Books in Brief: The High Road

The High Road, by Ben Bova (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $11.95).

This is one of the most exciting and positive books to come out in years. The “high road” of the title is space, but this book is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It deals concretely with issues as real and timely as inflation, national security, and energy, and it makes a compelling, practical case for America’s expansion outward into the space frontier. After the sorry wave of anti-growth, anti-intellectual, anti-technology screeds of the protest era, the pendulum is swinging back to an optimistic view of the human condition. We do have the capacity to be masters of our destiny. We not only can cope with current problems but can find new and imaginative solutions to them. For Ben Bova (of Omni magazine) the point is not that we live in a world of limited resources, but that we live in a solar system of unlimited ones. Energy, natural resources, and even Lebensraum are all out there, no further away in terms of scale than California was for nineteenth century wagon trains. The question is, Do we still have the spirit and the courage to reach upward for the answers to our problems? One of the main virtues of The High Road is that it doesn’t just preach to the converted. It is written in clear, factual prose for those who haven’t lost their excitement and curiosity or their reasoning powers. As Bova shows, the case for space is not just a romantic ideal but the best dollars-andcents option we have. There is no doubt that space will be utilized—if not by us, by others. Bova puts it perfectly: “It would be the crudest irony in human history if the Russians, of all the tyrannized people on the face of this earth, find prosperity and freedom in space while we in ‘the land of the free’ sink deeper and deeper into poverty, despotism, and despair.”

JK

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Jack D. Kirwan

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The High Road, by Ben Bova (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $11.95).

This is one of the most exciting and positive books to come out in years. The “high road” of the title is space, but this book is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It deals concretely with issues as real and timely as inflation, national security, and energy, and it makes a compelling, practical case for America’s expansion outward into the space frontier. After the sorry wave of anti-growth, anti-intellectual, anti-technology screeds of the protest era, the pendulum is swinging back to an optimistic view of the human condition. We do have the capacity to be masters of our destiny. We not only can cope with current problems but can find new and imaginative solutions to them. For Ben Bova (of Omni magazine) the point is not that we live in a world of limited resources, but that we live in a solar system of unlimited ones. Energy, natural resources, and even Lebensraum are all out there, no further away in terms of scale than California was for nineteenth century wagon trains. The question is, Do we still have the spirit and the courage to reach upward for the answers to our problems? One of the main virtues of The High Road is that it doesn’t just preach to the converted. It is written in clear, factual prose for those who haven’t lost their excitement and curiosity or their reasoning powers. As Bova shows, the case for space is not just a romantic ideal but the best dollars-andcents option we have. There is no doubt that space will be utilized—if not by us, by others. Bova puts it perfectly: “It would be the crudest irony in human history if the Russians, of all the tyrannized people on the face of this earth, find prosperity and freedom in space while we in ‘the land of the free’ sink deeper and deeper into poverty, despotism, and despair.”