It was now that she exhibited her devotion to the principle she had expounded at college: The test of a woman is how she organizes space. Therefore, men like you and me and the general, we’d be a hundred times more valuable to the Americans than to the Russians.’ () II. Russia has made maybe thirty thousand of them by now. It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you’re qualified to make a rocket. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted. And one day the galaxies will be gone, too. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten.

Four MenĪlways remember, John, that you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. Whether it be the creation of a space for ideas to thrive, being in a political space to make a difference, being in the right place at the right time (see Cory Doctorow), working in a pragmatic space where lies and truth do not matter, making clear a place of race within space, and manipulating space to own and control it. It was also an exploration of the concept of space itself.

Although there are key characters, they are books tied together around a concept.įor me, Space was more than just about the exploration of the universe. Michener’s novels at my grandparents, but never really taken to picking any up. I remember growing up with bookshelves filled with James A. A group of trainee astronauts are introduced to fly fictional but plausible Project Gemini and Project Apollo missions the intensive training and jockeying for position among the astronauts forms much of the background of the middle of the novel, reminiscent of a fictional version of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and the movie as well. The lives of the fictional characters interweave with those of historical figures, such as Wernher von Braun and Lyndon Johnson. Randy Claggett, a rambunctious Marine Corps aviator and astronaut, is considered by Michener to be the most important supporting character (the first two parts of the book are entitled “Four Men” and “Four Women”). government mission to rescue Kolff from Peenemünde and John Pope, a small-town boy turned Naval Aviator who becomes a test pilot and then an astronaut. Senator from a fictional mid-west state Stanley Mott, an aeronautical engineer charged with a top-secret U.S. The story begins in 1944 and covers more than 30 years in the lives of four men and their families: Dieter Kolff, a German rocket engineer who worked for the Nazis Norman Grant, a World War II hero turned U.S.

Michener space