This week on the excellent Escape Pod science fiction podcast, a perfect little short-short story by Geoff Landis (a no-foolin' NASA engineer who worked on the Mars rovers) that brings Kerouac to space travel and vice versa. Enchanting stuff-o-roonie.
Turns out, you know, that old dharma bum never made it off the wheel of karma. He had too many attachments, to the road, to words; and if you love the things of the world of Mara too much you fall back into the world, like gravity pulling back a rocket that doesn't reach escape velocity. Two, three thousand years later, he's still on the road. Really, nothing's changed. And Neal, that old prankster, Neal never really did want to transcend, he loved to see it all streaming past the window, a constant moving circus disappearing in the rear-view mirror, loved to talk, loved it all.
(Image: kerouac On the Road scroll, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from emdot's photostream)
