We Only Got the Disasters

"It was only as I sat on a panel with three older male [science fiction] writers, listening to them decry the loss of hope and wonder in modern science fiction, that I started to react...What happened to the wonder, they asked. What happened to the hope and promise for the human race?

It felt, to me, like mourning for a genre that had lost its way – and it was that, more than anything, that made me angry.

A moment of silence came. “Do you know my first memory of space travel?” I asked into that quiet. “Challenger.”

In contrast to their earlier stories, I talked of being four years old and watching on television as something went terribly wrong after liftoff. I hadn’t truly understood what I was seeing in that moment, only knew that my mother sat down very suddenly, very abruptly, on the coffee table.  My mother never let anyone sit on the coffee table.

I talked of spending days in my dorm room watching as crews searched fields for the wreckage and remains from the space shuttle Columbia.

Of NASA budget cuts. Of projects cancelled or failed.

“No one has walked on the moon in my lifetime,” I told them. “Yet you try to tell me that it’s my generation who has lost their wonder?  That it’s the young people of today who have let everything slip and fall into ruin? You don’t understand. You had the dream and the potential and the opportunities, and you messed it all up. You got hope and moon landings and that bright, glorious future. I got only the disasters."

- Karina Sumner-Smith