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Artist concept of the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, 1978. Image: NASA/Wikimedia Commons (PD)
‘I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.’
——Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium
I can vividly recall the moment I first fell under the spell of objects sent by humans into outer space. One wintry evening in 2017, I found myself sitting in the basement of the Sydney Observatory, listening to a talk by the space archaeologist Alice Gorman. From an image of the swarms of space junk and debris around Earth, she began to introduce us to individual satellites (some defunct; some active), making them real and relatable through evocative details. In an essay I later wrote about Gorman and her work expanding the archaeological interest in material culture and artefacts out into the cosmos, I retold snippets of these stories: how the tiny Vanguard 1, ‘the oldest human-made object in space,’ had been disparaged as a ‘grapefruit satellite;’ how the very first poem taken into space was etched onto the instrument panel of the TRAAC satellite.
In that profile of Gorman’s pioneering career, I didn’t mention the emotional impact her stories about space objects had on me. It felt a little shameful to feel so much about an object, or to admit how enchanted I was by human-made objects in Earth orbit and beyond—whether on the Moon’s surface or, like the Voyager 1 and 2 twin spacecraft that had been travelling in space since 1977, at the furthest reaches of the solar system.
Over the years that followed, I became more deeply involved in communities interested in space. Whether as archaeologists, lawyers, ethicists, space scientists or astronomers, these people had very strong and complex emotions about space objects too, whether those objects were on a one-way journey away from Earth, or had flown to space and returned. I read stories of space scientists sobbing on hearing that the European Space Agency’s beloved Rosetta orbiter had been intentionally crashed into the asteroid it had been following for over two years in 2016. I scrolled through the Twitter account of the Voyager spacecraft: Still sciencing after all these years, they tweeted in 2020, to an outpouring of heart emojis from human followers.
The landers and rovers that humans have sent to Mars have always been fairly easy to anthropomorphise, in part because we give them special status as space objects that do things that our own species prizes (move around independently, ‘think’ and process—and sometimes even learn from past mistakes, for instance, by changing routes or backing out of tight spots). They are usually somewhat wistfully named for a human quality that their makers hope they might embody once they’re all on their own on the red planet: Curiosity, Perseverance, Spirit, Ingenuity.
I wanted instead to use fictional, speculative and experimental modes of writing to look back at human beings, as if from the perspective of the object itself.
People all around the world joined the campaign to ‘Free Spirit’ when the Spirit Mars lander got stuck in sand on Mars in 2009, sending in suggestions to NASA of how to help Spirit get unstuck. When none of the ground control team’s fixes worked, and it became clear that Spirit would remain stuck and uncommunicative, the lead scientist on the mission, Steve Squyres, expressed his feelings of grief and loss openly:
Over the course of a mission like this you get very attached to these things. You attach so many hopes, dreams, frustrations, pride. When the rovers are doing well, you’re proud of them, and when they do badly, you’re angry. And if they’re about to stop doing what they do best, that’s sad.
Margaret Weitekamp, a curator of space history at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, has described to me how people stand and gaze with ‘reverence’ at the museum’s spacesuit collection. Bits of Moon rock—called the Goodwill rocks—brought back from the Apollo 17 mission were gifted by the US to nations around the world, but many of them were soon stolen or smuggled onto the black market, where they still fetch extraordinary sums. Sweetgum, redwood, sycamore, loblolly pine and Douglas fir seeds were taken into space on the Apollo 14 mission, and on their return planted all over the US to grow into ‘Moon trees’, that are treated by humans as being magical and otherworldly.
Whenever I encountered one of these stories about a space object, I had the strange, vertigo-inducing impulse to not simply excavate its sociological and anthropological meaning as an essayist and science writer. I wanted instead to use fictional, speculative and experimental modes of writing to look back at human beings, as if from the perspective of the object itself. A space-object’s-eye view of humanity, in other words.
This idea consumed and also terrified me. I knew well the dangers of this kind of destabilising desire to look at human life from an extreme outsider standpoint. I’d felt the same spark—and the same fear—many years ago, when I first came across a description in a history book of a real bear, Wojtek, who had been adopted by a platoon of Polish soldiers during World War II. I wasn’t interested in the soldiers’ perspectives on the bear, so much as Wojtek’s perspective on the soldiers. This initial spark became a book of stories told from the perspectives of animal souls that had died in human conflicts in the past century. In spite of my worry that I might be taking my poetic licence one step too far, I saw that project all the way through, and the collection was published in 2014 as Only the Animals.
Of course, it’s a logical impossibility to inhabit the inner lives of objects. All I could do was invest these objects with human qualities and capabilities: language, feeling, thought, agency.
The stories in Only the Animals were an experiment in radical empathy: a lament about all that is lost in wartime, but also a tribute to the redemptive power of literature in helping humans to reconstitute themselves and their ethical imaginations after the unspeakable has happened. Like so many of my favourite authors, from Leo Tolstoy to Colette to Virginia Woolf, I was writing within the ancient tradition of fable-telling, giving voice to the non-human to understand the human from new perspectives. While it felt artistically risky to write the stories from a non-human point of view, I was comforted in knowing I was joining a long, rich human tradition of anthropomorphising animal characters for storytelling purposes.
