A Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

One of the cess-filled horrors of the Twentieth Century slowly seeping in on the journalists was that they were becoming obsolete. Events were developing a style and structure which made them almost impossible to write about. If a reporter did his homework for space, which is to say went figuratively back to school and got himself up again on forgotten physics and learned near-unpronounceable engineering terms, he could still hardly use this language in stories for popular consumption. Yet if he tried to do features on the people in the Space Project, he encountered the familiar difficulty that engineers who worked for NASA seemed to pride themselves on presenting personalities which were subtly faceless and interchangeable. A process was taking place that was too complex to be reported for daily news stories by passing observers, and so the process itself began to produce the news for the reporters. Their work had come down to rewriting publicity handouts. When they interviewed a personality in the Space Program, the eminent figure gave them quotes which sounded exactly like the handouts, except the handouts, being freed of the vicissitudes of communication between brain and tongue, were more detailed and more quotable. Computers could have written their pieces.