From Publishers Weekly
After the last moon landing in 1972, America's space program seemed to come crashing down to earth. Now journalist Benjamin (Living at the End of the World) looks at how earthbound Americans have continued their fascination with outer space. Sometimes this fascination veers to the extreme, as with the Roswell true believers who can recite by heart details of the spaceship with three aliens aboard that supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947 and was spirited off by the military. At the other extreme, Benjamin describes the SETI@home project, through which millions of people around the world donate their computers' extra processing capability to analyze radio signals collected by the enormous Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, hoping to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Benjamin also details the effects of the decline of the space program on the fortunes of communities, real and virtual: the problems faced by many real estate ventures in central Florida, including the Disney Company's utopian visions, as well as the growth of virtual communities whose members can buy plots on Mars and establish their own colonies like something out of Ray Bradbury. This is also an elegantly written memoir, as the author tells about her youthful fascination with the space program and her travels to places like Arecibo and Roswell, as well as her virtual travels among various computer groups over the last 20 years. Space buffs will appreciate many aspects of her story.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Booklist
The thrill was gone after the Apollo astronauts departed the moon: the futurism of human space exploration expired and was replaced by a routine of running laps around earth in space stations. Essayist Benjamin ventures a suite of explanations for the disappointment (to space enthusiasts, at least) that play off the visions of Arthur C. Clarke, Werner von Braun, and Gerard O'Neill, which fired up so many imaginations through the 1970s. Their outward-directed attitude to discover and colonize space, she avers, is quite moribund today, succeeded by a more inward orientation that, she provocatively argues, we can blame the astronauts for. Benjamin finds that the discovering spirit occasionally reemerges with missions such as the 1997 Pathfinder landing on Mars. However, she demonstrates the weakness of that spirit by contrasting it with the strength of belief in UFOs, amusingly captured by her irreverent tour of Roswell, New Mexico. A perceptive lamentation.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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