Happy International Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics, comrades! Has it really been sixty years since Yuri Gagarin took that first flight?
With the recent death of the Queen’s Consort in mind, and seeing the real Prince Philip (may he rest in peace) through the lens of Matt ‘Eleventh Doctor’ Smith’s portrayal of him in The Crown, this feels like a good day for thinking about lost futures, counterfactuals and might-have-beens. (When is it a bad day for thinking about such?).
Specifically, I’m imagining a lost future in which Britain is a little less bankrupt than it was following the Second World War, in which the purported ‘New Elizabethan Age’ (read Peter Hennessy's 'Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s', children) contains a higher ratio of real gold to tinsel, and in which it's the young Prince Philip (who was, after all, a pilot) who becomes the world’s first spacefaring human. The book cover would, of course, depict the Prince in heroic, stylised terms according to the then-extant dictates of Monarchist Realism.
I won’t be writing this short novel personally – lack of time,
not really my politics. But as books go, it would be fun to read, so if anyone else wants to have a try...
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"You Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight, and didn’t take it seriously until several years after us.” – Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Prelude to Space’ (1947), a near-future ‘hard SF’ novel in which the world’s first manned lunar mission is put together by Britain and its Commonwealth, launching from the Australian desert.
Position statement: this left-libertarian culture blog sees human beings as ineffably complex creatures. Therefore, while strong value judgements will from time to time be made, no truck will be had with notions that the Prince was 'just' some horrible old racist, that Sir Kier Starmer is 'just' some sell-out melt or that Jeremy Corbyn is 'just' some kindly, harmless old grandfather etc etc. Save that for #SocialistSunday twitter, or for pub talk! Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, that's the watchword my friends.
