SALON

Space

Monday, Aug 30, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

The true adventures of a space buccaneer

"I think space will happen," Jim Benson says. "People will move off the planet." And when they do, he wants a piece of the action.

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Space may still be the final frontier, but few of us associate the cosmos with the kind of daring exploits that once grabbed headlines. The dreamy futurism inspired by the space race has been replaced by a warm glow of nostalgia. Mercury and Apollo exist as cultural relics alongside “Star Trek,” inviting us to look back, not ahead, feeding a seemingly endless appetite for reruns. Space entrepreneur Jim Benson, for one, has had enough. To Benson, the marking of the 30th anniversary of the moon landing in July seemed less a celebration than “a wake” — “Something died 30 years ago and we’re still pining away for it,” he said. “Young people have gone through two generations of disappointment in the space program. It’s clear that the government is not doing it, can’t do it, and it’s up to the private sector to make it happen.”

Benson, who sold his software company in 1996 and retired a millionaire at age 50, thinks the problem is simple, and he repeats his solution like a mantra: “Space is a place, not a government program.” In 1997, bored after a year of retirement, he founded SpaceDev, the world’s first commercial space exploration company. SpaceDev plans to design, build and launch a series of spacecraft, conducting missions with no direct government subsidies. Even more revolutionary, Benson is promising his shareholders a healthy profit at the end of each mission. “We’re not a charity,” he says. “We can’t afford not to make a profit.”

Slowly but surely, the seeds of capitalism are spreading into the heavens. Benson, a conservationist who worked in the early days of the federal Energy Department during the Ford and Carter administrations, represents the beginning of a wave that could soon rival the upstart dreams of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. The commercialization of space has yet to impress Wall Street, but the public sector — from Congress to NASA to the White House — has embraced the idea that business will lead the next great space age. A bill being hammered out in the House of Representatives would require NASA to stay out of any activities where its involvement would preclude that of the private sector. In other words, NASA would have to either facilitate commerce or get out of its way. Many people, including businessmen and scientists, see a brand-new industry on the horizon. Benson is aiming to be one of its captains.

This fall, SpaceDev will begin building a miniature spacecraft that will launch in late 2001 and land on a near-Earth asteroid called 4660 Nereus. The Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP) will collect scientific data — for a price — and will claim ownership of Nereus in a bid to establish private property rights in space, since no one ever has, and no law says you can’t. The mission, which is purely profit-driven, was urged on Benson by the scientific community, including astronomers at the cutting-edge Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology that defines and conducts most deep-space missions for NASA. Nereus, which is a half-mile across and travels in a solar orbit between Earth and Mars, will be extremely close to us in January 2002. The asteroid is a floating mountain of stainless steel, gold, and platinum. It will be Benson’s staging ground for one of the century’s most innovative experiments in capitalism.

An early computer enthusiast, Benson earned a degree in geology from the University of Missouri in 1971 and took a programming job in Washington the next year. A neighbor gave him a copy of a study called “The Limits to Growth,” an apocalyptic warning about the consequences of global warming and the depletion of natural resources. Already disillusioned by the Vietnam War, Benson’s eyes were opened to conservationism and the potential future uses of space as the escape route from a doomed planet. He quit his computer job and went to work for the Solar Energy Division of ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration, forerunner to the Energy Department. He helped analyze President Gerald Ford’s National Energy Plan and gave it poor marks for ignoring the potential of solar energy, and he later advised Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign on environmental issues.

At the newly named Energy Department, Benson began to clash with superiors, and left government work to become an independent computer programmer. He founded Compusearch Software Systems in McLean, Va., in 1984. The company pioneered commercial PC-based full-text searching, a precursor to today’s Web search engines. It was profitable every year until Benson sold it in 1995 for several million dollars and moved to Colorado with his wife.

But Benson grew restless. So he started reading up on his old avocation, astronomy, and began looking for ways to meld it with his business acumen. “I’ve always liked science and technology and I’ve always liked astronomy, ever since I saw the rings of Saturn through a department-store telescope,” he told me. “I’ve been a businessman all my life, so when I think about space, I think about business.” Benson did the first thing any good businessman would: He defined a market, realizing that the NASA budget represented “one or two billion dollars” that taxpayers were forking out annually “to collect data in space,” since missions mainly produce material for scientists to analyze. Benson decided to re-allocate some of those funds.

At the same time SpaceDev was forming, NASA was looking for ways to get out of routine space matters and into forging new technologies expensive enough to require government funding. As a start, NASA had begun to transfer oversight of its shuttle missions to a private consortium called the United Space Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin is spearheading a cost-cutting campaign with a series of “Discovery” missions, small-scale spacecraft designed to proceed from development to flight in three years or less and cost under $150 million. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), NASA’s ongoing mission to the asteroid Eros, is the first of these. Benson finds NEAR to be “a good mission to try to emulate.” NEAR won’t land on the asteroid, but will orbit around Eros for a year once the two cross paths a second time, in February 2000. (The first time, NEAR failed to fire its main engine, missing an earlier opportunity to orbit.) Benson’s mission, he hopes, will do more for less, landing on Nereus for under $50 million.

How? With low administrative costs, no red tape, and technological innovations that have resulted in miniaturization. Whereas NEAR weighed in at 2,000 kg, NEAP will weigh 200 kg. NASA’s spacecraft required a $50 million launch vehicle, but Benson plans to send his up for between $1.5 million and $6 million. SpaceDev will collect million-dollar research fees according to a published price list from scientists (many of whom will get their funding from NASA), and is also looking into corporate sponsorship (prices for logos, which may adorn the NEAP spacecraft, are negotiable). Construction on NEAP begins in October, using off-the-shelf components. “Most spacecraft are made of commercially available products,” says Benson. “I don’t know if the public is aware of that, but they ought to be.” Future spacecraft will be standardized, “to make many more in the coming years and keep the cost down.”

When SpaceDev launched in 1997, much of the media focused on the company’s intention to declare mining rights on the mineral-rich Nereus. In 1991, Benson had been alerted to the value of natural resources in space in an article by Steve Ostro of JPL, a leading radar astronomer. Ostro examined a near-Earth asteroid and determined that it contained naturally occurring stainless steel. (Ostro would later say of SpaceDev, “As a privately funded commercial enterprise, it marks the dawn of a space ‘gold rush’ with tremendous positive long-term importance to human civilization.”) But Benson began to realize the impracticality of bringing tons of minerals back into the atmosphere. Where would they land?

Luckily, scientists handed Benson a new idea when they began to pay serious attention to near-Earth objects in our corner of the universe, soon determining there may be as many as 100,000, in orbits similar to Earth’s. Scientists believe that as many as 20 percent of them are dormant comet cores, or “space icebergs,” containing water, which can be electrolyzed into oxygen and hydrogen. “And that’s rocket fuel,” Benson says confidently. “Without water in space nothing is possible. With water in space, everything is possible: water supports life, grows food, and serves as energy.” Finding a source of rocket propellant in space “could be a major economic attraction,” Benson has said.

In terms of economic attractions, the new industry could use a boost. Take Iridium, the satellite telephone company with much-publicized money problems. Iridium spent $5 billion launching its global satellite network, but the bottom fell out when it found itself 400,000 customers shy of the 500,000 it needed to break even. In August the company sought bankruptcy protection after going into default on its $1.5 billion debt. I asked Benson what he thought of the debacle. “How could anybody in their right mind have thought that thing would work?” he said, with true bafflement. “It was wildly expensive and under-powered, and it’s not servicing an under-serviced market. How can anyone expect to spend $5 billion on something and then sell $1,500-to-$2,000 telephones and charge $8 a minute?”

