A game about the sorrows of Admiral Adama and his crew. Charles Mudede
Here are the spacecrafts of my life. There is the Nostromo in Alien (an interstellar commercial towing vehicle with serious class tensions). There is Zion in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Zion orbits the zone between dark space and earth's blue atmosphere with "bass-heavy" dub music reverberating through its crammed compartments, segments, nodes, locks, and docks.
There is the only good thing about the movie Sunshine, Icarus II. What makes this spaceship unique is it understands what life is. Life is always other life. We will not travel deep into space just as humans. It will be as humans/bacteria/plants/bugs. The incurus has lots of mud, bacteria, and plants refreshing its air. It also has a gardener as one of its crewmembers.
Also recall what the late and great biologist Lynn Margulis wrote about the spaceship on Star Trek...
If people ever journey for extended periods in outer space, endeavor will never be as machinate and barren as Star Trek. The vision of sterile engineering emancipating us from our planetmates is not only tasteless and boring, it borders on the hideous. No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex Interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within ) our own skin⌠Without âthe otherâ we do not survive.
(Indeed, my writing class on life has Margulis thinking and books at its core.)
Lastly, it is Battlestar Galactica in Syfy's Battlestar Galactica. After watching all 75 episodes of the series this January, I found it provided my dreams with bold images and themes, and also my soul with a tone for space travel. That tone was new to me. I would never have felt it if the show had not been created (or recreated in the '00s). It's a deep and existential tone. What is the mood of moving through vast and empty spaces indefinitely?
What is the feeling that consolidates in your chest from working, eating, fucking, and sleeping on a spaceship that creaks and hums constantly, that is attacked constantly, that is constantly all that stands between you and oblivion? What must be felt after years on this spaceship is a galactic-scale depression. Nothing on earth can compare to it. This is what a star feels when it's pulled toward the black hole that will rip it apart.
Alcoholism is near universal on Battlestar Galactica. Many commit suicide. There is no real reason for living like this. Space is oppressively more space.
