by Lowell Bliss
Long before Will Smith strode up to the stage of the Academy Awards to slap Chris Rock, there was Freya, at least in the pages of fiction. Freya didn’t just slap the moderator who was calling for more attempts at interstellar travel, she pummelled him. She climbed on top of him and kept throwing punches until she broke his nose. How dare he regard Planet Earth and her family and friends so lightly!
· Definition of “will”: determination; an ability to continue on despite obstacles.
· Definition of “smith”: as a verb-- to treat metal by heating, hammering, and forging it.
· Meaning of “Chris”: Short form of Christopher, or ‘the bearer of the anointed one’
· Meaning of “rock”: as slang--refers to Planet Earth, as in ‘Third Rock from the Sun.’
· Who is Will Smith?: American actor who has appeared in nine science fiction films, over half of which involve a successful human determination to overcome obstacles posed by violent alien life forms.
· Who is Chris Rock?: Comedian incidentally known for his jaded treatment of human vulnerability, in this case, the disease alopecia.
Who is Freya? Freya is the heroine in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora. She is part of the seventh generation of inhabitants of a starship sent out from Earth 160 years earlier in order to colonize a promising moon in the Tau Ceti system. (SPOILERS ALERT:). In the end, though travel at 10 percent of the speed of light allows them to finally arrive, they barely make it, and the first landing parties, while enamoured with possibilities of the new “home” which they call Aurora, soon encounter a strange pathogen in the mud which inflects and kills them all. Those who had not yet left the starship are faced with a decision. Do they try again on Aurora? Do they attempt to terraform a dead but nearby planet, much like the generations back on Earth were doing to Mars? Do they push off to another promising planet a few light years away where their great-grandchildren could test their luck? Then, there’s the fourth option: turn around and return to Earth. Freya is the leader of this group; they are called “the Backers.” If you are the type of reader who appreciates the mechanisms which make sci-fi plot lines plausible, then suffice it to say that it is the starship’s AI (developed by Freya’s mom) and hyper-hibernation (knowledge of this innovation which is communicated from Earth to the starship’s computers and human engineers) that allows Freya, as a main character, and 600 others of her generation to arrive back to Earth, a planet they’ve never known except in stories.
Freya and the starship are not necessarily welcomed back. Some on Earth fear a collision with the decelerating starship; others fear contamination; but still others don’t want any reminder of humanity’s abject failure. The flooded cities, disappeared beaches, and high CO2 content in the atmosphere are reminder enough, but interstellar travel and colonization was our absolution! See, there is always a “Planet B,” there is always an extra measure of human ingenuity! We can Elon Musk ourselves out of this mess! The Tau Ceti survivors are an indictment. Some people want to shoot the returning starship out of the skies.
Now back on Earth, Freya and a handful of her colleagues are invited to a conference held above the flooded streets of New York City. They are a little confused about the topic and during the first speaker, Freya leans in to Badim, her father, to ask “More starships?” Badim nods. The current plan is to send out many small starships to systems some 27 to 300 light-years away. The most self-satisfied speaker—“They are all men, all Causcasian, most bearded, all wearing jackets”—looks out over the audience and pronounces: “You see, we’ll keep trying until it works. It’s a kind of evolutionary pressure. We’ve known for a long time that Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not supposed to stay in your cradle forever” (427).
Freya is triggered, but it is love that triggers her. She loved her mom, Devi, the brilliant engineer who kept a dying starship with its de-volving biomes (self-contained eco-systems) going just the few more light-years needed before arrival at Tau Ceti. Devi died of overwork.. Freya loved her friend Euan. He was one of the first to land on Aurora and one of the first to contract the bug. In his dying communication to Freya, he told her:
“What’s funny is anyone thinking it [interstellar colonization] would work in the first place. I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you’ve got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work it would take thousands of years. So what’s the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you’ve got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the f*** were they?” (178).
Freya loved her other friends who had died, including during their re-entry to Earth. In the end, in the final pages of the novel, as she goes swimming in the ocean for the first time, she seems to sense that she might fall in love with planet Earth herself. Certainly she wonders why the generations of Earthlings STILL seem not to love their own planet. Before she rises uneasily to her feet, hobbles to the stage, and beats this smug, bearded, jacketed interstellar visionary to a pulp, her old friend Aram addresses the audience. I quote him here in full, since he is speaking to you and to me in the year 2022:
“No starship voyage will work. This is an idea some of you have, which ignores the biological realities of the situation. We from Tau Ceti know this better than anyone. There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have captured your fancy, and perhaps these problems can be solved, but they are the easy ones. The biological problems cannot be solved. And no matter how much you want to ignore them, they will exist for the people you send out inside these vehicles.
“The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and any truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great. Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can’t be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too—far—away.
Aram pauses for a moment to collect himself. Then he waves a hand and says more calmly, “That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. [cf. Fermi’s Paradox]. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet”(428).
The moderator is undeterred: “There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos,” he avers. “So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! And that’s how it will be with us—” (429).
Smack! Or rather pow! Keep my [mother’s, friend’s, children’s, the seventh generation’s, planet Earth’s] name out of your f***ing mouth, or at least out of your dandelion metaphors.
The starship inhabitants, floating out around Tau Ceti, divided themselves up between Stayers and Backers, based on choice of destinations. Here as readers of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, we too are called to declare our allegiance, but defined according to our love. Do we want to STAY with the current paradigm of technological advancement, in love with our own ingenuity and our dreams of mastery over Nature? Or do we want to go back to a more elemental love? Love for people born and unborn, assigning actual faces and names to them. Love for the only planet that we will ever be able to call home? We have a will. We are smithies. We bear the Christ. We live on this rock. Euan cried out: “Who were they, that they were so discontent?”
Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora, New York: Orbit Books, 2015.