Benson rightfully distanced his company from the satellite-telephone industry, but conceded that “Iridium has hurt the market. It has hurt the Wall Street interest in these things.” He knows this problem firsthand. Last April, Benson ended a protracted tussle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had accused him of overstating SpaceDev’s earnings potential to investors. In a settlement with the SEC, he agreed to tone down his projections. The usually expansive Benson grew terse when I asked about the run-in: “It’s ancient history and I have nothing to say about it.” For Benson, a stern businessman who prides himself on his nose for financial order, the criticism still stings. Still, he admits, “You never know who the winners and losers are going to be — SpaceDev is just another risky startup.”

For a risky startup, a lot of important people are in Benson’s corner, including NASA’s Goldin, who has said of the NEAP mission, “This is a hell of a courageous thing to do. It will get people’s attention focused on the frontier still to be conquered.”

Benson has also hired some of the best in the field. They include a board of directors with several former NASA officials and mission planners and a chief mission architect, Rex Ridenoure, who spent more than a decade at JPL and before that held positions with the Hughes Space and Communications and Lockheed. Benson himself is chairman of the board, president and CEO, and is active in SpaceDev’s marketing and sales.

Instead of the vision of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke — Pan Am flights to an orbiting space station — the real 2001 will see the launch of NEAP, the potential harbinger of a new age that may be stranger than fiction. The NEAP mission will observe Nereus over a period of one to three months, during which the spacecraft will drop scientific instruments on the surface. In July 2002, NEAP will land on the asteroid, and SpaceDev will claim ownership of it. Since the only law currently governing space is the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty, which deals with issues of national sovereignty in space, Benson may establish a legal precedent for extraterrestrial property rights. As astronomer, professor and writer Timothy Ferris said, “The laws won’t be written in earnest until some buccaneer forces them to be.” Benson clearly relishes the thought of being that space-age pirate.

But SpaceDev doesn’t spring solely from a capitalistic urge. “I’ve been an environmentalist most of my life,” Benson points out. While he initially conceived of the new company as “a way to save natural resources on Earth” by importing them from space, the mission still resonates with the idealist in Benson, only for different reasons. “I think space will happen. People will move off the planet,” he said. “We’ll wind up with self-sustaining human settlements off the earth that in some ways will be valuable, because they will create gene pools.” In the event of “some catastrophe on earth in the future, if there are self-sustaining settlements out in space or on other planets or moons, then the human race will go on.” And of course, if Benson has his way in space, the profit margins will go up.

Frank Houston is a frequent contributor to Salon. More Frank Houston.

Monday, May 10, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Write your name on Mars

Space enthusiasts are signing their names to a CD bound for Mars -- where it will be radiated beyond recognition.

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When will you get a chance to visit Mars? Who knows — but your name could easily make its way onto the very next mission. By visiting the Sign
Up For Mars Web site, you can give NASA your name and let space agency officials burn it onto a CD-ROM that will be carried to the Red Planet on the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander. John Lee, a program analyst for the Mars 2001 mission, expects to collect “3 to 4 million names at a minimum.”

A similar CD was carried on last year’s Mars 98 Polar Lander — but only school-age kids could participate. Over 932,000 kids’ names were collected, and Lee says that quite a few adults wanted in on it, too. Now they’re getting their chance. Within a day of announcing the new CD on a NASA mailing list, nearly 9,000 people signed up to have their names rocketed into space in April 2001. Lee says adults are as excited as kids about the names CD, if not more so. In fact, he’s been hearing from kids who don’t want their names sent to Mars, but who have been added to the CD by “overzealous uncles.” Some kids are afraid that the CD will be used by Martians to compile an invasion hit list.

The kids have little to worry about: Because of the high radiation levels on Mars — the planet has no atmospheric shield like Earth’s ozone layer — the data on the CD will be damaged beyond recognition within a few days of landing. NASA could construct a radiation-proof case for the CD, but “the added cost to the mission would be considerable.” Instead, the agency will let the CD destruct and will leave its remains on Mars.

The Mars 2001 Lander is part of NASA’s new philosophy of “Faster, Better, Cheaper,” which attempts to generate maximum scientific returns at a minimum of cost. The mission will carry a number of experiments specifically designed to aid a future human visit to Mars. Most notable is a system devised to create rocket fuel out of materials readily available in the Martian environment, a procedure suggested in the 1996 Robert Zubrin book, “The Case for Mars.”

But until the day when tourists can head off to the Red Planet, the name CDs will give everyday people a chance to send a bit of themselves to Mars. Lee expects that the name lists could become a regular part of NASA missions, at least those with an element of public interest.

“We’d like to do this on the Europa mission,” Lee says. (Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, will be the target of an upcoming mission to look for extraterrestrial life.) “Humans have a natural inclination to be explorers,” he says. By adding one’s name to the 2001 Lander CD, Lee purports, “you can be a part of the exploration.”

At least for a few days after landing.

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Jamais Cascio is a scenarist and writer working in Los Angeles, where he's still waiting to be discovered. More Jamais Cascio.

Thursday, Jan 7, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

On to Mars!

While NASA fiddles with robots, a grass-roots movement burns to put human beings on the Red Planet -- soon.

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Last Sunday, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander lifted off for an 11-month voyage to the Red Planet, searching for signs of life in its polar icecaps. Robotic missions to Mars are nothing new — they date back to the Mariner 4 fly-by in 1964. But ever since the Apollo moon missions ended a quarter century ago, the notion of manned exploration of our celestial neighbors has seemed beyond our reach — more like science fiction than reality.

Today, most of us discount the prospect of a human mission to Mars as far-fetched. I did too — until a phone call from an old friend four months ago. But over the last several months, through an avid and serious Internet community of Mars devotees, I’ve learned that their dream, what I’d call “extreme pioneering” — the exploration and settlement of Mars — is easily within our technological grasp.

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“I’ve been through the solar movement and the environmental movement, but I have never experienced such passion,” Bruce Anderson’s voice quaked. “It was palpable.”

The late night call had shrilled through my cottage. After a while, I began to comprehend that, no, my friend had not been to a workshop on tantric sex. Anderson had flown to Boulder, Colo., on Aug. 13, 1998, to join more than 700 people at the founding convention of the Mars Society.

As director of industrial liaisons for MIT, Anderson enjoys a prime view of the technological horizon; he’s an aficionado of reality, not science fiction. Moreover, with a long history of environmental activism, he’s not inclined to undervalue our present planetary accommodations. So when Bruce revealed the Mars Society’s mission — to establish a human settlement on Mars within 10 years — my pulse accelerated.

The next day, I opened an investigative file. My first step was to dig out the story of the society’s roots in a loose-knit confederation of Mars enthusiasts who called themselves the Mars Underground. Long ago — about 20 years — a group of precocious graduate students at the University of Colorado, including Chris McKay and Carol Stoker in astrogeophysics (both now at NASA Ames Research Center and on the Mars Society’s steering committee), started a seminar on terraforming Mars — transforming the planet into a more Earth-like habitat. That led, in April 1981, to the first Mars conference at which enthusiasts bonded as the Mars Underground, sketching plans for human exploration of Mars. The conferences continued every three years; by the third Boulder conference in 1987, there were more than 1,000 attendees. Carl Sagan keynoted.

