Last week we focused a lot on opposites, and the dichotomy between Earth and space is one that we didn’t discuss. The specific passage I want to highlight is the one that Prof. Sample pointed to earlier, the one on page 170. Instead of looking at the relationship between the astronauts and the kosmonauts, I want to focus on how the characters describe and discuss Earth and space and how they defamiliarize the earth from our current notions of them.
One important thing to keep in mind is that this was written in 1977, in the midst of the “space race” with Russia and the U.S.’s obsession with the exploration of space and what we can learn from it. It was no question back then that the moon would more than likely be colonized, and probably relatively soon. Space was a means of expansion, both for countries to lay claim to certain territories, and for the human species as a whole. This knowledge makes the characters’ discussions not as surprising as when read for the first time.
First are the descriptions used for the Earth and for space. When the characters look outside their little windows they see the vastness of space rather than the vastness of land, and Niven and Pournelle describe the earth as an alteration between light and dark: “Cities glowed across Europe at the world’s edge, but the black face of the Atlantic covered half the sky.” This is reminiscent of how we describe the sky: as glowing bright clusters of stars amid a black canvas. Contrasting this are the colors used to describe the sight they see immediately in front of them, “luminous blues and oranges and greens streaming upward.” Normally space never has this amount of dynamic qualities, only Earth can accurately be described with such vivid language.
Also interesting is the astronauts’ disassociation with simple observations that tie them to Earth. They can no longer look outside the window and tell approximately what time of day it is, even something so simple as if it’s morning or night. They can’t tell time according to light or dark because they pass through the phase every ninety minutes, so they’re forced to look at a clock. This isn’t something one would immediately think of when trying to figure out how different being up in space would be. These characters are so distant from what we define as natural, because their situation has no amount of naturalness whatsoever. Nature didn’t design man to fly into space, man did, and the astronauts understand this on a deeper level than everyone else, which is why their discussion of colonizing space comes so naturally to them.
The astronauts believe that Earth is no longer habitable by humans. Though it miraculously has the correct formation of atoms and molecules that allow for life whereas no where else (yet) in the universe does, they think it’s too damaged to live on anymore. What they conclude, but don’t actually say, is that civilization has made Earth inhabitable, so it’s even better to attempt to colonize space in any way possible, whether that means building infastructures on the moon or putting more mobiles into the middle of space. Despite the world’s obsession with space in the ’70s, I don’t think the majority of people would think this is a good idea simply because of all the factors that could contribute for the process to go wrong. Of course it’s the astronauts who think this is the best of all possible alternatives. In the face of the Hammer, imminent disaster, though, perhaps that is the best idea, if only they thought of it sooner.
I find this view of the relationship between Earth and space interesting because it is an alternate way to look at space. We don’t often get a report from a person who has visited space because there are so few of them, so this scene is very imaginative and idealistic and incredibly believeable within the narrative of this story. It’s difficult to dispute the content of these scenes from space because they seem so realistic, and we can imagine that a few guys are really interested in how a woman pees in space even when they’re making history among so many fantastic gadgets and sights.