Stimulating simulation
A story of astronauts on a Mars mission dummy run achieves its own lift-off.
Although it’s a work of fiction, Meg Howrey’s The Wanderers is one of the most informative and brainiest books about space travel you could find. The informative side is the detailed and well-researched technical data relating to a long-term space mission. The
braininess is in Howrey’s determination to deal with human beings first and the technology second.
Scrupulously vetted and psychologically tested, three astronauts are chosen for an international team to take part in a simulation of the first manned mission to Mars. One woman and two men, they are all middle-aged and experienced. For 17 months they will live in an enclosed and monitored environment, performing the procedures of the real mission.
The astronauts are self-controlled people of firm resolve. But despite this, they all have emotional ties outside the mission, and over such a long haul, there is always the possibility they will interact in unexpected ways.
The American woman, Helen Kane, is widowed with a daughter, an aspiring actress who can be extreme in her behaviour. The Russian man, Sergei Kuznetsov, is divorced, worries a bit about his ex but worries even more about his two teenage sons, one of whom is gay but doesn’t yet know that Dad
knows
and is quite accepting. (Sergei’s dialogue also introduces a nice line of dark humour.) As for the Japanese man, Yoshi Tanaka, his childless marriage seems stable enough, but he’s beginning to wonder whether his wife is drifting away from him.
The astronauts’ main impulse is science and whatever wonders the universe can reveal to them, but as they get further into the mission, they are increasingly aware of how much family ties mean to them and how they are citizens of Planet Earth, after all.
Does this sound like space soap opera? I hope not. Howrey wraps her story in deep layers of irony, devoting almost as much of it to the significant others as to the astronauts.
If the latter are in an artificial, controlled and monitored environment, we are reminded that much of the Earth’s population is too: Helen’s actress
daughter spends time hooked up to monitors, performing in front of a blue screen; Yoshi’s wife habitually converses with a robot.
More essential is the novel’s awareness that every moment of a space mission is watched by ground control. The astronauts are enacting a performance and fully aware that they are doing so. They mentally check every nuance of what they say and do for the effect it will have and how they will be evaluated.
Only one moment in this novel seems out of sync with Howrey’s serious intent – an incongruous, explicit sex scene (not between astronauts). Otherwise The Wanderers flies where the author meant it to.