Life and Living and Science Fiction

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is all about life and living. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. That all became clearer to me when I began thinking about writing a science fiction novel.

I’ve been a fan of science fiction ever since I learned to read.  I am from the age where we were still feeling the ripples from Sputnik and hard science fiction was the main attraction for nerds like me.  When I started writing, I decided I’d like to turn my hand to it, and when I was a kid, I wrote some really horrible science fiction short stories.  They don’t exist any more.

But now, having lived long enough to maybe know something, I’ve been thinking about writing a novel and have been reading a lot of science fiction novels in order to prepare for this.  I’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy; I’ve read Iain M. Banks “Culture” books; I’ve read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books; I’ve read Alistair Reynolds books; and, of course, The Expanse series.

All good. But...

They are good, but they get to a point where they use something akin to magic.  This is usually to circumvent the speed of light limit that would make travel between stars an affair that takes years.  The ones who keep the speed of light as a hard and fast speed limit then invoke something about freezing people while they travel through the depths of space.  That sounds plausible, but the truth of the matter is that if you can “wake someone up” after having frozen them for 20 years, you also have the power to raise the dead.

In addition, speeding a spaceship up to even a tiny fraction of the speed of light requires a tremendous amount of energy.  And when you get to where you are going, you have to slow down again.

All of this to say, I don’t find any of that plausible.

And I want to write something that is realistic.  Well, as realistic as it can be while still being science fiction.

All of this having been said, it brings me to an essay that Isaac Asimov wrote in 1960 which was titled “Stepping Stones to the Stars.”  It has been almost fifty years since I read it, but essentially he was saying we could gradually make our way outward to other stars through the Oort Cloud, which is a collection of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system.

In the setting that I am creating for this possible future novel, mankind would begin by setting up mining and industry on the moon.  We would then make space platforms for farming and other manufacture.  Then we would move out to the asteroid belt, out to the moons of Jupiter and the other outer planets, out to the Kuiper Belt, and out, as Asimov suggests, to the Oort cloud.

A key part of this that I brushed by pretty fast is the farming platforms.  Those will be key. And this is the part where I start talking about living and life.

Remember, it’s all about living and life.

Mankind cannot exist as a species in isolation.  We are part of a much larger, very tightly intertwined whole.  We are part of the tapestry of life.

So if we raise crops on space platforms, we will need the plants, of course.  But the plants will require soil.  Soil is not just rock, it has all sorts of organic matter in it.  Organic matter is a delicate way of saying poop.  For the poop you are going to need animals.  The animals will have their own particular needs.

All of this to say, you can’t just take up seeds to plant on a space platform.  You are going to have to take up a whole ecosystem.  You can’t just move Man into space: You have to move Life into space.

Space does not seem to be very friendly to life, at least not the sort of life we are used to having around us here on Earth.  Because of this, it seems to me, that if we ever really have a culture that does move into space, they will all have to be very mindful of Life.

It seems to me that they would all have to have a realization that it’s not just them.  Each individual is part of a larger, indivisible whole, that tapestry of life I was talking about.

But then I think no.

Because we are now living in space, but instead of a thin metal wall separating us from the vacuum of space, we have a thin layer of atmosphere.  Some do think about it, but most people just go on about our lives oblivious to the fact that we are dependent on other people, on other organisms, on systems and ecosystems that we simply take for granted.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about life and living and how it might manifest itself billions of miles away from the Sun, and how to set a story there.

Hope you are having a good summer.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.