The Telegraph recently posted an article/interview with Dave Eggers, who I write about here as often as I can.  It’s a good article, focusing primarily on Eggers’ last three novels.  The article is mostly couched in Eggers’ take on technology, which is most seen in The Circle.  But the article also makes decent use of the most recent (and under-discussed) book by Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And Your Prophets, Do They Live Forever?  One image that inspired that book is something potent for many who grew up in the 90s: the NASA shuttle program:

“Fathers was so odd,” he admits. “I wrote it on and off for about a year, but in a fury each time.” Even more than Alan Clay in A Hologram for the King, Thomas is a figure of dispossession adrift on America’s post-industrial landscape. He yearns obsessively for the time when America blazed a trail with the Space Shuttle programme.

“Half the people I grew up with wanted to go up in the Space Shuttle,” Eggers replies when I ask about this. “It was one of the most central images of our childhood and teenage years. I went to the last Shuttle launch in 2011. It made me feel incredibly patriotic and proud, and really sad. There were so many of these old-timers who have been at NASA from the beginning and they knew it was ending. Astronauts were going to have to ride on Russian rockets to get to the space station.

“It was crushing. Everyone was crying. The Shuttle was such a powerful emblem of a sense of optimism and a can-do spirit. I think this is what Thomas in Fathers is suffering from and Alan too in Hologram. That lack of that big next glorious communal mission, whether it’s the opening of the West or the transcontinental railroad or the Panama canal or Apollo or the Shuttle.”

But it’s talk of the internet and data and privacy that takes up the rest of the article.  Instead of technology that directs us truly beyond ourselves, we have apps where “they’re all more intrusive, they all reach through” into the personal areas of our lives.

You can read the whole article here.  It’s a worthwhile read and a healthy perspective.