To Live in a Different Future
Watching Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood
The 1960s must have been some time! As a late 80’s-early-90’s kid, I always a bit envied those who got to live their best years through one of the most golden ages of humanity ever. I remember watching The Wonder Years as a kid (and experiencing my first celebrity crush on Winnie) and thinking how boring my semi-rural European childhood was against the American suburbs of the Apollo era. Those were the boomer kids I learned about much later — the generation of my parents.
The situation in Europe, especially here in the Eastern block, wasn’t as golden as in Texas or California, but still, it was hopeful, and there was a sense of being pushed forward. Sci-fi of that time was predominately utopian, and only when history showed its teeth in the late 1980s, with the Balkan wars and many needlessly dead, did the moods of the era (and consequently Sci-Fi writing) start to shift into darker tones. The future we’re inhabiting now is not what they imagined.
For a brief moment, humanity indeed had its golden time. It was just developed enough to crawl out of the dark age of scientific ignorance and not yet as…
