I Dream of Martian Soil

Spengler, Blish, and Science Fiction

The Martian (2015) is one of my father’s favorite movies, and it’s one of the few books he’s read cover to cover that wasn’t a technical manual or a Louis L’Amour Western. It is a movie that he has seen more than once, and it’s one of those movies that still brings a smile to his face every time that he watches it. He grew up in the midst of the space race, the shuttle, and the optimism that came that America was going towards the stars and we would one day make it a home away from home.

When I was younger we lived around the DC area, and as a kid at the turn of the century the optimism was everywhere. The National Air and Space Museum is still my favorite museum of all time, and when going there in the 2000s you would see the promotional material for the then-latest rovers headed to Mars, Spirit and Opportunity. The Space Shuttle regularly launched, and seemed like that the United States was at the top of the world technologically, and I remember furiously reading over as many science books about spaceflight as I could. Not to wax poetically on nostalgia, but even to this day I can still look up in the sky and accurately identify civilian and military aircraft. I wanted to be a pilot, I still love video games with an emphasis on flight, and the hours I have in IL-2 (especially the Flying Circus pack) and War Thunder are more than I would honestly like to admit. I don’t think I’m leaning too hard on the nostalgia, especially when most Americans nowadays know that things have certainly off course.

So when watching this movie with my folks a few weeks back, I was taken aback at how much I wanted to like this movie. It’s enjoyable as you look past the “I’m going to science the shit out of this” you see the ultimate kind of Robinson Crusoe plot play out: A Man, on a Desert Planet that is Uninhabitable, Forced to Survive for as Long as He Can.

It’s one hell of a plot, with technology on screen that is believably close enough to what has been sketched out by NASA, ESA, the Chinese, and other nations with developed space programs. There is something rather cheery in an age of “woke hollywood” (Hollywood was always red, debauched, and propagandistic since the destruction of the Hays Code.) to see a straight white male protagonist engaging in a tale of survival, ingenuity, and the reliance of his wits and tools to keep him alive. The plot is competent, and even offers an “updated for modern audiences” take on that Cold War era Space Cooperation between the United States with its diversified cast of races, religions, and characters and the monolithic/ethnic Communist Chinese Space Program. Of course this is to pander to the growing international theater audience, especially the Chinese with their hundreds of millions of consumers with a disposable income, but if we did Apollo-Soyuz at one point then you’ve got the historical narrative cover you need to sell the idea that mankind would work together on a historical rescue mission to save just one man.

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

—Astronaut Gus Grissom, 1965

In the early days of Space Flight, the televised technological marvels of the future of mankind was also engulfed with the domestic politics of “Billions for space pennies for the hungry” that came at the apex of two revolutions that were happening in America. The United States’ racial strife in the midst of the civil rights movement, and America’s technological revolution into a space age superpower in their attempts to match and best the Soviets. Paired with their best and brightest from the academies, the military, and former Nazis, they went about into the great unknown. Many died, many were injured, and the weight of the missions that were carried out weighed on the shoulders of men who used the best in their understanding of technics and physics both practical and theoretical weighed on them. The great and late Wernher von Braun said "The more we learn about God's creation, the more I am impressed with the orderliness and unerring perfection of the natural laws that govern it. In this perfection, man - the scientist - catches of glimpse of the Creator and His design for nature.  The man-to-God relationship is deepened in the devout scientist as his knowledge of the natural laws grows."

I always thought that this contrasted nicely with godless Soviet man, whose bloody uprising created millions of martyrs, and then went up into the Heavens and said God wasn’t up there down to the rest who lived on his earth. These are the feelings that I get when watching a movie about man’s desire to go up into the stars, even if the film has flaws or a simple premise heightened to narrative ends like that of Interstellar this writer simply can’t help but go back to dreaming again like the little boy he once was with his army of space shuttles, models of the futuristic looking X-33, alongside bi-planes of the Great War. The movie The Martian makes me want to feel the same things, but now as someone whose thirties are just around the corner it’s harder to feel that. That turn of the century, new millennium outlook on space exploration is clearly not there anymore. The recession came, the shuttles retired, no viable NASA alternative has really emerged, for a time America was reliant on its old adversaries’ technology, the ISS did its work, the tech sector caught up and now an Autistic Twitter Poster our closest thing to Howard Hughes sending men and women up into space. Space exploration got more politicized, from “Hidden Figures”, females taking credit for work that men did most of the actual labor of, and diversity quotas affecting the competency of our space programs as much as our air and space forces.

