I can’t imagine why, but out-of-nowhere I caught a bug to re-read James Michener’s Space last week. I’m glad I followed the impulse; this is the book you ought to pick-up if you’re looking for some thoughtful beach reading.
A historical fiction about America’s space program, Michener undertakes to capture the whole of a period of huge change in American life — the anti-war protests and drugs and Weathermen against a backdrop of mind-numbing technological progress. Though nobody in the history of the world has actually spoken as Michener characters speak, with 35-years distance it is clear that he was no mere entertainer; Michener saw what was coming. He foresaw the systematic looting and possible ruin of the middle class, he foresaw the political rise of the anti-intellectual evangelical right and its southern locus, he foresaw that cynics seeking political power would target gays as subjects of especial odium, he foresaw that American life would stratify into layers of knowers and resolute know-nothings.
On Michener’s telling the great engine of change turns out to be … fear. Fear of Russia drove the space program forward — there was nothing America could do, then, about Sputnik’s impudent beeps directly over our heads — and it is certainly fear that drove, and still drives, the conservative reaction against technological and social change.
We could use today a lot more of the can-do attitude that put us on the moon, and a lot less sentimental hankering after a Sunnybrook Republic that never actually existed.