Soviet tanks stood at the Iron Curtain, which was less than thirty miles from my then hometown of Vienna. If the Cold War were to turn hot they would be in our street within two hours. That was the smaller problem. The bigger problem would be the counterstrike from our own side. It would be nuclear, and none of us would survive.

We were living on a future battlefield, in the crosshairs of nuclear arsenals. This sounds more dramatic than it felt. As a popular Viennese saying goes, one gets used to anything.

Stratospheric Mushrooms

The Cold War was not as mysterious as John le Carré would have us believe. It was the bureaucratic distribution of threat with the promise of a hot, quick end. It was a gray war that took the heartbeat out of man and forced time to a standstill. It was dystopia by apathy against the backdrop of mushroom clouds reaching for the stratosphere.

I needed distance from that.

Lightyears of it.

So I left.

I left for space.

The Books

My father had thousands and thousands of books. They rose in architectural progression, shelves upon shelves to the heights of human imagination. The spines of the science fiction books were as black as space, their covers as colorful as the promise of a golden future. The real world did not reach the height of those shelves.

As I stood before the rising wall of books, I heard them speak of legends, whisper the mythos of a good future. I heard them speak of distant planets, remote stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters at an unimaginable distance.

The First Spaceport

Space began in the left bedroom bookcase, second shelf from the bottom, and went up higher than my Lego spaceships would fly without the help of a chair to step on. This was how I traveled to the planets of science fiction space: through the collection of my father.

There was Robert A. Heinlein with Tunnel in the Sky, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Robots marched in Isaac Asimov’s stories. A. E. van Vogt traveled deep into interstellar space and Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat took things more lightly than you’d have thought possible.

Their worlds were dangerous, but never dystopian. Mankind was always in danger, fought and lost and won again. Many might die but nobody was ever doomed. Tomorrow was always another day.

Tomorrow was always a better day.

The Aesthetic of Tomorrow – The Man in the Armored Spacesuit

The promise of science fiction cover art was that the future had color, had life, had a heartbeat.

One book cover that stood out was the German edition of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. It showed a man in a black, armored spacesuit amidst fireballs of explosions. It was as if he were flying through the core of a star. The subtitle suggested he was the last survivor of the spaceship Nomad. If he wanted to survive he had to defeat the universe.

He was still alive in that picture.

So you could defeat the universe?

That was a much better outlook than the dystopia of cold and gray. I signed up instantly. Just where could I get such an armored spacesuit?

The Process of Discovery: Stanislaw Lem

Years later, I was in the audience when Stanislaw Lem read at a café in Vienna:

“… and the space ship would approach the planet and go into orbit and the astronauts would not know what they would find on that new world. I would not know, either. I had to be with them, land with them on that planet. I would explore the planet with my astronauts...”

It was Stanislaw Lem’s process of discovery through writing that opened up a tomorrow that was not determined. It was a tomorrow that I could define through my actions. A future created by life. It was a world, a universe that was ours to shape. Our actions created the facts of life – and the wonders of tomorrow.

It was never gray. It was colorful – and it was dangerous.

You just had to be able to take risks.

It was science fiction as the great writers meant it to be. Those who had invented a new future. Tomorrow had the warmth of a human heartbeat. It was the source of energy of classic science fiction.

It was the literature of future.

The government said it had no proof of alien life.

There are a few things that do not fit.

First, no military personnel who work on classified programs can blow any whistle that was not manufactured by a government agency. What is the point of this? They were acting on government instructions, saying the opposite of what the government tells us.

What was this charade of contradictory messages about?

Flooding the zone is a strategy that releases contradictory messages, mixes facts with fictional details so that in the end nobody knows what is true and what is not. This means that either the government has information on aliens and wants to hide it or it has no information on aliens and wants to hide that, too - potentially using it as a smokescreen for something else, for example advanced weapons testing.

It would be highly amusing if the government had used science fiction playbooks to cover up military technology after decades of denying the existence of UFOs (renaming them as UAPs is another flood point).

If the government knew, should it drop all contradictory messages and tell the truth? Or would truth be something that mankind could not stomach at this time?

Imagine the president of the United States stepped in front of a bouquet of microphones:

“We have proof of alien intelligences visiting Earth. We also have some of their craft and are reverse-engineering it. This is a great business opportunity. Be reasonable, people.”

And would they be?

Would they be reasonable?

There are two primary ways this could play out.

1: Mankind acts at its best

A spark illuminates the human night. It is the realization that there is an infinite universe out there. It used to be the fabric of stories. Now it has become reality.

We are standing at the threshold of the interstellar era of mankind.

It is a new era of enlightenment. The commercial media landscape dries up overnight. Interest in knowledge, thought, science, wisdom, philosophy, literature and the arts expands exponentially. Suddenly humanity wants to become the best version of itself.

