🚀👨‍🚀 It's the 10th anniversary of one of the most Up Wing stories ever told

'The Martian' celebrates the power of human ingenuity and the usefulness of duct tape

Quote of the Issue

“The emergence in the early twenty-first century of a new form of intelligence on Earth that can compete with, and ultimately significantly exceed, human intelligence will be a development of greater import than any of the events that have shaped human history.” - Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

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The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

“With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic.”

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The Essay

🚀👨‍🚀 It's the 10th anniversary of one of the most Up Wing stories ever told

From 1980 through 1989, ice hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky was nine times awarded the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player. (Mario Lemieux won in 1988). “The Great One” was so utterly dominant back then that one sportswriter joked — or maybe he was serious — that the annual award should just be renamed the Gretzky Memorial Trophy and given to the second most valuable player in a season.

I kind of feel the same way whenever I think about what piece of science fiction is the most Up Wing, my favorite term for pro-progress, risk-embracing, techno-solutionist thinking. How can the answer not be the Star Trek franchise? Trek is clearly Up Wing at its core. Here’s series creator Gene Roddenberry encapsulating its ethos in this famous speech by Captain James T. Kirk from the episode Return to Tomorrow, first broadcast on Feb. 9, 1968: 

They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk. Risk is our business. That's what the starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her.

When you combine Trek’s broad Up Wing philosophy with the franchise’s ubiquitousness (some two dozen films and television series and counting, plus numerous books and video games), financial success ($11 billion in revenue and counting), and cultural impact (from addressing social issues to inspiring both technological advance and technologist careers), there’s a strong case than any award for most Up Wing sci-fi should be named after Trek. Maybe the Return to Tomorrow Award or some such. Trek is the GOAT.

So let’s set Trek aside, though, and think about what has been the most Up Wing SF of the past decade? Well, this past week marked the tenth anniversary of a strong nominee:

The Martian, both Andy Weir’s book and the (mostly) faithful 2015 film version directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon as astronaut/botanist Mark Watney, is an almost pure distillation of full-throated Up Wingery. It celebrates the power of a problem-solving attitude as embodied by Watney, left behind and alone on Mars. Faced with the daunting prospect of survival on the  hostile Red Planet, his determination and resourcefulness exemplify a key Up Wing principle: the capacity for individual initiative and self-sufficiency to drive progress.