Over on my Flickr photostream, where the image from the previous entry resides, our friend Cranky Robert asked if I could explain a bit about the book you see in that photo standing alongside my bottle of The Good Stuff. I thought some others among the Loyal Readers might be curious about that as well, so here is an extended and somewhat reworked version of what I said over there:

The book is a childhood treasure of mine, a Christmas gift I received when I was ten or eleven. (If I recall correctly — and I’ll admit that I might not — it was a stocking stuffer along with a non-fiction book about black holes and the novelization of the Disney movie The Black Hole.) Copyrighted in 1979, two years before the first orbiter actually reached space, Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was a work of pop-science, essentially a primer for laypeople (and precocious 11-year-olds like myself) on just what the shuttle was, how it was supposed to work, and why it was going to be cool. Like so many similar publications from that general era — I’m thinking primarily of magazines like OMNI, Science Digest, and Popular Mechanics, as well as a number of book-length works by so-called “futurologists” — it was breathlessly optimistic and filled with wild predictions of space stations, orbital factories and laboratories, solar-power-collecting satellites that would beam energy back to Earth, and, eventually, vast cylindrical colonies in space. And all of these would be constructed and/or serviced by shuttles and their descendants, which would of course be refinements of the shuttle’s spaceplane design, and not Apollo-style capsules, which is where we’re headed back to now in the post-shuttle era. All that stuff about cities in space may sound laughable now, but it really wasn’t so
outlandish when I was a kid. In a culture where we’d just recently had men walking on the moon, it all seemed plausible, if extremely ambitious. And back then I believed we had the ambition. I wanted to believe that, anyhow.

As you may have gathered, this book was the source of many of my visions of the future that never arrived. I was interested in the shuttles before I read it — which is why Mom and Dad got it for me as a gift — but Shuttle: The World’s First Spaceship was what really fired up my dreams and gave them specific, real-world forms. More real-world than Star Trek, anyhow. And so, for the purposes of the photo and the occasion, the book seemed like the most appropriate symbol of what I was saying goodbye to. (It was also convenient to hand, and small enough to sit beside the bottle and glass without distracting attention away from them.)

And at this point, I imagine my Loyal Readers have read quite enough about space shuttles for a while. I still have some thoughts on the subject, but I’ll hold onto them for the time being and promise the next few entries will be on different subjects…