(This is the long-delayed second in a series of posts about the themes I explore in my new sci-fi novel, as I go through the process of seeking representation and trying to publish it. I’ve also decided to post a splash page for the book! Check it out: https://josephshoer.com/book/)
This post is going to get into minor spoilers right away — you’ll learn this information in the first two to four chapters of the book — followed further down by increasingly major spoilers. Click through to the next page to continue.
Almost one year ago, I announced here that I’d written a sci-fi novel. Since then, after finishing a last round of edits and finally — for the very first time — reading the complete book myself, I’ve been querying agents to represent me to a traditional publisher.
I picked up some advice on how to parse Manuscript Wishlist, and wrote a basic query letter with a plot summary and description of my themes. Every time I set out to put something together for the next likely-seeming agent, I’d customize to that agent. It seemed like each time, I ended up creating something a little new. Biographic material. A clip of the first ten pages. A standalone plot summary. A target audience description. I’m working on my one-sentence pitch right now. (This is currently hovering around: “After a scientist accidentally discovers the ancient force behind her galaxy’s looming disaster, she fights through academia, politics, and finally space battles to save her civilization.”) I save all the material from each query to make future queries easier.
And there will be future queries — my first round have all come back with the agents declining. I’m sure they’re all form letters, though they all sound gracious. One of them actually came back in less than a week. The longest couple took about seven weeks to reply.
I still have plenty more agents on the list, and am full of hope that the novel I now call “A More Glorious Dawn” will ultimately find a publishing home. Its depiction of the heroic effort of science in pursuit of making the world a better place seems more and more timely. For now, I keep putting one foot in front of the other.
(I’ve decided to write a few posts about the themes I explore in my new sci-fi novel, as I go through the process of seeking representation and trying to publish it.)
Pop science fiction is rife with scientist characters — yet, many of them are depicted either as supporting encyclopedias or as the untested and untrained learner at the feet of a protagonist. For the first, think of Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, who was introduced specifically as a cyberneticist — but who, after a couple episodes, is the single resident expert in biology, genetics, and nuclear physics. For the second, think of Jeff Goldblum’s hacker in Independence Day, who’s an expert in his domain, but whose main character arc is being taught how to not look at the cool explosion behind him by Will Smith’s hero. Rarely have I seen a story with a scientist — or even a team of scientists — who are the heroes because of their scientific efforts. So, one of the major themes in my recently completed novel is the depiction of scientific effort, the scientific process, and scientists themselves as heroic.
This thought process started way back around 2010, when I had Battlestar Galactica fresh in mind as I was working through a Ph.D. program. I realized that the way grad students thought of their work — grinding lab experiments, flashes of inspiration, high-stakes exams, publications, reviewers and revisions, rival labs, friendly compatriots, and romantic relationships — held enough drama to fill an epic. I followed this thread by writing a short story. I wrote about Ceren Aydomi, an early-career scientist struggling to prepare her results for publication at a conference. She makes a last-minute tweak to her analysis and thinks she’s uncovered a groundbreaking result. After her presentation, she fields questions — and she expects to treat this process like a battle, so it becomes one. A more established scientist belittles her work in front on everybody. But, in reeling from that experience, she kindles new relationships. Much of this was inspired by things that happened to me or the grad students around me.
In the novel, my scientist’s story expands from here. Ceren’s new result turns out to be correct, and terrifies her — but she has to fight an uphill battle to convince anyone else of its import. Her advisor is indifferent to her, and her institution doesn’t support her. She even faces repressive conspiracies and political headwinds, as she tries to raise awareness of the dangers she’s discovered with the government — only to have a politician, whose interests aren’t served by acknowledging the threat, turn her away. (The conspiracy’s weapons include campaign finance loopholes. Can you tell that another major theme running through this story is the climate crisis?) But, in making that all-too-political deflection of scientific results — “more study is needed before we’ll know enough to discuss policy!” — the politician tries to brush her off by putting Ceren in charge of the makework “more study” effort. And this is the call to adventure where Ceren starts to pick up a more heroic mantle: she’s been set up to fail, starting from scratch, but she has a network of colleagues and friends she can draw on. She takes her new position and sets out to do science. She builds herself a team of fellow scientists, disparate personalities all moving with a single purpose. She becomes the leader of a research effort, pushing forward until she finds a result that cannot be ignored. Her evolution is from early-career researcher to project leader. In this crucible, she makes new friends, weathers tragedies, suffers others trying to capitalize on her work, and finds love.
