A New Frontier
A major theme which runs throughout the book, intersecting with other individual themes and collectively uniting them is the idea that the story being told represents one of those rare moments of epochal change for a society. For Homer, the line separating the two epochs is clear: the day in October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit. The book is a not just a story about the beginning of the space race and everything that entails for how America changed after Sputnik, but also about how life in coal mining communities changed and how the view of marriage and family changed and how the relationships between fathers and sons changed. Homer asserts that his life can be divided into two distinct phases which exist on either side of Sputnik, but in a very real way that before and after distinction can be applied to America as a whole as the technology of space research opened new career opportunities and chances for escape from "company towns" that simply did not exist before.
The Cold Wars
The Cold War is present as a theme in the narrative not just as the backdrop to the period setting in which the story unfolds. The space race and the urge to build better rockets is inextricably linked to tensions between America and the Soviet Union and those tensions had the effect of filtering down into aspects of everyday life that might not even be recognizable as such. The author engages this aspect of Cold War society to expand upon it by paradoxically narrowing its focus as a means of examining his own household. A Cold War exists inside that house, creating tensions between husband and wife and father and son. The domestic manipulations for power inside the Hickam home mirror the larger implications of global manipulation for power taking place between the two superpowers.
Cooperation versus Competition
This theme plays out in a number of ways throughout the text. Most obviously, perhaps, is the attention the community places upon football and its primal exhibition of competition versus the cooperative atmosphere eventually fostered among the more nerdy members of the Big Creek Missile Agency. Even there, however, the issue of competitiveness versus team play must be worked through. Less obvious, perhaps, is that Homer’s rocket design skills eventually push him toward exactly the same kind of competitive atmosphere as football when science fair rolls around. The competition versus cooperation theme intrudes into the Hickam family with Homer, Sr. digging in for a fight again his son’s hopes for his future while his mother engages him to cooperate with her own dreams of escaping the vicious cycle of coal mining town life. And then there is the fatally beautiful Dorothy Plunk whose whole life seems to be a competition to see how far she can push Homer’s patience even when her motivations are made clear to him through the cooperative empathy of the non-blinded vision of Emily Sue. Ultimately, of course, the center of the cooperation/competition theme is Homer’s own gift for problem solving and his tragic flaw of thinking everything in life is a problem which can ultimately be solved.
