mainly was. He has also been an advisor both to NASA and to the Citizens' Advisory Council on National s.p.a.ce Policy. And he was rewarded for all this in 1995 with a Lord Foundation award, which is a seriously heavy distinction given to not many scientists.

He has published around 150 scientific papers, which is a lot, and in addition has produced many popular science articles forAmazing (1969-76, and some much later),Vertex (1973-75) and in the nineties forIsaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine . (However, quite a few of the more recent Benford columns--these have att.i.tude, being simultaneously levelheaded and deliberately polemical--have been more about literary criticism than popular science.) It is perhaps odd, given this rich publis.h.i.+ng history, that not until the end of 1998 did Benford's first non-fiction book appear. It isDeep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia .

Greg Benford is arguably the premier hard sf writer of our time-though Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Paul J.

McAuley and Kim Stanley Robinson in their different ways are up there too--and he is amusing and interesting in person, too. Also approachable and friendly. Don't be frightened to talk to him. Chances are he will talk right back, and if he doesn't, well, no damage has been done. He will not be the sort of guest of honour that spends most of the time lurking in his or her hotel room. I like him a lot, and I think you will too.

GREGORY BENFORD.

ANTARCTICA AND MARS.

Recently I was mulling over my favorite authors, and it struck me that often a writer's essential flavor can be summed up by one of his book t.i.tles. Charles d.i.c.kens, Great Expectations. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Hemingway, In Our Time.

At least it's an amusing game. I picked The Stars My Destination for Alfred Bester, Star Maker for Olaf Stapledon, Childhood's End for Arthur C. Clarke. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest.

Poul Anderson, Time and Stars.

Then I thought of that ceaseless advocate of the s.p.a.ce program, Robert Heinlein. Surely his mood and att.i.tude is captured by The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. s.p.a.ce as gritty, huge, hard, real.

Which depressed me a bit, for today the s.p.a.ce program's spirit is anything but that. A diffuse unreality pervades NASA. Similarly, James Gunn's definitive treatment of the radio search for intelligent life, The Listeners-- not a bad t.i.tle choice for his essential theme, since Gunn is one of our best social critics -- now seems quite optimistic, since Congress recently killed the program (though the Planetary Society plans to carry on, using public donations). Were all these hopeful outlooks in sf simply naive?

I reflected back on my own involvement with s.p.a.ce, from the freckled kid reading w.i.l.l.y Ley and Arthur Clarke describing how rockets worked, to a consultant for NASA and the Planetary Society. Somehow a lot of the zip has gone out of s.p.a.ce for a lot of us, and for the public, too. Why?

We went wrong just after Apollo, I think. James Fletcher was NASA Administrator from 1971 to 1977, when the Shuttle was being proposed, designed and checked out -- or rather, not checked out.

He convinced Congress that this nifty little reusable rocket-c.u.m-s.p.a.ce-plane gadget would get magically cheaper and cheaper to fly, eventually delivering payloads to orbit for a few hundred dollars a pound.

The cost now is over $5000 a pound, and still climbing as missions get delayed and services shrink. A twenty-fold increase, allowing for inflation. The Nixon administration bequeathed to us an econo-ride Shuttle (and Jimmy Carter signed the appropriations bill for it). They also axed the remaining Apollo missions and the 1970s version of the s.p.a.ce station, though they weren't vital. Their killing the long-range research for a Mars mission had great effects, however, because we now have no infrastructure developed for large deep s.p.a.ce missions.

Then came the Challenger disaster, with Fletcher in charge again. In the Challenger commission report he allowed as how "Congress has provided excellent oversight and generous funding and in no way that I know of contributed to the accident." Except, of course, for consistent under-funding and pressure to attain goals set by people with little or no technical competence.

The shuttle is a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p designed by a committee of lawyers. "The fault was not with any single person or group but was NASA's fault," Fletcher went on, "and I include myself as a member of the NASA team." As Joe Haldeman sardonically remarked, "Most people would say he was more than just a member."

And we can't even buy shuttles in quant.i.ty. The Fletcher-Nixon vision saw a flight a week. That got scaled down to twenty-four a year, then twelve. In 1989 there were nine, in 1990 six, with that abysmal prospect, a flight every few months, apparently settling in as the normal routine.

Unmanned exploration was once the virtually unblemished, high-minded face of s.p.a.ce. Now our failures acc.u.mulate. The wrong lens curvature of the Hubble telescope. The big antenna which won't deploy aboard Galileo as it limps toward Jupiter, years late; we could have sent it directly, on a Proton booster the Soviets offered us at bargain rates, but politics of the late 1980s ruled that out. The t.i.tans that explode with billion-dollar packages aboard, the satellites which go awry.

And the Mars Observer, lost to unknown error or just bad luck. My personal guess at the time was that while a small chip manufacturer is now getting blamed, there is an interesting coincidence that we lost contact after the thruster tanks were being pressurized. Tanks have exploded on missions before-- remember Apollo 13 -- and in both cases they had been engineered to three times the expected design limits. The review panel fingered the same plausible culprit, but basically we will never know.

The repair of the Hubble Telescope lifted spirits a bit, but face facts: it was a repair job we should not have had to do at all. The Hubble mission was overloaded with tasks, and NASA ejected to do them all with One Big Shot -- a poor strategy when you're pus.h.i.+ng the envelope in several different directions.

