Astronaut-themed science fiction

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This article was published 20/07/2019 (2315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All this reporting and writing about the moon landing’s 50th anniversary got us in the mood to read and watch some science fiction. So here are picks for some of the best astronaut-themed science-fiction books and movies. We narrowed it down to selections grounded in science and space travel. (Thus, the exclusion of Star Wars.)

Here goes, sorted by media type in order of release year.

Books — fiction

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey. This is character-driven literary science fiction at its finest and it examines how humans will deal with the challenges of long missions of space exploration. The Wanderers follows three astronauts through a 17-month training simulation for a Mars mission and, through them, gets at the question of what drives humanity’s need to explore.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What would we do if we knew the world was about to be destroyed by “hard rain” that will fall for 5,000 years? That’s the premise of this science-fiction saga by a Seattle novelist who’s one of the masters of the genre. As Seattle Times reviewer Nisi Shawl wrote in 2015, “Stephenson’s storytelling style combines the conversational and the panoramic, allowing him to turn his piercing gaze on the familiar aspects of a strange future, encompassing the barely conceivable detail by detail, striking vista by sweat-covered heroic gambit, and telling us how it might be possible to regain what we could so easily lose in so many heartbreaking ways.”

The Three-Body Problem series by Cixin Liu. Former U.S. president Barack Obama called it “just wildly imaginative, really interesting.” Amazon reportedly may spend up to US$1 billion acquiring the rights to produce a three-season TV show based on the Hugo Award-winning series. The series, based in China, chronicles the existential crisis that grips all of humanity when it encounters an extraterrestrial civilization bent on taking over Earth, but the alien armada won’t arrive for another 400 years, leaving humans plenty of time to bicker over how best to prepare the eventual space battle.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. This was adapted to the big screen as the movie Arrival, featuring Amy Adams as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist charged with finding a way to communicate with Earth’s new alien arrivals. But this isn’t your everyday alien encounter story. It incorporates sophisticated concepts of physics, language and time, and wrestles with the idea of free will.

Books — nonfiction

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. Mary Roach is the queen of taking scientific subjects and turning them into witty, hilarious prose. In Packing for Mars, she puts everyday questions in the context of space travel and what it would take to get astronauts to Mars. This means you get a series of delightful essays centred around questions like “What happens when an astronaut pukes in his helmet?” Roach shows you how space food evolved to what it is today, writes about the Zero G toilet in entertaining detail and takes you behind the scenes to see how Japan selects astronauts.

Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program by Margaret A. Weitekamp. The public faces of the Apollo program were male astronauts, but that’s not because women weren’t qualified for space travel. In fact, the doctor in charge of stress-testing the test pilots who became the first astronauts was convinced women might be especially well-suited to the job, and invited women pilots to undergo the same tests as their male counterparts.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith. Originally published in 2005, this was written by a British journalist who decided in 1999 to track down all nine of the remaining living (at the time) astronauts who had walked on the moon to find out what they did with the rest of their lives. Essentially, to try to answer the question of whether there’s any way to find fulfilment again on Earth after walking on the moon.

Movies

Apollo 11 (2019). Released in 2019, the documentary consists solely of archival footage — on 70mm no less — of the mission’s various stages from launch to touchdown, plus on-the-ground video of the folks camped out to see the rocket blaze into the sky. With a subtly thrilling score, masterful editing and no talking heads or hand-holding narration, it unfolds more like an exciting feature film than a dry historical account, and short of sitting in front of a living-room TV on July 20, 1969, it may be the closest thing we have to a real-time look at the moon landing.

Hidden Figures (2016). A rousing, inspiring crowd-pleaser, this fact-based 2016 Oscar nominee shone a light on a trio of heroines: three brilliant black women who worked as “computers” in the early days of the space program, a workplace dominated by white men.

The Martian (2015). Whip-smart astronaut played by Matt Damon uses his science-based skills to save his life on the Red Planet after being accidentally stranded there.

— Seattle Times