Jupiter Project: A Final Word

As depicted in Jupiter Project,
life in space could be fun.

Walk into any bookstore, and you are confounded by an infinite number of books.  Even segregated into helpful categories, more titles await your perusal than you could ever read in a lifetime.  All too often, educators and employers force on us a simple choice: read this assigned work, or face my displeasure.  After thus equating reading and work in our minds, some of us opt to read little more, and if we do, these tend to be books which make no demands of us, such as light entertainment or ones that explore our interests or hobbies.  Some of us aspire to do more than this, to dedicate at least a portion of our reading to books of importance: ones valued by previous generations, or that speak to current issues.  So why can’t we do all three, you ask?  Why do we find it so difficult to identify those special books that not only inform us in vital ways, that not only fill us with delight, but speak to issues pertinent to generations both previous and present?  I, for one, believe that Jupiter Project, by Dr. Gregory Benford, is one such book.

Firstly, Jupiter Project is both important and fun.  For those who want factual reading, the novel explains how we could live beyond the confines of Earth, touching on such fundamental issues as space station design, how to build shuttles and satellites, even how to extract necessities like air and water from a distant world we might wish to colonize (in this case, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede).  Like Huckleberry Finn and the Heinlein juveniles, Benford’s novel stirs the blood with rousing adventure.  His young protagonist, Matt Bowles, confronts crucial issues from past and fights against those who would bar him and those he loves from choosing their own destinies. 

Secondly, while Fantasy novels are currently in vogue, Jupiter Project offers just as much escapism for children as it does for teens and adults.  Children could imagine themselves putting on Matt’s space suit, walking out of an airlock, and floating through space.  Teens could imagine themselves piloting a shuttle like Matt, or performing satellite maintenance using an electronic device of their own design, while Jupiter rotates below them, its storm clouds spinning and clashing before their eyes.  Adults could imagine taking their families with them (like Matt’s parents) to live on the space station JABOL, or exploring the mysteries of Jupiter and its asteroid belt as JABOL’s crew members do, or building the big reactors for Ganymede’s Atmosphere Project, so that their grandchildren could live unassisted on its surface.  While previous generations thrilled to Captain Ahab’s attempts to capture and kill Moby Dick, people of all ages can revel in Matt’s death-defying effort to save JABOL from closure.

Lastly, Jupiter Project is a book everyone should read because it speaks to timeless issues, and because it challenges us to consider the direction in which we, as a society, are headed.  For previous generations, Lewis and Clark were heroes.  The great American dream was to leave behind known society and settled territories, and forge a new life in distant lands full of possibilities they could only imagine.  Today we relegate a few weeks each year to our personal explorations, and that’s if we have the funds and can get the time off work to do so.  Instead of taking on the wilderness and converting it to our desires, we repaint our rooms, remodel our homes, and re-landscape our yards.  When these efforts at transformation fail to satisfy, we consult books and experts on how to re-prioritize our lives to make them more productive.  A young president once charged us with a different dream, one that he believed we should pursue, not because it would make our individual lives easier or more pleasant, but because it would constitute a noble achievement for all humanity. 

Visionary writer Arthur C. Clarke is credited with saying that the remarkable thing was not that we made it to the moon, but that we stopped going there.  We’ve all heard variations on this self-help mantra: if we can conceive it, and we can believe it, we can achieve it.  Yet we’ve allowed the accountants and bureaucrats to tell us that our dreams of exploration and colonization beyond this world are too costly, too impractical, too hard.  In so doing, we’ve relegated those dreams to the trash cans of history.  Are we content to let them remain there?  In Jupiter Project, Dr. Gregory Benford suggests a way forward for us all, if we will only rededicate ourselves to the goals we once dared to believe that we really, truly could achieve.

Dragon Dave