Instead of looking at themselves in self-centered isolation, human beings raise their eyes and take in the grand panorama of the universe. Political divides disappear like lines of chalk on a sidewalk in spring rain. Gambling joints remain empty. Pornography sites have no visitors. Criminals want to turn their lives around and turn towards the light.

The liars and ideologues, manipulators and frauds, marauders and mercenaries, all those pied pipers that have led humanity into the darkness for so long fall into oblivion as if they had never existed. Mankind rids itself of these agents of annihilation as any civilization must do if it wants to rise.

Dystopian fantasies fade like the nightmares they have been. The rising morning sun of a new future burns them to ashes.

This is a monolith moment in human history:

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and a classic movie by Stanley Kubrick, an alien monolith appears among ape men. By its supreme energy it raises the human race towards becoming space men, and they find a second monolith on the moon. This inspires an interplanetary pilgrimage to Jupiter, where astronaut David Bowman finds a third monolith and the understanding of existence.

The aliens are impressed by the sudden turn of mankind from consumer culture to an interstellar race and alter the reserved behavior they have held over hundreds of years of watching us. They acknowledge that man is ready to step out into space.

This is how the interstellar era of mankind begins.

2: Mankind acts at its worst

Can you see the crowds racing towards the alien landing sites guided by alien spotter apps? Look how they blindly run into the high energy drive fields of the ships. Those surviving the attempt at a historic selfie with aliens tell stories of alien attacks copying the tropes of SciFi horror TV shows.

Platform algorithms of doom make these invasion reports go to the top while the boring voices - those who offer truth and thought - get pushed down to the bottom where nobody can see them. AI slop amplifies those lies. Lies feed upon lies and this tornado of fake grinds up every bit of truth. Nobody knows what is true anymore. Nobody can tell what really happened and nobody thinks they should. Truth is irrelevant. What gets the most clicks, likes and follows is what counts.

Human virtues and truth fall like dominoes one after the other. And when the last tile has fallen, will humanity still stand?

Digital hate mobs turn into real lynch mobs. The hordes drag the reasonable out of their houses, decry them as traitors who sympathize with the alien invasion, and burn them alive at the stake.

The worst of mankind rise to riot, rob, rape, and murder. A mob in a delirious frenzy of bloodlust imagines itself an army of freedom fighters, marching to cleanse the world.

Warlords attack the National Guard and firefighters, declaring the government an enemy - taken over by alien body snatchers. AI-driven home lab nutcases release deadly viruses, imagining themselves as instruments of Judgment Day.

In the chaos, war breaks out all over the globe. Nobody knows who is fighting whom and why. Black clouds of a burned civilization cover the horizons and above them stand, in ghostly stillness, the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions like statues of regret over a planet-wide cemetery.

The aliens reconsider. After hundreds of years of watching us they decide mankind is a lost cause. Only one thing is left to do: this madness must not spread to other worlds.

No human being sees the aliens leave. As the last tile drops not a single human is alive.

Seeing what is: this is deceptively difficult.

I congratulate the US government on its well thought-out strategy of flooding the zone.

It may have saved mankind.

1029

Even though I was born a quarter century after WWII, we children were instructed about the danger of unexploded bombs and booby traps that in the war killed and crippled so many children.

I had not known what war was, but I had heard its echoes. I saw it in the countless bomb craters that still peppered many a field in the outskirts of Vienna. I played in the bomb craters. For me they are just as another playground.

There were the ruins of houses and factories, abandoned areas where we should not go because we could blow ourselves up. It was the shadow of something nobody talked about. My grandparents never mentioned the war. What I heard was just what they said when they thought I was out of earshot.

My grandmother told the story of when she had been bombed out. One day she came home and the house was gone. There was just a big hole in the ground filled with rubble that used to belong to her, her clothes, her books, her bed, her family photos, the landscape of her life.

How was Childhood when the Bombs were Falling?

I remember the serenity of life back then, in my childhood. Everything was dead serious, serious as death. All of Vienna was like a giant graveyard of serenity where the living pretended to be dead.

What did I know about war? What did I know of childhood in a city that burned? I didn’t know how it was when your eardrums burst when the pressure wave of a bomb attack hit the cellar you were hiding in. What did I know when you saw your sister cry but couldn’t hear her because your eardrums were gone? How could I know that some children called themselves lucky because it had just been a bomb attack, and not an attack with fire to burn them alive?

I did not know because I had never experienced it myself. But I experienced the war through the traces it had left in others.

The Burning Children Haunting the Living

There were nights when liquid fire fell from the sky and burned the children and there was no protection against it. Either the fire killed them, or the heat killed them or the fire consumed all oxygen and they asphyxiated in their bomb shelters.

One story stuck with me. A group of children ran across the street to reach a bomb shelter while fire was falling from the bombers. The asphalt was boiling hot and soft and the children sank deep into it and got stuck in this bog of asphalt. Then the fire - phosphorus canisters that burned like napalm - hit the ground. The air reached a temperature of 1000 degrees. Their flesh ignited and the children burned like candles, their little bodies black like wicks.

