When I was in my young teens, I borrowed a novel from my local library entitled Journey to Jupiter. I had never heard of the author – Hugh Walters – and did not yet know that Journey to Jupiter was the eighth novel in a series recounting the adventures of Chris Godfrey and comrades, a team of astronauts working under the auspices of the (fictional) United Nations Exploration Agency, or UNEXA. I took the book and its characters to my heart more or less immediately, and over the course of the next year or so I burned through the rest of the series, revisiting my favourite volumes multiple times.
Hugh Walters became a science fiction writer by accident. Born Walter Llewellyn Hughes, he once said in a newspaper interview that he chose to write under a pseudonym because he was afraid writing science fiction might cause his friends and colleagues in the business community to take him less seriously. A keen amateur astronomer, Walters was asked to give a talk on space exploration for his hometown rotary club. His lecture was so well received he was invited to repeat it, this time for a local library as part of a week-long festival of science fiction. As preparation for the event, Walters read a number of recently published science fiction novels and found them disappointing. He felt that American science fiction writers especially were not sufficiently engaged with actual science, leaning instead towards the kind of pulp sensationalism that gave science fiction a bad name. Walters felt instinctively that science fiction should entertain, but that it should also educate. With ideals similar to those of the writers and producers of the first Doctor Who adventures, Walters wanted his books to inspire young people, to make them interested and passionate about science in the way he was himself.
For the first fifty or so pages of The Last Astronaut, I believed the book I was reading might have been conceived with a similar purpose. In considering this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, one of my aims has been to ask myself why each individual title has been selected, why, in the minds of the judges, the book stands out. My initial impression of The Last Astronaut was that it had been chosen as an example of the kind of space fiction that draws so many fans into the genre: a story that generates the excitement we remember from our first encounters with SF, with the added intention of exploring a speculative idea from a scientific standpoint. I get it, I thought. The Last Astronaut is like The Martian, with added aliens.
Reader, I was mistaken. And I’m sad about that.
The Last Astronaut is set in 2065. Following the catastrophic failure of the first manned mission to Mars twenty years earlier, NASA has been defunded, leaving the exploration and exploitation of space to private enterprises. The beginning of our narrative sees an employee of one of the hungriest and most successful space corporations, KSpace, jumping ship to a NASA that, though almost defunct, still retains the framework of its earlier idealism. Sunny Stevens is an astrophysicist who always wanted to be an astronaut, and he has made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a body previously identified as an asteroid is decelerating, which means it must be moving under its own power. If asteroid 21/2054D1 is not in fact an asteroid, but an alien spacecraft, the implications are seismic. Stevens wants to make a deal – his information and expertise for a place on the team. With ‘21’ clearly headed for Earth, NASA chief Roy McAllister, now in his seventies, has a problem: action is clearly needed, but there are no astronauts qualified to take it. NASA’s only option is to make the best of what they have.
And so our rag-tag team of spacefarers is duly assembled. Sally Jansen previously captained the Orion 6 Mars mission and is the only one of the four with spaceflight experience. Still traumatised by the death of a colleague on that earlier mission, she believes she has something extra to prove in commanding this new one. In theory, Sunny Stevens knows everything there is to know about being an astronaut – but it is all theory. Parminder Rao is an astrobiologist, still young and misty-eyed at the thought of being the first to make contact with alien life. Windsor Hawkins is ex-military, more recently an expert in the art of tracking and capturing spy satellites. He is there to represent the interests of the US Defense Department, and if necessary to take command if things get out of hand.
It doesn’t take an Einstein to guess that’s exactly what things are going to do, and rapidly. Unbeknown to our heroes, a rival mission has launched and overtaken theirs – if there is anything of value to be gained from the incoming aliens, KSpace mean to be the first to seal the deal. As the Orion 7 approaches 21, the crew’s attempts to communicate with the KSpacers’ vessel the Wanderer return a negative. Anxious that they might be in trouble, Sally jets across to the Wanderer to investigate more closely. On boarding the craft, she finds no one at home. She can only assume the rival crew have decided to gain a headstart in exploring the alien ship. With memories of her first disastrous captaincy still fresh in her mind, she is determined to head off in pursuit and, if necessary, rescue.
In its outline and premise, the Last Astronaut has a great deal in common with Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvouz with Rama, although in the way it unfolds it reminded me equally of Jules Verne’s 1864 classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Both are noble examples to follow, and thus it is all the more dispiriting to discover that The Last Astronaut has neither the plainspoken competence of the Clarke, nor the timeless elegance of the Verne. In terms of both narrative plausibility and technical expertise, Wellington’s updated version reads like the novelisation of an inferior commercial genre movie we happened to see five years ago and didn’t much like.
