‘Her dreams receding’: : gender, astronauts and alternate Space Ages in Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet’

Baker, Brian (2019) ‘Her dreams receding’: : gender, astronauts and alternate Space Ages in Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet’. In: Sideways in Time : Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction. Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies . Liverpool University Press, Liverpool. ISBN 9781802076950

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Abstract

Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet (of which three volumes have been published so far: Adrift on the Sea of Rains (2012), The Eye With Which the Universe Beholds Itself (2012) and The Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (2013)) develops a series of alternate histories of the Space Age. Determinedly ‘hard’ in its approach to sf and the technical (as well as historical) background, Sales uses slightly different alternate scenarios in each novella for exploring not only the NASA’s Apollo Moon program, but the fabric of the post-war United States. Each novella is mildly formally experimental, combining multiple narrative time-frames with paratextual material, such as appendices and glossaries, which extend the presentation of the alternate narrative worlds. As well as offering a means by which to examine the ideological and institutional structures of 1960s America, Sales’ focus is largely upon gender representation, and in this Sales challenges the masculine emphasis of space fictions from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Marooned (1969), through Apollo 13 (1995) to Interstellar (2014). Where the first novella investigates male Cold Warriors and homosocial relations, as stranded American astronauts use a singularity-producing machine to try to switch into an alternate time-line and return to an undamaged Earth, and the second’s ‘first man on Mars’ suffers debilitating emotional alienation through his experiences, Then Will the Great Ocean… partly focuses on ‘Jerrie’ Cobb, the leading female astronaut in a world of all-female crews. This paper will analyse Sales’ alternate-history mode in terms of an explicit intervention in science fictions of space exploration with regard to ideological and patriarchal constructions of gender, and in particular as a means by which to re-imagine both the potentialities and implications of space exploration and of post-World War II masculinity and femininity.