AS YOU gaze into the night sky, would it be a comfort to know that, orbiting our planet, are the tiny remains of your cremated forebears? A company, Celestis, offers “space funeral ashes services” to those who feel that the only suitable place for their mortal remains is beyond the surly bonds of earth; but, as we discovered on Sideways (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week), the business is not immune to criticism — and not just from bereaved relatives who can think of better ways to spend the money.
Objections have been raised by Native Americans about the desecration of a celestial object that they hold sacred. Others just don’t like the idea of so much junk floating around up there: tens of thousands of objects that have accumulated in the past few decades of space exploration and exploitation.
Into this ethical confusion steps Matthew Syed, with a four-part series designed to pick apart the arguments — some abstract, and some very much closer to home, particularly if your home happens to be Brownsville, Texas, where Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has set up shop and refashioned the infrastructure of the entire area. While Syed declares himself wholly in favour of space colonisation, as a responsibility that we owe to our descendants, he catalogues some of the environmental injustices that arise on earth in the quest to find a better and more equitable existence in some distant galaxy. Meanwhile, some look up at the stars and wish merely not to get hit on the head by a latrine from a redundant satellite.
“How do you get your ideas?” It is the question all novelists must face on the promotional circuit; and, while Elizabeth Day’s new podcast, How to Write a Book (Daylight Productions; new episodes every Monday), doesn’t quite unlock the secret of inspiration, the first episode does offer some useful tips on what to do with ideas once you’ve had them. Powered by the terrifying “collective head-girl energy” of three publishing experts — all of whom enthusiastically log-roll for one another — Day’s “podclass” is built on that age-old assumption that “We all have a story in us.” Whether or not it should stay there is a different matter.
If the contributors can keep focused, this limited-edition series ought to be worthwhile. If, for instance, they can be encouraged to analyse what makes a bad book, then we will learn a good deal more than from stories of those surprise, unputdownable submissions that form the mythology of the publishing business. Let’s hear about the graft.
It is one of the attractions of The Bottom Line (Radio 4, Tuesdays) that Evan Davis is prepared to talk about the graft, as well as the grift, of building and maintaining businesses. Anyone engaged in education, especially in the private sector, should listen to last week’s episode, in which the talk was not of the three Rs, but of M&A (mergers and acquisitions) and HMRC.