THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF ROCKET SHIPS

From an interview with Randolph Brightman, March 2052

I used to dream of being an astronaut when I was young. Read almost nothing but science fiction of the pulpiest kind, spent countless hours in front of the television taking in every iteration of Star Trek, and watched all the NASA launches as if witnessing the resurrection of Christ. I was twelve years old when the Challenger exploded on live TV, and though it had left me shaken, it had not shaken my dream of traveling in a rocket ship someday.

A dream is all it remained, however. A poor kid from a backwater southern town who had trouble passing his math classes, I had not been able to attend college and right after high school took a job cleaning bathrooms at a manufacturing plant. It paid enough for a cheap apartment and a used car that ran more on hope than gasoline. I settled in and that became my life.

I switched jobs a few times. Janitor to bag boy to cashier at a convenience store then finally a security guard at a textile plant. That was the one that took. One year became two became ten.

I never forgot my dreams of being an astronaut, even though that dream faded so far into the distance that I could only wave at it on occasion. Sometimes at night I would sit out on my little balcony and look up at the stars, naming the constellations to myself, remembering when I had once wanted to walk among them. The nostalgia was tinged with sadness, and I may have shed a few tears out on the balcony though I would never admit that to anyone. At least not until now.

I don’t want to give the impression that I had a bad life. My work wasn’t the most exciting in the world, but it paid the bills and wasn’t too stressful. I had friends, even a few romances. I wasn’t sitting at home every night, wallowing in my unfulfilled desires and abandoned hopes. I went out, had fun, laughed, and had adventures even if on a smaller scale than the ones I had imagined as a kid.

So no, I wasn’t unhappy … but I also couldn’t stop staring at the stars and thinking about what could have been.

As children, most of us wanted to be things like astronauts, firefighters, cowboys and cowgirls. At least for brief periods of time. Usually those dreams were passing phases that came and went and, if remembered at all, were remembered with embarrassed amusement. That wasn’t the case with me and my dream of exploring space. It wasn’t a flight of childish fancy, but a serious passion. Even after I realized it was an unattainable goal, it still clung to me like perfume on the collar of a shirt.

Ironically, one thing I never dreamed of being was a writer.

It all started when I was working as a guard on third shift. Not much to do on those long nights, so sometimes I would stand outside the guardhouse and watch the stars. On this particular night, I was staring up at the sky when a shooting star went streaking past, a blazing trail of light that was gone almost before my eye could even register it. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a shooting star before, but for some reason this one made me start thinking of aliens.

That isn’t as unusual as it sounds. I have always been the biggest sci-fi geek. Watched every movie that dealt with space, read everything from Bradbury to Heinlein to Weir to Dick. So a lot of things made me think of aliens. Not in a serious way, I hadn’t gone all Whitley Strieber where I believed little green men had been visiting us on a regular basis. Truthfully, I believe the statistical probability is that life probably does exist on other planets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean intelligent life. We could be talking about simple bacterial life, and even if there was something more evolved, they may still be centuries behind us in terms of technology. We very well may be the most intellectually and technologically advanced life in the universe. Depressing as that may be.

But it was still fascinating to think about extraterrestrial life visiting our planet. So I stood there, contemplating what that life might be like. As I said, maybe not life as we know it. What if it was a bacteria, and what if the invasion happened not as an attack but as an infection? The idea wasn’t new, it had been done before, but I wondered if it would fail because of the human immune system kicking in and beating the infection. Then again, cancer was aggressive and could thwart the immune system. Which led me to ponder what would happen if the alien bacteria tried to infect someone already battling cancer. Would the cancer prove more virulent, and prevent the infection from taking hold? If that were the case, then would the only true humans left on the planet be those dying of cancer? How would they fight back and try to save humanity?

The train of thought intrigued me. I didn’t think I’d ever read a book or seen a movie quite like that. I went back into the guardhouse and jotted the idea down. Not really with the intention of doing anything with it, no conscious intent anyway. I simply thought the idea was neat.

So neat that I couldn’t quite get it out of my head. Over the next few days I kept thinking of it, adding little tweaks to the idea, thinking what a great story it would make if only there was some writer to put it down on paper.

Then it occurred to me that I could put it down on paper. The very thought was kind of bizarre to me. I was no writer, I hadn’t even gone to college. Other than some melodramatic teen-angsty poetry in junior high, I had never written anything. What made me think I had the ability to craft a story?

