From the Vault: "The End of an Era"

Welcome to the next installment of From the Vault!  I spent quite a bit of time writing articles related to fiction, especially genre fiction.  Many of these are no longer available on their original websites, and exist only on my hard drive.  "From the Vault" is a place to share some of these older articles that have had their rights revert back to me since publication.  Please note, many of these are 5-10 years old, and have not been edited since their original publication; I apologize for any spelling and grammar errors!

Today, we will look at the end of NASA's manned space shuttle program.

The End of an Era

By Luke Forney

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
—John F. Kennedy

On Thursday, July 21, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis landed at the Kennedy Space Center, officially bringing NASA’s manned space shuttle program to a close.

NASA, formed in 1958 (as NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) to compete with the Soviet Union’s Sputnik series of satellites, began its ascent to greatness most prominently with the Mercury missions, the first to put Americans in space, launching greats such as Alan Shepard and John Glenn.  Gemini pushed the American space program forward, working to prepare for NASA’s eventual trip to the moon.  After the success of this program, begun with Gemini 3, NASA hit its pinnacle with the Apollo missions.

The first manned mission in this new program was Apollo 7.  Yet, it was with Apollo 1 that the true cost of man’s quest for the moon was brought home.  Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were participating in a test in the command module when a fire started.  All three astronauts died in fire, in what turned out to be a series of lethal design flaws in the original command module build.  Apollo 1 never flew, while Apollo 2 through  Apollo 6 were unmanned.  Finally, in October 1968, Apollo 7, featuring Apollo 1’s backup crew, put man back into space.  The success of Apollo 7, despite the crew conflicts that led to all three astronauts never going to space again, reignited confidence in manned missions after the Apollo 1 tragedy, and paved the way for lunar landing.

John F. Kennedy’s call for men on the moon was a path continued under Richard M. Nixon, who was president when, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to stand on the moon.  It took four days for Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to leave Earth, travel to the moon, and land.  Four days for one of humanity’s greatest achievements.  Human’s had left Earth, landed on another celestial body, and would return safely.  Mankind could finally, after millennia of existence, reach the stars they had looked up at for so long.

If only it had lasted.

Apollo missions continued, taking more people to the moon.  In the mid-‘70s, NASA sent up Skylab, which hosted three crews, before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and crashing down in 1979.  During Skylab’s time in the sky, the United States and Russia teamed up for the first time on a space mission, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which ended the Apollo missions.

NASA decided to focus its efforts on its space shuttle program, and in 1981 launched the first shuttle, Columbia.  Only five years later, in 1986, space shuttle Challenger disintegrated less than a minute and a half into its flight, killing all seven people aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher participating in the Teachers in Space Project.  Only in 2007, 21 years after the Challenger disaster, Barbara Morgan, McAuliffe’s backup, become the first “teacher in space.”

After nearly three years without a space shuttle mission following the Challenger, NASA resumed the shuttle project.  However, national interest had begun to decline following the end of the Apollo missions and the Challenger disaster, and most of the missions received little fanfare as NASA headed into the ‘90s.

1998 saw NASA’s next big project.  Teaming with the Russian space program, NASA began work on the International Space Station, a project that, over a decade later, is nearing completion.  A center for scientific experimentation, the ISS is a crowning achievement for the cooperation of mankind in its efforts for studying and exploring space.  However, the dwindling interest in NASA’s space shuttle program continued, only getting a burst of media buzz in 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Eight years later, space shuttle Atlantis lands, and ends the space shuttle program, along with any NASA-based manned space flights.  The final flight didn’t even break into the major news stories of the day, and NASA’s space shuttle missions truly went out with a whimper, if even that.

As science fiction fans, space exploration is a fantasy turned reality, and manned space flight was that fantasy at its greatest.  Man’s thrust into space is something that can transcend national borders, and unite all of humanity together behind a common goal and a common purpose.  With the termination of manned space flight through NASA, many of these dreams for the future have been stunted and cut off.  Perhaps, with continued unmanned space flight, mostly outsourced, and with the beginnings of commercial space flight, as well as growing space programs in other countries, manned exploration of space won’t take too large of a hit, but one can’t help but feel that, with this chapter of closing in the annals of NASA, the group that put man on the moon for the first time, some vital will be missing.

As the plaque on Apollo 11’s lunar module states, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D.  We came in peace for all mankind.”

In honor of the 28 astronauts who were awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, 17 of which were presented posthumously: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, John Young, Thomas P. Stafford, Jim Lovell, Shannon Lucid, Roger Chaffee, Edward White, William Shepard, Rick D. Husband, Willie McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clark, Ilan Ramon, Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, and Robert Crippen.  And to all those worldwide who died to send humanity to the stars.

This article was originally published in late summer or early fall 2011 at Digital Science Fiction's website.  Text copyright Luke Forney.

From the Vault: "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!"