Members of the Mars Underground thought their efforts had paid off when in 1989 President Bush called for manned missions back to the moon and on to Mars in the 21st century. Responding to the president’s bugle, NASA proposed a buffed-up space station, already a pet project of many scientists. At the station, a Galactica-sized spaceship would be constructed for a voyage to Mars “flag and footprints”-style (we came, we saw, we conquered). The estimated cost: $450 billion.

It was a lousy plan with a Neiman Marcus price tag. Splat went the Mars movement.

But NASA’s wasn’t the only plan around: Robert Zubrin had one, too. Zubrin, a science teacher, attended the second Boulder conference in 1984. The event rekindled his childhood excitement over Sputnik and Kennedy’s classic 1961 mission statement: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. By 1989 Zubrin, who’d moved on to become a senior engineer at Martin Marietta, had developed his own strategy for getting to Mars and staying there a while. Pitching his “Mars Direct” plan to NASA and the Mars Underground, Zubrin kept fine-tuning his ideas, eventually writing and publishing the book “The Case for Mars” in 1996.

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The book details a plan that takes about five years to execute, at a base cost of $20 billion plus $2 billion per mission. It works this way: 1) Send an Earth return vehicle (ERV) to Mars. 2) On Mars, using off-the-shelf technology, ERV components convert carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere plus hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen — the fuel and propellant needed for the return trip. 3) After a six-month outbound trip, a spacecraft with a crew of four lands on Mars and establishes a base. 4) For 18 months, the crew explores Mars, looking for water, mineral deposits and evidence of microbial life. 5) As the first crew returns to Earth, a second crew arrives, establishing a new base and, perhaps, beginning greenhouse agriculture. 7) The process of launches, new bases, exploration, settlement and eventual transformation of Mars into an Earth-life planet continues.

By 1996, the engineers and scientists of the Mars Underground had dwindled to a small, grim group. But a popular tide was rising. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson published “Red Mars” in 1993 and its sequels “Green Mars” in 1994 and “Blue Mars” in 1997 — adding characters and plot to a story line that Zubrin had already demonstrated was technically and financially feasible. When Pathfinder landed on Mars in July 1997, about 2,000 enthusiasts, including Bruce Anderson, watched the first pictures of Mars flicker on a 26-foot screen at the Pasadena (Calif.) Civic Center. Over the next 30 days, NASA’s Pathfinder Web site took 566 million hits.

“I got 4,000 letters from people that read my book, all basically asking, how do we make this happen?” says Zubrin.

That ground swell convinced the Mars Underground to convene the Mars Society Founding Convention in Boulder last August. The epic conference covered a wide swath of territory, including biomedical issues, advanced propulsion and the need for a legal system on Mars. The conference organizers wanted to break out of the confines of the space-industrial complex and build a populist movement — and they got the diversity they sought. For example, Kathleen Bohne, a 12-year-old home-schooled Colorado girl, gave a brilliant presentation, describing how the prospect of exploring Mars had inspired her. And a plenary session on the ethics of terraforming Mars unleashed a ruckus of dissent.

Six of seven panelists spoke fondly of extending the concept of “Manifest Destiny” into space — including Zubrin and, most ardently, science-fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford. Most panelists had no problem with annihilating indigenous Martian life, as long as doing so advanced human interests. No one gave a damn about the fate of subterranean microbes on Earth, so it didn’t occur to the engineers that people might care about them on Mars.

But when the panelists invited questions, the conversation heated up. It was, essentially, an outer-space version of the abortion debate: When does life begin to have value? To many in the audience, whatever meager life Mars had managed to harbor had the same ethical value as Earth’s biota (the sum of all living organisms). Afterwards, several people from the audience climbed onstage to continue the discussion for another two hours. One of those was a corporate attorney from Los Angeles named John McKnight.

“Dr. Zubrin listened, really listened,” says McKnight, “and understood we weren’t Luddites or anti-Mars or anti-terraforming. For the most part the interchange was exhilarating. I think it did spook some of the Mars Underground to suddenly be challenged by all those people whose values were so different from that of the old steely-eyed missile men.” The docking between lay public and expert engineers wasn’t the smoothest, according to McKnight, but it was a respectful engagement nonetheless. “I think it was the birth of Mars as a grass-roots cause, the real birth of the Mars Society,” concludes McKnight.

Like Zubrin, McKnight had been a space-crazed kid who lost his way. He rediscovered Mars in the mid-’90s with Robinson’s trilogy. The Pathfinder photos of the Martian surface made him feel like he was 10 years old again, living in a world full of possibility. He read everything he could get his hands on about Mars and penned one of the 4,000 letters Zubrin received. On the final night of the convention, McKnight offered to create a worldwide task group to address the legal and ethical aspects of Mars settlement. Riding such enthusiasm, the society took off.

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My case file was already bulging. But I wanted to better understand the object, half the size of Earth and one-10th its mass, that had inspired so much passion. So I attended a lecture at the University of Arkansas by Mars geology expert Harry McSween.

McSween described the ’97 Mars Pathfinder mission. First, the Pathfinder’s rover located andesite, an indication of a possible continental crust system like Earth’s. Second, unlike Earth, where soils vary locally, all Martian soils seem to have roughly the same composition — as though homogenized by dust and wind storms. Third, much of the purported evidence of life on early Mars comes from the study of one Mars meteorite. Embedded in the meteorite are tiny objects that some people think are fossils, but McSween believes are magnetite grains.

On the other hand, McSween noted that water is probably present at both Martian poles and underground elsewhere. Erosion and flood deposits indicate massive, long-term water flow — like “pulling the plug on the Great Lakes.” What’s more, hydrogen isotopes in Mars meteorites imply that water cycles from the atmosphere into rocks. Why all the recent fuss about water on Mars, ice crystals on Earth’s moon, water vapor in the atmosphere of Titan (a moon of Saturn), and indications of a hidden sea on Europa (a moon of Jupiter)? Because everything we know today suggests that wherever there is water — no matter how cold, hot, dark, light, pressurized or laced with chemicals or radiation — there is microbial life.

At a reception across campus in the University Museum, McSween stroked a large asteroid on display. “She’s worth a lot of money,” he said. I asked McSween about the Mars Society, but he hadn’t heard of the organization yet, so I explained the society’s goal of beginning settlement no later than 2008 — as compared to NASA’s revised plans today, which vaguely call for human exploration in 2014 or so. “Oh, I think we have to go in steps,” McSween said. “NASA needs to prove it can carry out a large project on time, in budget. They did it once with the Apollo program, but their recent history with the International Space Station isn’t great.”

That ho hum approach — on time, in budget, no risk — has become NASA’s mantra. The collective rush we got from Sputnik’s launch in ’57 and from the glide of human feet upon the moon in 1969 has been supplanted with the tedium of watching objects circle and circle and circle Earth. The Mars Society could restore boldness to space exploration, with its spanking new motto — “Public if possible, private if necessary, but on to Mars!”

Already the Mars Society has 70 chapters in 20 countries, 10 task forces, 900 dues-paying members and a mailing list of 6,000. Relying on the Internet, the Society has become both a global forum and bazaar. Task forces coordinate through discussion and work groups. At the hub is the Web site, providing chapter contacts, news, a library, bookstore, archives and message boards.

The membership has toned its political muscles by rescuing the Marie Curie rover on the Mars 2001 mission from budget trimming. To date, the organization has operated online only — but bricks and mortar, file cabinets and a phone will soon materialize in Lakewood, Colo., at Pioneer Astronautics, a space R&D firm founded by Zubrin. Just before Christmas, the steering committee hired an executive director — John McKnight.

