Rude Astronauts Read Free

imagination, an uneasy symbiosis between the fictional and the factual. Many people prefer stories about talking dragons and galactic empires; they are discomfited by any close association between the fantastic and the real. “If I want this kind of thing,” they say, “I’ll read a newspaper” … but you’d be surprised how many of them don’t read newspapers, simply because they don’t want to be reminded how weird or wonderful their own world has become.
    Yet one of the many functions of science fiction is to hold up a warped mirror to our present reality, distorting the image so that reality is seen in a different way. Science fiction, in this sense, isn’t as much about the future as it is about the present.
    Events sweep past us so quickly that we barely have time to assimilate the changes. When I wrote “Live from the Mars Hotel” in 1987, for instance, vinyl LPs and singles were still the preferred format of most music buyers and even radio stations, and the CD was still a novelty many people, including myself, thought was a passing fad. Five years later, you can’t find vinyl singles in a retail music store, except as—ahem—a fad item.
    Likewise, several stories in this book make reference to the USSR, reflecting a time when the Soviet Union still represented a real or imagined threat to the West. Much has been written elsewhere about how the collapse of Soviet communism affected fiction writers; all I can plead in my defense is that I, too, thought the Iron Curtain would stay up much longer. Although I was tempted to revise these stories to reflect present-day political realities, I decided instead to let things stand as they were. Those references represent a different time, different politics, a different world—even if that world is now less than a half-decade behind us and its remembrance now brings a sour taste to everyone’s mouth—which should not be forgotten.
    In one sense, we’re all rude astronauts, getting ripped on a strange beach near the edge of space and time.
    Your guess is as good as mine as to how the future will be. A few years from now, swamps in southern Georgia may indeed be roamed by genetically recreated dinosaurs; on the other hand, the Okefenokee could be soon populated by clones of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Dan Quayle. Stories about near-future space colonization are currently considered to be unfashionably optimistic; a reviewer for a British SF magazine once spent most of her time mocking the cover blurb of one of my novels for invoking the “dream” of space exploration, leaving me to wonder if she reads newspapers, for anything I’ve written about space may seem as quaint and old-fashioned as Arthur C. Clarke’s projection that communication satellites would be placed in orbit sometime shortly before the end of the 20th century.
    There are two great lessons which science fiction teaches us, each contradicting the other one. Anticipate the best, prepare for the worst; that’s the most obvious lesson. Yet the second is more subtle, although it is the exact opposite: when you expect the worst to happen, things will likely become much better than you believed they would be. It’s the old philosophical test. Is the glass half empty or half full? What does this random ink blot mean to you?
    And what did you dream about last night?
    It’s midnight. I’ve got a six-pack of ice-cold beer in the refrigerator and a pack of cigarettes. There’s nothing on the tube worth watching except an old Dr. Who episode we’ve all seen a dozen times. Everything around us looks dull and stupid …
    But just past this horizon, over on the next block, I can hear one hell of a blowout going on. Liquor, loud music, lewd women … might be worth checking out.
    Let’s go.
    The party’s just getting started. Want a beer?
—The Rocket Farm, St. Louis, Missouri January 31, 1993

PART ONE
Near Space

On the Road: Eulogy
    I N THE END, FOR everyone, there was the image which was