My Biggest Lessons For Earthly Life… Have Come From Outer Space
Sci-fi helped me work it all out
Hi, I’m Andy, and I was made in space.
Not literally (I don’t think), but so much of what makes me… me, has its origins in stories set among the stars. I just happened to have lived in a golden age of sci-fi, and it shows.
I was premiered to the world in May 1977, 18 days before the original Star Wars film was. It got a glitzy red carpet screening in LA, I got a plastic wristband in a concrete-clad maternity hospital in West London.
‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ started its run on UK TV in 1990 when I was 13. My sister and I had just watched ‘Neighbours’ and I was glad to find something else on telly to delay the inevitable onset of homework.
‘Apollo 13’ was released in 1995 during the first September I hadn’t been in full-time education since I was 4. I was 18, in a rock band with my mates, and putting off university for a year in the hope we’d make it big.
Space is a brilliant setting for stories, because the storyteller gets to make up the rules. The annoying necessities and realities of life on earth need not always apply.
I remember that studying science in school used to annoy me because the teacher would say things like…