I let it germinate in my mind for a bit longer before boredom at work finally led me to put pen to paper. I thought it would be a fun lark, putting together a short story, something I could show my friends for a laugh. Only once I got started, I was surprised by how deeply I became immersed in the world I was creating. What I thought would be a short story started to grow as more twists and turns of the plot revealed themselves, as characters started to come alive on the page as the cliché goes. A short story became a novelette became a novella until finally I realized what I had on my hands was a novel.

It took me only two months to write, but that was almost a full eight hours a night at work, scribbling away into a five-subject notebook. When I finished the final line, printed THE END in block letters at the bottom of the page, I had a feeling akin to waking from a vivid dream. It left me adrift and disoriented, my mind fogged and clinging to the fantasy.

I had written a novel. Me. Seemed unlikely yet I had the evidence right in front of me. So what should I do with it?

You may find this hard to believe, but I didn’t really consider getting it professionally published at all. I had a great deal of fun writing it, and it entertained me, but I couldn’t truly believe the book was any good. I figured agents and editors would laugh their asses off if they got ahold of it.

Still, I felt a certain pride in the thing. Even if it wasn’t a masterpiece, it was something I had created. Created from nothing, actually, but a shooting star and an overactive imagination. I wanted to share it somehow.

At that point, the internet was still relatively new. No real social media, not the way we have it now, but there were message boards and blogs were just starting to become a thing. I made an account on one of the popular blog sites and decided to start posting my book one chapter at a time. I actually hadn’t even given the thing a title yet, so when I went to post the first chapter, I came up with one on the spot. The Big Sea.

At first the only people reading along were family and friends I had told about it, but they shared the link with others, and gradually I started to gain a following. It wasn’t overnight, but over the course of the year it took me to post the entire thing, the number of views grew and grew. Some message boards for sci-fi fans even started talking about the book. My cousin Gwen showed me that, and I was flabbergasted. Not all the comments were positive, but a large number of people seemed to really be enjoying the story.

By the time I posted the final chapter, I was averaging 350,000 views.

I hadn’t started a new story or anything because I still didn’t think of myself as a writer, but the blog continued to gain attention and readers. Then almost a year after I had finished posting, I was contacted by a publisher asking if I had an agent.

I must have read that email a hundred times, not quite able to make sense of it. I mean, I understood all the words and the configuration of those words conveyed a clear message, but I might as well have been looking at a random jumble of letters. Why would a publisher want to know if I had an agent? I know you’re thinking no one could be that dense, that their intention couldn’t have been more obvious, but that was how alien the idea of me as a writer was. As alien as the creatures I had written about in my story.

I responded that I did not have an agent, and I even stated in the email, “I’m not really a writer, this was just a lark to pass the time.” Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. The publisher replied that they were impressed with what I had accomplished with The Big Sea and could see it as a popular title. They encouraged me to find an agent and even sent me four suggestions.

I talked to my friends who enthusiastically told me I should query the agents. I still thought the whole thing was a joke, that the agents would take one look at my manuscript and assume someone was playing a prank on them. However, I sent a query to all four agents and much to my surprise, all four wanted to represent me. I shouldn’t have been surprised considering they knew a publisher was already interested. I talked to all four agents on the phone, picked the one I felt most comfortable with, and she began to shop the book around.

Oddly, we didn’t end up going with the publisher which had initially contacted me. My agent got me a better deal with another. The money wasn’t astronomical but seemed like a lot to me at the time, enough that I didn’t have to work for a while if I didn’t want to. The only downside was the publisher insisted I sign a two-book deal and I didn’t have a second book. Didn’t even have an idea for one.

So I went about trying to get an idea. Have you ever tried to get an idea? It is kind of like that old saying about a watched pot. With The Big Sea, I didn’t have to try. The inspiration fell right out of the sky, literally. This time inspiration remained elusive.

It didn’t help that I struggled with the editing process. Since I had never thought of myself as a writer, having a professional editor return my manuscript with all these notes about what was wrong with it felt like an ice pick in my ear. Yes, he also included some notes about what he liked, but those were easier to ignore than his negative critiques. It was a painful process, even if in the end I did recognize it made the book tighter and better.

