I am privileged and thrilled to be able to host Pauline Baird Jones on my blog today, part of the great Out of this World blog tour. I don’t want to say to much, but suffice to say, I think she hits the lure of science fiction right on the head:

Stargazing

When I was a little girl, it used to be safe to sleep outside. My siblings and I would spread our sleeping bags on the lawn, sometimes front, and sometimes the back yard. Summer nights in Wyoming were cool, and it was lovely to crawl into the soft flannel that lined our bags, and stare at the sky while my brothers tried to scare my sister and I into giving up and going inside.

Sometimes the moon would be big and round and yellow and sometimes it was just a sliver in the sky, but the stars were always there to provide a backdrop. Back then, that moon and those stars were distant, mysterious, and out of reach except through the imagination. We could peer at the part of the moon we could see and wonder what was on that dark side? The movies of the time seem pretty hysterical now, but they all started with the key question: what if?

I was nine when the first man set foot on the moon and we found out what was on that dark side. If you’ve never watched Tom Hanks’ Earth to the Moon miniseries, I can’t recommend enough that you track it down and watch it. I lived through it, but to see it through older eyes was to bring back the wonder, the awe, and the soaring sense of adventure as we raced to the moon.

I am always touched by the episode on Apollo One when three brave astronauts died. During the hearings that followed, Colonel Frank Borman testified that the accident was “a failure of imagination.” He pointed out that Gus Grissom, in an interview some months before the fire that took his life, had said that “the conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”

We are so used to technology now that it is easy for forget they had to create everything as they went, that the risks were enormous. No one knew how to do any of it until they did it. It was a grand adventure on a grand scale. It was an amazing leap into the unknown.

As our space program faces an uncertain future, it is possible that only authors of speculative fiction will keep us boldly dreaming of going where man has yet to go. The good news is that our fictional journeys aren’t life threatening. It is, however, my opinion that now is not the time for a “failure of imagination.” It is time to turn on the boosters and ramp it up.

That little girl that used to gaze at the night sky lived in a world where the most she could hope for was to see a man step on the moon. Now we live in a world where women pilot the space shuttle, a world where we now share a space station with the people we once raced into space in the midst of a cold war. The new millennium has the potential for many more possibilities than when I was small.

I say again, this is not the time for our imaginations to fail. Most of us live in a world where it isn’t safe to let our children sleep outside alone and too many of us are so focused on the things of this world that we forget to look up and ponder the moon and the stars and the huge and amazing universe that surrounds us.

No matter what happens in the real world, in our real lives, we need to keep trying to nudge the next generation into looking up from their video games and homework and their gravity based problems. We can keep trying to get them to see the stars and to dream the big dreams until mankind is once again ready to make that big leap into the unknown.

---

Pauline Baird Jones made the leap into speculative fiction when her character, Captain Sara Donovan informed her that Earth wasn’t big enough for her story. She needed another galaxy. Before The Key got a title, it was known as the BAB (big a** book) because Sara apparently needed a lot of words, too. Pauline recently released her second BAB, Girl Gone Nova, whose characters also tried to push her around. If you read it, you will find she pushed back. That didn’t stop Colonel Carey (from both books) from deciding Pauline needed to take a walk on the Steampunk side. Tangled in Time will release in December, but only as a novella. Pauline needed to save some words for the next BAB. You can find out about her BABs, her science fiction romance, and other stuff on her website at: www.perilouspauline.com

Girl Gone Nova: Doc–Delilah Oliver Clementyne’s—orders are simple: do the impossible and do it yesterday. A genius/bad ass, she does the impossible on a regular basis. But this time the impossible is complicated by an imminent war between the Earth expedition to the Garradian Galaxy and the Gadi, an encounter with some wife-hunting aliens, and not one but two bands of time travelers. The only way it could get worse? If the heart she didn’t know she had starts beating for the wrong guy… Available through B&N, Amazon, and Fictionwise, as well as on the Kindle

“After a multiyear absence, Baird Jones makes a very welcome return by once again visiting the alternate reality first explored in The Key. Time paradoxes run amok in this extraordinarily complex tale. Amongst the densely packed and mind-bending action, there’s also some welcome humor. A spectacular ride!”

–Romantic Times Magazine, Jill Smith, 4 and 1/2 stars!