- Wolfe, Steven.
The Obligation.
Los Gatos, CA: Smashwords, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-301-05798-6.
-
This is a wickedly clever book. A young congressional staffer spots
a plaque on the wall of his boss, a rotund 15-term California
Democrat, which reads, “The colonization of space will be the
fulfillment of humankind's Obligation to the Earth.” Intrigued,
he mentions the plaque to the congressman, and after a series of
conversations, finds himself sent on a quest to meet archetypes of
what the congressman refers to as the six Endowments of humanity—capacities
present only in our own species which set us apart from all of those from
whom we evolved, and equip us for a destiny which is our ultimate
purpose: the Wanderer, Settler, Inventor, Builder, Visionary, and
Protector. These Endowments have evolved, driven by the
Evolutionary Impulse, toward the achievement, by humans and their
eventual descendents, of three Obligations, which will require
further evolution into a seventh Endowment.
The staffer tries to reconcile his discovery of the human destiny
beyond the planet with his romance with a goo-goo eco-chick who
advocates cancelling the space program to
first solve our problems on the Earth.
As he becomes progressively enlightened, he, and then she realise
that there is no conflict between these goals, and that planetary
stewardship and serving as the means for Gaia “going to seed”
and propagating the life it has birthed outward into the cosmos
are a unified part of the Obligation.
When I describe this book as “wickedly clever”, what I mean
is that it creates a mythology for space migration which co-opts
and subsumes that of its most vehement opponents: the
anti-human
Merchants of Despair (April 2013).
It recasts humanity, not as a “cancer on the planet”, but
rather the means by which Gaia can do what every life form must:
reproduce. Indeed, Robert Zubrin, author of the aforementioned book,
along with a number of other people I respect, have contributed
effusive blurbs on the
book's Web site.
It provides a framework for presenting humanity's ultimate
destiny and the purpose of life to those who
have never thought of those in terms similar to those I expressed
in my
Epilogue
to Rudy Rucker's
The Hacker and the Ants.
(Warning—there are spoilers for the novel in my Epilogue.)
In the acknowledgements, the author thanks several people for help
in editing the manuscript. Given the state of what was published,
one can only imagine what these stalwarts started with. The text
is riddled with copy-editing errors: I noted 61, and I was just
reading for enjoyment, not doing a close proof. In chapter 6,
visiting Evan Phillips, the Builder, the protagonist witnesses a
static test of an Aerojet
LR-87
engine, which is said to have a “white hot exhaust”
and is described as “off the shelf hardware”. But the
LR-87, which powered Titan missiles and launchers, has used
hypergolic fuels ever since the
Titan II
replaced the
Titan I in
the early 1960s. These storable fuels burn with a clear flame.
Re-engineering an LR-87 to burn LOX and RP-1 would be a major
engineering project, hardly off the shelf. Further, during
the test, the engine is throttled to various thrust levels,
but the LR-87 was a fixed thrust engine; no model incorporated
throttling.
In chapter 9, after
visiting a Kitt Peak telescope earlier in the night, in the predawn
hours, he steps out under the sky and sees a “nearly full Moon
… dimming the blazing star fields I saw at Kitt Peak”. But
a full Moon always rises at sunset (think about the geometry), so if
the Moon were near full, it would have been up when he visited the telescope.
There are other factual goofs, but I will not belabour them, as
that isn't what this book is about. It is a rationale for
space settlement which, if the reader can set aside the clumsy
editing, may be seductively persuasive even to those inclined
to oppose it.
Update: The copy-editing errors mentioned above have been
corrected in a new edition now posted. If you previously
purchased and downloaded the Kindle edition, log in to your
Amazon account, go to “Manage Your Kindle / Manage Your Devices”
and turn on Automatic Book Update. The next time you synchronise your
reading device, the updated edition will be downloaded.
(2013-08-03 13:28 UTC)
Only the Kindle edition is available from
Amazon, but a wide variety of other electronic formats, including
HTML, PDF, EPUB, and plain text are available from
Smashwords.
July 2013 