I was near the end of the editing, still not having started a second book, when I decided to relax one evening by watching an old favorite of mine, The Last Man on Earth. Have you seen it? Vincent Price is the last human alive on a planet where everyone else has been turned into vampires. The twist at the end is he realizes that because of the population shift, vampires are no longer the monsters. He realizes that in an ironic role reversal, he is now the monster. This led me to think about all the alien stories I loved, almost all about aliens coming to the planet, more often than not hostile and wanting to take over.

But what if the roles were reversed? What if we were the invading species on another planet? Humans were known to be hostile and a little war-hungry. I could feel an idea starting to percolate, but it felt delicate, like a bubble that could burst with the slightest pressure. I stayed where I was on the sofa, the movie still playing out on the television, trying to think about the idea without consciously thinking about the idea. I wanted my subconscious to do the work.

The next day I started what would become Invaders from Earth. By the time The Big Sea was released that winter, I was halfway through my second book.

The publisher launched a huge marketing campaign for The Big Sea, and even sent me on a book tour to do signings and readings all over the country. It paid off when the book got as high as number seven on the best seller’s list. Everyone was happy, and I couldn’t believe it. The reviews were mixed, but then some critics will always dismiss sci-fi as nothing more than pulp trash.

Invaders from Earth was an even bigger hit, my first number one. The reviews for that one were also mixed, but they skewed more toward the positive than the negative this time. Some even suggested it was my commentary on the colonization of America and the genocide of the Native Americans. Honestly that had never entered my brain while writing the book, but I never publicly contradicted the idea because I had to admit it made me sound a lot smarter than a really am.

A studio bought the rights, and they hired one of the biggest directors in Hollywood to direct. I was asked to do the screenplay, but I was still learning how to write books; I didn’t feel comfortable trying to learn script writing at the same time. The movie was a blockbuster, and suddenly I was one of the most well-known sci-fi authors in America.

Ideas became easier for me after that. I guess some switch had been flipped in my brain, and I realized I already had a plethora of ideas waiting to be explored. All my life I would think things like, I wish there was a movie like this or If only I could find a book where that happens. It had simply never occurred to me before that I could bring those stories into the world. I wasn’t one of those book-a-year authors; I needed more time. On average, I’d release a novel every three or so years.

Because of my personal interests, everything I wrote had a sci-fi bent to it. Some critics called me out for that, said they wished I’d expand my horizons and branch out. I had no interest in exploring other genres, however. Since my writing career had started as just a fun little diversion, I wanted to keep it fun. And I had the most fun working in the science fiction field.

Around the time my fifth book came out, there was an article in a literary journal that dubbed me “a space explorer on the page.” That was when it finally occurred to me that I had actually fulfilled my childhood dream. I had become an astronaut. Only in the imagination, only between the covers of my books, but almost every day when I sat down at my desk, in a sense I strapped myself in, waited for the countdown, and blasted off into space. I got to explore other planets, other galaxies, walk among the stars.

I also learned a lot about space. It was necessary when researching my books. I spent hours and hours in libraries and on the internet, finding out everything I could about what lay beyond our world. So even though I never went to college, my writing did facilitate me getting an education.

I even caught the notice of NASA, and I was invited to visit and tour their facilities, I met many actual astronauts who were of course heroes to me. I witnessed a few launches firsthand, both out at the launch pad and even inside the control room. I, a vicarious space explorer, got to spend time with real space explorers, and they made me feel at home. Treated me like one of their own. A few astronauts I met even said that my books inspired their love of space and they wouldn’t be doing what they were doing if not for me.

It has been an amazing career, an amazing life. Since the cancer diagnosis, I have slowed down. I just finished a book, my twenty-third and I would say probably my last. I would imagine this will be my last interview as well. Modern science has done all it can for me, but I think my body is worn out and ready to call it a day.

I have no regrets. I got to live my dream, and I got to share that dream with other people. Though my feet never left the Earth, I still got to explore the universe.

From an article posted on the official NASA social media, August of 2052

Today we successfully launched the spacecraft Sagan from Cape Canaveral in conjunction with Russia and China who also launched their own spacecraft. In approximately three days’ time, the three groups of astronauts will land on the moon and converge near the Dandelion crater to commence work on the first space station on the moon. This is only the initial step in a joint project to see if life can be sustained off planet.

This mission also contains a side project. On board the Sagan are the cremated remains of famed sci-fi writer Randolph Brightman. His ashes will be scattered in a newly discovered geological depression that will be christened the Brightman crater.

MG Allan spent his childhood making up stories in his head. Now he is spending his adult life writing them down.