Tag: Food

I’ll close this series of posts on the music references in Food with a reference that is not to music: Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot soliloquy.

I mentioned Sagan in my post on Kyle Tran Myhre, and I want to return to the quote I included there, because it is key to what I’ve tried to communicate in this series.

“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

One cannot write without being influenced by the times in which one lives. And we are living through some shit. My primary goal with this series has been to provide young readers a vision of hopepunk optimism for our future: that they can build the society they want to live in. But, as I’ve written these books about humankind’s first generation off Earth, I have occasionally struggled to maintain that positive attitude. At these times, that sentence from Sagan’s speech has returned to mind and centered me. It’s a rallying call.

Excerpt:
“We don’t need someone to save us. What does that even mean?” She paused “Look,” she said, “we’re complicated. Kind of a mess, actually. We rarely live up to our ideals. But we try.” She paused again. “We save ourselves,” she said.
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Image: Original caption: This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters – violet, blue and green – and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.
NASA
Public domain

I was listening to I’ll Take You There, by the Staple Singers, and I had a vision of kids floating in zero gravity, laughing and bouncing around. It’s such an easy and hopeful groove, but as with so much good music, it emerges from a cultural context that is in no way easy or hopeful. That juxtaposition seemed a good fit for this book.

Excerpt:
“Several minutes later, as the main engines shut off and the girls realized they were weightless, a soft funky bass line and a gospel female voice invited them to a place where nobody was crying, and nobody was worried. The music oozed comfort and good vibes. The sisters looked at each other as they floated and bobbed in their straps.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Image: The crew of STS-45 is already training for its March 1992 mission, including stints on the KC-135 zero-gravity-simulating aircraft. Shown with an inflatable globe are, clockwise from the top, C. Michael Foale, mission specialist; Dirk Frimout, payload specialist; Brian Duffy, pilot; Charles R. (Rick) Chappell, backup payload specialist; Charles F. Bolden, mission commander; Byron K. Lichtenberg, payload specialist; and Kathryn D. Sullivan, payload commander.
NASA/JSC
Public domain

Do you get frisson? More specifically, do some pieces of music make the hair on your neck stand up? I get that at exactly one minute and fifty-four seconds into You and Me, by Penny and the Quarters, on the word “you”. I encountered this little known piece while working on Part Three, and knew I had to work in a passing reference to it somehow.

Excerpt:
“At T-minus six minutes, their helmets were filled with softly strummed electric guitar chords. A chorus of voices sang “you and me” in harmony, while a plaintive female voice riffed wordlessly over them… The singer drew the word “you” out long and smoothly, voice shifting across several notes. Cas felt as if she were floating on that voice.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Image: Picture of skin with goosebumps. Image has been altered to display the words “it’s just a song”.
photographer: Ildar Sagdejev
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

My oldest also likes Radiohead, though she would probably think Creep is basic.

Excerpt:
“You’re just different, and different is good. We’re all different. In fact, I’ll tell you a secret that is true for everyone: we are all lonely and feel like creeps sometimes. That’s a good thing. It reminds us to treat each other kindly.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

We’ve all felt like one at some point. It’s a good song with the sort of staying power that will take it deep into the century. Maybe even to Mars.

Image: The author in a different and wilder period of life. This is too embarrassing to describe further.

My oldest went through a Riot Grrrl phase. That phrasing sounds dismissive. I don’t mean it that way at all. She still loves loud music that challenges social norms, and I love that she loves that. I also love the idea that Martian tweens have that same rebellious streak, even in a culture more nurturing than our own.

Excerpt:
“A heavy drumbeat filled the cabin of the Peregrine. A guitar moaned softly then erupted into distorted power chords. The singer came in, shouting the first verse. The sisters looked at each other, smiled, then they shouted the chorus together: Rebel Girl!”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Maybe the sisters recognize a kindred soul in the confrontational lyrics. Mars had its moment of revolution (the Schism). It was quiet, as revolutions go, but likely not without trauma. Of course the kids share that rebellious streak.

The end goal of the Schism was to build a culture in which we do a better job of treating each other well. Reading the text of the flyer pictured here, I feel like Kathleen Hanna would make a good Martian.

Image: Flyer written by Kathleen Hanna in 1989.

Excerpt:
“The Country Roads stood upright on the pad, engine bells down, nose up, like all rockets since the beginning of the rocket age. But this ship was not tall and sleek like a rocket from Earth. It was squat and ungainly, with weird bumps wherever some interior feature required them. Solar panels and heat radiators were folded uncomfortably against its sides, and various antennas and dishes stuck out here and there. There was no need for it to be aerodynamic, as it would never enter an atmosphere.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

One could argue that my choice of name for the translunar ferry that becomes a lifeboat, Country Roads, is a bit too on the nose. That’s fine. Sometimes on-the-nose is exactly what is needed.

(Savvy through-readers may also find a callback to my reference to lithopanspermia in the prologue to Water.)

Image: illustration by Luis Peres for Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Do you remember the first time we see the Discovery One in 2001? It eases slowly onto the screen, as a melancholy orchestral piece plays (the Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite, by Aram Ilyich Khachaturian). The effect is to emphasize the foreignness of humans in deep space. I’ve always found the scene incredibly lonely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jft1rvWQv0&t=1s

I had that scene in mind as I was writing of Nyla playing her cello over Radio Mars. But I wanted to deemphasize the loneliness and instead focus on finding strength through shared struggle.

Excerpt:
“The intimate and plaintive tone of the instrument, so similar to a human voice, sometimes made the children cry, but the tears brought them together. It was as if the music spoke to them of their fears and their suffering and told them that they were not alone, that other humans have suffered so, and knowing that helped them feel stronger.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

I didn’t have any particular cello piece in mind for Nyla to play for Radio Mars, but my youngest has been practicing Vivaldi’s Cello Sonata in E Minor, Op. 14, No. 5, from Suzuki Book 5, lately. I think it’s a good fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoL5RYymIB4

Image: Victorian woman standing with cello. Public domain