And it still is a space opera. She travels to exotic places, finds herself in battles, and deals with ancient sources of power. In the end, it’s Ceren whose actions must provide the resolution for the epic plot. And it’s her integrity and compassion — virtues of the modern scientific process, absolutely necessary for collaborating on multidisciplinary teams! — that make her exactly the right person for the job.
I’ve been working on a big creative project: I finished writing my first novel!
It’s a standalone adult-audience space opera epic, and it runs about 180,000 words. That would amount to roughly 720 pages as a trade paperback, though of course there are variations in page size. The story follows a young scientist as she investigates a breakdown of the wormhole network left behind by a long-vanished ancient people and makes revolutionary discoveries about the nature of her galaxy, thrusting her into academic, political, and military conflicts. Of course, there’s everything you’d expect from a space opera — giant starships, court intrigue, space battles, romance, mysterious creatures, and even a detective sequence — but depicting scientists and scientific effort heroically was a big focus for me.
The book takes place in a distant galaxy I call the Cathedral Galaxy (more here and here), filled with nonhuman interstellar civilizations and ruins of the departed ancients. I first developed a map of this galaxy in about 2008 and wrote a few short stories over the following years — four of which ultimately became chapters in the novel.
I worked on an updated and improved version of the map as a personal project during the COVID-19 pandemic. I finished it in December 2020, but the creative feel of working with that map spurred me to keep going on a follow-on series of zoomed detail maps of major regions in the galaxy. As I worked, real-world events helped me crystallize a viable central conflict for an overarching Cathedral Galaxy epic. I finished the regional maps by January 2022. At that point I got myself a copy of Scrivener and started experimenting with its outlining features.
I didn’t think I’d be the kind of writer who meticulously planned out a story — I figured I would be the sort who had some characters and settings and wrote as exploration. But it turned out that I ended up plotting out every chapter and scene for the whole book, using Scrivener’s corkboard to track the three main point-of-view characters and drag scenes into the right order. By the time I was ready to write, I had a full set of template documents, each with a few notes about who was in them, where they took place, and what had to happen. This worked out well, as I found Scrivener really functioned as advertised: it helped break the big project into small, doable chunks. It helped me get into the mode of doing a little at a time, chipping away at the book until it was done, which happened in October 2023. (A few critical weeks of productivity took place dockside at a lake during the summer months!)
The hardest scenes to write were the ones I’d summarized as “this person talks to that person and learns this thing” or “so-and-so talks to whoever-it-is and gets a thing.” I found that my initial inclination to just start writing dialog and see how the characters interacted collided with the need to achieve whatever it was I’d plotted out. I sometimes ended up with people having an interesting conversation…that didn’t achieve what I needed. Or I’d rush into it: “Hello, Mr. Spoon Supplier, I need a spoon, please!” “–Sure, that’s my job.” It often took a lot longer for me to workshop all those pieces together than other scenes. Next time I do this, if there is a next time, I’m going to try and remember the “fractal method” for pivotal conversations: plot them out like mini-stories, with a beginning, middle, and end: suspense, tension, and resolution.
When I hit the halfway point, I gave it to a few family and friends. I wanted a check on the feel and style. The feedback I got was positive. I was on the right track! I could sustain this for another half! Once I finished, I sent it out again and gathered some comments. With the full story available, there were some aspects that didn’t work for some of the readers as well as they had in my head. (Funnily enough, they weren’t the plot threads I was worried about.) However, the feedback all pointed in roughly the same direction. Right away I had some ideas. I spent a few months revising, and finished that in July 2024. What I’ve received from the following round of feedback has told me that it will be the last round. Now I’m getting a few more outside opinions — and after I address any remaining comments, the next thing to tackle is querying agents.
I know I have a whole lot of rejection ahead of me, but I’m excited! I’m happy with what I’ve created, and I hope it goes somewhere. In the meantime…it will be nice to draw some maps again for my creative outlet.
The Cathedral Galaxy setting is now complete with a full set of regional maps, each highlighting a particular area of the galaxy and an aspect of the setting. Extra lore and artwork are scattered throughout, in addition to the larger overview map and establishing descriptions of each region posted here. Enjoy!
My next step is writing a story in this galaxy. I will not make any statements on how long that will take!
In addition, I’ve had a few people ask me about setting role-playing games in the Cathedral Galaxy. That idea intrigues me, and I’m happy to learn that players are interested in using my universe for their games. So, I have put together some lore and gameplay reference materials that you may use. Click through to read more.
