The “Artemis Effect” – The Stuff of Dreams

[Mural of Ray Bradbury by Richard Wyatt; the mural is located at Los Angeles High School, which Ray attended.]

With the onset of the Artemis missions and rockets going up on a regular basis (and with a frequency that exceeds some bus services) it seems we once more live in a science fictional age, with the boundary between the imagined and the actual overlapping like never before. Rocketry was always the stuff of dreams, something Ray Bradbury understood very well when he employed his “silver locusts” to transport colonists from the Earth to Mars: such a migration is still some way off in reality, and the plan now seems to call for bases on the Moon as a preliminary stepping stone for the human exploration of the Red Planet.

Those who can’t wait for such missions may have to content themselves with The Martian Chronicles as Ray’s collection of short stories is perhaps better known, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy – two very different but equally valid depictions of how non-evolutionary life may appear on our nearest planetary neighbour. Edgar Rice Burrough’s “Barsoom” series is another such representation, though one that perhaps owes more to the swashbuckling traditions of romantic fiction – in the vein of Alexander Dumas and his famous quarrelsome musketeers – than to a modern speculative narrative.

If the Moon comes first, as it now seems it will, then maybe it’s time to revisit Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, or Arthur Clarke’s Earthrise. And of course there’s Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Heywood Floyd’s epic journey in stages to the surface of the Moon ("No matter how many times you left Earth... the excitement never really palled."). The insectoid looking International Space Station is of course very different from the grand wheeled space station that is the centrepiece of that journey; and there are as yet no Moon shuttles skimming over ancient craters on their way to investigate a mysterious discovery unearthed forty feet beneath the regolith (more’s the pity). But a permanent human presence on the Moon now seems increasingly likely, especially given the high level of public engagement with the Artemis missions. “Moon Station One” is straight out of the canon of imaginative fiction, a body of work that has been predicting such outposts for decades.     

With these new Moon-shots we have recovered the ability to do daring things. To turn the stuff of dreams into a new and bold reality. Perhaps the only alchemy that really matters for any species that has its eyes set firmly on the stars.

[Were Ray Bradbury’s famous short stories a deliberate attempt to create a mythical version of Mars, as distinct from the harsh reality of the planet’s inhospitable surface?

Image: Wallpaper Abyss.]

[British artist David A. Hardy’s depiction of a Moon colony, envisaged long before the Apollo missions: https://astroart.org/ ]

[A typically detailed and atmospheric cover by the late Tim White from the legendary NEL imprint.]