In memory of Abraham Savitzky, 1919-1999; Shirley Weinland Hentzell, 1931-1999.
I wrote this for my father a few months before he died; he went to grad school with Isaac Asimov, and introduced me to folk music, computers and science fiction.
Some dreams were dead before they could come true.
The Saturn Five once carried spacemen moonward
We've lost the plans to build her kind again
Bureaucracy and budgets dragged her under
Her launching pad stands rusting in the rain.
refrain
The century's last year was safely far away
We'd have machines that talked with us, and more.
We never knew the challenge we'd be facing
Was code we keypunched forty years before.
Atomic powered rockets were a pipe-dream;
Most cities still burn coal to chase the dark.
The monorail that once ran to the spaceport
Takes children to an outing in the park.
refrain
But the future that we lost is still someplace out there
Orion still rides hellfire toward the blue,
And rockets proudly land upon their tailfins,
As God and Robert Heinlein meant them to.
Yes, someplace there are old fans who remember
The way the future was when we were young,
And when the chains of space and time slip from me
I'll be part of the song that once was sung.
C
And I'll share a song with Rhysling,
F
C
bes
ide the Grand Can
al,
C*
G
G7
Ride l
ightsails on the endless starry s
ea
F*
C
When
I've become the st
uff that dreams
C
F
are made
of
G
C
G
C
In the f
uture of my ch
ildrens' mem
or
y.
My father went to graduate school with Isaac Asimov and was a long-time SF
fan, though as far as I know he never went in for FANAC.\footnote{Fannish
Activity, e.g., conventions, fanzines, and lettercols.} Many of the
references in this song will be obscure to those unfamiliar with science
fiction as it was before the opening of space in the 1960's.
The canals of Percival Lowell's Mars figured in almost every story about the
Red Planet right up until the first probes proved beyond a doubt that there
weren't any. ``The Spires of Truth'' are mentioned in the song
The Grand Canal by Rhysling, the Blind Poet of the Spaceways,
in Robert A. Heinlein's
classic tale The Green Hills of Earth, which can be found in his book
of the same title. We meet Rhysling again in the final chorus.
Similarly the clouds of Venus were generally believed to be water vapor, over
a water-world of swamps and seas (see, for instance, Asimov's
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Heinlein's Between Planets,
and The Space Merchants by Frederic Pohl).
The probes, of course, proved that the
clouds consisted largely of sulphuric acid, near the top of a deep atmosphere
of carbon dioxide. Conditions at the surface are literally hellish, with
pressures of 600 atmospheres and temperatures above the melting point of lead.
Pohl later wrote a book, The Way the Future Was, about the early
days of science fiction fandom. Its title forms part of the last verse.
The Saturn 5, used to launch the Apollo astronauts to the moon, was the
largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It still is. The engineering
drawings for the Saturn 5 and its engines no longer exist. Kids graduating
from college these days were born after men stopped going to the moon. Robert
L. Glass used pictures of its abandoned launchpad to illustrate his book
about failed software projects, Computing Catastrophes.
My father used to be a chemist; he has major patents in infrared spectroscopy
(the dual-beam spectrophotometer) and digital signal processing (the
Savitzky-Golay algorithm for smoothing and peakfinding). He got me interested
in computers when I was in high school. In those days people were more
worried about saving space on 80-column punched cards than about such trivial
problems as what would happen when two-digit date fields rolled over. Code
has a way of sticking around, however, and somewhere there is probably still
an IBM System 390 mainframe emulating a 7090 emulating a 650 (with drum memory
and tubes) emulating a patchboard program on a 407 punched-card tabulating
machine. I've seen a square root patchboard for a 407--you don't want to
know.
Robots\footnote{See, for example, Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot.} and
other talking computers\footnote{E.g., Hal in Arthur C. Clarke's
2001, A Space Odyssey.} of course, are still in the future.
Atomic-powered rockets were stillborn: Freeman Dyson's Orion, powered
by a sequence of nuclear explosions, was still in the early stages (a
dynamite-powered prototype had actually flown in 1959) when it was killed by
the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Orion appears as the Earth-to-Moon
craft in 2001. Atomic power, once touted as safe, clean, and ``too
cheap to meter'' has proved to be none of the above (though in terms of lives
and pollution coal and oil are still much, much worse).
Almost every other SF cover illustration in the 50's featured cities of
streamlined art-deco skyscrapers with monorail trains running on improbably
fragile bridges between them. The best-known working example these days is
at Disneyland.
Arlan Andrews, reporting on the first flights of the Douglas DCX (a prototype
SSTO,\footnote{Single Stage to Orbit} spacecraft) in a 1993 Analog article
entitled ``Single Stage to Infinity'', said that the DCX and its kin ``...
take off and land vertically, the way God and Robert Heinlein intended.'' The
phrase is frequently misquoted (I have merely paraphrased it; I believe my
poetic license is still current) and often mistakenly ascribed (as I
originally did) to Jerry Pournelle. Of course, the DCX had landing struts,
not fins. Perhaps the best known exemplar of that style of flight was seen in
the George Pal film Destination Moon, for which Heinlein was the
technical advisor.
Lightsails are still in the future, but could be the cheap way to fly the
spacelanes. As I write this, the Russians are experimenting with large,
lightweight mirrors near Mir. The classic story is ``The Lady Who Sailed
the Soul'' by Cordwainer Smith. Others\footnote{E.g., Robert
L. Forward in Flight of the Dragonfly.} have put in more technical
detail, but noone has outdone Smith for sheer poetry and sense of wonder.
And in the end, that's what really matters, isn't it?
Oh, yes: ``The stuff that dreams are made of'' comes from
Shakespeare\footnote{The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1; one of my favorite
works of fantasy.} by way of Dashiel Hammett and Humphrey Bogart (as
slightly mis-quoted in the last line of The Maltese Falcon):
Our revels now are ended: these our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yes, and all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind: We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