Some time ago, I got the germ of an idea for a science fiction story after thinking about the ridiculousness of aliens invading the Earth for its resources. Basically, most raw resources that aliens could find on Earth are also present in other places in the Solar System…without a big gravity well to get down into, and without pesky native species to fight. With our limited space capabilities, we would have to sit here and watch as all the asteroids and moons in the system got stripped. I sat on this idea half-written for a while, until — during the COVID-19 pandemic — I realized something: this is a story about the climate crisis, and it includes some of the feelings I’ve been grappling with about our society’s declining ability to engage with the problems facing us. So, I’ve finished the story, and shared it with a few people.
The general feedback I got from early readers was that, while this is a neat exploration of an idea in the vein of Clarke or Asimov, it lacks character-driven development. And I agree…but I couldn’t think of a good way to add that without it seeming pasted on (or making the story completely about the character-driven problems, and having the alien invasion be the thing pasted on) and avoid muddling the whole point behind the story. So, since I think the lack of character-driven action will make a magazine unlikely to pick it up, I’ve decided to post the story in full here:
“Can I see, Mommy?”
“No,” said Terry. She hunched closer to the monitor for a moment, then leaned over to scribble a note on her pad. Hailey’s day care let out early that day, but her parents were still engrossed in their work at the observatory. So they split their attention.
“Daddy?”
“Hmm?” Dan glanced up. “Oh, sure. Here you go.” He hefted his daughter above the edge of the desk.
“Daniel! I don’t want her to see her whole future evaporate!”
“She’s too young to know.” Dan’s brow furrowed. “Besides, it’d be more like her great-, great-, great-, …”
“That’s not helping, Dan.”
On the monitor, a repeating loop of sixteen false-color frames showed the telescope’s view of Neptune. Small sparks flitted among the dance of moons. In a time-compressed view spanning several days, some touched down and lifted off. Some of them dove into the outer atmosphere of the ice giant itself.
Hailey flapped an awkward toddler hand at the keyboard. Dan grunted and put her down.
“I’mna gonna evvaprate!” she protested.
“Will anybody even recognize this as a threat?” he asked. “I mean, there are a few groups doing asteroid mining at a proof-of-concept level…but getting to stuff around Neptune is decades, maybe centuries, away.”
Terry rubbed the bridge of her nose. The alien craft had been in the Neptunian system for months. By now, it was clear – from albedo changes of the moons and careful examination of the changes to the aliens’ orbits – that they were mining and removing material. Water and nitrogen ice from Triton, hydrogen and methane from Neptune’s cloud layers – all valuable resources for a spacefaring civilization.
The Cathedral Galaxy: so named to evoke an awe-inspiring structure; something built over generations. Eons before the advent of starflight, the Ancients – Progenitors, Precursors, Archaics, Elders – constructed a galaxy-spanning civilization. They learned to harness energies, manipulate matter, and gather information on a vast scale, ultimately building a network of wormhole passages across the galaxy. At the height of their power, they encountered a malevolence from outside the galaxy: some think an evil intent, some say a natural phenomenon. Nobody yet knows what happened to the Old Ones. Perhaps they died. Perhaps they absconded. Perhaps their essence remains embedded in the constructs they left scattered through the galaxy – some still functioning at mysterious purposes, some long torn down by the forces of gravity and radiation. Perhaps the Elders even remain alive. After all, ages after empires have risen and fell and risen again, no one has penetrated the dense, irradiated Cathedral at the galaxy’s heart.
The Cathedral Galaxy map
Thousands of years ago, the first modern peoples discovered the principles of spatial trajection. With this starflight capability, a ship could disappear from normal space and, a fixed time interval later, reappear some light-years away. They soon found ruins of the Prior civilization. Eventually they located the Founders’ great Anchors, entry points to the wormhole network, providing instant transit – much better than time-consuming and energy-intensive trajector jumps. Many other peoples followed suit, and the wormhole passages thus became channels of commerce and information allowing galactic civilizations to be built again. Through their history, the peoples of the galaxy have always been keenly aware of those who came before – and all that has been lost, exemplified by the nonfunctional wormhole gates drifting near many of the active Anchors. Now, the galaxy has reached a relatively stable state. Decadent empires, considered republics, brave adventurers, learned researchers, inventive scavengers, and noble warriors make their home in this galaxy, from the populous core nations to the empty frontier fringes.