McKnight went to the Founding Convention hoping to engage in one good conversation and “got a lot bigger piece of the action than I ever imagined.” Some of the forthcoming action will be mundane — the start-up challenges of purchasing office equipment, writing procedure manuals, ordering business cards and fund-raising. Another project is the construction of a $1.5 million Arctic base, with money raised from private sources. To be located in the Martian-like Haughton Crater region of Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, the base will be a prototype of the Mars habitat for researchers and astronauts.

Still another formidable task before McKnight is to finish chiseling a profile of the Mars Society. How, for example, will the Mars Society relate to NASA, one institution to another? Several NASA officials sit on the society’s steering committee, and a large portion of the Mars Underground work for NASA as employees, contractors or subcontractors. Today NASA’s Reference Mission, its blueprint for manned exploration, has evolved away from the $450 billion monster of a decade ago; now it’s essentially “Mars Semi-Direct” — Zubrin’s plan plus two more crew members and one more launch per mission at a cost of about $55 billion. But aside from tiny budget allocations through the Johnson Manned Space Flight Center in Houston for Mars research and astronaut training, what little money Congress is allocating to Mars is all for robotic missions. The shuttle and the International Space Station gobble up NASA’s entire “manned” budget.

McKnight doesn’t fault NASA for its robotic-skewed priorities. NASA can’t lead, says McKnight. “As a government agency, its job is to follow where the president points and Congress pays.” The Mars Society joins existing groups like the Planetary Society and National Space Society on the nonprofit side of the space industrial complex. However, unlike these “newsletter groups,” as Zubrin describes them, the society is an activist entity: It aims to influence where the president points and Congress pays. McKnight elaborates: “We’re doing political action, looking to meet with potential presidential candidates to encourage them to make Mars a priority in the next administration.” In short, the Mars Society wants to see the first U.S. president of the third millennium walk to the podium for his or her inaugural speech and, echoing Kennedy’s promise three decades ago, announce that the United States will lead a global consortium to establish the first colony on Mars by the end of the decade.

“If that doesn’t happen,” says McKnight, “we can act as NASA’s competition by pursuing a private space program. That way, we’ve got a space race again, between us and NASA, and that can only speed the way to Mars.” In such a race, the society has a couple of advantages. “We’re global, with access to a much bigger talent pool, ” says McKnight. “And we have more fronts on which we can progress. We’ll explore the possibility of sending out a hitchhiker payload on a European or Japanese mission. We’re eager to build our presence in Russia. As we grow, we’ll be looking less and less like an American group with an American agenda. But as the big kid on the block, NASA will always figure prominently in our attentions and efforts.”

The Mars Society chose the timing of its debut carefully: It has time to influence the November 2000 election. The just-launched Mars Polar Lander destined for the planet’s south pole, along with the December-launched Mars Climate Orbiter, will begin returning new data on Mars in late 1999: analyses of rock and soil samples, views of the south pole, sound recordings, subsurface temperatures and observations about the movement of water and dust in the Martian atmosphere. That should help stir public interest in Mars. So, too, may a TV miniseries: Variety reported in November that Fox plans to air a miniseries based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s books, produced by “Titanic” director James Cameron and to be shown in the first quarter of 2000.

Underground for two decades, the Mars movement now pushes at the landscape of possibility — a pioneering spirit prepared to erupt into our lives through TV, educational initiatives, new products, symposia and, if the Mars Society achieves its goal, an international commitment to colonizing Mars. As the pitch of Mars fever increases, people will wonder: Is this a good thing?

Those of us who experienced the ’60s, either the big waves or the ripples of its wake, shared a sense of taking part in something more important than ourselves. Previous generations have found such passion in other historical moments. For young people like Kathleen Bohne, the rising tide of the Mars movement may be a rare opportunity to participate in the next defining moment in human history.

And what exactly is that? Today humanity sits on a threshold. Soon life will vault from Earth to Mars, the moon, asteroids and other planets. Some people will argue that the urge to leave our problem-ridden Earth is merely another expression of a disposable society. Others will contend that we should, instead, invest the time and energy in bettering conditions here.

But surely a global conversation about how we’ll seed Earth-originated life on another planet could reward us with a heightened perspective on problems at home. Such a conversation, and its outcome, might improve conditions on Earth via a simple mechanism — elongating the axes of time, distance and scale in which our species thinks and acts.

The Mars Society is a forum for the emerging philosophy of planetary exploration. Here, the lay public can collaborate in setting a course for the settlement and governance of Mars. Will we generate a prime directive (` la “Star Trek”) for noninterference in the evolution of other species, including microbes? What might a legal system for Mars look like? Can we devise less exploitative templates for relationships among human beings, between humans and other species, between humans and their habitat on Mars?

Such off-planet questions, while they may seem at the margins of relevance
today, will only grow more common, and more urgent, in the future. Answering them well could benefit not only the pioneers of Mars but the rest of us back
home.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T.S. Eliot

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Rebecca Bryant is a freelance writer. More Rebecca Bryant.

Wednesday, Aug 19, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

The truth about guidebooks

Dawn MacKeen reports from firsthand experience on why you shouldn't trust everything your guide tells you.

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Seven days after graduating from college, I boarded a plane and landed in the middle of Greece, with little knowledge of the language, the culture or the geography. I had two months from that moment to become an expert on the country for the now-defunct Berkeley Guides; to travel to, research and write about 15 islands and nine cities and towns, stretching from the northeastern island of Lesvos clear across the country to the southwestern island of Zakinthos. In 60 days, and in each location — and one of the islands I had to cover was Crete, with five of its own destinations — I had to find the best hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, museums, archaeological sites, beaches and bars, as well as the prices and schedules of the ferries, trains and buses. Plus I had to write them all up — and find some time to eat and sleep.

Armed with a backpack stuffed with every guidebook on the region and old newspaper clippings, a few changes of clothes, an AT&T card to call my editors back in Berkeley and the biggest bottle of ibuprofen a person could buy, I was ready to cover half of Greece, to trek the mountainous dirt roads and seek out the red sand beaches, to get sick on boat decks while en route to places inaccessible by car, to fall off walls in order to peek at crumbling ruins. I was ready to go “off the beaten path” and to “travel on a shoestring” — to be that poor student traveler all the marketing materials had talked about when announcing the debut of the Berkeley Guides series, which would now include a guide to Europe for the first time. I had lived near a Greek family growing up, had studied rhetoric in college and had inhaled the works of the ancient Grecian orators, and with that I sold myself as someone experienced to do the job. It was up to me (remember, I was “experienced”) to fill up my empty notebook with everything a traveler might need when coming to the regions I was covering — the Ionian, Dodecanese and Cycladic islands, Crete and the Peloponnesus — and then some.

What I did was akin to party-hopping, touching down on each island just long enough to get a sense of it, and then moving on to the next, with all of them quickly merging into one blue Aegean blur. With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn’t exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor’s schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter — despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough.

There was no way to research everything readers and publishers could want. So I started to just glance at the places I was supposed to be reviewing. Is this hotel OK? Glance — yeah, looks that way. Is this a good restaurant? Glance — yes, looks like one. But I struggled with never being able to give readers the “best” information possible; I was simply doing the best I could under the circumstances.

Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under — the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions — are almost a guidebook industry standard (or I should say, sub-standard). And yet guidebooks are thought of, and promoted as, the definitive key to a place — comprehensive in scope and discriminating in judgement. The glossy covers almost scream at you with their inflated claims: “Everything you need for a perfect trip”; “The perfect companion for independent travelers,” saturated with “expert advice” and “travel bargains.” Guidebooks have become almost biblical in their authority, filled with words to travel by, passed down from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t — required reading before any trip.

