M. LK

Reader Larry King, who commented on our Star Wars post below, notes (I've cut his paragraph breaks):

I'm guessing you know the song "Californication"? Whenever I hear the line "Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement" it makes me think a lot about science fiction and real space travel. Most folks think science fiction boosted the space program, and that is certainly true in many ways. On the other hand, the USSR had a lot less SF than us, and yet had a great space program. We gave up on the moon once it got boring. Was that science fiction's fault?The moon landing is too dim a memory in my mind, but I remember watching the Viking landings and being disappointed. Mars didn't look at all like Edgar Rice Burroughs had described it. Maybe the average American's image of "outer space" really is the product of a Hollywood basement.

The border between reality and fiction fascinates me. We have our own small world, and much of the rest of our imagination is filled out by fiction. Not just sf and fantasy, but stuff like cop shows giving us a (very false) idea of how cops work. (Some say CSI is hurting prosecutors since juries now expect great forensic evidence.) Look at our knowledge of America's western frontier, which for most is based on the movie version, which has about as much connection with the real west as Latin has with Pig Latin. A few weeks ago I noted it's Talk Like A Pirate Day, but of course, we don't really know how they talked, we know how movie pirates talk. The space program caught our attention when we were racing the Russians to the moon, but I guess after that it was bound to fall short if it had to compete against the images built up by science fiction.