It is a galaxy of both promise and stillness at this moment in time. After eons, what is an extra nova in the uninhabited core? What is a rumor of new Anchors opening, or existing Anchors closing, but a rumor? And what is an archaic megastructure activating instruments, seeming to seek for something outside the confines of the galaxy, but a relic running an obsolete program…?
Original line art
I have been mulling an improved map of the Cathedral Galaxy for some time, and finally bit the bullet. (Here’s the original.) For this improved and expanded version, my method was to draw the line art in black pen on white paper, then invert a photograph and color/manipulate it in Photoshop. I’m pleased with the result.
Amseile, a proud young realm nestled in two star-forming nebula regions. After uniting from several independent systems in 18k450, Amseile fought a devastating war with Shobah with lasting effects on galactic politics to this day.
The Axiom Republic, a large, baroque state of learning and cultural achievement. The Republic’s central location in the galaxy means that it contains many Precursor artifacts such as the Spire and Taron’s Throne, as well as celestial phenomena like the emission nebula Twin Idols, dust clouds of Onyx Space and Silver Run, the active Sapphire cluster, and the end-of-life star Khalkeus that sheds heavy elements.
Harrow’s Core, home of two enigmatic peoples who believe, among other strange ideas, that the galaxy itself is a living organism. There are rumors that a secret and powerful Archaic weapon prevented other polities from absorbing the Core during their expansionary phases.
The realms of what the core nations call the Exiles, nearly cut off from the rest of the galactic network by a quirk of the arrangement of wormhole passages: Babylon, a decadent theocratic empire; the Free Worlds, a xenophobic and militant confederation; and the Underworlds, domain of a people stereotyped by the rest of the galaxy as the Dead Ones – according to one legend, the last of the Ancients, but robbed of their faculties. The Panther Nebula, a dust cloud with an obviously recognizable shape from throughout the Burial Grounds, signals adventurers away from this region.
The Far Reaches, a spiral arm of the galaxy with a sparse population but many lesser Elder relics.
The Imperium of the Triumvirate, once a vast empire, now reduced to three closely allied provinces each under its own despot: technologically advanced, aggressive, and lacking restraint. The Imperium’s skirmishes are not always with other nations. Aoreu is known for the exotic star-forming Menagerie, but the true symbol of the Imperium is the Coliseum, a Progenitor-built sphere surrounding a white dwarf, where biomechanically modified beings battle for citizens’ amusement.
The Mariner Worlds, a loose affiliation of wanderers, not all native to this sparse region or even to the galaxy itself. Among these worlds are Harbor, a focusing construct partially surrounding an unusual dwarf star that appears on the verge of collapse to a neutron star; Haven, a resource-rich protoplanetary disk; and the Lighthouse, an array of transmitters and instruments aimed into the extragalactic medium.
Shobah, a nation of rigid structures and protocols, home to a sect of Librarians who believe that the Ancients discovered all knowledge it is possible to find, and therefore focus all research on the ruins scattered throughout the galaxy. Knowledge gleaned from the Ancient wrecks helped Shobah fight off Amseile’s incursions in the war.
The Traders’ Rim, where the layout and performance of the Channel Anchors make the region vital for speeding commerce and communication among the central galactic states from the Imperium to Shobah. Traders are some of the few people grudgingly accepted into the Free Worlds, making them a tenuous link between that region and the inner galaxy. Prominent landmarks in the Rim include the blue giant Azure, the black hole Point of No Return, and the planetary nebula Mokid’s Eye.
The Ramparts, filled not only with ancient artifacts from the First Ones, but also with the remains of several civilizations that died out before contact with others.
The Sea of Relics, a span with a high proportion of Elder artifacts – many of them still functioning, such as the cryptic information repository at Bastion. Radiation from the active jets of The Pillar keep this region relatively uninhabited. The Burial Grounds, on the other hand, collects fragmented wrecks of Archaic constructs after gravitational tides and cosmic radiation have weathered and broken them down.
The Well of Ghosts, a devastated region scattered with burned worlds and detritus from the Amseile-Shobah wars. It stands as a monument to the terrible power of starflyers’ weapons.
Not all peoples of the galaxy are rooted to a location. The Waygehn had the misfortune of evolving close to the end of their star’s life, and are now spread throughout the Axiom Republic, Traders’ Rim, Imperium of the Triumvirate, and Amseile to form their own political super-entity. Many Waygehn located functional-but-inert relics and retrofitted their own systems onto the ancient hardware to form great arkships and wandering space stations.
