‘For All Mankind,’ ‘Stowaway,’ and the Bleak New Space Fantasy – The Atlantic

Stowaway operates on several different levels. In one way, its a conundrum come to life, its pathos derived from the grim demands of survival. In another way, though, its a simple workplace drama. The film, in tone, is prosaic. It indulges in very few awe-filled images of an Earth made distant. Its spaceship is not exotic, but pragmatican office above all. The ship is home to a folding treadmill, sealed pouches of distinctly unappetizing food, a lab full of plants. Stowaway is, in that way, similar to The Martian, whose protagonist Watney, trained as a botanist, utters the line that might as well be the films motto: Im going to have to science the shit out of this.

The two films may diverge in their messages about space as a site of human communion; what they share, though, is a conviction that space is, at this point, fundamentally mundane. The Martian illustrates this not just with its extremely quotidian dialogue, but also with its soundtrack: Rather than the booming orchestrals of the space opera, it features music that is decidedly earthly: disco. Hot Stuff, Turn the Beat Around, Love Trainthese are the sounds of The Martians version of space. Several other recent works have adopted that mode of sonic banality. One of the best scenes in The Midnight Sky, an otherwise uneven new entry into the annals of space-travel movies, finds the crew of a ship singing along to Sweet Caroline, trying to find a moment of levity amid catastrophe. A scene in Season 2 of For All Mankind shows a group of astronautspeople both grand as adventurers and bland as co-workersjoining in a round of Bob Marleys Three Little Birds.

The Martian is based on the 2011 novel of the same name from the hard-science-fiction writer Andy Weir. The book, narrated with jovial charm by the stranded astronaut, is notably casual in toneso much so that, if you take away the details about radiation and telemetry, the story often has the feel of a sitcom. That same tone informs Weirs latest work, Project Hail Mary. The novel, published this week, adopts a long-standing sci-fi trope: It tells the story of one human, the scientist Ryland Grace, fighting to save humanity from a potential extinction event. Grace awakens on a spaceship only to discover that his fellow crew members have died. Beset, at first, with amnesia, he describes the situation in a manner that is almost aggressively conversational; in this space drama, instead of awe at the giddy fact of a swirling universe, we get detailed descriptions of bodily functions. Weirs writing emphasizes what it feels like to be a human body navigating an inhuman environment. (It often feels, readers will learn, exceptionally bad.)

Project Hail Mary is an elegant inversion of The Martian: Instead of humanity working to save the life of one person, here is one person working to save all of humanity. But even this most epic of tales is shaped by the centripetal forces of human nature. Before Grace leaves Earth, he writes a controversial paper and is consequently banished from academiathe victim, Weir suggests, of human small-mindedness. (The storys hints of normalcy are also injected playfully: As he labors to save his species, Grace encounters an alien that he names Rocky.) Weir is a master of the narrative splice, and Project Hail Mary cuts between Graces memories of Earth and his present in space. The effect serves not only to keep the story propulsive; it also suggests a fundamental continuity between terrestrial realities and cosmic ones. The upshot is similar to what you find in Stowaway and For All Mankind: space, made small. Space, a place of possibility, but also constraint. The magic is the mundanity of it all. This is one of those things I frequently have to explain to my students, Weir, as Grace, writes:

Gravity doesnt just go away when youre in orbit. In fact, the gravity you experience in orbit is pretty much the same as youd experience on the ground. The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.

That captures things nicely: You just fall forever. These recent assessments of space traveltheir wonder made determinedly banalare an apt outcome of this moment. Space exploration is ever more a matter of corporate interest and corporate wrangling. As billionaires fight for the moon, it becomes much more difficult to think of space as a setting for some kind of absolutionand to believe that humans might yet find ways to escape our humanity. The new fictions reflect that reality.

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'For All Mankind,' 'Stowaway,' and the Bleak New Space Fantasy - The Atlantic