It wasn't always so. Both Voyager s.p.a.cecraft -- remember them? --returned a very interesting bonus in mid-1993 -- a burst of low frequency electromagnetic radiation. We believe these emissions came from beyond the s.p.a.cecraft, about a hundred astronomical units from the sun lan A.U. is the distance from the sun to your house). A big flare eruption on the sun had propagated past the s.p.a.cecraft and the emissions came at a time when the fast-streaming particles, going about 100 km/sec, struck something about twenty or thirty A.U. further out. What?

Plasma physicists identified the emissions as probably waves radiated by those particles as they ploughed into the shock wave which separates our solar neighborhood from the true deep-s.p.a.ce plasma that ranges between the stars. Thus the Voyagers may have sensed the boundary of our little solar comfort zone. Within a decade or so they will cross that standing transition, where the plasma density drops and true inter-stellar s.p.a.ce begins, a "wall" more meaningful than the orbital radius of Pluto.

Voyager was a miracle. We caught the big bra.s.s ring on that one, beginning when an orbital specialist noted in 1963 that a Grand Tour could be won by looping a probe past several of the outer planets. The window for this...o...b..tal high wire act opens every 175 years, but the last time, when Thomas Jefferson was President, we missed the chance. In 1972, when astronauts still trod the moon, we decided to go for the launch window in 1977.

I don't think NASA could do that today. h.e.l.l, it couldn't even decide to not do it that quickly. In just five years during the 1970s NASA invented and developed nuclear-power batteries which are still running, sixteen years after launch. It a.s.sembled fail-safe computers, and electronics that withstood the proton sleet of Jupiter, where a human would die of an hour's exposure. Built to give us Jupiter and Saturn, they still forge outward after gliding past Ura.n.u.s and Neptune as well.

Voyager is a legacy of the 1960s, a child of the hustling s.p.a.ce Age that wanted to do everything it could (and a few things it couldn't, like building a true s.p.a.ce plane). The Voyagers keep sailing on just as they were, dutifully sending back reports to a society that has changed profoundly.

Nothing follows them. Sure, Galileo is bound for Jupiter, due to arrive in 1995, but there it stops.

NASA pa.s.sed up the Halley's comet mission, while other nations went. Nothing will go to Saturn for many years. The proposed Ca.s.sini probe which does finally reach Saturn, probably sometime in the next millennium, will drop a vessel named Huygens onto t.i.tan, the second largest moon in the solar system and to me the most interesting place of all.

t.i.tan has a surface pressure not much different from that in your living room. It is far colder, but its thick atmosphere holds the organic chemicals we know existed on the early Earth. Has some slow, cold chemistry been at work there, conjuring up life forms utterly different from our own? Impossible to say, for our only closeup look showed only the featureless upper cloud deck of a methane atmosphere.

The stretching out of missions is getting worse. Galileo was planned to get to Jupiter in 1985. Though cooperation between the US and the Russians keeps getting talked about, it still has not materialized in solid ways. The recent agreements to combine our operations with the Mir station are a good sign, and probably will work out. But it's still only a beginning.

Gorbachev in 1987-88 sounded much like Khrushchev, talking up s.p.a.ce. George Bush in 1989 resembled Kennedy, setting a goal: a manned Mars landing by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing, 2019. Both leaders sounded the charge. Both countries yawned and changed the subject. Shortly afterward, they changed the leaders, too.

What's different? The game has changed. It isn't national rivalry any more, and probably won't be for quite a while.

Brace Murray, former director of the Jet Propulsion Lab and professor at CalTech, pointed out to me many of these curious a.n.a.logies and features of the s.p.a.ce Age, but his most striking a.n.a.logy reached even further back.

Once we had a distant, hostile goal, and men threw themselves at it, too: Antarctica. Early in this century, Scott and Amundsen raced for the south pole with whole nations cheering them on. The Edwardian Englishman who tried to impose his own methods died. The savvy Norwegian who adapted to the hostile continent came through smoothly.

Others tried to follow. Shackleton made some progress, and then national rivalry became far more serious: World War I swallowed up the exploratory energies. Admiral Byrd and others made headway between the wars, but true, methodical Antarctic exploration did not resume in earnest until the International Geophysical Year, 1957.

The wars gave the International Geophysical Year teams cheap, reliable air and sea transport technology. (Scientists don't like to talk about it much, but modem war bequeaths science a feast of intriguing gadgets.) Military services were happy to a.s.sist, exercising their capabilities. International though the spirit was, national and territorial claims did not vanish; Argentina and Chile still mutter over their rights to turf. Indeed, perhaps the major reason n.o.body disturbs the present high-minded international air is that no serious resources seem to be at stake. Discover a rich field for mining or pumping and all bets are off.

Scott-Amundsen: Apollo. Shackleton and Byrd: Voyager and Galileo. The World Wars, in this a.n.a.logy, are like our rising concern with domestic problems -- not soaring nationalism, luckily, but at least a deflection of those energies to local concerns.

Bruce Murray pointed out, in a speech published in s.p.a.ce Policy, Feb. 1991, that a science fictional alternate world scenario can perhaps illuminate our predicament. Think what our world would be like, he said, if the two-term limit on the presidency had not been enacted in the late 1940s. Franklin Roosevelt's four terms had provoked that change in the Const.i.tution. The first president it applied to was Dwight Eisenhower. I remember how popular he was even in 1960. I'm pretty sure he could have beaten Kennedy; good grief, Nixon almost did.

Eisenhower would have presided over the whole early s.p.a.ce Age, 195764. He called s.p.a.ce programs "pie in the sky," refused to fund research at a fast clip, and warned us against the "military-industrial complex".