"A Fine Moral Point" is one of many amazing essays in the book, all written for magazines in the 1940s and 50s, when the world was just starting to measure the effects of fallout, learning how to treat the diseases caused by radiation, and coming to terms with the inevitable destruction of civilization. As Lloyd Smith says in one of the essays, "If war should come, we scientists might die the same as anyone else, but at least we would understand exactly what was causing our death." It's a time that's obscured in hindsight by our view of the Cold War and the Apollo program, but there's a lot of interesting and/or horrifying stuff going on here.
Other books I've read about the atomic bomb focus heavily on the scientists who designed it. Lang has a lot of scientists, but he also writes a lot about their families, the workers at plants like Oak Ridge, and the soldiers who work with the bombs—the people who are buying the magazines.
In "What's Up There?" Lang visits the White Sands Proving Ground where they're strapping scientific instruments onto leftover Nazi V-2 rockets. Capt. Edward Detchmendy shows him around the base and introduces him to Lt. James Kincannon, the Recovery Officer. Once the rockets go up, Kincannon very much cares where they come down, because he has to go out in a Jeep and recover the instruments. Lang asks to tag along:
Apropos Werner von Braun and the other German scientists, Lang gets off this line:
In "Bombs Away!" (1952) Lang visits Yucca Flat for an Army field test involving a live bomb drop. It's like getting to see Dr. Strangelove twelve years early:
...
Of the various officials I talked with during the tours and between lectures, none awaited the impending test more eagerly than the civil-defense people. "We're counting heavily on this bomb," one of them told me. "It's a tough job selling accident insurance."
...
Eight hours after the detonation, a hundred troops who had been in the
foxholes and trenches that morning were marched into the City Hall
auditorium. They were ranged against the walls in groups, by states,
for the convenience of newspapermen interested in local
stories. Almost instantly, the barnlike structure was alive with the
din of feature stories. I wandered down one of the aisles, listening
to snatches of the interviews, and found that the atomic G.I. sounded
very much like his counterpart of a few years ago. An Arizona boy had
prayed. A chipper California man said that he'd take the atomic bomb
any day over those German 88s he'd known in Sicily. An Illinois
corporal said that he'd drawn a stranger as his foxhole mate, but that
after the hot earthquake they'd experienced together he was sure
they'd be buddies for life. A very young blond New York City corporal
wanted the reporter talking to him to do him a favor. "My name is
Geiger, Vincent Geiger," he said, "and all the fellows in my company
keep asking me if my father's the guy who invented that counter. I
would appreciate it if you wrote that he isn't."
The most hopeful,
though unconsciously hopeful, words I heard were uttered by a New
Mexican, an earnest, swarthy private first class named Evaristo
Hernandez. "I passed up my furlough to be in on this test," he told
his interviewer. "I figured I might never have another chance to see
an atom bomb."
I could just go on and on. The book ends with a story on the impending launch of the first Vanguard rocket, a postmortem on the failure of said launch, and the super-speculative early phases (1958) of "what is known to researchers, in and out of the U.S. government, as 'the man-in-space program.'" Apparently the word "astronaut" hasn't yet found currency outside the pages of Astounding, because the still-hypothetical astronaut is always referred to by ominous terms like "the space man" or "the space traveller".
Sun Nov 20 2011 07:06 From Hiroshima to the Moon:
At a flea market Sumana got me a really good book: From Hiroshima to the Moon: Chronicles of Life in the Atomic Age by Daniel Lang.
It was published in 1959, so the "Moon" in the title is purely aspirational--nothing in this book even gets close to the moon. But Philip Morrison does go to Hiroshima, a month after the bomb is dropped, and Lang gets him to tell the story of that initial fact-finding mission.
The commander started things off by gravely explaining that he had asked one of his aides, a young major, to tell the Americans the "facts of the disaster." "They always referred to it as 'the disaster,'" Morrison said. "It made me feel as though I were a member of an earthquake commission."
"Well," [Kincannon] said, "meet me outside the blockhouse right after the
shoot. Don't be late. Look for the Monstrosity—that's the name of my
jeep. Can't help spotting it. It'll be kind of loaded. I carry ten
gallons of water for the vehicle, five for passengers. Also four
quarts of canned oil. Tools for the vehicle and rocket extricators
will be in it. It has two-way radio-communication equipment, a
bedroll, and binoculars. I carry a first-aid kit and a snake-bite kit
with serum. I always have my forty-five for snakes and mountain lions,
and also for coyotes. And don't bring a pillow, the way some
people have. That's sissy stuff." Kincannon abruptly proceeded into
the blockhouse, and Detchmendy said to me, "Take along a pillow."
They were originally signed on for one year at a small wage and
six dollars a day for expenses. Since the expiration of the contract,
however, they have come into substantial raises. It is probably the
first time that the kidnapper has also paid the ransom.
From [a helicopter] emerged a lieutenant general, who strode past us halfway up the knoll, turned around, and delivered a talk. He had been up forward with the troops, he said, and the boys had made jokes immediately before and after the explosion. The weapon, he declared, had to be regarded as so much firepower. From a tactical point of view, he went on clinically, the day's bomb had been too big, because it had prevented the troops from advancing quickly enough. "We learned in the war that you have to follow close behind your firepower to capture your objective," he said.
Writing the book was not quick at all. The original plan was to build up a backlog and then start the serialization, the way webcomics work. I did about a quarter-draft that was awful, and then I had a conversation with some published novelists in which the novelists were unanimous that they would never start serializing something without having at least a complete draft. I started over and told Simon I'd like to finish a draft before we serialized.
Fortunately, the second draft was much better, I finished it by the end of 2010, and we decided it would be cool to try and find a real publisher for the novel. (Serializing the novel on GSW would pay me as a columnist, which--spoiler alert--is not very much.) I was apprehensive about chasing this particular carrot, anticipating years of bitter failure and publishing-industry drama, but I was able to get Candlemark & Gleam interested quickly, and the rest of the process has moved very smoothly.
So, thanks, Simon and GSW, for giving me the push I needed to write something novel-length. I'm also happy that on GSW I will forever be "Leonard Richardson (robotfindskitten)". It's like the way the Columbia alumni magazine refers to "Barack Obama ('83)".
Sun Nov 20 2011 22:17 Thanks, GameSetWatch:
As this GameSetWatch post implies, Constellation Games was triggered by, and originally written for serialization on, that site. Here's what happened: at the end of 2008 Simon Carless emailed me and said (paraphrase) "Hey, I liked 'Mallory', would you like to write some kind of game-related serial on GSW?" Later that day I sent him a pitch that still describes the novel pretty well. Turnaround was quick because I took the setting wholesale from my 2007 novella "Vanilla", which now needs to be rewritten because I completely cannibalized it for the novel.
