Darwin’s Rocket

Alan Smale, rocket scientist and acclaimed alternate history author, joins us with a new tale about an evolution that could have been…

~ Julian and Fran, Oct. 19, 2025

For October, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you sparkling new stories by William Alexander, A.D. Sui, Alan Smale, and John P. Murphy. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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Darwin’s Rocket

by Alan Smale

It was a strange, stubby thing, nothing like a firework. Fins adorned its base, and it had an odd cat’s cradle twenty feet up, just below its pointy end, that I did not initially understand. In short, it looked nothing at all like the men had led me to expect, its metal skin obscuring the system of pressurized vessels and nozzles and tubes that Charles and his partners had repeatedly described to me in brain-deadening detail over port and cigars.

No, of course I had no idea that my daffy younger brother would come to be considered one of the greatest scientists of the age. What sister would? He was always such a dumpling of a boy, quite ordinary; a big reader, but with only the normal amount of mischief in him, and less energetic than most.

And raised in the overlapping shadows of a famous grandpa and a domineering father? That could squish the hopes and dreams out of any boy. It even weighed on me a bit, and I was only a girl.

And yet: Charles Robert Darwin grew up whole and ambitious after all, to become the central figure in a scientific revolution that has changed the world. Who on earth saw that coming?

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Lots of people have scary grandpas, but ours was scarier than most, on account of the sheer gawping magnitude of his accomplishments.

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) was a fearsome polymath: physician, poet, natural philosopher, inventor, abolitionist, reformer, agriculturalist, and philanthropist: basically, an all-around smarty. Nationally famous for his poetry, he gave Wordsworth and Coleridge a run for their money. The definitive mad inventor, he was always banging together new gadgets: an automatic speaking device, a horizontal windmill, a machine for copying letters, a Better Oil Lamp. . . . On the philosophy side he was co-founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a collection of inventors and intellectuals, instigators of what we are now pleased to call the Industrial Revolution and . . . The pithy summary is that Grandpa must have been thoroughly annoying, and we Darwin siblings are blessed that we entered this earthly coil either just before or well after he departed it.

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I suppose some introductions are in order.

As you know, my name is Caroline Sarah Darwin, second-oldest child of Robert Waring Darwin and Susanna Darwin, née Wedgwood. Our merry sibling sequence runs as follows: Marianne, Caroline (me!), Susan, Ras, Charles (him!), and finally Catherine. I am nine years older than Charles. And Ras is short for Erasmus, of course, because we can’t possibly go a generation without a new Erasmus in the family.