obsessive degree in her last published work, the novella “Hard Vacuum”, about a group of astronauts marooned at a lunar base. The science fiction written by women at this time, however, was considered to be “soft”, and despite her command of her subject, Parker had great difficulty breaking into the all-male “hard” science fiction club. She sold only three stories, in addition to her novella, and those sank without trace.
Parker stopped writing science fiction after the appearance of “Hard Vacuum”. Two space-related non-fiction works, and a co-writing credit on her husband’s autobiography, appeared during the following decade, before Parker finally faded from sight.
Chapter 5
Max-Q
Ginny looks down at the sheet of paper she has just fed into the typewriter and she thinks about a title for this story she can feel taking shape in her mind. She thinks about the word “invisible” and its synonyms, but then she decides she needs to make invisibility an act , not a property—the ships are not hidden from sight, people simply do not see them .
She types,
THE SPACESHIPS MEN DON’T SEE
Yes, she likes that.
And on the next line,
by Virginia G. Parker
Her name, her byline. The letters which identify this story as something created by herself, even though she herself is a creation, a fictional construct. Virginia Grace Parker, who I named for three actresses of the 1950s—Virginia Leith, Grace Kelly and Suzy Parker—and whose life bears a passing resemblance, in parts, to those women I researched in the writing of this novel—especially Mary Irwin, wife of Apollo 15 astronaut James B Irwin, but also science fiction authors Judith Merril and Alice B Sheldon. However, Ginny Eckhardt née Parker is more than the sum of her inspirations, more than an invented history patchworked from the lives of others; and she leans forward and narrows her gaze as the first sentence of her story comes to her, and she types:
Once a month, the wives of the test pilots and engineers met up gathered at the social club for coffee and conversation.
Walden is away at the Cape, she has not seen him since the weekend; and the small apartment is quiet. Ginny has her imagination, and a network of friends spread across the country, and she uses them to fill the empty hours. And, of course, there is the AWC, members of which are all too prone to drop by or telephone, to chat, to have a drink, coffee or something stronger, to just be company, whether she wants it or not. But somehow she has managed to free up today, although she has an appointment tomorrow at the beauty parlour so she will look her best when Walden flies home from the Cape on Saturday. For now, her thoughts are centred on the world of her heroine with the spaceship research pilot husband, a deliberate echoing of her own situation. She thinks about an invisible Navy destroyer in 1943, about pantyhose hanging from a line across the bathtub and lost earrings and women’s magazines sitting on coffee tables. She considers her role as an astronaut wife and the pressure to conform exerted by NASA and the other wives; and her mind is drawn to the Apollo spacecraft, the command module and lunar module, so exhaustively detailed in the manuals Walden studies so assiduously. She thinks about the fiction she has read in her magazines over the past six months, stories by Linda Marlowe, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffrey, Monica Sterba, Susan Trott, Betsy Curtis, Joan Patricia Basch…
And the words flow from her, this is one of the easiest stories she has ever written, perhaps because it had such a long gestation, perhaps because so much of herself is in it—and the narrative does not require those mental gymnastics she must usually perform if, say, her story were set among the crew of a spaceship on some endless voyage landing on an alien world for the first time. She is writing about the Astronaut Wives Club and the Apollo astronauts,
Parker stopped writing science fiction after the appearance of “Hard Vacuum”. Two space-related non-fiction works, and a co-writing credit on her husband’s autobiography, appeared during the following decade, before Parker finally faded from sight.
Chapter 5
Max-Q
Ginny looks down at the sheet of paper she has just fed into the typewriter and she thinks about a title for this story she can feel taking shape in her mind. She thinks about the word “invisible” and its synonyms, but then she decides she needs to make invisibility an act , not a property—the ships are not hidden from sight, people simply do not see them .
She types,
THE SPACESHIPS MEN DON’T SEE
Yes, she likes that.
And on the next line,
by Virginia G. Parker
Her name, her byline. The letters which identify this story as something created by herself, even though she herself is a creation, a fictional construct. Virginia Grace Parker, who I named for three actresses of the 1950s—Virginia Leith, Grace Kelly and Suzy Parker—and whose life bears a passing resemblance, in parts, to those women I researched in the writing of this novel—especially Mary Irwin, wife of Apollo 15 astronaut James B Irwin, but also science fiction authors Judith Merril and Alice B Sheldon. However, Ginny Eckhardt née Parker is more than the sum of her inspirations, more than an invented history patchworked from the lives of others; and she leans forward and narrows her gaze as the first sentence of her story comes to her, and she types:
Once a month, the wives of the test pilots and engineers met up gathered at the social club for coffee and conversation.
Walden is away at the Cape, she has not seen him since the weekend; and the small apartment is quiet. Ginny has her imagination, and a network of friends spread across the country, and she uses them to fill the empty hours. And, of course, there is the AWC, members of which are all too prone to drop by or telephone, to chat, to have a drink, coffee or something stronger, to just be company, whether she wants it or not. But somehow she has managed to free up today, although she has an appointment tomorrow at the beauty parlour so she will look her best when Walden flies home from the Cape on Saturday. For now, her thoughts are centred on the world of her heroine with the spaceship research pilot husband, a deliberate echoing of her own situation. She thinks about an invisible Navy destroyer in 1943, about pantyhose hanging from a line across the bathtub and lost earrings and women’s magazines sitting on coffee tables. She considers her role as an astronaut wife and the pressure to conform exerted by NASA and the other wives; and her mind is drawn to the Apollo spacecraft, the command module and lunar module, so exhaustively detailed in the manuals Walden studies so assiduously. She thinks about the fiction she has read in her magazines over the past six months, stories by Linda Marlowe, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffrey, Monica Sterba, Susan Trott, Betsy Curtis, Joan Patricia Basch…
And the words flow from her, this is one of the easiest stories she has ever written, perhaps because it had such a long gestation, perhaps because so much of herself is in it—and the narrative does not require those mental gymnastics she must usually perform if, say, her story were set among the crew of a spaceship on some endless voyage landing on an alien world for the first time. She is writing about the Astronaut Wives Club and the Apollo astronauts,
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