The world known to humankind as Zarmina (catalog identifier Gliese 581g) is a habitable planet orbiting a red dwarf star. It is tidally locked to its dim sun, such that one face of the planet always points toward the sun. The most striking consequence of this orbit geometry is that the habitable region of the planet is a disk-shaped area roughly the size of an earthly continent. The center of this zone always sees a sun at high noon, while toward the edge of the disk, the sun sinks gradually away from zenith. Outside this region, Zarmina is encased in ice. As the sun does not define east and west, the cardinal direction convention on Zarmina refers to the planet’s orbit, instead: prograde (in the direction of the orbit), retrograde, normal (up from the orbit), and antinormal.
Zarmina does not exhibit evidence of plate tectonics. Surface features express several processes: large-scale rift graben form from tidal stresses, shield volcanoes build over mantle hotspots, impact craters and basins dot the planet, and erosion slowly whittles down the more ancient features.
The world hosts life with biodiversity similar to the Earth. One dominant intelligent species has settled across the landmass, with cultures reaching technological development levels roughly equivalent to 1300-1600 CE on Earth. There are three regions with large populations, indicated on the map in normal-retrograde (NR), antinormal-prograde (AP), and normal-prograde (NP) callouts. In the four major language families of Zarmina, the natives call their world Hámnù, Pedak, Gaustan, or Estivama.
The NR region hosts two major linguistic and cultural families. The first is an empire ruled from the city of Hòmp Sīnkà (Port Sinka). Explorers and artisans populate this empire; though the political extent of the empire only reaches as far as Níngtòhús (Greencliff), speakers of the imperial language can be found all along the coast in the prograde direction as well as in coastal settlements on the other side of Fíkùm Pòst (The Normal-Direction Sea). The antinormal borders of the empire are more ragged and contentious, however – the imperial urge to spread its vision of culture and knowledge brings it into direct conflict with the city-states in that area. The people of Kivod Sev Adoso (Mountain Gate Town) dominate the substantial resources of Sev Skem (Mountain Channel) and have repelled several campaigns launched from Hútpòkā (Chasmtop). Hòmp Sīnkà rapidly loses its stomach for these campaigns, and so Kivod Sev Adoso holds back imperial expansion. A more fluid and contentious collision of cultures occurs in Pasken Gimet (Pasken Forest). Scattered settlements under the command of local chiefs raid imperial populations farming antinormal of Ngùsì Āmā (Wide River) while imperial reprisals prevent the Pasken peoples from incorporating large towns. The disparate kindgoms of Ogjapud (Grayrock), Katofa Petang (Retrograde City), and Fetva Zand (Calm Peninsula) maintain their own set of animosities and alliances.
The plains of the AP region offer little shelter from the winds that blow in off the ocean. As the land rises, larger and larger plants cover the land until one encounters lush prairies between dendritic river networks. Roaming clans live on the prairie “kidan.” A few large settlements dot the kidan, most notably Jung a Uid Nakaun (the City of Two Rivers). The kida clans take pride in not pinning themselves to a particular place – many of their dwellings are portable, and they happily move their crops to new locations on the fertile plains when they tire of the old. The culture is leery of townfolk. The Ushtin clan is a splinter from the kida clans, and is more attached to their resource-rich homeland on the shore of Gaiju a Shai (Lake of Wind). On the other end of the cultural spectrum, the dramatically different Togui a Awaish (Chasm of the Forest) hosts a sect worshipping the sun god Dautwai. This sect possesses the settlements of Santiso (roughly, Above-the-Green) and Uigonja (named for the uigon trees), as well as a major urban center in Jung Togunau. From the isthmus of the Nakau Dautwai, dramatic views of the Audos a No (Mountain of the Sun) have inspired monuments throughout the city. The natural defenses of Togui a Awaish shield the people within from raiding kida clansmen.
Lush lands and geographic barriers squeezed into a comparatively smaller area give rise to the warring city-states of the NP region. Though they share a common linguistic root, each of the population centers here represent separate nations. The largest are Evinbok and Neka Estag, both named for their original monarchs. Evinbok holds a position of strategic strength, with access to productive outlying farmland in Pantma Zhusti (the Upper Plains), while timber and easily quarried rock are in the ancient impact basin of Gesta Kazi (Broken Bowl). Kagzai (roughly, Blue-ton) and Ka Topi (Lower Town) are notable for practicing a form of representative democracy. Ka Shata Besi (High Cliff Town) is the center of a prosperous small nation of traders, who build ships from the timber of Tifa ko Pantma Shti (Forest of the Red Plain) and sail through Vimna Shti (Red Pass) as far antinormal as Sot Ushtin.