But there’s a huge disparity between what readers think they’re getting for $19.99 and what they actually get. I’ve known people who have read their guidebook so many times they can recite it almost word for word — which places to visit, how to get there, what to see (and, by sheer exclusion, what not to see). They have traveled from one end of town to another just because of a restaurant recommendation. Yet they could probably have gotten just as good advice by asking a local where there’s good calamari — which is most likely what the guidebook writer did, without ever taking a single bite.

“If readers assume I’ve tested every hotel in, for example, the Lonely Planet Thailand guide, they must be idiots!” says Joe Cummings, author of more than 30 guidebooks, travel atlases and phrase books. “It’s physically and economically unfeasible to sleep in every hotel and guesthouse in Bangkok alone, not to mention the rest of the country. In one district of Bangkok there are over 200 guesthouses — I’d never get around to writing a guidebook if I had to sleep in every hotel.”

The few sentences describing a place are often fragments jotted
down hastily on the spot and then later pieced together. Robert Holmes, who has written for Insider’s, Thomas Cook, Frommer’s and Fodor’s guides, says he allots about 10
minutes to do a museum. He walks quickly
through a place to get an idea of it, gets the admission
info and the historical focus and then checks it off his list. When I was
researching my Greece guide, I would walk in, ask the first guard I found
what the museum was known for, look at a few statues, scribble down what
the placards said and leave.

The eye can become trained to recognize the ills of a place pretty quickly,
but how well can you really judge a place with only a fleeting look? It’s
hard to ascertain what a pension’s noise level is like at 3 a.m. without
first losing a night’s sleep there, or if a bistro uses old meat for its
entrees until you eat there, or if there’s a
dangerous undertow at the secluded beach you’ve found without going in for
a swim. “People don’t realize how superficial guidebooks have to be done
to be
produced in the time and budget that’s allocated,” says Holmes.

They also might not understand the publication process involved. When the year “1998″
is emblazoned
across the cover of a guidebook, buyers often think that they’re
getting information
gathered in 1998. They should think again. Most of the time,
the information has been researched and written at least one year before –
in some
cases, the bulk of the information dates back several years — and has just been updated by phone.

Producing the first edition of a guidebook, especially if it is well researched,
can take years: All the information has to be collected, then the book has
to go through the writing cycle, the editing cycle, the production cycle
and the distribution cycle. Even in the guides with the fastest
turnarounds, the information is about six months old before it gets onto the
bookstore’s shelves and into your hands.

Editors of the bestselling books readily admit that some
places have probably gone out of business, changed owners or even gone from
hotel to brothel by the time guidebook-toting travelers show up on the
doorstep. “Mistakes get made in every guidebook,” acknowledges Anna
Portnoy, publishing
director of Let’s Go, the budget guide series written and edited by Harvard
students. “Prices are wrong, directions are wrong. We obviously do our
best — as any guidebook does — to get accurate information, but things
slip through the cracks.”

Let’s Go is just one of about a dozen brand-name series — such as Frommer’s,
Fielding’s, Baedeker, Michelin, Rough Guide, etc. — lining the walls of
bookstores nowadays. With such intense competition for every book
sold, publishers are in a race to get their books out as quickly as
possible for the lowest dollar amount. As a result, they’re often
not realistic about how much time it will take the writer to gather the
information, says Tom Brosnahan, author of guides published by Frommer’s,
Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Insight, and an advisor to the Society of
American Travel Writers’ Guidebook Institute. This downward trend began in
the 1980s, Brosnahan says. “Travel took
off, air fares came down to real
terms, people got richer and so they traveled more and the travel book
business just
exploded. Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get
into this market. They said, ‘Quick, find us some schmucks with
Underwoods to write these things up and get them out there.’” People were
given deadlines they couldn’t meet and amounts of money they couldn’t
even live off.

It’s precisely these financial and time restraints that have led one
guidebook writer to the dark side of the guide. “When I get tired, I
sometimes say,
‘Oh, fuck it,’ and pass something by and
make do on secondary sources — fatigue gets to you, laziness sets in,”
he says.
“If you’re not being paid well for a project, you can’t really expect
somebody to go out and break their back.”

In the worst-case scenario, some writers have been known to travel all the
way to their destination and then not even leave their
hotel room; they write their book or chapter from within the room,
with other guidebooks as their main resource.

“We all read other guidebooks and gain inspiration and information from
them, but some writers go too far and depend on other guidebooks for most
of their info,” acknowledges Cummings, who feels that this is one of the
biggest problems facing
the industry. “Even though it’s a perfectly legal thing to do as long as
the prose itself isn’t plagiarized, this cheats readers, who are expecting a
unique perspective on their chosen destination.”

Updates have their own problems. Even guidebook writers with the best
intentions can’t afford to revisit a place if they’re getting paid only
$1,500 or $2,000 to update a book. Airfare and ground transportation would
suck up most of that. That’s why if a guidebook says “updated” on its cover,
it doesn’t mean that the writer has actually traveled to the location and found
all the newest places to go for that year. It could simply mean that he or
she has traveled as far as the refrigerator, while calling the phone
numbers from the previous year’s guide to make sure that they were still
accurate.

Consider the plight of Chris Baker, who has been writing guidebooks for the
last 15 years for Moon, Lonely Planet
and Frommer’s, among others. When he was given $2,000 to update another
publisher’s book on Jamaica, he couldn’t afford to return to the country.
The whole thing was done from the comfort of his home in Oakland, Calif.
“I actually went back to Jamaica a few weeks ago for another reason,” Baker
says, “and
found out that it was absolutely impossible to discover very important
changes from home base that I had discovered on the road. So while these are
little niggly problems, they do factor into whether a guidebook is accurate
or not.”

Holmes faced a similar problem after being paid the same sum to
update a California guide. He says the amount wouldn’t have
covered the cost just to check everything out firsthand — let alone pay for
his time. (And he lives in California.) So he made
some phone calls, took information from press releases and relied heavily
on his recollection of the places. Right before the publication went to
press, his editors found the mention of a ride at Disneyland that
had been closed down for about three years.

The quality of a guidebook is also compromised by another one of the
biggest problems in the guidebook industry — the widespread acceptance of
complimentary rooms and meals. When writers
can’t afford to pay for everything they review, hoteliers and
restaurateurs often “comp” them — giving them rooms and meals for free.
Brosnahan says he sees no problem with taking a
$300 room for free; otherwise, he couldn’t afford to stay there and
wouldn’t be able to assess the place as thoroughly. He says it doesn’t affect his
objectivity — if there’s noisy plumbing or
other problems, he mentions it.

But not everyone is so sure. “There are journalists who say that [hosting]
doesn’t affect their judgment, but it does, it colors your frame of mind,”
says Holmes. “It automatically puts you in a good mood if you’re in a
good accommodation and you’re not paying for it.” Holmes recounts a time
when he was in Hawaii on other business and staying in a hotel with his
family. While he was there, he was also updating a guide to
Hawaii, but since he was just a paying guest — no one special as far as the
hotel was
concerned — he was stuck in a room above a loading dock with trucks
backing in and out starting at 6 in the morning. When he complained to the
management and told them who he was, they apologized and said that if they
had known who he worked for, things would have been different — he would
have been
given a quiet oceanfront room.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder about all the mistakes I might have made in my book,
how it affected the people who bought the guide, planned their vacations
around the places I recommended, took everything I wrote to heart. I dread the day when someone I meet tells me about an ill-fated
trip and then points a finger in my direction.

