Good news from Mars

Hoorah! Spaceflight Now (and lots of other sources) reports that the Mars rover Opportunity is finally free of the sand dune it’s been stuck in since the end of April, thanks to a weeks-long and undoubtedly pizza-and-chocolate-fueled effort on the part of NASA geeks to get it moving again. (What can’t geeks do? The rover, which was of course designed by geeks, is a year and a half into a mission originally planned to last 90 days.)

The thought that that plucky little robot has been literally spinning its wheels for a month without ever giving up just about melts my heart, in a similar (but much happier) way that the thought of the Mars Pathfinder fruitlessly trying to call home to Earth after the batteries on its lander had run down made me unspeakably sad. Man, I remember like it was yesterday sitting around watching TV all day on July 4, 1997, waiting for word -- and pictures, holy crap: pictures -- from the red planet that the lander had landed and the rover was roving and that we were on Mars again for the first time since Viking. And now we’re there again, and it’s too bad it ain’t people walking around in the Martian sand, but damn, those rovers got spunk, don’t they?

I was born a month after humans walked on the moon. I remember absolutely everything about that day when I was junior in high school when the Challenger shuttle blew up. Inseparable in my mind are the return to orbit of the shuttle and the offer of my first job in publishing after I dropped out of college -- they both happened on the same day in 1988. Generation X has been witness to the beginnings of human exploration of space at precisely the right tender age to imprint the excitement of it on our brains. We’re hardly the first generation to enjoy or create science fiction, but we’re the first for whom it hasn’t all been entirely science fiction.

Of course, not every member of GenX appreciates this. I remember, maybe a year or two after graduating from high school, where I had never made a secret of my geeky proclivities, running into a former, nongeeky classmate who was working as a cashier in a drugstore where I was shopping. We fell into conversation, and I noted with geeky glee the fact the some customer was paying with a credit card that had been personalized (an option that was just starting to be offered by the banks) with an image of the space shuttle blasting off. And this former classmate said, "Oh yeah, you were always into that science fiction stuff." I didn’t say anything, but I recall thinking, "Science fiction? This is science fact -- it’s happening now."

We’re all living in this world of rapidly accelerating technological change -- where, within the Xer lifetime, we’ve gone from black-and-white TVs showing three channels to global online networks of thousands of illegally downloadable movies and TV shows; from painful smallpox vaccinations that left us all with unmistakable scars on our upper arms to human cloning. But it seems to take the geeky mindset to get a real grasp on the impact all these cool toys will have on everyone. Sure, we geeks have an affinity for new technology and an irresistible urge to find unusual ways to use it, but intrinsic in "geekiness" seems to be a recognition that it has the potential to change everyone’s lives... that it’s not merely silly "science fiction" that’s easily dismissed.

And that, ironically, is part of why I suspect geeks are drawn to science fiction, and why science fiction is so big a part of Xer culture, not just in the form our stories take but in the metaphors that really speak to us in general. Of course the genre existed long before we came along... but if one literary tradition could have been specifically designed to speak to us, this’d be it.