Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe

Character, courage and redemption. These manifestations of virtue are not the moral preserve of any institution, including the Church. They are manifested by the human heart. And nowhere is that manifestation repeatedly better illustrated than by the influence of Gene Rodenberry in popular culture in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was about half-way through its seven-season run when Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, died in 1991.

In “The Enduring Lessons of ‘Star Trek,’” Manu Saadia, a contributor for The New Yorker, wrote for the magazine two years ago, “Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of science fiction. The first uses the trappings of the future to explore the present, suggesting to its audience that the existence of starships, aliens, and (to stray into that other sci-fi franchise) lightsabres doesn’t meaningfully change the experience of the human condition. The second uses the same sorts of artifice for the opposite purpose – to imagine foreign, even utopian, futures.”

Wrote Saadia in a 50th anniversary piece to mark the debut of the franchise on Sept. 8, 1966: “Tellingly, the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)”

By contrast, “It is hard to overstate how much of a departure the ‘Star Trek’ franchise’s eighties-and-nineties-straddling incarnation, ‘The Next Generation,’ was from the original series” wrote Saadia. “It retained much of the nomenclature and established codes (the inscrutable techno-scientific babble, the ship’s name, the naval ranks, the canonical alien species) but swung almost entirely toward the second, more cerebral form of science fiction. It had no anchor in the present, nor did it genuflect before America’s frontier myths. ‘The Next Generation’ was wholesale utopia, a thought experiment on how humans would behave under terminally improved material circumstances. Civilization, and the future, had won.”

A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994.

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out.”

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Newspapers turn to Augmented Reality (AR)

Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But they do have something new now called Augmented Reality (AR). And it’s not science fiction. The technology makes use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, year, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) last September with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

“Western Canada’s  largest local media company is pleased to announce the enterprise wide launch of augmented reality throughout its Lower Mainland, British Columbia properties,” Glacier said on Feb. 7, 2013, adding it was the “First company worldwide to build augmented reality into its digital sales platform.”

Layar, with over 35 million downloads worldwide, is the world’s most downloaded AR app, and continues to grow at an average of almost a million downloads per month. It operates as image recognition software invisibly tagging images, logos and icons with codes to allow the augmented reality components to appear instantly on a reader’s smartphone or tablet while scanning the AR content.

The Toronto Star and Bermuda Sun are among other publishers and newspaper using Layar.

Rather than a Quick Response Code (QR) matrix barcode in print, Layar provides the ability to link to multiple assets; watch video/listen to audio/share the content on social networks and even buy a product – right from the page, eliminating the gap between print and digital.

Maybe we won’t have to wait until the late 24th century after all for the Holographic Environment Simulator.