But I guess that same person could just as likely thank me for some of the places I stumbled into
and then jotted down. And this is true for most travel guides. Guidebooks
do offer gems in the form of thoughtful recommendations and necessary information to navigate a city or region for the first time. They are useful tools and can
be a person’s best companion in a foreign location.

But readers need an
attitude adjustment: Take guides for what they are, and know that not every piece
of information they present is definitive. Travel guides are
just slices of a world — sometimes ripe, and sometimes
gone rotten. This doesn’t mean you should throw your guidebooks away; but don’t limit your world by what a harried travel writer
has scribbled. Sometimes it pays to venture into the margins.

Continue Reading Close

Dawn MacKeen covers health for Newsday. More Dawn MacKeen.

Monday, Aug 17, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

The truth about guidebooks

Dawn MacKeen reports from firsthand experience on why you shouldn't trust everything your guide tells you.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Seven days after graduating from college, I boarded a plane and landed in the middle of Greece, with little knowledge of the language, the culture or the geography. I had two months from that moment to become an expert on the country for the now-defunct Berkeley Guides; to travel to, research and write about 15 islands and nine cities and towns, stretching from the northeastern island of Lesvos clear across the country to the southwestern island of Zakinthos. In 60 days, and in each location — and one of the islands I had to cover was Crete, with five of its own destinations — I had to find the best hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, museums, archaeological sites, beaches and bars, as well as the prices and schedules of the ferries, trains and buses. Plus I had to write them all up — and find some time to eat and sleep.

Armed with a backpack stuffed with every guidebook on the region and old newspaper clippings, a few changes of clothes, an AT&T card to call my editors back in Berkeley and the biggest bottle of ibuprofen a person could buy, I was ready to cover half of Greece, to trek the mountainous dirt roads and seek out the red sand beaches, to get sick on boat decks while en route to places inaccessible by car, to fall off walls in order to peek at crumbling ruins. I was ready to go “off the beaten path” and to “travel on a shoestring” — to be that poor student traveler all the marketing materials had talked about when announcing the debut of the Berkeley Guides series, which would now include a guide to Europe for the first time. I had lived near a Greek family growing up, had studied rhetoric in college and had inhaled the works of the ancient Grecian orators, and with that I sold myself as someone experienced to do the job. It was up to me (remember, I was “experienced”) to fill up my empty notebook with everything a traveler might need when coming to the regions I was covering — the Ionian, Dodecanese and Cycladic islands, Crete and the Peloponnesus — and then some.

What I did was akin to party-hopping, touching down on each island just long enough to get a sense of it, and then moving on to the next, with all of them quickly merging into one blue Aegean blur. With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn’t exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor’s schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter — despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough.

There was no way to research everything readers and publishers could want. So I started to just glance at the places I was supposed to be reviewing. Is this hotel OK? Glance — yeah, looks that way. Is this a good restaurant? Glance — yes, looks like one. But I struggled with never being able to give readers the “best” information possible; I was simply doing the best I could under the circumstances.

Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under — the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions — are almost a guidebook industry standard (or I should say, sub-standard). And yet guidebooks are thought of, and promoted as, the definitive key to a place — comprehensive in scope and discriminating in judgement. The glossy covers almost scream at you with their inflated claims: “Everything you need for a perfect trip”; “The perfect companion for independent travelers,” saturated with “expert advice” and “travel bargains.” Guidebooks have become almost biblical in their authority, filled with words to travel by, passed down from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t — required reading before any trip.

But there’s a huge disparity between what readers think they’re getting for $19.99 and what they actually get. I’ve known people who have read their guidebook so many times they can recite it almost word for word — which places to visit, how to get there, what to see (and, by sheer exclusion, what not to see). They have traveled from one end of town to another just because of a restaurant recommendation. Yet they could probably have gotten just as good advice by asking a local where there’s good calamari — which is most likely what the guidebook writer did, without ever taking a single bite.

“If readers assume I’ve tested every hotel in, for example, the Lonely Planet Thailand guide, they must be idiots!” says Joe Cummings, author of more than 30 guidebooks, travel atlases and phrase books. “It’s physically and economically unfeasible to sleep in every hotel and guesthouse in Bangkok alone, not to mention the rest of the country. In one district of Bangkok there are over 200 guesthouses — I’d never get around to writing a guidebook if I had to sleep in every hotel.”

The few sentences describing a place are often fragments jotted
down hastily on the spot and then later pieced together. Robert Holmes, who has written for Insider’s, Thomas Cook, Frommer’s and Fodor’s guides, says he allots about 10
minutes to do a museum. He walks quickly
through a place to get an idea of it, gets the admission
info and the historical focus and then checks it off his list. When I was
researching my Greece guide, I would walk in, ask the first guard I found
what the museum was known for, look at a few statues, scribble down what
the placards said and leave.

The eye can become trained to recognize the ills of a place pretty quickly,
but how well can you really judge a place with only a fleeting look? It’s
hard to ascertain what a pension’s noise level is like at 3 a.m. without
first losing a night’s sleep there, or if a bistro uses old meat for its
entrees until you eat there, or if there’s a
dangerous undertow at the secluded beach you’ve found without going in for
a swim. “People don’t realize how superficial guidebooks have to be done
to be
produced in the time and budget that’s allocated,” says Holmes.

They also might not understand the publication process involved. When the year “1998″
is emblazoned
across the cover of a guidebook, buyers often think that they’re
getting information
gathered in 1998. They should think again. Most of the time,
the information has been researched and written at least one year before –
in some
cases, the bulk of the information dates back several years — and has just been updated by phone.

Producing the first edition of a guidebook, especially if it is well researched,
can take years: All the information has to be collected, then the book has
to go through the writing cycle, the editing cycle, the production cycle
and the distribution cycle. Even in the guides with the fastest
turnarounds, the information is about six months old before it gets onto the
bookstore’s shelves and into your hands.

Editors of the bestselling books readily admit that some
places have probably gone out of business, changed owners or even gone from
hotel to brothel by the time guidebook-toting travelers show up on the
doorstep. “Mistakes get made in every guidebook,” acknowledges Anna
Portnoy, publishing
director of Let’s Go, the budget guide series written and edited by Harvard
students. “Prices are wrong, directions are wrong. We obviously do our
best — as any guidebook does — to get accurate information, but things
slip through the cracks.”

Let’s Go is just one of about a dozen brand-name series — such as Frommer’s,
Fielding’s, Baedeker, Michelin, Rough Guide, etc. — lining the walls of
bookstores nowadays. With such intense competition for every book
sold, publishers are in a race to get their books out as quickly as
possible for the lowest dollar amount. As a result, they’re often
not realistic about how much time it will take the writer to gather the
information, says Tom Brosnahan, author of guides published by Frommer’s,
Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Insight, and an advisor to the Society of
American Travel Writers’ Guidebook Institute. This downward trend began in
the 1980s, Brosnahan says. “Travel took
off, air fares came down to real
terms, people got richer and so they traveled more and the travel book
business just
exploded. Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get
into this market. They said, ‘Quick, find us some schmucks with
Underwoods to write these things up and get them out there.’” People were
given deadlines they couldn’t meet and amounts of money they couldn’t
even live off.

It’s precisely these financial and time restraints that have led one
guidebook writer to the dark side of the guide. “When I get tired, I
sometimes say,
‘Oh, fuck it,’ and pass something by and
make do on secondary sources — fatigue gets to you, laziness sets in,”
he says.
“If you’re not being paid well for a project, you can’t really expect
somebody to go out and break their back.”

