Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Armstrong

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 15:24:46 +0000

- long TR interview already excerpted in separate thread:
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2014-July/054936.html
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/headline/2014/07/23/9bc1790e-061b-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html
book review, "_Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight_ by Jay Barbree", Lee
Billings:

    > At one point in Gene Wolfe’s _Book of the New Sun_, a story set
on a far-future Earth lapsed into a Dark Age, the narrator glimpses a
“warrior of a dead world” in an enigmatic picture hanging in a dusty
gallery. Clad in bulky white armor and a bubble-like helmet of
polished gold, standing beside a stiff banner in a desolate gray
wasteland, the “warrior” is actually an Apollo astronaut planting an
American flag on the moon. For most of the inhabitants of Wolfe’s
fallen world, the moon landings and the people who made them had
become little more than a half-remembered fairy tale.
    >
    > I recalled Wolfe’s scene while reading one of the final
anecdotes in Jay Barbree’s admirably accessible new book, a biography
of Neil Armstrong, who died at age 82 in 2012. At the conclusion of a
global tour promoting space exploration, Armstrong, the first man on
the moon, sits in a roadside diner with Gene Cernan, the last,
chatting over coffee about when humans might at last return to the
lunar surface, and how we might someday visit Mars. More than 40 years
ago, their Apollo missions had captivated billions, but now Armstrong
and Cernan were retired and relatively anonymous, pining for a future
that had never fully arrived.
    >
    > Like most people Armstrong and Cernan now encountered, the
server refilling their cups had no idea that his customers were living
bookends to what, even now, is our modern era’s most astounding
adventure. Yet unlike in Wolfe’s tale, the moonwalkers? fade to
near-myth has happened not over countless millennia, but in less than
a half-century. Somehow, as Apollo and its astronauts have aged, its
legacy has been perversely twisted, with human interplanetary voyaging
now routinely depicted as just an old-fashioned eccentricity of the
Cold War rather than the existential imperative it truly is. ...
- http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/07/23/sham/ "The Sea a Sham Born of
Uniformity: On Subverting the Normal with Gene Wolfe
(#WritingWednesdays)":

    > From a writer’s perspective and Wolfe’s story really is a kind
of narrative writer’s workshop we can learn from his ability to
disorient the reader. One can do that easily enough through strangers,
dreams, foreign lands, or other dimensional realities; there are some
brilliant examples of these in all of the best fantasy books. But
Wolfe takes it a step further. He not only enhances the texture of his
world by having readers discover its idiosyncrasies, but he also
disorients the reader by having her discover mundane realities in her
world in new and surprising ways.
    >
    > The following excerpt is a great example of this subversion of
the normal. The protagonist falls asleep beside a giant. In his sleep
he mounts a leather-winged beast and explores the dying globe that he
has been forced to wander. Watch the way that Wolfe inverts our
expectations, speaking of the vision ahead as a “sham of uniformity”
and a “purple waste.” The Shadow of the Torturer is a narrative
reprimand to the writer prone to info dump, as well as a template for
the double inversion of the reader’s expectation in entering the
speculative universe:
    >
    > _The Shadow of the Torturer_, "Chapter 15: Baldanders": "And
then I dreamed?.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net