our unattainable distance. A distance so great that it’s not even necessary for us to act cruel or proud with all of them. It’s more than enough for us to be invisible.
We are, yes, The Faraways.
And we’re different.
Our stories aren’t made public. We don’t read them aloud with tremulous voices at meetings. Our stories have little or nothing to do those of the others: space is there, yes, but Earth doesn’t figure into our plots and when it does, on occasion, get mentioned, it’s only as an impossible-to-confirm rumor, a space legend no one is all that interested in verifying. Our magazine, Planet, soon goes out of circulation and is printed only for private consumption. We don’t want to be just more faces in the crowd, amid so much space trash floating in the atmosphere.
Ezra and I observed all of this as if through a telescope but with microscopic malice, as if it were a virus or bacteria. The abundance of fanzines, the dreadful but enthusiastic stories, the absurd and impassioned theories, our sects’ epithets: The Futurists, The Cosmics, The Futuristics, The Dimensionals, The Astronomics, The Futurexics. Each of them corresponding to the different Manhattan boroughs we were from and organized according to a ranking system more complex than those of many armies and businesses and families where everyone despises everyone else with cordiality and courtesy. And, soon, the different political stances: those who understood that being devoted to the future should inevitably be linked to the birth of a better and more just world, where science would be of everyone and for everyone; and those who thought that what was to come should be privileged material, that a chosen race would have to write better and better what they imagined, turning themselves into laser beams for the never servile but always obedient masses. Some time later, several of the former were accused of anti-American activities by devout patriotic organizations. And, from the newspapers, I learned about suicides in hotel rooms in Miami, about small-town jails and alleyway beatings, about those who emptied bottles to try to feel full, and about a man with a worn-out face whom I saw later behind a supermarket cash register and who pretended not to recognize me in hopes that please, please, I’d pretend not to recognize him.
Meanwhile and in the meantime, editors with good noses (previously dedicated to printing noir detective novels and disheartened romances) had descended on us, aware almost immediately that—it didn’t matter if we were good writers or not—we symbolized the reader of the future, so they bought our clumsy first stories for almost nothing and collected them in magazines with long names full of adjectives with big letters and absurd but captivating illustrations.
I’ve read a couple of books written about those days (Ezra and I barely appear in them; we were barely a blip on the radar screens, few invoked our last names along with their own) and I remember the combination of boredom and astonishment I felt reliving all of that, arranged and narrated like transcendent historical events that changed the face of the planet, like all of it meant something.
Sure: some of those who marched in the streets and raised their fists or made insane proposals ended up titans of the genre: writers admired by hundreds of thousands of readers, into visionaries, into guests appearing on late shows every time a satellite was launched or the success of a formula made public. Satisfied men smiling at cameras with the all-knowing smiles of those who are convinced they were the first to think or predict something. Because, soon, in an age when everything seemed to accelerate—when progress progressed faster than ever—science fiction had become a combination of meteorological forecast and horoscope and hundred-meter dash. The important thing wasn’t to write well, but to get there faster and before everyone else. The imagination didn’t need to be reflective, but boundless.
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