Dayton Ward said something on Twitter the other day (about Apollo 11) that prompted some musing that I really wished
James Michener's Space were available on DVD, because I could imagine a binge watch of
The Right Stuff and
From the Earth to the Moon and
Apollo 13 and
Space (even though that's fictional) all in close proximity. Then I realized that I probably had never read Michener's novel, and when coincidentally
Space appeared in a bargain ebook newsletter the next day I took that as a sign and bought the book immediately.
Space tells a fictionalized version of the story of the American space program, beginning during World War II and carrying on through about 1980, give or take, as seen through the eyes of four men (a World War II Navy veteran and United States senator, a Navy pilot of the Korean War who becomes a test pilot, an engineer from the German rocket program who dreams of multi-stage rockets, and an American civilian engineer who helps the German engineers escape from Germany to work for the United States government on their rocket program) and the people around them.
I have not finished the book yet -- like 95% of Michener's work, it's a doorstopper, even as an ebook -- and Sputnik hasn't even been launched by the Soviets. Yet, I wanted to talk about one aspect of Michener's book that I find absolutely fascinating.
Space is an alternate history. Not in the sense that Michener created fictional characters to tell a story about the factual events around early American space exploration. In the sense that the United States of
Space is not our United States. It has at least two additional states -- Fremont and Red River. Fremont is sort of in the Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado area, but it doesn't replace any of these, as those states also exist. Red River, at least to where I am, is a little more difficult to figure out, but it's somewhere near the Ozarks (since the Senator from Red River talks about hunting in the Ozarks). Perhaps Red River is like West Virginia, a part of Arkansas that broke away from the state during the Civil War and formed its own Northern-aligned government. Fremont is a bit harder to figure, because its major cities (named after Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun) don't align with any known cities, but I can almost imagine a scenario where it was admitted during the Civil War, much as Nevada was, in order to pad the Electoral College for the Republican Party. Yet, in the early 1950s there are still only 96 Senators, indicating 48 states, so which states do not exist? Are states we know combined into one in Michener's alternate history? Possibly the Dakotas admitted as a single state, and Arizona and New Mexico as a single state?
Michener is trying to tell a story about the space program, and I'm trying to figure out his alternate history's point of departure.
As for the book itself, it's fine. Michener can sometimes be frustrating to read because his characters are underdeveloped (frankly, I don't understand Elinor Grant and her motivations at
all) or because he pulls his narrative POV back
so far that it feels like mental whiplash. Still, there are moments of subtlety and genius, like an early passage that prefigures Carl Sagan's own "Pale Blue Dot."