Yet this is also what initially gave me pause when I began to be drawn to the idea of writing a new set of stories, this time from the perspectives of inanimate space objects. I realised that the creative appeal—but also the larger risk—of putting words into the mouths of non-living things was that I could not lean on any literary tradition in which it’s considered worthy (let alone advisable) to create stories for adults with non-living objects as characters. There’s a mostly automatic empathy that we experience in the face of animal suffering—even when it is caused by humans—that evaporates when presented with a speaking and suffering object. We may accept this in fiction written for children (think of all the talking forks and knives and teapots in celebrated children’s stories), but once we grow up we are expected to leave behind any interest in the inner lives of objects.
Yet these space objects were calling to me. I wondered if I should give it a go to deepen my own entanglements with the questions of authorship, voice, representation, empathy. By becoming their medium, channelling observations of humans through their stories, what else might come into view? Of course, it’s a logical impossibility to inhabit the inner lives of objects. All I could do was invest these objects with human qualities and capabilities: language, feeling, thought, agency, and an awareness of their relationships with humans and other objects alike. The trick of perspective would be to use the object to get at the inner lives of the humans who had made them and thrust them out into space.
I began to listen to the call of those objects. Their narratives are now at the heart of a new book of short stories I’m writing, Only the Astronauts (to be published by Penguin Random House in 2024). In each of the five extended stories, I’m writing from the perspective of a real-life space object launched by humans into space since the start of the Space Age in the late 1950s. This framing lets me engage with elements of history and the ethics of contemporary spacefaring within the mode of speculative or experimental fiction.
This framing lets me engage with elements of history and the ethics of contemporary spacefaring within the mode of speculative or experimental fiction.
The stories will be ordered in the book to take the reader’s perspective slightly wider with every tale. The first is told from the perspective of Starman, the mannequin sent into space in a red convertible car in 2018 by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, in a trial of one of their rocket launchers. This will be followed by a story from the point of view of the International Space Station, as it anticipates being deorbited and crashed into the sea at Point Nemo in the near future, and looks back on its long history of being a home to humans. Next in the book will be a tale told from the perspective of the first art object to be sent to the Moon, a tiny sculpture called The Fallen Astronaut, which is inhabited by the ghost of Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the Moon.
The most experimental story will be about a crew of fiercely feminist Tamponauts (tampon-astronauts) on a mission to Mars. This is a playful but barbed critique of the misogyny that has historically been a feature of spacefaring, and the ways in which people who menstruate have systematically been excluded from hallowed, extreme places (like Antarctica and outer space), where historically only men have been allowed to test themselves and their bodies. This story is inspired by a real incident recounted by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, who—right before her mission—had 100 tampons suddenly thrust upon her by the male NASA engineers for her one-week journey to space (she was also asked in press conferences if she would get teary and emotional in space). The final story will be a narrative told from the perspective of one of the twin Voyager spacecraft, the furthest human-made objects from Earth.
As the book’s title makes clear, I consider it a sequel of sorts to Only the Animals. The title phrasing (Only the…) comes from the work of Boria Sax, an historian of animals in myth and legend. In a foundational document for his non-profit organisation Nature in Legend and Story, he asks, ‘What does it mean to be human? Maybe only the animals can know.’ (My youngest son recently asked me if the next book in the series would be called Only the Asparagus and would tell stories from the point of view of talking plants. This made me laugh, but who knows!)
In these stories about space objects, I hope to push my thought experiment even further in terms of what kinds of perspectives human readers will countenance and connect with in fiction.
If we want to know what it means to be human, maybe the object-astronauts or envoys we’ve sent out into space could give us a few clues.
By using ‘astronauts’ rather than ‘objects’ in the book’s title, I’m playing with the idea of the literal meaning of the word astronaut—a navigator of the stars, a skillset we would not normally associate with inanimate objects. Yet of course, certain space objects are the ultimate astronauts: Starman, the International Space Station, and the Voyager spacecraft have their own methods of navigating by the stars, and their survival depends on this ability. If we want to know what it means to be human, maybe the object-astronauts or envoys we’ve sent out into space could give us a few clues.
My object narrators are not the usual heroic human astronauts glorified in much science fiction and in many mainstream television series or Hollywood films about space travel. These objects are outsider-astronauts, sometimes sent to, or stuck in, outer space against their will. Their object-histories reveal, in the telling, something about other, more contemplative ways to spacefare, and perhaps gently expand the traditional modalities in which humans think, feel and act when it comes to our activities in outer space.
My space object narrators also let me step outside the normal assumptions and expectations of human narrators. They let me float free from the constraints of realism, into that dreamlike, off-kilter allegorical space of our inner lives. I visualise this method of using objects to tell human stories as a way of orbiting around the human psyche—as some of these objects orbit Earth—peering at it and us in all our beastliness, sweetness and despair.
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