Rocket Dreams by Marina Benjamin, Chatto & Windus/Free Press in April, 拢12.99/$24, ISBN 0701169265/ 0743233433 Reviewed by Simon Ings
WE HAVE heard this story before: how the pioneering ambitions of the space age were only a local manifestation of our ancient desire to transcend mortal flesh. Then, when we discovered how hopelessly difficult it was for us ever to colonise space, how we disappeared into spaces of our own devising: the consensual hallucinations of the World Wide Web, strip malls and the Big Brother house.
And when we read contemporary novelists such as M. John Harrison and Gordon Burn, and see how these hallucinatory escape routes shatter, time and time again, against the walls of an ungivingly material world, we may conclude that the time of pioneers is past; that we can no longer afford to run away from ourselves.
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Journalist and former arts editor Marina Benjamin gives us, in Rocket Dreams, a personal account of how her generation grew up with, and grew out of, the space age. And while she pays her dues to cyber-rhetoric, she is, refreshingly, much more interested in the material manifestations of post-Apollo escapism 鈥� the high-Earth-orbiting islands of Gerard K. O鈥橬eill; Disney鈥檚 airbrushed designer town of Celebration; and the monastic subcultures thrown up by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
She is always acute, often caustic, and sometimes very moving as she maps the landscape of her own well-justified disillusion. Where do we go from here? Where can we go?