In the worst-case scenario, some writers have been known to travel all the
way to their destination and then not even leave their
hotel room; they write their book or chapter from within the room,
with other guidebooks as their main resource.

“We all read other guidebooks and gain inspiration and information from
them, but some writers go too far and depend on other guidebooks for most
of their info,” acknowledges Cummings, who feels that this is one of the
biggest problems facing
the industry. “Even though it’s a perfectly legal thing to do as long as
the prose itself isn’t plagiarized, this cheats readers, who are expecting a
unique perspective on their chosen destination.”

Updates have their own problems. Even guidebook writers with the best
intentions can’t afford to revisit a place if they’re getting paid only
$1,500 or $2,000 to update a book. Airfare and ground transportation would
suck up most of that. That’s why if a guidebook says “updated” on its cover,
it doesn’t mean that the writer has actually traveled to the location and found
all the newest places to go for that year. It could simply mean that he or
she has traveled as far as the refrigerator, while calling the phone
numbers from the previous year’s guide to make sure that they were still
accurate.

Consider the plight of Chris Baker, who has been writing guidebooks for the
last 15 years for Moon, Lonely Planet
and Frommer’s, among others. When he was given $2,000 to update another
publisher’s book on Jamaica, he couldn’t afford to return to the country.
The whole thing was done from the comfort of his home in Oakland, Calif.
“I actually went back to Jamaica a few weeks ago for another reason,” Baker
says, “and
found out that it was absolutely impossible to discover very important
changes from home base that I had discovered on the road. So while these are
little niggly problems, they do factor into whether a guidebook is accurate
or not.”

Holmes faced a similar problem after being paid the same sum to
update a California guide. He says the amount wouldn’t have
covered the cost just to check everything out firsthand — let alone pay for
his time. (And he lives in California.) So he made
some phone calls, took information from press releases and relied heavily
on his recollection of the places. Right before the publication went to
press, his editors found the mention of a ride at Disneyland that
had been closed down for about three years.

The quality of a guidebook is also compromised by another one of the
biggest problems in the guidebook industry — the widespread acceptance of
complimentary rooms and meals. When writers
can’t afford to pay for everything they review, hoteliers and
restaurateurs often “comp” them — giving them rooms and meals for free.
Brosnahan says he sees no problem with taking a
$300 room for free; otherwise, he couldn’t afford to stay there and
wouldn’t be able to assess the place as thoroughly. He says it doesn’t affect his
objectivity — if there’s noisy plumbing or
other problems, he mentions it.

But not everyone is so sure. “There are journalists who say that [hosting]
doesn’t affect their judgment, but it does, it colors your frame of mind,”
says Holmes. “It automatically puts you in a good mood if you’re in a
good accommodation and you’re not paying for it.” Holmes recounts a time
when he was in Hawaii on other business and staying in a hotel with his
family. While he was there, he was also updating a guide to
Hawaii, but since he was just a paying guest — no one special as far as the
hotel was
concerned — he was stuck in a room above a loading dock with trucks
backing in and out starting at 6 in the morning. When he complained to the
management and told them who he was, they apologized and said that if they
had known who he worked for, things would have been different — he would
have been
given a quiet oceanfront room.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder about all the mistakes I might have made in my book,
how it affected the people who bought the guide, planned their vacations
around the places I recommended, took everything I wrote to heart. I dread the day when someone I meet tells me about an ill-fated
trip and then points a finger in my direction.

But I guess that same person could just as likely thank me for some of the places I stumbled into
and then jotted down. And this is true for most travel guides. Guidebooks
do offer gems in the form of thoughtful recommendations and necessary information to navigate a city or region for the first time. They are useful tools and can
be a person’s best companion in a foreign location.

But readers need an
attitude adjustment: Take guides for what they are, and know that not every piece
of information they present is definitive. Travel guides are
just slices of a world — sometimes ripe, and sometimes
gone rotten. This doesn’t mean you should throw your guidebooks away; but don’t limit your world by what a harried travel writer
has scribbled. Sometimes it pays to venture into the margins.

Continue Reading Close

Dawn MacKeen covers health for Newsday. More Dawn MacKeen.

Friday, Aug 7, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

The Truth About Guidebooks

Dawn MacKeen reports from firsthand experience on why you shouldn't trust everything your guide tells you.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Seven days after graduating from college, I boarded a plane and landed in the middle of Greece, with little knowledge of the language, the culture or the geography. I had two months from that moment to become an expert on the country for the now-defunct Berkeley Guides; to travel to, research and write about 15 islands and nine cities and towns, stretching from the northeastern island of Lesvos clear across the country to the southwestern island of Zakinthos. In 60 days, and in each location — and one of the islands I had to cover was Crete, with five of its own destinations — I had to find the best hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, museums, archaeological sites, beaches and bars, as well as the prices and schedules of the ferries, trains and buses. Plus I had to write them all up — and find some time to eat and sleep.

Armed with a backpack stuffed with every guidebook on the region and old newspaper clippings, a few changes of clothes, an AT&T card to call my editors back in Berkeley and the biggest bottle of ibuprofen a person could buy, I was ready to cover half of Greece, to trek the mountainous dirt roads and seek out the red sand beaches, to get sick on boat decks while en route to places inaccessible by car, to fall off walls in order to peek at crumbling ruins. I was ready to go “off the beaten path” and to “travel on a shoestring” — to be that poor student traveler all the marketing materials had talked about when announcing the debut of the Berkeley Guides series, which would now include guide to Europe for the first time. I had lived near a Greek family growing up, had studied rhetoric in college and had inhaled the works of the ancient Grecian orators, and with that I sold myself as someone experienced to do the job. It was up to me (remember, I was “experienced”) to fill up my empty notebook with everything a traveler might need when coming to the regions I was covering — the Ionian, Dodecanese and Cycladic islands, Crete and the Peloponnesus — and then some.

What I did was akin to party-hopping, touching down on each island just long enough to get a sense of it, and then moving on to the next, with all of them quickly merging into one blue Aegean blur. With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn’t exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor’s schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter — despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough.

There was no way to research everything readers and publishers could want. So I started to just glance at the places I was supposed to be reviewing. Is this hotel OK? Glance — yeah, looks that way. Is this a good restaurant? Glance — yes, looks like one. But I struggled with never being able to give readers the “best” information possible; I was simply doing the best I could under the circumstances.

Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under — the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions — are almost a guidebook industry standard (or I should say, sub-standard). And yet guidebooks are thought of, and promoted as, the definitive key to a place — comprehensive in scope and discriminating in judgement. The glossy covers almost scream at you with their inflated claims: “Everything you need for a perfect trip”; “The perfect companion for independent travelers,” saturated with “expert advice” and “travel bargains.” Guidebooks have become almost biblical in their authority, filled with words to travel by, passed down from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t — required reading before any trip.

But there’s a huge disparity between what readers think they’re getting for $19.99 and what they actually get. I’ve known people who have read their guidebook so many times they can recite it almost word for word — which places to visit, how to get there, what to see (and, by sheer exclusion, what not to see). They have traveled from one end of town to another just because of a restaurant recommendation. Yet they could probably have gotten just as good advice by asking a local where there’s good calamari — which is most likely what the guidebook writer did, without ever taking a single bite.

“If readers assume I’ve tested every hotel in, for example, the Lonely Planet Thailand guide, they must be idiots!” says Joe Cummings, author of more than 30 guidebooks, travel atlases and phrase books. “It’s physically and economically unfeasible to sleep in every hotel and guesthouse in Bangkok alone, not to mention the rest of the country. In one district of Bangkok there are over 200 guesthouses — I’d never get around to writing a guidebook if I had to sleep in every hotel.”

