KIDS IN SPACE, PART ONE: FAMILY PLANNING
With so much being bantered around lately about planetary colonization, taking that phenomenon as a given already, it is appropriate to devote some attention to the much less discussed matter of raising families in a non-Earth environment. After all, any successful colony requires families and children as long as human colonists are mortal -- and we have proven time and again here in the relatively safe confines of our home planet that we are nevertheless a very vulnerable species.
It is no fault of science fiction if the area of extraterrestrial family planning has been neglected by our more official space agencies, at least as far as they have chosen fit to divulge. As early as Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's fiction in the mid-seventeenth century, the topic was broached, be it in an unconventional way. In Les Etats et empires de la lune, soon after the protagonist makes moonfall, he is at first caged by the Selenians with a Spanish traveler who arrived before him, in hopes that the two humans would mate and produce observable offspring for the moon beings to study. Sex, after all, often involves plumage, and the distinctly different clothing styles of Spain and France led the Selenians to conclude that it also signified a case of sexual dimorphism. Cyrano discreetly omits to mention if any intimacy developed between the two earthly males, a tease that conforms very well with his irreverent wit.
It is a shame that after Cyrano, much early sci fi writing skips the issue of families in space. Jules Verne's lunar travelers, for instance, parallel their contemporaries crisscrossing Africa by maintaining a strictly masculine fellowship in their exploration. Likewise, H. G. Welles underlines the fact that his book involves the first MEN in the Moon, though Hollywood saw fit to add a female aboard their antigravity craft to swell the audience for its film and please the female public with a very underplayed hint of romance in the bud. Early television was not nearly as exclusively concerned with male adults. An early serial, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, includes a precocious youngster named Bobby, who always emphasizes that he is perfectly adapted to space. Another child, an infant, makes a brief appearance in one story loop: this is the child of the humanoid alien Bovarro and his wife, who dote on their young one as the hope for their own displaced race. Curiously, Bobby himself, like many children of the 1950s screen world, does not have a family. Described as the ward of Professor Newton, he might as well have sprung fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, never enjoying the company of others of his generation. Though Rocky and his girlfriend Vena take on somewhat parental roles, without even being formally engaged, Bobby is perhaps both of product of the 50's and 60's theme of children without conventional families (Lassie, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, etc.) and perhaps a precursor of sci fi films that produce children as in vitro or embryonic characters.
Post-60s sci fi begins to investigate the necessity of kids in space. Star Trek includes a number of episodes focussing on problems of children, often in stressful situations that usually involve some difficulty of adaptation. Spock is perhaps the ultimate expression of this focus, since he is a human/Vulcan hybrid. Yet the main source of his difficulties are social rather than strictly biological, since the circumstances of his birth are not really presented in detail. Instead, he experiences troublesome rejection by fully Vulcan peers and even, in one instance, by his own father. These are echoed in later series by the case of Worf, who also experiences wrenching issues of identification involving the competing factors of his purely Klingon biology and his upbringing by a Russian family after losing his birth parents in a war. By the time Deep Space Nine comes on the scene, space kids become much more common, including Sisco's son Jake, Bashir's genetically modified childhood, Odo's clouded origins, the O'Briens' space-born child, Worf's son Alexander, Quark's offspring and others; so many, in fact, that the Enterprise and the space station both operate onboard nursery schools! With all this youthful presence one might expect a exhaustive treatment of the problematics of childhood in space, but other than briefly hinting at the various consequences of other-than-earthly upbringing in some peripheral characters like members of the maquis, many questions are left unanswered.
Star Wars, by contrast, sidesteps many of the central issues of childhood in space by presenting characters like Luke and Anakin Skywalker, whose origins are shrouded in politically associated mystery but who notwithstanding seem to dominate their environments, due in no small part to the fact that they possess super midichlorian powers. Diseases, birth defects, or bullies are, after all, no match for The Force. The Apollonian atmosphere of Lucas's universe is, of course, not completely dominant in sci fi. In later installments, we plan to concentrate more closely on some very different interpretations of children in space, especially in the universes of more dystopian authors such as Philip K. Dick. Our next piece in this series will move on to the topic of conception in space, referring to some of the works mentioned here and others, as they stack up against what science may or may not tell us about producing future generations in space colonies. Please follow our discussions.
