Minutiæ

William Parker Wrothgate’s The Future Para­dox—or “TFP,” as it is affec­tion­ately called in sci­en­tific and lit­er­ary circles—immediately rev­o­lu­tion­ized sci­ence fic­tion when it was pub­lished 36 years ago. Called “bril­liant,” “genius,” and “utter genius” by crit­ics, the novel won Wroth­gate both a Pulitzer Prize for Fic­tion and a Nobel Prize in Physics for his “inno­v­a­tive ideas regard­ing jet propul­sion.” Wroth­gate became an instant celebrity, mobbed every­where by fans, sci­en­tists, and paparazzi. In his cel­e­brated com­mence­ment address to the Har­vard Class of 1974, Wroth­gate promised to con­tinue his life goal of “imag­in­ing a tech­nol­ogy that is at once unfath­omable and unques­tion­able” with his next work.

Although he is still con­sid­ered to be a key mem­ber of the lit­er­ary intel­li­gentsia, since 1974, Wroth­gate has not pub­lished a sin­gle word. This week, he breaks that silence with The Astronaut’s Lament.

“It’s not that I haven’t been writ­ing,” said Wroth­gate in his first inter­view in 30 years, recently aired on Date­line, “I’ve con­stantly been work­ing from my cabin in the Berk­shires. It’s just that every time I sent a draft to my pub­lisher, there have been issues.”

The “issues” to which Wroth­gate alludes are with the futur­is­tic worlds he imag­ines. In the ear­li­est incar­na­tion of The Astronaut’s Lament, then called Arti­fi­cial Feel­ing, the main char­ac­ter, Alexan­der Ger­bain, is injured in an inter­stel­lar laser bat­tle in the first few pages, and his crew must devise an arti­fi­cial heart for him. Wrothgate’s under­stand­ing of arti­fi­cial trans­plant tech­nol­ogy was detailed and expert—he spent at least 200 of the draft’s 280 pages detail­ing the device and the specifics of the oper­a­tion. Wrothgate’s ideas were accurate—so accu­rate, in fact, that they could be mis­taken for tran­scripts of the first real arti­fi­cial heart trans­plant in 1978, which occurred two days after Wroth­gate fin­ished the draft.

Insist­ing he could come up with some­thing com­pletely new, Wroth­gate returned to writ­ing with a vengeance. In the sec­ond incar­na­tion of the book, Galac­tic Con­nec­tion, Ger­bain has no heart issues. Instead, he tries to con­nect with sur­vivors of an inter­stel­lar laser bat­tle by con­struct­ing a mas­sive “Inter­mat” sweep­ing the galaxy, where beings from all plan­ets can com­mu­ni­cate. The draft was fin­ished August 6th, 1991, the same day CERN pub­lished the World Wide Web Project. Wit­nesses say that when Wroth­gate saw head­lines about the project, he started tear­ing at his clothes and mut­ter­ing about anti-matter.

It is rumored that Wroth­gate went through 26 drafts of The Astronaut’s Lament. Titles such as Red Planet Rover, Dilly the Clone, and iPod all had to be scrapped, as their plots hinged upon imag­ined tech­nolo­gies that quickly came to mir­ror inven­tions like the Hub­ble Tele­scope, the devel­op­ment of the Human Growth Hor­mone, and, most recently, the video stream­ing and social net­work­ing ser­vice Wizi.

Wrothgate’s final prod­uct, then, is a depar­ture from what the author orig­i­nally pic­tured. As it stands, The Astronaut’s Lament story gives the last thoughts of a dying Lt. Ger­bain after the galaxy has been dec­i­mated in a series of inter­stel­lar laser bat­tles. The 2,200-page tome is writ­ten in a stream-of-consciousness style as Ger­bain, on a for­eign planet, with his back bro­ken, lies wait­ing for his oxy­gen tank to run out. It has no punc­tu­a­tion and includes sev­eral expanses of blank pages inter­spersed through­out, as well as var­i­ous abstract draw­ings by the author. There are no unfath­omable yet unques­tion­able inven­tions pre­sented, just sim­ple descrip­tions of for­eign bod­ies seen through the shat­tered win­dow of a space­craft and the child­hood mem­o­ries those images evoke for Ger­bain. When asked what he wanted to say with the work, Wroth­gate sighed, “Future… in… space?”

The Astronaut’s Lament is pub­lished by Bryce Turner House and is avail­able now in hard­cover. It will be released soon for the Kin­dle, a device Wroth­gate envi­sioned last June. ✦