The world of the Rocket Ranch is set some 80 years into the future (hello, Posterity!) but not pinned to a specific date.
J. R. R. Tolkein said that in composing The Lord of the Rings, the primary motivation was to tell “a really long story”. Jurassic Pouch is not a long story, though it is my longest, and my motivation is different.
Many of my favorite science fiction stories ask the reader to permit faster than light travel, infinitely strong diamond space elevators, positing access to futuristic (and fantastic) technologies that almost certainly can never be. If the Starship Enterprise has no warp drive, there’s no story, no strange new worlds within reach.
The fastest spaceship built in my time, the New Horizons probe, would take tens of millennia to reach Proxima Centauri, nearest star to our own, if it were going there, which it is not. A future “Breakthrough Starshot” may one day take a few zeros off that travel time, but not enough to really matter. Our distant posterity might visit other stars, but we will not. It is less likely that you are reading this in a different solar system than mine, than it is that the English language will survive long enough for you to read it.
We are even limited by the expanse of our own solar system, boldly explored in fiction by Lucian, Kepler, Rostand, Verne, Wells, Bradbury, Vonnegut, and Clarke. We are exploring the solar system with robotic probes, some of which, launched long ago but within living memory, still return data from the interstellar void just past our Sun’s influence. But no one is going to walk on Venus any time soon. Or survive the hazards of artificial hibernation (and intelligence) to play among the moons of Jupiter (or Saturn).
What’s left? Our own planet, spinning in space. It is more than four billion years old. Life emerged in splendor pretty much as soon as it could have. We ourselves have stood upon it for less than a thousandth of that time. In our struggle to survive upon this planet, we invented technology. In our struggle to apprehend the world, we invented, proportionately recently, the scientific method.
This is a story of the practical application of science in the exploration of a planetary body, the Earth. In all the Universe, it is the most interesting planet that I know of. It is our Pale Blue Dot, filled with wonders that continue to defy our best efforts to understand (and survive) it. We leave marks on this Earth. This is a story about coming to grips with that, too.
Captain Bender and crew find themselves exploring an exotic alien world, with “splendor beyond compare” (Porco). It just happens to be the planet we, and they, were all born on.
I hope you like it.
Alan Canon
Louisville, Kentucky.