Cosmonaut Keep at 25 years

Cosmonaut Keep imagined a future where the detritus of the Soviet space program becomes the skeleton key to interstellar travel—not despite the USSR's collapse but because of it. The novel's central joke, which has aged into something more like prophecy, is that the patient, unglamorous work of keeping humans alive in tin cans (Salyut, Mir, ISS) matters more than any Apollo-style sprint. MacLeod was writing three years after Mir's final crew and one year into ISS habitation, when the station still felt provisional. Now the ISS has been continuously occupied for twenty-five years, longer than many of the political arrangements that funded it, and its successor politics look exactly as fractious and cobbled-together as MacLeod's fictional Second Enlightenment. Meanwhile O'Neill's 1976 letter from space—with its homesteaders designing their own spacecraft "rather like homebuilt-aircraft clubs"—reads like the aspirational flip side: the future where orbital life becomes *culture* rather than mere endurance. Cherryh's Cyteen warning that "we are too young in space; our support systems are still too fragile" sits precisely at the hinge between these two visions. What MacLeod understood, and what the Salyut history in McDougall's account confirms, is that the species that reaches the stars will be the one that finds staying boring enough to keep doing it.