The past year has seen a Pluto flyby, a Mars landing, and an
asteroid landing—all major, major successes for space exploration and events whose
images are utterly fascinating for their reality and the mind boggling amount
of calculation and preparation that went into getting each. These missions remind us that, despite the
immense technological deficiencies remaining, some small progress is being made
toward humans beyond the moon. These
three successes apparently so poignant, a new science fiction award was created.
Just what the genre needed…
Intending to spotlight works that have interstellar
exploration and travel as their prime motif, The Canopus Award was
inaugurated just this past week. Such is
the world we live in today. Don’t like
something? Change it yourself! With a little bit of money and a few people
to help coordinate the necessities (locating pertinent texts, writing policies and
procedures, creating online presence, etc.) one can, in this example, attempt
to overcome the wrenches in the works (known as Barry Malzberg, cyberpunk, and space
fantasy—sorry, Singularity texts) and get back to the good ol’ fashion idea of massive
metal objects transporting humans through the great void at great speed by
creating an award that brings awareness to such texts.
What’s interesting to see on the Canopus award slate is Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, a
cautionary tale that seems to draw focus away from space and back to Earth, and
not Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, a
masturbatory exercise in space gadgetry if ever there were. One would have
almost expected Stephenson’s novel to be a shoo-in given the novel’s theme, but
I’m not the award’s organizer.
Looking through the Science
Fiction Awards Database, a person finds many a defunct award. The group were able to hold the ship together
for a few years, sometimes even a decade or more, before the strings let loose
(probably the purse strings) and the award slipped into the night of genre
awareness (that vast space comprising the majority of material older than ten
years). I’m not pronouncing the Canopus’
doom, but with so many crises at hand on Earth, I think I’m in Aurora’s boat, not Seveneves. Shouldn’t we be
solving Earth’s problems before tackling the riddle of space???? They seem more imminent... I’m sure many of you are now thinking “Thank goodness that guy’s only got two
cents.”
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