Original caption: This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters – violet, blue and green – and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification. NASA Public domain

I’ll close this series of posts on the music references in Food with a reference that is not to music: Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot soliloquy.

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The crew of STS-45 is already training for its March 1992 mission, including stints on the KC-135 zero-gravity-simulating aircraft. Shown with an inflatable globe are, clockwise from the top, C. Michael Foale, mission specialist; Dirk Frimout, payload specialist; Brian Duffy, pilot; Charles R. (Rick) Chappell, backup payload specialist; Charles F. Bolden, mission commander; Byron K. Lichtenberg, payload specialist; and Kathryn D. Sullivan, payload commander. NASA/JSC Public domain

I was listening to I’ll Take You There, by the Staple Singers, and I had a vision of kids floating in zero gravity, laughing and bouncing around.

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A closeup of the drive plume as Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket called “PREFIRE and Ice,” lifts off from Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand at 3:15 p.m. NZST Wednesday, June 5, 2024. NASA/Rocket Lab public domain

Maybe my use of Sly and the Family Stone’s I Want To Take You Higher was a bit on the nose for a launch song.

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A picture of two toy trains: Thomas and James.

Kids love trains. There are no trains on Mars, but kids there love them all the more for this. Cas and Ori, the sisters in my books, are past this stage of childhood, but they remember.

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Picture of skin with goosebumps. Image has been altered to display the words "it's just a song". photographer: Ildar Sagdejev license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Do you get frisson? More specifically, do some pieces of music make the hair on your neck stand up?

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The author in a different and wilder period of life. This is too embarrassing to describe further.

My oldest also likes Radiohead, though she would probably think Creep is basic.

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Flyer written by Kathleen Hanna in 1989.

My oldest went through a Riot Grrrl phase. That phrasing sounds dismissive. I don’t mean it that way at all.

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An illustration of a very ungainly spaceship taking off. Illustration by Luis Peres for Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Excerpt:
“The Country Roads stood upright on the pad, engine bells down, nose up, like all rockets since the beginning of the rocket age...

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Victorian woman standing with cello public domain

Do you remember the first time we see the Discovery One in 2001? It eases slowly onto the screen, as a melancholy orchestral piece plays (Adagio from Gayane, by Aram Ilyich Khachaturian).

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Closeup of a Woody vehicle with surfboards on top. Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Damian Gadal. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

“Music filled the Country Roads. It was what used to be called surf music, with echo-y jangling guitars and voices in harmony singing about cars and waves.”
-- from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four
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I reposted this already, but I want to elaborate on it a little more. Kyle deserves a special place in my series of posts on #GenMarsFoodMusic.

I use the final verse of his piece called “Matches” as an epigraph for Food because it captures the essence of hopepunk.

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An image of an acoustic phin instrument. public domain

Many years ago, I went to Bolivia to help a friend with some field research. We stayed on a remote ranch in the Gran Chaco, an arid grassland in the southern part of the country.
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#GenMarsFoodMusic 1
I listen to a lot of music when I’m writing. At these times, I prefer instrumental pieces that don’t tug at my Wernicke’s. Phish is a good fit for this. On the journey to Mars, one of my characters listens to #Phish much of the time. So did I as I wrote.
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...So I thought it might be fun to elaborate on some of them here under the hashtag #GenMarsFoodMusic.