Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Diaper-wearing astronauts (and Barry N. Malzberg)

The whole Lisa Nowak affair seems straight out of a Barry N. Malzberg novel. Malzberg delighted in depicting the Space Program as a futile enterprise mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, and astronauts as mentally imbalanced people. Check out his novel Beyond Apollo, for example.

As sometimes happens, the craziest and/or more depressing author has turned out to be the most prophetic. Anyway, it's almost comforting to know that astronauts are not always superhuman paragons of achievement and rationality, but can flip out and drive 1000 miles wearing diapers to kill some poor fellow with whom they have a grudge. Just like the rest of us.

The image of a former astronaut driving a car in such awkward conditions, and the general deranged quality of what happened, also reminds me of Lem's The Chain of Chance.

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