Name: Rocket Ship Galileo
ISBN: 9780450006951

What Hacker News says

RajT88Mar 2024

Your comment reminds me of "Rocket Ship Galileo" by Robert Heinlein.

Which is to say, crazy reductive.

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eesmithDec 2023

Stross did not characterize it as "specific to some conservative 70s American culture".

He wrote: "The science-fiction genre that today’s billionaires grew up with—the one that existed in the 1970s—goes back to inventor and publisher Hugo Gernsback. ... His magazine’s strain of SF promoted the combination of the American dream of capitalist success, combined with uncritical technological solutionism and a side order of frontier colonialism."

The kids reading SF in the 1970s were reading SF from across multiple previous decades, not just the 70s.

One such example is Heinlein's 1947 book Rocket Ship Galileo. In it, they are trying to convince some parents to let their teen-aged children to go on an experimental atomic-powered rocket to the moon. The mother describes why she gives permission:

> “Oh, I know what I said,” she went on, “but a mother is bound to cry a little. Just the same, this country was not built by people who were afraid to go. Ross’s great-great-grandfather crossed the mountains in a Conestoga wagon and homesteaded this place. He was nineteen, his bride was seventeen. It’s a matter of family record that their parents opposed the move.” She stirred suddenly and one of her knitting needles broke. “I would hate to think that I had let the blood run thin.” She got up and went quickly from the room. - https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780441012374/page/40/mode/...

That's an explicit link between space colonization and the mythos of American westward expansionism and "strong blood".

(John Varley recontexualizes this scene in his "Red Thunder" where the protagonist is of Cuban descent, and it is his aunt, who fled Cuba by boat, who comes up with a very different reason to grant permission. Alas, I don't have a copy of that book, haven't read it for 20 years, and can't find it in the limited search available from archive.org.)

A lot of early SF was based on Westerns, but in space, with blasters, rockets, and aliens instead of guns, trains/horses, and Indians. "Star Trek" was characterized as "Wagon Train to the stars!" as it drew from the Western "Wagon Train." A old SF movie serial I watched from the 1930s had rockets to get from planet to planet, and horses to get from base to base.

And Westerns, as a genre, were full of revisionist white supremacist colonial expansionism that collapsed after the frontier myth it was based on collapsed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6zD1sjnClM

You write: "These are not arbitrary concepts that were uniquely dreamed of by some sci-fi authors because they had colonialism nostalgia."

But of course they are not, and I don't see Stross making that claim. They were embedded in a white-supremacist culture produced by violent colonial expansion. Gernsback was a racist even for his era, and used his influence to sideline and suppress alternative viewpoints.

John Carter of Mars was a captain in the Confederacy during the American Civil War, which meant he would have committed treason in the name of slavery he he been real. He was portrayed with all the honorable characteristics of Antebellum South, but without the slavery. This was part of a larger range of Lost Cause literature focusing on Southern honor, not "econ-fiction" exploring how slavery supported that culture.

The "taser" is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" because its inventor was inspired by the book "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle", wherein the titular character invents an electric rifle so he can go to Africa and hunt elephants for their ivory. Africa, and where locals are described as "All about were the natives, tall, gaunt black men, hideous in their savagery, wearing only the loin cloth, and with their kinky hair stuck full of sticks, bones and other odd objects, they presented a curious sight." ("The witch-doctors ran around like so many maniacs, and it looked as much like an American Indian war dance as anything else.") - https://archive.org/details/tomswifthiselect00applrich/page/...

And these are some of the most popular series of the early SF era.

So you are an author and want to write SF. The readership is primarily white males reading a certain flavor of SF, who want to buy more SF in that flavor. What kind of story do you want to write, and will it make it to market?

And that's why the SF market is inherently slow to change, that is, conservative.

The existence of a market, and the need for the publishing company to make money, and the views of the editor, are why you can't simply say "that's idiosyncratic to the sci-fi author."

There's an old complaint along the lines that it was easier for an SF reader to put himself in the place of an alien named Zxtyqyz than it was to put himself in the place of a black man.