The lucky ones had been killed by regular bombs that took the roofs of the houses so the city would burn better.

I had cartoons, too. Children’s stories. Astrid Lindgren. The children of Bullerbyn. Science fiction for kids. But the burning children mingled with them. They appeared right next to Tove Jansson's Moomin and were in Walter Ernsting’s spaceships. How could you have been a child in those days? Ten-year-old boys had to go to war and do battle against hardened adults, equipped with weapons that did not work.

There was a sound that scared children out of their wits. It was the sound of the cuckoo. Not the cuckoo that echoed through the halls of trees in the forest. It was the cuckoo call that came from the radio. It was code. It said: the bombers are coming to kill you. Go. Run! Hide!

How much those children feared the cuckoo. They heard it and it was to them like the hiss of the alien in Ridley Scott’s movie ship, the Nostromo.

I walked the city and saw the facades of old buildings, still riddled with bullet holes from WW II. There were overgrown big holes in the ground. Bomb craters were expected street furniture like benches and traffic lights.

The city had been helpless. There were flak towers, built in the style of medieval fortresses. On top of them stood the guns that fired at the bombers. They were pretty. But they couldn’t protect the city.

Twice Vienna had survived the siege by the Ottomans who tried to conquer Europe and enslave Europe. Vienna had resisted. Vienna had been their point of return. Vienna had sent them packing. But what could you do against fire falling from the sky if you had no planes to keep it away?

The Legions of One-Legged Men

I saw the one-legged men every day as they were walking the streets. They were quiet men, their gaze turned inward as they moved along in their one-legged man’s stride with two crutches and one leg, two crutches and one leg, crutches, then leg, crutches, then leg, a terrifying rhythm that was the Morse code of their destruction. Every day we saw six, seven, or even ten of them.

We did not count them, as we counted the Volkswagen beetles as they were parked on the roadside. How many of them would be lined up without interruption by another make of car, an Opel or even one of those rare Mercedes? The record stood at 23.

Those one-legged men were still so present so many years after the war. Now they were about 50 years old and stuck with the loss of a leg they experienced at 18 or 20 years of age. The sun was shining warmly as they moved past, but their gaze was turned inward as if the world were making them feel cold.

It was as if the sun were not shining for them. How often had those men asked themselves: what if? What if I had not stepped on that mine that day, what if that machine gun burst on the Eastern front had not fragmented my leg so badly it could not be saved and had to come off with a saw. What if I had been able to get a medical orderly to pick me up, what if the Russian snipers had not prevented that and I had not lain with my leg shot to pieces for days until the Russians had been pushed back and my friends had gotten me out? By then gangrene had wrought its destruction and the leg had to come off with a bone saw.

And how I remembered that vibration of the saw when it cut into my bone. I would never forget it. It had been in one of those front emergency stations. It was just a table, an old dining room table in a tent and the orderly had knocked me out with a piece of wood - they called it wooden anesthesia - because they had not had any anesthetics.

When they had carried me back to their own lines and put me on that table and I had been so full of pain and fear and told them to leave me my leg! There were already three sawed-off legs lying in a heap on the ground waiting for mine to be thrown on top. They would throw them all out later, those legs, out on the trash heap. This had made me a one-legged man, isolated from the rest of the world and from sunshine.

So they walked by, those one-legged men, so quiet 35 years after the war and the war had been with them every day since the vibration of the saw had cut into their bone. They had felt it every day since that day on the Eastern front. They went to bed one-legged and woke up from a one-legged nightmare and were still one-legged in the morning.

One-legged men had been so ubiquitous that in the hit show of the Austrian 70s “Kottan investigates” about a crazy cop in an even crazier Police department, the coll of the detective had been a one-legged man. The actor had lost his leg in the war. It had been cut off without anesthesia in an emergency operation during a battle to save his life.

The Black Hole of War

War was in every adult I met. It was in the teacher. It was in the shoemaker. It was in the grocer, in the insurance agent, in the poet, in the painter, the trader, the merchant… They had been at war and had seen things they could not forget and could not talk about. Their war had never ended.

Nobody talked about the war even though it was still going on in their minds. There was no armistice for the soul. They had come back from a nightmare that had swallowed up their personal lives and the sunshine and their friends without giving them anything in return.

They survived, but not all of them. A part of them was left in the war, be it a leg or a piece of their mind or their peace in general. In those dark days that dimmed the brightest sunshine they still heard the echo of war.

How could a child, who did not know what they had been through ever hope to reach them?

A Future Different from the Past

The future does not have to look like the past. It will look like the past if we just move on. Even if we were not at war, the war was at war with us through the destroyed minds of those who had physically survived.

When I, the child, discovered the science fiction collection among the thousands of books of my father, I found a way out. I had found a future that was different from the past, a future that was… promising!

It would not be an easy one. But it would be a future.