ast week, riveted along with the rest of the world to television's horrific sounds and pictures, I watched and wept as my country came under attack by faceless cowards. I channel-surfed from one terrible image to the next even more terrifying image, as what seemed at first to be one accidental plane crash turned to two deliberate acts of war, and then multiplied to four. Stunned, I searched for sense where there could be no sense. Phone service was erratic, and so I could do little more than watch and worry—about my friends, those in both New York and Washington, as well as those from any other place who might have been among those traveling on the hijacked airliners; about New York, the city of my birth; about my nation; about my world.
And as I shifted from channel to channel, listening to military helicopters and jets overhead (for I live on the flight path between D.C. and Maryland's Camp David), each minute brought new moments of sadness and destruction, and sensory overload made it difficult to find any emotion I could feel through the numbness. During my fruitless search for understanding, the only place of peace came upon me by accident.
For when I thought that my brain could not possibly hold any more of the day's horror, when tears would no longer come, I found myself staring at a pacific image, one without noise, without explosions, without screaming, without pain. I was suddenly out in space, looking down on this Earth the way that until recent generations no one had ever been able to see it—the way God must see us. Thanks to a cable channel transmitting a NASA feed, I could see live broadcast pictures of the Earth's surface, a brilliant, pristine marble on a stark background. It was then very quiet, and a spiritual calm came over me, as if I had entered a church or synagogue or mosque. I felt strangely comforted.
From this new macroscopic perspective, I could make out no borders. I could see that the teeming billions of us were all one species, inhabiting one planet, and were very small and fragile in the universe. Still numb, I had to stay there for a while and just contemplate the sight, because I could not bear to go back to the other channels, with their updates of more deaths and more destruction and more insanity. I thought back to what it had been like when such pictures of our planet were first broadcast back to us here on Earth. I remembered how we were all filled with hope. How we thought that no one seeing, truly feeling the planet from that perspective, could ever make war. Surely no one seeing this could kill senselessly. The peoples of the world, we thought, would see that we were really one world, that all the man-made boundaries on the maps were false. That all our other divisions—racial, religous, societal—were also man-made. That we would suddenly see the our shared world the same way an alien coming from a distant star would see us, an alien who would see only our similarities, and who would find it difficult to tell apart even the most different of us.
Earth still continues to abide
Maybe that was just the '60s talking. I can't be sure. All I know is that the image of Earth gave me hope back then, and that it was one of the few images that could give me any sort of peace last week.
I had thought that the space program, even though it was initially funded and built for a military and political purpose, would help bring about the end of a need for arms or politics. I was an optimistic idealist then, I know that; that isn't how it all played out.
Science fiction, my chosen profession, uses science to promise us that there will be a future. It doesn't promise us what kind of future, just that there will be one. That is why it has always brought me hope, even in those times like these when it has been difficult to hope. And as I looked at the tranquil image of the world below, as if I were an astronaut in space, I knew that those who threaten us threaten not just New York or Washington or the United States, but threaten hope, and put the entire world at risk.
Their path of terror, which has destroyed the World Trade Center towers, if allowed to be followed to its natural hate-filled conclusion, promises to destroy the world entire. We cannot and must not allow that to occur. The peace that can be seen from space must be brought down to Earth's surface as well. Many of the scientists whose work gave us this view of Earth were first inspired by some of science fiction's first dreamers. So let us now use what science fiction has inspired to inspire us, and take another look at ourselves from out there. We are such a small planet. We must take care.
Our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones, and to those whose lives are still swathed in uncertainty. Getting on with our lives in the face of this tragedy and grief is difficult, but we must go on. There will always be madmen with us, but we must endeavor not to let the madmen drive us mad. Let us move forward, building the future for which science fiction has been writing the blueprints for most of the last century.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