That's why Heinlein had to carefully write between the lines to figure out the protagonist in his 1950s "Tunnel in the Sky" is black, instead of saying so explicitly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_in_the_Sky#Rod's_ethnic...

When you commented "it tells stories about what might go right ... or might go wrong", remember that you can't see the stories that weren't told. If you never revisit and reexamine the SF you read as a teen, you might easily forgot how you've also been enculturated with some outdated ideals.

Read "Gone With the Wind" and you get a very different account than reading "The Wind Done Gone".

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1bentJan 2023

Sounds like the system in Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo

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mordechai9000Apr 2022

This reminds of the classic Heinlein story, Rocket Ship Galileo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo

I remember the plot was a little outlandish to me even when I 11 years old: All American kids team up with a brilliant scientist and build a rocket to the moon, where they discover and defeat a secret Nazi moon base.

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ebcodeMar 2018

I do believe that China's unmanned lander is real. I don't believe that the US manned landings were real.

Here is more elaboration than I had planned:

I came to the conclusion that the landings were faked by my own reasoning. I grew up believing they were real, and only changed my mind in my 20s, after learning more about cosmic rays.

Cosmic Rays weren't even on the radar for the Apollo missions; US states had only just begun banning shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in the 60s.

That was the first inkling I had that something was suspect. Later I learned about Stanley Kubrick's alleged involvement in the documentary film, "Room 237".

Every other recorded major scientific advance has been followed by more observed results in the same area. Yet the official story is that astronauts drove around in moon buggies and played golf on the moon in the 1970s. We just haven't been back because ... there's no reason to go back? Is it not funny that there was a huge reason to get to the moon in the 60s and 70s, but once we got there that reason just vanished?

No, the official story is to me simply not plausible, whereas the alternative makes a ton of sense. The US had every intention of going, but the task itself was simply too difficult. Thankfully, existing trick camera technology, as evidenced in science fiction movies of the time, made the hoax appear entirely believable (to a gullible public).

The last straw for me was around 2010, when I read one of Buzz Aldrin's accounts of the moon landing in "The Week"[0], and I thought, "wait a minute, I've heard that story before", and sure enough, went and found approximately the exact same story of the "last-minute, running out of fuel, manual take-over moon landing" in a novel by Heinlein called "Rocket Ship Galileo"[1]. I would encourage anyone interested to compare the landing story told by Aldrin with the landing story told by Heinlein and judge for themselves whether or not the official story is what actually happened in reality[2], and not just a really great (and wonderfully written, I might add) piece of sci-fi.

[0] https://theweek.com/articles/503621/last-word-eagle-landedba... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Ship_Galileo [2] I also believe in an objective reality, where things either did or did not happen.

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huxleyMar 2015

Interestingly enough, in 2011, Brandenburg thought that was the case too: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2011/pdf/1097.pdf

The more recent paper seems like a rehashed subplot from Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo"

From chapter 11:

Morrie grasped his arm, to steady himself apparently, but quite as much for the comfort of solid human companionship. "You know what I think, Ross," he began, as he stared out at the endless miles of craters. "I think I know how it got that way. Those aren't volcanic craters, that's certain—and it wasn't done by meteors. They did it themselves!"

"Huh? Who?"

"The moon people. They did it. They wrecked themselves. They ruined themselves. They had one atomic war too many."

"Huh? What the-" Ross stared, then looked back at the surface as if to read the grim mystery there. Art stopped taking pictures.

"How about it, Doc?"

Cargraves wrinkled his brow. "Could be," he admitted. "None of the other theories for natural causes hold water for one reason or another. It would account for the relatively smooth parts we call ‘seas.' They really were seas; that's why they weren't hit very hard."

"And that's why they aren't seas any more," Morrie went on. "They blew their atmosphere off and the seas boiled away at Tycho. That's where they set off the biggest ammunition dump on the planet. It cracked the whole planet. I'll bet somebody worked out a counter-weapon that worked too well. It set off every atom bomb on the moon all at once and it ruined them! I'm sure of it."

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