{"id":62,"date":"2011-07-15T02:55:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T02:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/long-looks-at-short-fiction-whats-it-like-out-there-by-edmond-hamilton\/"},"modified":"2011-07-15T02:55:00","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T02:55:00","slug":"long-looks-at-short-fiction-whats-it-like-out-there-by-edmond-hamilton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/long-looks-at-short-fiction-whats-it-like-out-there-by-edmond-hamilton\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Looks at Short Fiction: "What’s It Like Out There?" by Edmond Hamilton"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With the final mission of the Shuttle ending next week, I thought this would be an appropriate story to write about.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“What’s It Like Out There?” is probably Hamilton’s best known story, certainly his most reprinted, and arguably his best.\u00a0 It concerns an astronaut, Frank Haddon, who has returned from the second Mars expedition and his adjustment back to civilian life on Earth.<\/p>\n

A victim of Martian sickness, Haddon had just been released from the hospital in Arizona, where the Mars program is headquartered.\u00a0 Before he goes home, he has to honor some promises to visit the families of some of the men who didn’t come back.\u00a0 As he travels, everyone wants to know what it’s like out there.\u00a0 They usually don’t bother to listen to the reply, or try to tell him how dry\/cold\/etc. it’s been locally.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The truth is that the whole experience was a living hell.\u00a0 Yet he can’t bring himself to hurt the grieving families and finances with the facts, so he makes things up about how they died.\u00a0 Rather than pain, their passings are peaceful; rather than shot as a muntineer, one’s death is described as an accident.\u00a0
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Instead of the quiet homecoming he’s looking forward to when he finally makes it back home to Ohio, the whole town is waiting to welcome him and talk about what it’s like out there.\u00a0 He wants to lambast them.\u00a0 The Mars expeditions are searching for uranium to power all the luxuries on Earth, and Haddon doesn’t think the cost of cheap energy is worth the lives of good men.\u00a0 He sees the hopeful faces looking up at him and understands why the men who returned from the first expedition didn’t talk about how hard it was.\u00a0 His friends and neighbors needed heroes and they needed something to dream about, a glorious undertaking for all of humanity.\u00a0 So Haddon tells them a whitewashed version of the truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For a story published in 1952, “What’s It Like Out There?” holds up remarkably well.\u00a0 The first-person narrative moves at a good pace, and Haddon’s voice is real and believable.\u00a0 The picture of Mars Hamilton paints is one not too far off from the Mars of today.\u00a0 Rather than the canals of Bradbury and the ancient cities of his wife Leigh Brackett, Hamilton’s Mars is dry and cold, windswept and empty.\u00a0 It’s a hostile place.\u00a0 Only the promise of uranium and the plentiful supply of energy is holds entices men to journey there.<\/p>\n

Unlike our current space program, the commitment to go to Mars is a real one.\u00a0 The second expedition consists of 20 rockets and hundreds of men.\u00a0 At one point the fourth expedition is mentioned, and it consists of one hundred rockets.<\/p>\n

The story ends with Haddon feeling a sense of age from his experience and doubting he will ever feel young again.\u00a0 The story implies he’s in his early 20s.\u00a0 This was pretty grim stuff in 1952, when space travel was usually depicted as being easy.\u00a0 Yet Hamilton didn’t shy away from harsh realities, physical or emotional, in this tale.\u00a0 That’s what gives the story its power.\u00a0 This is the work of a mature writer.\u00a0 Hamilton got better the more he wrote, and he was still writing up until near the end of his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I said earlier, this story holds up better than most from the early 50s.\u00a0 While there’s probably not much uranium on Mars, the ever-growing need for energy is something a contemporary reader will relate to.\u00a0 And while the ubiquitous cell phone technology we enjoy is absent, the story still feels real because it’s not about gadgets.\u00a0 The best science fiction is that which has people at the center.\u00a0 When a story is focused on a gadget or a piece of technology, it’s almost certain that it won’t age well.\u00a0 When the human aspect is the focus, then even if the technology or science becomes a little dated, the story will normally last.\u00a0 If you haven’t read “What’s It Like Out There?”, you should.<\/p>\n

Haffner Press<\/a> is bringing all his short fiction back into print, with the first<\/a> three<\/a> volumes<\/a> available now.\u00a0 Since Hamilton started writing in the 1920s, it will be a while before the series reaches 1952.\u00a0 Your best bet of finding a copy of “What’s It Like Out There?” is the reprint of The Best of Edmond Hamilton.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the final mission of the Shuttle ending next week, I thought this would be an appropriate story to write about.\u00a0 “What’s It Like Out There?” is probably Hamilton’s best known story, certainly his most reprinted, and arguably his best.\u00a0 It concerns an astronaut, Frank Haddon, who has returned from the second Mars expedition and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104,105,106,99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edmond-hamiton","category-haffner-press","category-leigh-brackett","category-space-program"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-10","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}