brettt's review
3.0
Sometimes science fiction books incorporate their advanced technology into the story as a part of the fabric. Artificial gravity, for example, makes the story flow a little more smoothly and offers a ready explanation for why accelerating at thousands of times the speed of light does not crush your characters into paste against the back wall. Some stories outline the development of such technologies, showing how scientists or inventors are moved by the desire to explore the universe and the frontiers of human knowledge.
But not until Jon Del Arroz's Gravity of the Game did we come across a futuristic technology employed for a truly meaningful and important purpose: Allowing baseball to be played on worlds other than the Earth.
World Baseball League Commissioner Hideki Ichiro is facing hard realities. His sport's viewership numbers are cratering. His owners are mostly short-sighted money grubbers who will do whatever they can to increase their own profits even when it might hurt the overall game and the rest of the League on which they depend. Sports media magpies huddle, waiting for his commissionership's demise so they can exalt themselves by claiming they knew it would happen. He's gambling on the novelty of baseball played on the moon, but that body's lesser gravity presents problems that would render the game strange and unwatchable even if it could work, which so far it hasn't.
Which is where the artificial gravity comes in. Even in the high-tech world Ichiro occupies, the concept is seen as fantasy fluff, and the money spent on its research wasted. Ichiro's investment in that research is one of the reasons some of the owner factions cite as a need to remove him for a more practical mind. Can he keep his position as commissioner and succeed in a long-shot bid to revitalized the sport he loves?
Del Arroz doesn't stuff Gravity with more than it needs to do its job. It's not hard to see it on the pages of a mid-century sci-fi pulp magazine even if it's much more novella-length than short story. Ichiro's love of his game and his belief in its importance come straight from the days of Mantle and Maris, no matter his date of birth or country of origin. But Gravity isn't satire or send-up, and Del Arroz illustrates the important point that sometimes people trying to solve ordinary problems bring about solutions with extraordinary reach. In this world, artificial gravity wasn't developed by a space navy or a technocratic state so that starships could explore unknown planets. It was developed so that pitcher and batter remain separated by 60 feet, six inches, as God intended.
Original available here.
But not until Jon Del Arroz's Gravity of the Game did we come across a futuristic technology employed for a truly meaningful and important purpose: Allowing baseball to be played on worlds other than the Earth.
World Baseball League Commissioner Hideki Ichiro is facing hard realities. His sport's viewership numbers are cratering. His owners are mostly short-sighted money grubbers who will do whatever they can to increase their own profits even when it might hurt the overall game and the rest of the League on which they depend. Sports media magpies huddle, waiting for his commissionership's demise so they can exalt themselves by claiming they knew it would happen. He's gambling on the novelty of baseball played on the moon, but that body's lesser gravity presents problems that would render the game strange and unwatchable even if it could work, which so far it hasn't.
Which is where the artificial gravity comes in. Even in the high-tech world Ichiro occupies, the concept is seen as fantasy fluff, and the money spent on its research wasted. Ichiro's investment in that research is one of the reasons some of the owner factions cite as a need to remove him for a more practical mind. Can he keep his position as commissioner and succeed in a long-shot bid to revitalized the sport he loves?
Del Arroz doesn't stuff Gravity with more than it needs to do its job. It's not hard to see it on the pages of a mid-century sci-fi pulp magazine even if it's much more novella-length than short story. Ichiro's love of his game and his belief in its importance come straight from the days of Mantle and Maris, no matter his date of birth or country of origin. But Gravity isn't satire or send-up, and Del Arroz illustrates the important point that sometimes people trying to solve ordinary problems bring about solutions with extraordinary reach. In this world, artificial gravity wasn't developed by a space navy or a technocratic state so that starships could explore unknown planets. It was developed so that pitcher and batter remain separated by 60 feet, six inches, as God intended.
Original available here.
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