The few sentences describing a place are often fragments jotted
down hastily on the spot and then later pieced together. Robert Holmes, who has written for Insider’s, Thomas Cook, Frommer’s and Fodor’s guides, says he allots about 10
minutes to do a museum. He walks quickly
through a place to get an idea of it, gets the admission
info and the historical focus and then checks it off his list. When I was
researching my Greece guide, I would walk in, ask the first guard I found
what the museum was known for, look at a few statues, scribble down what
the placards said and leave.

The eye can become trained to recognize the ills of a place pretty quickly,
but how well can you really judge a place with only a fleeting look? It’s
hard to ascertain what a pension’s noise level is like at 3 a.m. without
first losing a night’s sleep there, or if a bistro uses old meat for its
entrees until you eat there, or if there’s a
dangerous undertow at the secluded beach you’ve found without going in for
a swim. “People don’t realize how superficial guidebooks have to be done
to be
produced in the time and budget that’s allocated,” says Holmes.

They also might not understand the publication process involved. When the year “1998″
is emblazoned
across the cover of a guidebook, buyers often think that they’re
getting information
gathered in 1998. They should think again. Most of the time,
the information has been researched and written at least one year before –
in some
cases, the bulk of the information dates back several years — and has just been updated by phone.

Producing the first edition of a guidebook, especially if it is well researched,
can take years: All the information has to be collected, then the book has
to go through the writing cycle, the editing cycle, the production cycle
and the distribution cycle. Even in the guides with the fastest
turnarounds, the information is about six months old before it gets onto the
bookstore’s shelves and into your hands.

Editors of the bestselling books readily admit that some
places have probably gone out of business, changed owners or even gone from
hotel to brothel by the time guidebook-toting travelers show up on their
doorsteps. “Mistakes get made in every guidebook,” acknowledges Anna
Portnoy, publishing
director of Let’s Go, the budget guide series written and edited by Harvard
students. “Prices are wrong, directions are wrong. We obviously do our
best — as any guidebook does — to get accurate information, but things
slip through the cracks.”

Let’s Go is just one of about a dozen brand-name series — such as Frommer’s,
Fielding’s, Baedeker, Michelin, Rough Guide, etc. — lining the walls of
bookstores nowadays. With such intense competition for every book
sold, publishers are in a race to get their books out as quickly as
possible for the lowest dollar amount. As a result, they’re often
not realistic about how much time it will take the writer to gather the
information, says Tom Brosnahan, author of guides published by Frommer’s,
Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Insight, and an advisor to the Society of
American Travel Writers’ Guidebook Institute. This downward trend began in
the 1980s, Brosnahan says. “Travel took
off, air fares came down to real
terms, people got richer and so they traveled more and the travel book
business just
exploded. Pretty soon, every publisher and his neighbor were trying to get
into this market. They were like, ‘Quick, find us some schmucks with
underwear to write these things up and get them out there.’” People were
given deadlines that they couldn’t meet and amounts of money they couldn’t
even live off.

It’s precisely these financial and time restraints that have led one
guidebook writer to the dark side of the guide. “When I get tired, I
sometimes say,
‘Oh, fuck it,’ and pass something by and
make do on secondary sources — fatigue gets to you, laziness sets in,”
he says.
“If you’re not being paid well for a project, you can’t really expect
somebody to go out and break their back.”

In the worst-case scenario, some writers have been known to travel all the
way to their destination and then not even leave their
hotel room; they write their book or chapter from within the room,
with other guidebooks as their main resource.

“We all read other guidebooks and gain inspiration and information from
them, but some writers go too far and depend on other guidebooks for most
of their info,” acknowledges Cummings, who feels that this is one of the
biggest problems facing
the industry. “Even though it’s a perfectly legal thing to do as long as
the prose itself isn’t plagiarized, this cheats readers, who are expecting a
unique perspective on their chosen destination.”

Updates have their own problems. Even guidebook writers with the best
intentions can’t afford to revisit a place if they’re getting paid only
$1,500 or $2,000 to update a book. Airfare and ground transportation would
suck up most of that. That’s why if a guidebook says “updated” on its cover,
it doesn’t mean that the writer has actually traveled to the location and found
all the newest places to go for that year. It could simply mean that he or
she has traveled as far as the refrigerator, while calling the phone
numbers from the previous year’s guide to make sure that they were still
accurate.

Consider the plight of Chris Baker, who has been writing guidebooks for the
last 15 years for Moon, Lonely Planet
and Frommer’s, among others. When he was given $2,000 to update another
publisher’s book on Jamaica, he couldn’t afford to return to the country.
The whole thing was done from the comfort of his home in Oakland, Calif.
“I actually went back to Jamaica a few weeks ago for another reason,” Baker
says, “and
found out that it was absolutely impossible to discover very important
changes from homebase that I had discovered on the road. So while these are
little niggly problems, they do factor into whether a guidebook is accurate
or not.”

Holmes faced a similar problem after being paid the same sum to
update a California guide. He says the amount wouldn’t have
covered the cost just to check everything out firsthand — let alone pay for
his time. (And he lives in California.) So he made
some phone calls, took information from press releases and relied heavily
on his recollection of the places. Right before the publication went to
press, his editors found the mention of a ride at Disneyland that
had been closed down for about three years.

The quality of a guidebook is also compromised by another one of the
biggest problems in the guidebook industry — the widespread acceptance of
complimentary rooms and meals. When writers
can’t afford to pay for everything they review, hoteliers and
restaurateurs often “comp” them — giving them rooms and meals for free.
Brosnahan says he sees no problem with taking a
$300 room for free; otherwise, he couldn’t afford to stay there and
wouldn’t be able to assess the place as thoroughly. He says it doesn’t affect his
objectivity — if there’s noisy plumbing or
other problems, he mentions it.

But not everyone is so sure. “There are journalists who say that [hosting]
doesn’t affect their judgment, but it does, it colors your frame of mind,”
says Holmes. “It automatically puts you in a good mood if you’re in a
good accommodation and you’re not paying for it.” Holmes recounts a time
when he was in Hawaii on other business and staying in a hotel with his
family. While he was there, he was also updating a guide to
Hawaii, but since he was just a paying guest — no one special as far as the
hotel was
concerned — he was stuck in a room above a loading dock with trucks
backing in and out starting at 6 in the morning. When he complained to the
management and told them who he was, they apologized and said that if they
had known who he worked for, things would have been different — he would
have been
given a quiet oceanfront room.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder about all the mistakes I might have made in my book,
how it affected the people who bought the guide, planned their vacations
around the places I recommended, took everything I wrote to heart. I dread the day when someone I meet tells me about an ill-fated
trip and then points his/her finger in my direction.

But I guess that same person could just as likely thank me for some of the places I stumbled into
and then jotted down. And this is true for most travel guides. Guidebooks
do offer gems in the form of thoughtful recommendations and necessary information to navigate
through a city or region for the first time. They are useful tools and can
be a person’s best companion in a foreign location.

But readers need an
attitude adjustment: Take guides for what they are, and know that not every piece
of information they present is definitive. Travel guides are
just slices of a world — sometimes ripe, and sometimes
gone rotten. This doesn’t mean you should throw your guidebooks away; but don’t limit your world by what a harried travel writer
has scribbled. Sometimes it pays to venture into the margins.

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Dawn MacKeen covers health for Newsday. More Dawn MacKeen.

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