#71 L.L. Richman
The objects inside the L.L. Richman folder aboard the Writers on the Moon time capsule are equal parts stardust dreams and childhood memories.
I suppose, looking back, it was almost inevitable that I would become a science fiction writer. I was, quite literally, born to it.
Both my parents worked for NASA. I’m talking the early years, the halcyon days of wide-eyed exploration where people passed by with excited whispers, pointing to giant buildings that housed enormous rockets, made to claw their way through the skies and reach the inky blackness of the void.
It was a pretty darn idyllic childhood. Some of my earliest memories are of one of the astronauts buzzing our neighborhood to “tell his wife he was on his way home,” according to my mother (often accompanied by an eyeroll). Or of my dad, calling home to warn my mom they were about to test the Saturn boosters, so not to worry if the house shook a bit.
I have memories of walking through Mission Control, my hands trailing along the consoles (though never when in use!). The anechoic chamber was one of my favorite places, the massive testing cavern, built with great cones of sound-deadening material that lined its oddly-shaped walls.
I remember sitting at the airfield, my dad pointing out the astronauts, falling from the skies as they parachuted to the ground. And I will never forget how the loss of one of those astronauts, on a launchpad at Cape Kennedy, impacted my dad. He lost a friend the day the fire broke out, killing the Apollo 1 astronauts.
He was in charge of flight safety, you see.
He flew out to JPL and was there for weeks, listening to what they called the ‘seven minute tapes,’ over and over again…. I found his calendar from that year, decades later. For weeks, the only notation, scrawled in bold handwriting, was simply… FIRE.
It changed his life.
I will always hold close the memory of many, many evenings spent staring up at the stars—all four of us, my dad, mom and sister.
I knew all the constellations early in life. My dad taught me how to tell time by the stars, the big dipper marching around the north star once every twenty-four hours. He’d point out the passage of space junk, those tiny dots of light that would wink out and then back in as they tumbled in their orbits across the night sky.
I will be forever thankful to my dad for instilling in me a yearning to touch that sky. Years later, I would do exactly that. I’ve been a pilot for nearly twenty years. I still feel the rush, every time an aircraft rotates, lifting me into the air… just that much closer to the ultimate destination.
That same rush, that thirst for adventure, might also explain why I love thrillers so much. It was natural, then, that I combine the two in my writing. The books in this time capsule are hard sci-fi technothrillers that take place around other stars.
I’ve leaned into my years working in radiation physics and with linear accelerators to bring as much scientific realism into these thrillers as I can. At the very least, they’ve captured my imagination, and some day in a far-flung future, I hope it does the same for someone else.
I can see it now: someday, some unnamed individual will crack open this time capsule, kick back with a good, stiff drink, and pop this archaic disk into a holoprojector for hours of reading enjoyment, while staring out the clearsteel window of their lunar apartment at the earthrise.
I can dream, can’t I? L.L. Richman, February, 2021, Leawood, KS
Find L.L. Richman’s stories here.