Fiction is fiction, and whilst it would seem churlish to hold The Last Astronaut too stringently to account for being factually improbable, the subgenre of exploratory science fiction to which this novel owes its allegiance depends on at least an appearance of verisimilitude. Novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora or the Mars trilogy, for example – or indeed a film like Gravity – gain much of their effect through reminding us that space exploration is painstaking, hazardous, and often repetitive work, that its thrills are hard won, dependent on planning and strict adherence to scientific protocols. Indeed such close observation of truth is part of the attraction of this kind of fiction. Yet those with only the vaguest awareness of scientific etiquette will quickly come to the conclusion that what transpires on board Orion 7 is pretty much codswallop – not because the astronauts are chasing UFOs, but because their methods and decisions are farcical from the beginning. The crew leave the Orion 7 ‘parked’ just 2 kilometers from where 21 is in orbit when they have no idea what the object is, what danger it might pose. Sally Jansen undertakes an unauthorised EVA then boards the Wanderer without a clue of what might have happened there. Stevens pilots the Orion closer to the Wanderer when he knows there is a malignant alien life form on board, and so on. It is all so tiresome, the kind of plotting that occurs when the author needs something to happen, but cannot find an organic, realistic-seeming way of progressing the action. Instead, characters are moved around like puppets, or like pieces on a game board.
Read any astronaut’s memoirs and you will be in no doubt that the actions of the Orion crew are about as far from anything resembling reality as you could get. What we have instead is a plot that appears to be strung together from a series of movie clichés. Here is the scene from Interstellar in which Michael Caine reveals that NASA never really died, it just went into hiding. Here is the scene from Alien where Ripley warns against bringing the infected Kane back on board the Nostromo only to have her veto countermanded. The big reveal recalls Sam Neill’s defection to the dark side in Event Horizon (‘I don’t need eyes where I’m going.’) and there is even a rehash of a classic scene from Indiana Jones – you’ll recognise it when you come to it. Windsor Hawkins plays the ubiquitous power-mad egotist with the ‘secret’ Chekhov’s gun in his pocket, ready to be used as the catalyst for the final confrontation. The tediously violent showdown-as-climax as per every derivative, hackneyed, lazy Hollywood screenplay you’ve ever seen is the final letdown. Wellington couldn’t resist the duct tape, either, or the robot pal. Add a dash of Final Girl Theory to complete the recipe.
Such reliance on overripe material does not end with the plotting. A lot of argument has been expended on the language of science fiction and what is the most appropriate mode of expression for a literature of ideas. Personally I would argue there is no right way to write science fiction; the dense rococo of Catherynne Valente is as fit for purpose as the visionary optimism of Arthur Clarke, the social realism of Le Guin, the factualism of Stan Robinson or the modernist and post-modernist approaches of Ballard and Gibson. What can never work – in any mode of literature – is the language of cliché. Thus in The Last Astronaut you have to put up with a lot of stuff like this:
It was the first time the two of them had been alone since they’d danced in the air, since the day Wanderer blew right past them. It was the first time she’d had to think about what being alone with him meant…
Rao knew what she wanted from him. She also knew she was very, very good at controlling her impulses when she needed to focus. Most of the time.
She reached under the collapsible shower unit for a bolt that had floated away from her. When she came back up, Stevens put his hands on her shoulders. He leaned in close to kiss her neck. She’d kind of been expecting that, so she stiffened up.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Was that… OK?’
Rao laughed. ‘It was… extremely OK. Honestly,’ she said. ‘But Sunny – we’re working…You must be as excited to meet the aliens as I am, don’t lie.’
‘I’m excited about a lot of things,’ he said… He put his mouth very close to her ear. ‘Are you seriously going to tell me you don’t want to be the first person to have sex in space?’
And this:
The interior walls were covered in thin padding with a white vinyl covering, and back near the airlock leading to the command module, someone had drawn on the padding with a red pen. At first she thought it was a note – maybe left behind by a desperate crew in case anyone ever found their abandoned ship. She steeled herself to read the last words of a dying astronaut.
Then she saw there were no words. Just crude drawings of a woman with exceptionally large breasts, and next to her a giant penis with hairy testicles.
It’s all very ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ (if this reference passes you by, you’d be advised to keep it that way), steeped in the affectless banter that has become the accepted currency of Hollywood sci-fi. The writer has made little attempt to imagine what real people and more specifically real astronauts might say in these circumstances; he relies instead on pre-imagined scenarios, pre-imagined dialogue of the kind spoken not by human beings under stress but by actors playing roles.
