Nick Curtis: Life on Earth is no fun right now — I’m booking my seat on the next rocket to Mars for a game of tennis

Nick Curtis
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis23 August 2018

The first tennis match played in space lifted the hearts of a million nerds yesterday. Here was utopian science fiction made real. With no gravity and precious little, um, space, the game aboard the International Space Station was all about exploration and exuberant problem-solving rather than actual competition (plus a little bit of promotion for the US Open, which organised it).

The sight of commander Andrew Feustel and three flight engineers shooting a ball back and forth across an improvised net recalled Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity in orbit, and Britain’s Tim Peake juggling water and gyroscopes in zero-G. It validated the optimistic promise of sci-fi that space travel could open up new dimensions in leisure and pleasure, as well as advances in medicine and technology.

Commercial space flights are on the way. The first luxury space hotel — Orion Span’s Aurora Station — is planned for 2021. The meek can keep the Earth. We geeks were always holding out for something bigger.

For most of my life being a sci-fi fan invited pity at best, derision at worst. The genre was seen as an escapist niche interest, a refuge for people in flight from reality and chronically incapable of forming relationships with the opposite sex. At my first job, in a library, the great 20th-century sci-fi writers — Clarke, Bradbury, Aldiss, Le Guin — were shelved next to pulp westerns and identikit romances.

Sci-fi was the stuff of comics and preposterousness. The cinematic revolution of the Seventies did little to dispel the idea that sci-fi was for kids (Star Wars) or weirdos (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

Except it turns out that those writers and film-makers, and the readers who believed in them, were right all along. Not just about the good stuff but the bad stuff as well.

Figures as diverse as the historian and academic Yuval Noah Harari, the physicist Stephen Hawking, and the cosmic fly-tipper Elon Musk — who used space as if it were a rural lay-by in which to dump his old Tesla roadster — warned in recent years of the risk to humanity from the rise of the robots and artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov and Stanley Kubrick did the same decades earlier. George Orwell pretty much predicted Rudy Giuliani’s “truth isn’t truth” comment in his book 1984. Instead of Aldous Huxley’s mind-numbing drug, soma, we have the Kardashians and cat videos.

So my joy at watching Feustel and his mixed-doubles partners bouncing their balls off the galactic hardware yesterday was tempered somewhat. I kept thinking that Donald Trump’s Space Force didn’t sound a million light years from Robert A Heinlein’s fascistic Starship Troopers, pitted against a hazy enemy given the dismissive and disgusted term “bugs”.

"We sci-fi fans want to believe in the brave new future of flying cars and jetpacks — which are finally on the way"

We sci-fi fans want to believe in the brave new interstellar future of space tennis, flying cars and jetpacks — which are also, finally, on the way.

However, we are equally drawn to the idea of space tourism — to the Moon, to Mars, to the furthest reaches of the Milky Way — to escape the dystopian realities we’ve also seen predicted. At the very least, in space no one can hear you scream.

Strictly missed a trick with this misstep

Hurrah, Strictly Come Dancing is back, with model Katie Piper, YouTuber Joe Sugg and newsreader Kate Silverton among those about to strut their stuff. But the producers surely missed a trick by refusing to allow TV doctor Ranj Singh a male partner.

Dr Ranj Singh
PA

Gay dance nights have helped keep London’s only intact 1950s ballroom, The Rivoli in Brockley, open and active, and in my very limited experience, ballroom is often a same- sex experience. This year my wife, a natural mover, and I, an uncoordinated collection of spasms, had our first dance lesson.

Women in the class outnumbered men two to one. As we were encouraged to switch partners between routines I found myself, for the first time in decades, in demand by the opposite sex, who were otherwise mostly forced to pair off with each other. And — ha ha — I turned out to be slightly better than my wife when it came to following instructions for the cha-cha or the waltz. We haven’t been back, funnily enough.

*Having commuted in London by bike for more than 30 years, getting knocked down three times and having had my jaw broken, I’ve long held the Netherlands up as an example of a country that had its priorities right with regard to road- users. A visit to Amsterdam last weekend disabused me of this notion.

It was terrifying. Although pedestrians and drivers strictly observe traffic signals, cyclists and scooterists seem to exist in an alternative universe, blithely surging forward, often while talking on a mobile or with children held on laps, heedless of whether a paraplegic or a pantechnicon is in their path. I never thought I’d say this but I feel safer biking around Hyde Park Corner than I did crossing the Singelgracht.