Member-only story
The strange case of the runaway moon
Suspension of disbelief is important to some genre fiction, but it’s got its limits.
As I was getting ready for work this morning, I noticed “Space: 1999” in the listings — it was playing on Shout! Factory TV — and watched a few minutes of it.
“Space: 1999” was a British-made science fiction program which came out in 1975. It was syndicated in the U.S.A., but if I recall correctly, none of the Nashville stations carried it. I remember reading about it in magazines as a 13-year-old but being unable to watch it. The show starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (a real-life couple who had previously appeared together on “Mission: Impossible”) and was created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who’d previously been associated with “Thunderbirds” and other puppet-based adventure programs.
Even as a teenager, though, I remember thinking that the show’s basic premise was ridiculous.
Most science-fiction shows of that ilk take place on a spaceship, traveling here and there by means of some sort of faster-than-light drive. As you probably know, Einstein’s theories indicate that it’s impossible for normal physical objects to travel faster than the speed of light (and to even travel close to that speed would require fantastic amounts of energy). But if the demands of…