Similarly, the main body of the text suffers from an overabundance of ‘dead’ words – adverbs and qualifiers that serve no purpose except to leave the prose feeling clogged and overburdened with waffle. Writers are drawn to this manner of expression because they think it adds realism and immediacy. That certain words and phrases feature frequently in spoken English should act as both an instruction and a warning: used sparingly in colloquial dialogue they can be effective, used in narrative prose they are a menace to society. Most writers’ first drafts are littered with spare verys and actuallys – that’s how we talk and think, especially when we’re working out a new idea. Part of the work of the second draft is to weed them out. Here’s a brief extract from The Last Astronaut:
When NASA actually answered his message, he’d basically just walked out the door. He’d never actually expected this to happen, and he hadn’t thought to prepare. Now it was time to make an actual decision. He could still walk away – say he was sorry, but he’d made a mistake. Take the train all night to get home and go to bed and pretend he’d never even thought of this crazy plan. Go back to work tomorrow at the Hive and hope nobody was monitoring his email.
And here’s how I would redraft it:
He hadn’t expected a reply to his message, and so when NASA called him he left immediately and without preparation. Now he had to decide. He could still walk away, say he was sorry, that he’d made a mistake. He could get back on the train, fall into bed then go to work at the Hive the following morning as if nothing had happened. Hope no one was monitoring his email. Pretend he’d never thought of this crazy plan.
This new version conveys the same information, but with greater economy and precision. Just cutting those three actuallys and the basically would leave the passage neater and cleaner. Apply this simple method to the text as a whole and even if you made no other material changes you’d have a better book.
Writing is, as we all know, the devil, and it would be unfair of me to suggest that The Last Astronaut has no redeeming features, or that it is an entirely negative reading experience. As I suggested above, my initial encounter with it reminded me pleasurably of my own early forays into the genre: the thrill of adventure, the sense that anything was possible, the intimation that something marvellous and possibly dangerous was about to happen. The book reminded me of how exciting science fiction can be, while the pace of action kept me hooked and entertained. I mentioned in an earlier post how quickly I become invested in stories, and in spite of my mounting annoyance at the novel’s technical shortcomings, I still wanted to know what happened. I would have kept reading even if I hadn’t committed myself to writing this essay.
I would also add that The Last Astronaut does make some gestures towards the science fictional principle of conceptual breakthrough. There are several key moments in the novel where the parameters shift, where our understanding of what is happening becomes radically altered. It is interesting to note that these are also the moments when Wellington’s imagination becomes more fully engaged. In his descriptions of the interior of 21 there is passion, finally, and a sense of wonder, a clearer, more precise language that more adequately serves the novel’s key ideas:
After the continuous darkness of 21, the flare’s light was blinding and Rao had to look away. When she dared to lift her head again she saw it, a red comet blazing across the air above them. For a second, just a second, she could see for kilometers, she could see the arcing walls of 21, the walls of the drum curving up and away from her, walls covered in water dotted with the last scraps of ice. She saw all the bubble mounds and hand-trees and arches, the vast domes and wells and things she couldn’t describe, saw just how much of this dark lake had come to life. She saw, directly above her, the roof of the drum, saw hand-trees up there that must be kilometers tall, saw their slender fingers twitch and curl up. She saw the arches rising over her head, hundreds of them, arches growing from the curves of other arches like the staircases in an Escher painting. The air over her head was crisscrossed by a network that branched and rebranched very much as the tendrils ramified. A pale scaffolding that crossed from one side of the drum to the other.
If only Wellington had trusted his own resources more; freed from the hackneyed dialogue, the dodgy romance plot, the clumsy in-paragraph point-of-view shifts, the (God help us but at least they’re short) dream sequences, how much truer to its inspirations this novel might have been.
Why does this matter, I hear you asking. Why am I expending so much time and energy in excavating the perceived faults of a novel for which I am and never was the intended audience? Because The Last Astronaut is on the shortlist for the Clarke Award of course, and any proper examination and evaluation of that shortlist should mean subjecting the book to the level of critical scrutiny one would expect from an award jury.
Having concluded my critical examination of The Last Astronaut, I am forced to admit that I cannot understand the process by which the Clarke jury came to select it as one of the six best science fiction novels of 2019. The book is derivative, generic, reliant on stereotypes and awash in cliché. The Big Dumb Object novel is an honourable tradition within science fiction, but taken as an example of it The Last Astronaut does not demonstrate any notable qualities of rigour or originality. Thus for it to merit inclusion on the Clarke shortlist, it would need to showcase some other arbiter of excellence – linguistic dexterity perhaps, or formal innovation. Sadly, as we have seen, it possesses neither. The only reason I can imagine for its presence here is that one or other of the judges really, really enjoyed reading it. If this were a fan award, then fair enough. But it isn’t, and it’s not. The Clarke deserves better.