What's so cool about Space, anyway?

On Deborah Willis' space-writing brilliance, what William Shatner, Olivia Rodrigo and I have in common + a November writing prompt.

Nov 16, 2024

I have never had a dream about Space. Which is curious fact, really, when balanced against just how much time I have spent thinking about Space in recent years. Like all of us, I think about a lot of things, some pleasantly and some not-so-pleasantly, and I certainly dream about those things all of the time. But space? No.

In that same vein, I have never written about the topic of Space, despite some of the most useful writing advice imploring us to write what we can’t stop thinking about, or write what keeps us up at night. I’ve written on a lot of my personal fears and anxieties, some of them being dug out like marrow from a bone and exorcised into an essay form, or other times, gently tapping its way into the craft of character inside of a short story. But so far, the idea of Outer Space has not visited my writing practice.

In the 2013 film Gravity, rogue Russian satellite debris storms towards astronauts doing a space walk to work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Above the astronauts, Earth’s giant sphere looms comfortably, looking close enough to reach out and touch, even though us viewers know that it isn’t. Its incredible swirls of ocean blues, verdant greens and milky clouds are familiar; the astronauts are close enough to the sun to have ample light thrown on the space shuttle as they work. But their position is still set against the black cavity of free space behind and below, showing the viewer that they are suspended above a bottomless pit, without the aid of gravity to differentiate between our earthly directions of up and down.

As the incoming debris storm begins to tear apart the spacecraft, we watch Sandra Bullock’s character become detached from the ship as its systematically destroyed beneath her, and she cycles through the atmosphere in a dizzying panic, her only tether a long robotic space arm. With George Clooney’s voice being radioed to inside Sandra Bullock’s space suit, we hear him urge her to detach, detach, detach, and she finally does, unclipping her metal connector belt and becoming free of the space arm, tumbling swiftly through outer space.

Bullock’s character becomes a white blotch on our screen, shrinking smaller and smaller against the expanse of space around her, the lonely void. She tumbles away from the viewer and disappears deeper into a Stygian black as dark as ink, peppered with scarce stars.

When I first watched this particular movie scene as an adult, sitting on my living room couch indoors — warm, safe, predictably weighted by gravity on Planet Earth — I realized that my heart was beating quite fast and that I was sweating through my shirt.

Before this time in life, I hadn’t thought very much about Space at all. I was not a child who grew up having remembered the map of the solar system or the positions of the planets around us, their correlation to each other in size and placement. I was not a science kid. Vaguely, I understood the visual concept of Mars being red. I didn’t have much time during my childhood to think about these kinds of things, and no adults around me talked about them. Family life was preoccupied with more terrestrial topics: the monthly walk from our Ajax apartment building complex to the grocery store when my mom’s ODSP cheque came in, her perennial worry over if we’d be able to pay the phone bill.

I’m not saying that poor people don’t think about Space, or want to, I’m just saying that they don’t really have the time.

I only began to think of Space as a middle-class adult. When married, with a job, working on fixing up a home, raising my own children. Over time, the concept of it, once turned over a few times in my head, began to feel sickly and foreign to me. How are we supposed to accept that it goes on forever? How is a day on Mercury twice as long as a year on Earth? Why can’t Google certifiably confirm for me one way or another that the images we have of space, the ones we’ve always looked at, are either 100% real or rendered? Why would anyone want to go there if there is no air, which inevitably means that there is no sound? How could you willingly give up the audible pleasures of land on Earth: wind rustling through leaves on trees, buzzing scream of cicada? Trickling creeks. A loon call. Rain patter. A howl of wolf.

Last year I read Deborah Willis’ 2023 Giller Prize longlisted novel, Girlfriend on Mars, and recommended it to everyone I talked to. Against the rampantly growing idea of space colonization in our society, the novel’s premise came as a fresh breath of air. Since I want to tell you now to read it (as soon as you possibly can, because it is just that good) I won’t share very much on the plot. But, as two intrepid explorers are slated to be sent on a one-way mission to Mars via a very millennial reality TV show competition, one is nurturing a growing realization that nothing may be as awe-inspiring as Earth. As the novel expertly edges away from the scientific to the philosophical near its conclusion, I finally felt for the first time that a writer had perfectly captured my own personal fear of Space: lack of Earth.

Recently, I came across a quote by William Shatner after his own very real trip to space, which inspired a book of essays. He writes:

“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

When I think about outer space, I think of Sandra Bullock hurtling through it, with absolutely nothing around her to hold onto. She is spinning, lost and alone in a dark space without an anchor. Without a rescue, there is no possibility of returning to Earth. There is no corporeally-experienced sunrise or sunset. No tangible sensation of holding a fluttering moth in your cupped palm. No newborn babies laughing for the first time with happy dribble glistening on their chin. There is no bare feet on July grass. No first quiet snowfall in November. No embracing of someone that you haven’t seen in a while, remembering how they always smell of the commonplace and the terene, the comfortable and recognizable: an oak leaf, but also laundry detergent. And wet soil, but also bar soap.

Yes. Outer Space, I have decided, is the most terrifying thought I can conceive of.

In recent celebrity news, Olivia Rodrigo revealed that a guy wanting to go to space is a red flag. “This is a very oddly specific question that I ask guys on first dates,” she shared. “I always ask them if they think that they would want to go to space. And if they say yes, I don’t date them."

She continues: "I just think if you wanna go to space, you’re a little too full of yourself. I think it’s just weird.”

WRITING PROMPT:

You knew I was going to ask you. What worries you about the concept of Space? Is it Outer Space you think of, that lonely tumble of an untethered course charted through nothingness? Or is it simply space in its simplest defined form: an unoccupied distance — between you or your character, or someone and something else? What does space look like in your current writing work? Do you need more space (pause) between scenes or setting? What about visual space — a line break in a poem, or a new paragraph in your prose? Think about what space means to you, whether it’s cosmically-inspired or or not, and see how in unfolds in your writing.

You can also just do what I did, and write about Space even though it terrifies you. Then feel free to send it to me so I can read it. I need the exposure therapy.

xx Britt