New Horizons 00: Launch

“Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars.

Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself.

Behold! I shall show you the Last Man.

‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’,

thus asks the Last Man and blinks.”

– Nietzsche’s Zarathustra”

Whatever else may be good or bad about the show Californication, the one scene that really stuck with me (which I would discuss in polite company), is him talking to his daughter about the first book she wrote.  He was clearly trying to figure out how to diplomatically tell her that it wasn't good.  He said it showed a lot of promise, but that he thought she should put it in a drawer and keep writing.

That's what should have happened with this book.  It showed a lot of potential, but at the end of the day it was a learning excercise which wound up a disjointed mess, ripped up and rebuilt for years trying to put everything into it whether it fit or not.  Long rambly digressions about points I wanted to make, explaining things I thought were cool, and my solutions to global problems.  The degree to which it is so obviously thinly veiled autobiography is shameful.  There's a good idea buried in there, which I have since realized in Chasing Stars, but the end result was something I resented being the necessary first entry into a larger, better written world.

So really, don't read this.  You can if you want to for whatever reason, my ego forbids burying it entirely, but it can no longer to be considered a part of the New Horizons series anymore.  It is more of a pseudo master's thesis after completing my university degree in psychology and philosophy and independantly learning just as much about history and sociology.

This prologue, which I added to the beginning when I republished the entire trilogy as one book, remains even more true and valid today as when I originally wrote it.

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A Note from the Author

To read this, is to know the person I was, and the way I viewed the world, in January of 2015.   As I learn more and more, there are bits which already make me wince a little, and all too soon there will be parts which elicit an outright cringe.  Although in this edition I correct minor errors and make small wording changes, I leave the content intact and honest to what it was when it was written: an encapsulating snapshot of the mind I was during one singular point in space and time.
Enjoy.

Launch, the first book, is about a man who grew up with maximum privilege and able to do anything with his life, but feels a profound ambivalence which comes from a lack of a driving force in his life. Applying to the New Horizons program effectively on a whim, he wins a spot and has to come to understand why he finds himself wanting to go, and walk away from his terrestrial obligations to surrender all his privilige, and die in deep space for a dream he'll never personally see realized.