Over at Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log, he's published a series of reader-submitted short stories which are meant to portray positive visions of technological change as influenced by their favored political ideology. ("Redtopia" for the Republicans, "Bluetopia" for the Democrats, and "Whitetopia" for Nader / other.)

I submitted a story, and although it didn't make the final cut, I'm still kind of fond of it. I suspect that the problem may have been that I filed it under "light purple" (meaning any of the above), since Bush, Kerry, and Nader all make me nauseus. Anyhow, here's my story, for what it's worth. Enjoy!

"Them? They Ain't Done Nothin'!"

by Nathan Koren, 24 Sep. 2004

Mikey here says y’all wants me to talk to the class. Says it’s ‘cause you think I’m some kinda "Pioneer". Heh! What’d you say you were studying?

"The Political History of the Frontier?" Well what in tarnation am I s’possed to know about that? ‘Sides, where I came from, fifth-graders didn’t study such high-fallutin’ things, and I can’t say I paid it no never-mind after fifth grade, neither. Why’d you bring me here again, Mikey? "Old coot" show-and-tell?

Oh, ‘cause I was there. ‘Kay. So. Um. What year are we talking about?

2004, sure. I remember that year like it was yesterday. That was the year that everything changed. Myself, I was weldin’ in a little rocket shop in the desert, along with some folk who’d been workin’ on it for years, never gettin’ off the ground, everybody laughin’ and hootin’ or jus’ generally ignorin’ us. But we kept pluggin’ along, and round about ‘03 folk started to notice. There was a race, called the "X-Prize" -- now don’t that sound all fancy and mysterious! -- which gave a whole pile o’ cash to whoever could build themselves a spaceship. Easy as -- all you had to do was pop three folk up a hundred klick, and do it again in a week or two. ‘Bout as tough as walkin’ the dog -- hardly worth the bother, ‘cept that everybody thought it was so tough that they wouldn’t even give you any money to do it. And then it really was a big deal, ‘cause you need money to do jus’ about anything, don’cha.

Why’d they think it was such a big deal? Shoot, I don’t know, they jus’ did. Folk were a lot dumber and scareder in those days. Other senile coots will tell you how much better things were then, but don’t pay them no never-mind.

Anyhow, round ‘bout ‘03, a bunch of rich folk suddenly noticed us, ‘cause of this X-Prize thing. I think it was kind of a hobby for them at first; they’d gotten bored with yachts and hot air balloons -- I’ll ‘splain ‘bout those later -- and they said what the hell, let’s give spaceships a fling. So then the money thing wasn’t so much of a problem, and by 2004 the first of us were getting our ships in the air. Itty-bitty little things, too, but they could haul the mail faster than a greased fart in a LOX tank -- uh... Sorry miss, I jus’ say that stuff sometimes, you know how it is... But really, you should have been there, at Mojave, first time they lit the wick on ‘ol Burt’s plane! Whooheee! That was somethin’!

‘Course the real action didn’t start up ‘till ‘09, when we got our first orbitals up. Then thing really took off --

-- What’s that? 2004 was an election year? Well I’ll be damned, I guess it was.

No, I remember it just fine, It was between, uh, Kush and Berry. Yeah. A real nasty fight it was, and both of ‘em dumb as stuck gimbals, no less. I jus’ tried to ignore it, best I could. Can’t even remember who won, at the moment, but that don’ matter.

Eh? How’d it influence the development of the frontier? Well it pretty much didn’t. The frontier was built with elbow grease and carbon fiber. Any politician what takes credit for it is just blowing smoke out their nozzles.

Look -- Kush and Berry and Natter and whoever were all oxidizer and no fuel. Whatever they said, all they ever did was cause problems. One had his thermals in a knot over "technology transfer" and "national security," and that was a real pain in the a--ft, uh, thrusters. ‘Course it turned out that there wasn’t really much technology to transfer, seeing as anybody with a metal press and a lathe and a filament winder and a bucket of balls could pretty much build a spaceship. Another had some snit ‘bout "protectin’ the environment" and "spendin’ money on Earth." ‘Course you can’t really keep folk from spendin’ their own money where they want, and there was more pollution from folk drivin’ out to protests than from our flights. So all that flamed out pretty quick, and once everyone from Argentina to North Korea were up and flyin’ their own suborbitals anyway, there weren’t no more questions ‘bout letting us American spacers do what we wanted.

Then, somethin’ strange happened. The more folk went up, the more they kept comin’ back down... different. Hard to ‘splain, but it’s like somethin’ that’d been missin’ from the world ever since it all got mapped -- somethin’ kinda magical – jus’ ... jus’ came back.

I don’ mean super-powers, ‘course; it’s jus’ that folk started seein’ – really seein’, with their own two eyes – that Earth was jus’ too small, and the ol’ universe was too gol-dang big, for folk to be squabblin’ and frettin’ ‘bout everything, and never really dreamin’ or doin’ nothing. I watched folk come off my rockets, all wobbly and space-legged, with somethin’ in their eyes that hadn’t been there before. Some kind o’ vision, some kind o’ hunger for somethin’ bigger than themselves. Not a belief; they'd seen it. I don’ know if I can ‘splain it. I s’pose you kids jus’ take it for granted, livin’ here on a world that’s still half unexplored, that you’ll all go out and do things that nobody’s ever done before. I don’t s’pose you’ll ever know what it’s like not to have that, but that’s what the bad ol’ days were like.

But as for your "political history" – bah! Ain’t no politician ever come out to our little rocket shop and tell me "Son, someday you’ll be an old coot, livin’ on the moon, blatherin’ to yer grandson’s fifth-grade class in Clavius City." It never happened that way, and don’ let no one tell you different.