Ben Bova predicted Sputnik in 1949, but no publisher would touch his novel

Often , when scientific discipline fiction novel get rejected , there ’s some political shenanigans at work . Take typesetter’s case of Ben Bova , whose first novel aright predicted that the Soviet Union would beat the United States into space — and publishers would n’t plow it .

Writing in his veritable chromatography column for the Naples Daily News , Bova recounts how he decide , in 1949 , to write a novel about the first person on the Moon . Because the Soviet Union had just set off its first atomic bomb calorimeter , years before most analysts had expected the Soviets to master the applied science , Bova decided to write a novel in which the U.S.S.R. gets into space before the U.S. , catching the Americans by surprise . The U.S. launches a heroic platform to get to the Moon before the Soviets do . As Bova say :

A softheaded plot . Nobody believe it . Nobody wanted to purchase my novel .

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He sent it to every publishing company in New York , and they all turned it down . Finally , he sent it to a young grownup publishing firm in Philadelphia , who agreed to converge with him :

The editor was a kindly man who recount me , near as I can remember his words :

“ see , kid . This novel of yours is n’t as uncollectible as some of the thing we do publish . But you ’ve bewilder this weird plot : the Russians blend into blank space before we do . Nobody ’s give-up the ghost to think that . ”

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So much for literary quality .

“ Besides , ” the editor went on , “ there ’s this guy in Washington , Sen. Joseph McCarthy , who ’s seek for communists all over the state . If we published a novel that even hint that the Russians were smarter than we are , he ’d make our life miserable . ”

The editor advised Bova to publish another novel — one set so far in the future that “ nobody can connect it with today ’s politics . ” And so a career was born . [ Naples Daily News ]

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