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WHEN I was young I stumbled on the pulp magazines, Astounding and Amazing
and was at once fascinated. I remember one story that I found impressive
at the time and would possibly still be impressive if I read it again now.
It was about a civilisation of the future, based on the advances of science
and technology, but which had a vociferous opposition led by a revolutionary
demagogue whose battle cry was that if anything was not ‘natural’ then it
was bad. I believe that the situation deteriorated into mayhem, though I
don’t recall much more. Neither can I drag the name of the author out of
my memory, but it has occasionally occurred to me that it was a plausible
theme, a hectic exaggeration of the relations between industry and the Green
parties of our own time.

A big part of the appeal of the magazines were the illustrations, especially
those of the strange shapes of imaginary spaceships against the blackness
of space and the glimpses of the fantastic surfaces of other planets in
other solar systems. So to look at the pictures from Voyager 2 of the surface
of Neptune and then Triton was magical, like stepping into the pages of
those old magazines and finding everything was real.

The discoveries made by the two Voyager spacecraft on their stupendous
journeys, and even the fact of the journeys being achieved at all, are prodigious.
It seems to me that imagination must be dead in anyone who is unmoved by
them. It has been fashionable for years, of course, to be blase about space
travel, especially about American effort. Odd that unfeeling and savage
jokes could be made about the Challenger disaster, but not about any Russian,
or indeed, European failure. Acknowledgement of the American courage in
showing launches, failures and all, to the whole world as they happened
has seldom been made. The US space programmes have been constantly criticised
as being so costly that they could be crippling to the country’s finances
or that they were spending money that would be better spent on welfare,
or that they did not and would not bring any worthwhile benefits.

Nagging and carping on such a scale must have been utterly dispiriting.
I sympathise with the Californian woman who wrote recently to The Sunday
Times protesting about a review of two books about the landings of men on
the Moon. The review, by Ben Pimlott, said, among other things, that they
detailed ‘a magnificently purposeless symptom of an excess of national power
and wealth’ and ‘a triumph, not of human daring, but of technological coordination
and bureaucratic planning’. She thought this invective insulting. I think
it is tiresome, ‘clever’ superiority. Also wrong. I wonder what word would
be more appropriate than ‘daring’ to describe men who landed on the Moon
without the certainty of getting off it again, for example? I doubt whether
such terms would have been used about a Russian expedition if it had reached
the Moon first (after a secret launch). For years we have been led to believe
that there were no plans in the USSR for a manned landing. The gospel was
that the Russians were more level-headed and would not risk lives, preferring
to use remote-controlled probes. Now we know from a former Russian astronaut,
Colonel Valeri Bykovsky that there were plans for a manned flight to the
Moon for a preliminary orbit round it, scheduled for 1968. Only the death
of the chief designer for the USSR’s space programmes prevented its being
one year ahead of the Americans. The Russians are famously better than the
Americans at bureaucratic planning, of course.

What things may be said of the mission to Mars proposed by President
Bush will perhaps employ even more extravagent sentences from those whose
feet are rooted to the ground. But Mars will be explored, no matter what,
because it is there to be explored and the means of doing it will exist.

Such a project might be somewhat nearer because of the splendid success
of the Voyagers. Some Americans think that there has been an uncharacteristic
timidity in NASA and other organisations since the Challenger catastrophe.
The serenity of the Voyager missions and the cataracts of information about
our Solar System they have provided might start a process of stiffening
the sinews and summoning up the blood for further enterprises.

* * *

AN IMMEDIATE bonus from the information is that we may not be plagued
any more by Venusians or Neptunians arriving on Planet Earth in spaceships
to warn us about something or other, or to colonise our shining home. It
is clear that there are no possibilities of life on the other planets orbiting
our Sun. The crews of flying saucers, whether anxious about our future or
concocting sinister designs on it, must come from other solar systems and
are, therefore, not likely to turn up in great numbers or with any frequency.

On the other hand, the believers will probably ride with the punch and
conjure up mother spaceships stationed just beyond the heliopause and the
ability to travel with the speed of light or through time and space warps.
Those who think that there is a big hole in the Earth from which flying
saucers issue can rest easy.

Science-fiction writers must take note of our loneliness. I hope they
are taking note of other discoveries of the Voyagers, such as the extraordinary
corkscrew-shaped magnetic field extending millions of miles into space from
Uranus. The startling phenomenon that should, I reckon, be exciting authors,
is the colossal electric current flowing between Io and Jupiter. There must
be imaginative ways of tapping this and transmitting power back to Earth.
A few hundred years on, perhaps it will be done in reality.

That would please any future Green party. Free power, no pollution,
no radioactive wastes. Perhaps John Gribbin and Marcus Chown, who, in a
recent novel, have already dealt with landing a comet on the Moon and so
providing that desert with an atmosphere and water, could give the idea
some thought.

* * *

SOMEWHAT shiftily, I was examining an acquaintance’s bookshelves while
he was out of the room. There was a section of books on jazz, with biographies
of Jack Teagarden, Hoagy Carmichael and so on and several volumes devoted
to Duke Ellington. One was called simply, The Duke, by Philip Guedalla.
I thought this was unlikely and opened it. It was a biography of the Duke
of Wellington.

I don’t know if someone had arranged the books in sections for him,
but also in the row was Mr Jelly’s Business. Ferdinand (Jelly Roll) Morton?
Not, it was a detective by Arthur Upfield.