No more edit­ing for me for a few days. I’ve reached about half-way through the 500 or so pages of my man­u­script. Two rea­sons for the pause: to pre­pare my accounts and to do some review­ing. Being forced to con­front the real­i­ty of how lit­tle a free­lance writer earns is always painful, so I’ll pass over the first fair­ly rapid­ly. But the sec­ond is more inter­est­ing.

Deb­o­rah Cad­bury’s Space Race is a great read. She tells the sto­ry of the space race through the lives of the Sovi­et rock­et sci­en­tist Sergei Korolev and the ex-Nazi Wern­her von Braun.

The mate­r­i­al on von Braun may be famil­iar but it is an extra­or­di­nary sto­ry that shows the ter­ri­ble ambi­gu­i­ty of sci­ence — its abil­i­ty to turn dreams into real­i­ty and take peo­ple into space, but also its destruc­tive poten­tial. For the rock­ets that were built to take us to the moon were also meant to deliv­er H‑bombs onto New York, Lon­don and Moscow.

That ambi­gu­i­ty was appar­ent at the release of the 1960 biopic about von Braun, I Aim at the Stars. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly giv­en the num­ber of his mis­siles that hit us, it flopped in Britain. One review was mem­o­rably head­lined: “I Aim at the Stars, but Some­times I Hit Lon­don.”

As I’ll show in Dooms­day Men, von Braun was the orig­i­nal mod­el for Dr Strangelove, the ulti­mate mad sci­en­tist of the Cold War. And it’s the sto­ry of the Atom­ic Age, told in pop­u­lar fic­tion, film and the lives of the sci­en­tists, that best reveals how our sci­en­tif­ic dream­s turn all too eas­i­ly into night­mares.

You’ll have to wait a few more months for Dooms­day Men (there’s the small mat­ter of the edit­ing to fin­ish yet), but I hope to pro­vide a few tasters of the book in this blog. So watch this space…

[orig­i­nal­ly on Myspace]