In addition to baseball, I’ve always enjoyed me some good science fiction. Right now the missus and I are watching Expanse (Netflix) on the recommendation of some friends. After two episodes, it doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse, but they urge us to keep going, comparing it with Battlestar Gallactica (also not really my thing, but I’m willing to give it further chance).
So it was with some sadness that I learned of the passing of Ben Bova, the legendary multi-Hugo Award winning writer, who passed away late last month at the age of 88.
Bova’s sci-fi connections are too many and too broad to list in this entry, which contents itself to the single focus of his baseball connection. According to author Rick Wilbur, Bovas was a “very knowledgeable baseball fan.” He published, “Beisbol,” a short story (1985), in which Fidel Castro pitches to Babe Ruth.
Here’s an excerpt from a non-fiction piece Bova wrote about “Sex in Space” that appeared in the February 2001 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction:
When you are in orbit it feels as if you are constantly falling. That’s because you are.
Gravity doesn’t disappear when you are in orbit. The Earth is still pulling on the spacecraft, still trying to tug it back down to the ground. But once the spacecraft is travelling at a velocity of five miles per second (18,000 miles per hour) its forward speed cancels gravity’s pull. In effect, the spacecraft is falling, but it is moving so fast that its fall never reaches the ground.
Think of yourself at bat in a baseball game. You hit the ball, it flies up and off some distance, then gravity pulls it back to the ground. Next, Mark McGwire comes up to bat. He smashes a shot that soars completely out of the ballpark. But eventually gravity brings the ball back to Earth. Now imagine Superman at the plate. He hits the ball so hard it rockets up, up and away at a velocity of five miles per second. Gravity keeps trying to pull it back to Earth but the ball is moving so fast that it “falls” in a curve that completely misses the Earth! Its path circles all the way around our planet.
The ball is in orbit.
And it will stay in orbit as long as it maintains that velocity of 18,000 miles per hour.
Notice that the ball is actually falling, even though its fall never reaches the ground. That is why the weightlessness of orbit is often called “free fall.” That is why astronauts and cosmonauts often feel nauseated when they first go into orbit.
And you probably will, too.
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It’s not Bova, but since we’re on the subject, here’s “A Sci-Fi Story As Told Through 9 Innings of Baseball” by Leah Schnelbach and Chris Lough (Tor.com, April 2016). And here’s something from maestro Ray Bradbury that has proved a bit controversial, “The Big Black and White Game,” which appeared in The American Mercury magazine in August, 1945.
is available on Amazon.com,
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