Child of the Space Age

I was a toddler when Sputnik launched, old enough to walk around the neighborhood after school listening on my red RCA Transistor Radio (with leather case) when John Glenn made his three and a half orbits. But the infatuation with space and rocket ships goes back two generations before mine, to the writings of H.G. Wells and the birth of science fiction.

There is something compelling in the way imaginations transferred human battle drama into space by drawing helmets and space rockets, as if foretelling that no matter how evolved we pretend to be, and how we can dress up the apeman, he still wants to fight off his neighbors with what amounts to just a better class of rocks in a new jungle. And what used to be tales narrated by the campfire, are now pretty paper to look at in front of the TV.

The themes are forever. Only the landscape changes.