This map is hand-drawn with Pigma Micron pens of various types, then colored in Derwent watercolor pencils. I finish the map by painting over the pencils to blend and soften the watercolors together. The last step is photographing the piece with a 60 mm macro lens. The entire thing is 17″ wide and 14″ tall.
“The Martian:” Yeah, Martian dust storms are nothing. Yeah, Rich Purnell could’ve explained his maneuver to the NASA top brass with about six acronyms and the phrase “gravity assist.” Yeah, real-life-JPL has almost nothing to do with human space exploration. And yeah, that blow-up-the-Hermes thing is a completely harebrained and terrible idea.
I’ll give the movie a pass on all those counts, because it’s a good story, it gets most things right, and it puts technical problem-solving front and center. But here’s what really drives me nuts about “The Martian:”
“The Martian” highlights what NASAmustdo, but is not doing, in order to get people to Mars.
The Hermes
NASA must build interplanetary transfer craft optimized for deep-space travel, like the Hermes, not single-use capsules designed mostly for reentering Earth’s atmosphere like Orion.
NASA must invest significant research and development effort into “in-situ resource utilization,” such as the robotic manufacture of the fuels and propellants the MAV uses for Mars ascent.
NASA must develop closed-loop life support systems, like Mark Watney has in the water reclaimer and the oxygenator.
NASA must learn to grow food on Mars, instead of trying to send every supply with their astronauts in a single mission.
NASA must build vehicles that provide their crew with artificial gravity, by rotating, to counteract the bone loss effects of long-duration spaceflight.
NASA must learn to let its astronauts solve their own problems when they are twenty light-minutes away from Mission Control.
Most of all, NASA must try a lot of ideas, and they must be willing to see some of those ideas fail, in order to accomplish their ultimate goals.
What astronauts on Mars should be doing
Right now, NASA’s plans for getting people to Mars revolve around a series of activities designed to “learn how to live and work in space.” These activities include astronaut Scott Kelly’s hashtag-YearInSpace mission and the Asteroid Redirect Mission.
Commander Kelly’s mission has the goal of learning how the human body responds to a long duration spaceflight. At the end of his mission, Kelly will be tied for the fifth-longest duration spaceflight. We already have much experience with long spaceflights. Our friends in Russia have even more. So we already know pretty much everything that’s going to happen to him. What’s more, we know ways to mitigate those adverse effects. We need, for example, something to simulate gravity. Like a spacecraft with a centrifuge. That’s a solution science fiction – including “The Martian” – has taken for granted for decades, though NASA has no obvious plans to build true long-duration space vehicles for its crews. They will go to Mars floating in the cramped zero-g environs of an Orion capsule.
NASA also isn’t looking seriously at growing food to keep their crews fed in space. At a conference last March, I learned that all the Mars exploration reference missions involve taking all the food the crew needs for their entire travel, exploration, and return mission. That takes a huge amount of payload mass. Mark Watney did a much better job – and saved a lot of weight – by turning a few potatoes into food for a year. He got fresh vegetables, something his colleagues on the Hermes didn’t even have. Rover data shows that plants could grow on Mars, and creating a spacefaring civilization obviously depends on our ability to feed astronauts – so, again, why not look at the obvious solutions?
The big idea that “The Martian” demonstrates is human ingenuity and problem-solving. To NASA, though, that’s a problem. NASA doesn’t want astronauts tearing components apart and putting them back together like Mark Watney does. They want to have astronauts follow a checklist that has been tested, verified, and validated on the ground in several dozen ways. That philosophy is so pervasive in NASA that agency officials talk about how they need the Asteroid Redirect Mission to “test” solar-electric propulsion – a technology that NASA itself has been using in flight missions since 1998. If NASA really wants to go to Mars, it’s going to have to learn to be more like “The Martian:” being willing to take risks, try new ideas, and give its astronauts leeway to make decisions.
That’s what drives me nuts about “The Martian.” It depicts the space program that I’ve been hungering for for thirty years…and I’m afraid I won’t see such a thing for thirty more, at least.
