Whatever Happened to the Rocket Men?

By Brian Clegg

This morning I heard Elton John’s Rocket Man and noticed the line about not understanding the science and it’s just a job he has five days a week. It reminded me of a sociological oddity of early science fiction films. If you watch a film about spaceflight from the 50s, say, the crew almost always included a ‘working man’ type. If it’s a British film he’d probably be a cheery cockney, while the US would give us a wise-cracking or cynical man of the people (they were always men).

The reasoning was pretty obvious – the filmmakers were basing their ideas of a spaceship crew on that of a traditional ship. Even Star Trek, despite starting well into the NASA era, fell for this idea – though they at least had a big enough crew on the Enterprise to require a whole range of roles. But those old, primarily black and white, films usually only had a small crew. So what were they expecting the role of the ‘I don’t know about the science, just do my job’ person to actually be? Turn big brass valves with greasy rags?

I think part of the reason for this occurring to me was reading Adam Roberts’ new marmite of a novel, Lake of Darkness, which explicitly mocks the way that most science fiction seems to base its model of future starships on the social structures of traditonal seagoing ships, and often military vessels at that. 

You might think there was one other reason for putting in that ‘man of the people’ character – fulfilling the role that the companion traditionally takes on in Doctor Who. That’s someone to ask what’s going on and get an explanation from the more scientific types. But I don’t particularly remember this happening in the old movies. Whatever the reason, these characters were an entertaining anachronism of their time.

Image (not M&S) from Unsplash by Andy Hermawan. 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.