New York Comic Con Special Edition 2018

Page 62

CULTURE

Mission:

MARS CAN RECENT FICTION HELP REIGNITE A DESIRE TO EXPLORE THE FAR REACHES OF SPACE? BY CHRIS LONGO ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH KNEISLEY

62 DEN OF GEEK

IN

his 1959 short story, “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting,” Arthur C. Clarke imagined an astronaut who is present for some of the biggest moments in the history of space flight. It’s 2000, and in the last half century, the astronaut has witnessed the launch of the first satellite, the first man to orbit Earth, the first moon landing, the subsequent construction of a moon colony, and a miracle of life—the first child born outside of Earth. Momentarily overlooking the triumphs of the lunar colony, Clarke’s protagonist still romanticizes the fourth rock from the sun. The Mars mission, he claims, would be man’s “first great leap” into space, leaving the moon as no more than “a suburb of Earth,” a stepping stone to the “places that really mattered.” As a longtime member of the British Interplanetary Society, Clarke tried to write the future into existence. His fiction, which he’s best known for, was always infused with fact. In 1945, 12 years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, he proposed using space satellites for a global communication system. Whether he was writing about


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