It shows in science fiction as well.

The NASA of the 2015 Movie The Martian is an imagined NASA of the diverse, optimistic future that liberalism promises itself, that the end of history came and went and rather than the anarcho-tyrannic bang we seem to be going out towards we instead reached for the stars like that of a Star Trek: Enterprise intro. Riff with Autistic African Americans, Children of Baptists and Hindus, asking for all the gods for help on their mission to bring one man home after an accident leaves him stranded over 140 million miles away from Earth. Even as the film offers the central message that much like the Moon Landing, rescuing an Astronaut left to survive on Mars and to get him home would be something that would get the world to freeze for a moment and look upward once more. Space and International Cooperation is the only way for humanity come forward because when you’re out in space it doesn’t matter who you are, you’re there to solve one problem and then another and maybe you might just get home in one piece.

This brings us to the late science fiction writer and author James Benjamin Blish, probably best known for novelizing some of the Star Trek Original Series episodes, and his series Cities in Flight. He was a Futurian, a fantasy writer, but also an outstanding literary critic of his time. Despite passing away in 1975 at the age of 54, he had an essay posthumously published in 1978 titled Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History, in the Science Fiction Review Journal Foundation. In it, he offers a Spenglerian analysis to the craft of science fiction that he had spent much of his life contributing to.

Blish sets out why he writes;

In this essay (which means ‘trial’) I propose to do five things: define science fiction; show why it arose when it did ; explain why it is becoming steadily more popular ; demonstrate that just as it has thus far produced no towering literary masterworks, so no such work can be expected of it in the future; and place it as a familiar phenomenon in world history.

Blish begins outlining the various schools of thought on the nature of science fiction and its place in the literary genre pantheon. From “ancestor hunters” of building off the works like that of the Epic of Gilgamesh, or to those like that of Judith Merrill saying science fiction was impossible before, and coincided with, the advent and rise of science and technology.

From here James Blish proceeds to explain where Science Fiction lies in our current state of world history. He writes the following;

Somewhere around 90% of the central thesis of this essay-which I haven’t stated yet--is not mine at all; I stole it from Oswald Spengler. This is something more than the usual acknowledgement of a debt, for the fact itself is a supporting datum for the thesis.

This does bring us to a pause, as for those unfamiliar with Oswald Spengler’s famous The Decline of the West, we are fortunate that Blish left behind definitions for the average reader or listener to follow. Oswald Spengler’s massive volumes of work delves into the nature of culture and civilization, what makes a people different from those around it, from its mathematics, language, historical perspectives of the self to religion. In doing so he offers a macroscale civilizational history of the world, cyclical and organic in its nature. I have two streams on these texts with Auron MacIntyre and Astral of the Astral Flight Podcast, if you want to know more on Spengler’s works. The article provides excellent definitions from Spengler, and James does a good job summarizing them, as for Science Fiction, Blish offers the following:

In 1975 we live late in that era of civilisation he (Spengler) calls Caesarism. In such a period he would not counsel a poet to try to become an army officer or courtier instead; but he might well say, “NOW it is too late to attempt writing a secondary epic; in Milton the West has already had its Vergil”. The incompletion and overall structural failure of Pound’s The Cantos would have been predictable to him from the outsets.

I found it interesting however that Blish cited the Club of Rome, an organization that one on the right mind as just another dubious if not outright nefarious NGO of wealthy people focusing on population growth and climate change although a dive into that organization is for another time. Here he gets to the meat of where Science Fiction stood in his eyes in 1975, the year of his death.

Blish writes the following words;

Science fiction is the internal (intracultural) literary form taken by syncretism in the West. It adopts as its subject matter that occult area where a science in decay (elaborately decorated with technology) overlaps the second religiousness-hence, incidentally, its automatic receptivity from its emergence to such notions as time travel, ESP, dianetics, Dean Drives, faster-than-light travel, reincarnation, and parallel universes.

I think it’s up to debate what our “second religiousness” looks like in 2023, whether its the empty civic religion of the American Nation and Constitution or an empty Pseudo Christianity that people pay nothing but commercialized lip-service to on Christmas and Easter. New cults emerge in a techno-messianic-materialism, straight down to a calvinist understanding that some are preordained to be left behind in the fleshly third world hell that those with the means will escape from. Either way, our science fiction today reflects the politics and the saccharine religiosity of today, right down to Gareth Edwards’ new film about artificial intelligence called “The Creator.”

