This week we drove through a hamlet just where the prairie meets the Rocky Mountains. It used to qualify as a village, but it’s too small for that now. At one time, it was a coal mining town. About the only thing that was open on the main street was an ice cream shop, and we decided to stop for some refreshment. They even had a soft-serve puppy cone for our little dog.
As I was enjoying my scoop of (really very good) fudge-brownie ice cream, I looked across the street and saw that there was a bookstore. I walked over and went in. Two older ladies greeted me and started showing me around the place. There were some local craft products, and a few shelves of what they told me were “useful things,” mostly office supplies. Ink cartridges for printers, envelopes and things.
At the back, there was a surprisingly large and diverse used book section. The usual romance books, some thrillers, gardening guides, self-help. The kind of books passing vacationers might pick up on their way to a cabin or a campsite, to deal with rainy days.
The first book I saw on the first shelf I encountered was Life Beyond Earth: The search for intelligence elsewhere in our universe and the impact of making contact, but Marcia S. Smith, with the assistance of Dr. George Gatewood, published by Coles Publishing Company in 1978. It was marked one dollar. I gave them two.
For Canadians of a certain age, Coles, founded in 1940 and now part of Indigo/Chapters, is a Canadian institution. We grew up with their bookstores (Coles, the Book People!) but also with their Coles Notes for university students, which were the precursors of the American Cliff Notes and its successors, and their Coles books, like this one.
The book itself is more a collation of technical reports than a unified whole. The Universal Search: Possibilities and Proposals, Characteristics of Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, Conclusions of the NASA Interstellar Communication Study Group Workshops, The Soviet CETI Program 1975, etc. A thin, dense, wonky book that the general public could still stomach in the 70s, in the days before listicles.
Back in those days, the authors were utterly comfortable with searching for life as we know it, rather than life as it could be. For example, there is a graph showing the “limits of habitable size” for planets “in all solar systems. In fact, there are a lot of graphs of all kinds. There is a page showing an Aceribo radio telescope message in binary.
This is real nerd stuff. The kind of stuff I would have pored over and spent hours analysing and interpreting back in 78, that I would have made presentations about to my hapless friends, had I known about the book. And it surprises me that I didn’t.
The main author, Marcia S. Smith was (is?) with the Planetary society and was a US government space policy analyst. I was a subscriber (thanks to my father) to the Planetary Society’s magazine from its first issue in 1980, just two years after this book came out.
George Gatewood, the “assisting” author, was one of the originators of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Program), which I followed avidly at the time, and for many years, In OMNI Magazine, for example, which was first published the very same year this book came out.
As I was looking up Dr. Gatewood when I got back from our little road trip, I found out about the Barnard’s Star affair. The nearby star (about 6 light years away) is intensively studied, and was more than once claimed by astronomers to have a planetary system. It loomed large as a possible source of extraterrestrial civilisation in the classic science fiction with which I grew up.
Gatewood was instrumental in proving one of those sensational claims wrong in the 70s. I had never heard of him, or of that particular claim, although I knew of others. And I had never heard of that book, which reconnected me with a part of my SciFi childhood, in a place I had never been, a place somewhat outside of time, and where I would never have imagined travelling until just a few years ago.