Why Astronomy and Storyelling?
Everyone tells me I need a blog, so here we go. The primary motivation is to gain more readership for my science fiction novel, From the Shadows of the Landscape, which was launched in April of this year. I guess this is license to share, with a much larger audience, various insights I have gained by chatting about the book at author events. At least to start with, I’ll tell you how and why I came to write it and what it was like. After that, I may take the liberty from time to time of talking about who knows what.
Along the line of insights, here’s the big one. I’ve known it on various levels for a long time, but it has crystalized after conversations with prospective readers: My astronomical career and my compulsion to write a science fiction novel sprang from a common source — my sense of wonder. There are two sides to it: wonder about this strange universe I live as we know it and wonder about what may be possible that we do not know, or perhaps cannot know.
I’m not claiming to live in a constant glow of rapture. Stupor may be more like it, if you ask my wife. But, even in the face of being a social organism living in a dystopian world full of pain and hate and being forced to do some annoying things, I will say that simply existing seems like a miraculous and magical gift. Like everyone else, the vast bulk of my time is spent in the everyday, but I often take comfort, or escape, in the larger Cosmos and in my own imaginings.
Let’s start with imagining. There was a period of time, from an early age growing up in Queens NYC, that, whenever I was given the time, I would occupy myself alone enacting complicated stories and adventures, especially mornings in my bedroom. These were sometimes serialized, with new episodes occurring on successive days. Ever after, I hatched stories in my head, even though only much later did I write them down. While a child, I would instead draw out the adventures like crude stick-figure graphic novels on the blank backs of invoice pads that my dad brought home for me from his job in the shipping department of a paint factory in Long Island City. So, I was always a storyteller, at least at first for myself if not others. It got in the way sometimes when life did not live up to my own imaginings.
Now, for the Cosmos. The explosion of my sense of wonder happened pretty early. This is one of those real-life stories about how strangely our personal lives can be shaped. I had an uncle, my dad’s brother, who lived upstairs from me with my grandmother when I was growing up. He was an extreme recluse who worked at night alone as a railroad crossing guard and avoided interactions with other people. He slept during the day, except for listening to opera. Even as his nephew, living right under the floor of his apartment for years, I saw him only a few times, mostly just glimpses. We never spoke. Anyway, he had evidently once been a bright self-educated man and had accumulated a small library of books that were locked up and stored downstairs with us. Some of them were really fancy. I remember sneaking a peek, after I found the key, at a volume of Goethe’s Faust with gilt-edged pages. It had color illustrations a young child of my day should never have seen. One day, my sister took down an astronomy book and showed me the pictures in it. She and my dad explained in a general way what some of them were pictures.
My naive innocence was shattered. Why wasn’t everyone constantly sharing and discussing this amazing information? Why was I allowed for so long to believe that the day-to-day world was everything when it was already known that the Universe was so vast? My awareness popped like a kernel of corn. I was a preschooler when this happened because I remember swearing to myself that I would read the book when felt I could read well enough. Some years later, toward the end of grammar school, I decided I was ready. I knew then that I wanted to be an astronomer.
So, early in my life, the seeds were planted for me to pursue life activities fueled by wonder and imagination.