Even Blish was regaling us with the politics and the nature of his work of his day over half a century ago.

He writes the following:

When a candidate for the presidency of the Science Fiction Writers of America made ‘fighting drug abuse’ part of his platform, most of us felt almost instinctively that he was making a fool of himself; and Harlan Ellison’s call to turn science fiction into a ‘literature of the streets’ met with dead silence. Nor has there been noticeable response to the challenges of Philip Jose Farmer, Michel Butor, George Hay, or British Mensa to turn science fiction into fact (and the Stalinist-oriented Futurians who published exactly this challenge 35 years ago gathered no following, either).

One might ask “what science fiction epics will stand the test of time?” Science Fiction remains in its niche, its mass appeal for the ages have also succumbed to the progressive polarization of coordinated trend appeal from young adult post apocalyptic fiction, franchise fatigue, or the personal petty politics of authors ruining their works with the fights of their audience. Science Fiction to me has always been the place where either a progressive or a reactionary can be born out of it. Secular Liberals see the world as a mission for the millenarian Star Trek, whereas the realist and the reactionary might just be happy if we get 40k or The Expanse. Science Fiction in mainstream discussion isn’t met with discussions over Haldeman, Heinlein, Blish (who coined the term “Gas Giant”) or countless others, but rather that or the medium of film such as RoboCop, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the rest. Even now as attempts to make the great Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation into a television goes underway, the progressive messaging overwrites its themes with desires for racial fantasies and poor execution.

Will “Star Wars” stand the test of time? Something tell me it won’t, even if you don’t count the franchise fatigue the original trilogy might be looked at the same way one might look at nearly century old “Metropolis” film, a historical footnote in filmmaking and story telling but nothing that may be cited in the same way the English canon still keeps Milton up on its pantheon, with countless individuals trying to be him or singing his praises.

I Dream of Martian Soil

This brings me back to the film at hand, 2015’s The Martian, with Drew Goddard’s screenplay, directed by Ridley Scott. The film is competently made, appeals to that general “lowest common denominator” audience that already had the international audience as an easy shoo-in thanks to the author Andy Weir including the Chinese in his novel. It has a diverse cast despite Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) being the main character, and being a straight white male. A black actor and rapper plays as the stereotypical “idiot savant” who comes up with the way to make the maneuvers possible, and it shows the stark contrasts between the diversified American NASA (an entity that can’t seem to get its own Artemis Program on schedule or on budget) and that of the monolithic and monoethnic Chinese Space Program.

Yet I know in reality, this is very much a fiction. A call back to a time when NASA was competent, and that we really were believers in exploration, and man’s desire to survive no matter how harsh the circumstances. It's a Robinsonade in Space, a harsh environment where man could not possibly live but somehow manages to survive for hundreds of days before being rescued by an international effort to save just one man. In the early days of manned spaceflight, it was not without near death incidents and the loss of human life. President Nixon had plans to deliver a speech if those on the Apollo 11 Mission were to die on the moon, as NASA or even the Soviets had no means to save them.

More recently in 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost in reentry, the foam strike had caused damage to the heat shield on the Shuttle’s wing that had caused the shuttle to break up upon reentry. There’s this ArsTechnica piece that I like to go back to every now and then, offering an alternative history on which NASA conducted the greatest rescue mission in the history of spaceflight, but even then I’m soberly reminded that this too, is nothing but fiction. As the report from the Incident Board tells us the NASA program managers were less concerned over the danger caused by the debris strike and well, we know the rest.

The Martian makes me feel like a kid again, one in which I want to go to that small storage box of my childhood things and see those old space shuttles and rockets one more time and think about what it would be like to land on the moon, Mars, or the exoplanets that NASA and others keep discovering. Mark Watney in real life probably exists, a competent scientist trying to survive diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a straight white man wanting to be on a future Mars Mission sometime in the second half of the 2020s. Perhaps he’ll get on that flight, only for something to go terribly wrong, have the mission grounded, or be told that for the sake of the mission he’ll be passed over for someone else.

I dream of Martian Soil, but in this place and time, it will be nothing more than a dream. At least the science fiction of these days will reflect that dream, with that hopeful technological optimism that we can escape our trajectory of civilizational winter and reach the stars before the fall comes for us all.