Welcome to a new, semi-regular feature here on the site!  I spent quite a bit of time writing articles related to fiction, especially genre fiction.  Many of these are no longer available on their original websites, and exist only on my hard drive.  "From the Vault" is a new place to share some of these older articles that have had their rights revert back to me since publication.  Please note, many of these are 5-10 years old, and have not been edited since their original publication; I apologize for any spelling and grammar errors!

First up, an article examining a classic character of science fiction: Buck Rogers!

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!

By Luke Forney

Everyone has gone to see a movie adaption of a book and heard someone say, “The book was much better than the movie!”  Most readers have probably said that exact thing on a number of occasions.  And, generally, the original format of the story stays the most popular.  No Star Wars novel, for example, will ever be as popular as The Return of the Jedi, nor will the Harry Potter movies be as fondly remembered as the book series.  However, there are certainly some cases in which this simply not true.  Cowboys and Aliens was successful in the box office, even though it was based on a graphic novel of the same name that not many people outside of the comics field had heard of.

Another excellent example of this is Buck Rogers.

From the incredibly popular comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D., to the Buck Rogers radio serial, to multiple films and television shows, comics, roleplaying games, and even novels set to continuing the Buck Rogers saga (which Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote the outlines for, tying the later novels into their collaborative effort, Lucifer’s Hammer), Buck Rogers has a lengthy history as a successful and popular character in multiple media.  However, most people aren’t aware that the character that would become Buck Rogers originated, not in comics or film or television, but in two novellas published in Amazing Stories.

Philip Francis Nowlan was a newspaper columnist in Pennsylvania who hadn’t written any professionally published fiction when he sent “Armageddon—2419 A.D.” to Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback.  Exploding out of the “Yellow Peril” subgenre running rampant in pulp adventure magazines, Nowlan’s novella explored a future controlled by “Mongolian descendants” known as Hans, who, with the help of the Soviet Union, conquered the planet, before turning on their Russian compatriots.  With the United States held under the tight fist of the Hans, Americans have been forced to live in the wildernesses surrounding the populated areas, where they can hide from Han attack forces.

All this means nothing to Anthony “Tony” Rogers.  Living in Pennsylvania in 1927, Rogers was working in abandoned coal mines when he was trapped in a cave in.  Due to some strange behavior of the radioactive properties of the mine, Rogers is knocked unconscious and sleeps for almost five centuries.  Awakening after what feels like only hours, Rogers escapes from the mine to discover a whole new world on the surface.  However, Rogers is quickly swept up in a violent, explosive gun fight, saving the life of a future American woman, Wilma Deering.  From there, the adventure continues as Rogers meets Deering’s gang, which is promptly assaulted by the Hans, leading to a string of futuristic adventures.  A year later Nowlan continued the saga of Tony Rogers, Wilma Deering, and the evil Han overlords in a sequel novella, “The Airlords of Han.”

Tony Rogers (He didn’t get the nickname “Buck” until the comic strip) manages to tie in his participation in World War I, his pulp hero steadfastness, and a surprising bit of equality towards women (not common in the pulp magazines) to create a story that is certainly a fun adventure piece.  While at times heavy on the exposition, with large info dumps on the future world that Rogers is living in, the story is generally fast paced, building suspense, and is a fun read that is easily finished in one day.

Fans of science fiction adventure, and pulp adventure tales, will want to check this one out.

This article was originally published on May 28, 2012 at Digital Science Fiction's website.  Text copyright Luke Forney.

What Luke's Reading: July 2018

As a writer and a reader, I love few things more than seeing what other people are reading and telling them about what I have picked up recently.  I decided in 2018 to take my reading a little more seriously, and have been tracking what I read.  For my own sanity, I have broken them down into categories I find easy to use.  Interested in talking books?  Drop me a line!

July 2018

Prose/Poetry

• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 6: Spiraling by Marie Brennan (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• Stories on the Go: 101 Very Short Stories by 101 Authors edited by Andrew Ashling (Available FREE here)
• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 7: Dreadnought by Cassandra Khaw (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 8: Refugees by Malka Older (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 9: Assassination by Malka Older (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 10: Shattered Blades by Marie Brennan (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• Born to the Blade - Season 1, Episode 11: All the Nations of the Sky by Michael R. Underwood (Available here, also available as part of the Complete First Season)
• The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon (Available here)
• The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon (Available here)
• The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson (Available here)

Graphic Novels

• The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future by Dav Pilkey (Available here)
• The Woods, Volume 1: The Arrow written by James Tynion IV, illustrated by Michael Dialynas (Available here)
• 5 Centimeters per Second written by Makoto Shinkai, art by Yukiko Seike (Available here)

Magazines

• Havok Magazine, July 2018 (Available for FREE through Splickety Publishing's monthly newsletter or via Amazon here)
• Game Informer, August 2018 (Available via subscription here)
• Flash Fiction Online, July 2018 (Available here)
• Xbox: The Official Magazine, September 2018 (Available via subscription here)
• Broadswords and Blasters, Spring 2018 (Available here)

Did Not Finish (Stuff I just couldn't get through, for one reason or another)

• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Available here)
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Available here)
• The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz (Available here)
• Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (Available here)