{"id":229,"date":"2021-01-05T13:01:04","date_gmt":"2021-01-05T13:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=229"},"modified":"2021-01-29T13:46:20","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T13:46:20","slug":"in-saturn-time-by-william-barton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=229","title":{"rendered":"In Saturn Time by William Barton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>In Saturn Time<\/em><\/strong> by William Barton (<em>Amazing Stories: The Anthology<\/em>, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark crater they find hard white rock (frozen water?) under a thin film of black matter.<br>The rest of the story telescopes forward at roughly four year intervals, and each time deploys an event vignette: Jensen is in orbit with the 1977 Apollo 29 when the Russians land on the Moon; in 1980 he is with President Udall, Vice President Mondale, and California Governor (and the next Democratic President after Udall) Jerry Brown, watching an (enhanced ) Saturn 5M lifting a moon base station; then, in 1984, he is on a mission taking a seventy-year-old Walter Cronkite to the Moon:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, [Cronkite had] chuckled softly and said, \u201cThis kinda reminds me of Paris . . .\u201d<br>Uh. Paris.<br>\u201cSure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a goddamn typewriter . . .\u201d<br>Then, sitting on the Extended LM\u2019s floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he\u2019d whipped out a kid\u2019s folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first space flight.&nbsp; p. 273 (<em>Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>There are various other events: Jensen is the first man on Mars; a partly reusable Saturn 5R is launched; Jupiter\u2019s moon Callisto is orbited, etc.<br>This is a well enough done piece but it\u2019s really just a techo- fantasy for thwarted space geeks, and one that exists in a world that is completely devoid of any sense of realpolitik (there is no explanation as to why the voters would happily spend the colossal amount of money needed to fund an Apollo program on steroids, and the piece also posits the election of four Democratic Presidents succession).<br>For dreamers.<br>*** (Good). 5900 words.<br><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Saturn Time by William Barton (Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[5,24,65,12,64],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-william-barton","tag-5","tag-3-2","tag-amazing-stories-the-anthology","tag-short-story","tag-william-barton"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}