But your home is not your prison
You forgot that without me, you won’t go far
“Purge the Poison”, Marina
I think we carry home on our backs.
My Diary From the Edge of the World, Jodi Lynn Anderson
While I’m not sure how I feel about its resolution, Jodi Lynn Anderson’s My Diary From the Edge of the World gave me a lot to chew on. The May Bird trilogy was a portal fantasy, but this standalone novel takes place in an alternate dimension similar to our reality with some key differences. Among them are the existence of dragons, mermaids, and sasquatch – fantasy creatures to us, but a loathsome reality to them as their world crumbles toward entropy. A family drama leads them to seek out the Extraordinary World the father theorizes exists as the solution to their problems.
What’s so unusual about the Extraordinary World is that it sounds an awful lot like the world we take for granted as mundane, just as dragons and mermaids are mundane to the book characters. This story stuck with me, especially now with the recent conversations regarding billionaires substituting rocket ships for sports cars, and all that implies. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the ethical ramifications of billionaires indulging their midlife crises as the world is in crisis, and whether or not anyone can even amass that kind of wealth through ethical means.
Instead it’s romanticizing their efforts, and space exploration in general I’d like to discuss. Don’t get me wrong. I think working toward a better understanding of the universe is essential. Astronauts often tell us how seeing the earth from space encourages a profound sense of humility and wonder for how precious and even, yes, extraordinary, our planet is. And maybe, one hopes, that is what it will do for people like Jeff Bezos. Still others speak of space with such hubris it suggests not only a lack of knowledge regarding the demands and limitations of space travel, but a stunning lack of regard for our home.
As I found myself saying earlier today, the grass is not greener on Mars.
Mars can’t even sustain grass.
Another theme that Anderson explores is running from your problems to seek a geographical solution. You can’t. You take your problems with you. What makes people think we can create a better life somewhere else if we can’t even maintain it on a planet that already sustains us?
And who’s to say other worlds won’t lose their sense of wonder once they become familiar and mundane?
Maybe there is life on other planets. Space is infinite. Seems possible. And maybe while we’re dreaming of life on another planet, they’re dreaming of Earth. Meanwhile we’re all taking our own homes for granted, and we’ll never survive long enough to see other planets because time is infinite, too, but we aren’t – something else people take for granted regarding the scope and scale of the universe or even just the distance from Earth to Mars.
So maybe the real truth is there isn’t intelligent life anywhere.
Nothing lasts forever, including us.
Does that mean we give up and stop asking questions or striving for more?
No. Of course not.
But perhaps we should show greater consideration for Earth and each other instead of rationalizing all manner of harm in search of some imagined better like Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland (The Dark Tower series covers similar thematic territory to My Diary From the Edge of the World) or destroying the lives we have in pursuit of eternity.
Even if the Extraordinary World exists, we’ll never reach it.
Not if we can’t recognize it when we have it.
