The Steampunk movement manifests itself in many ways. Already Jules Verne wrote of a floating city crossing the oceans. Some modern-day enthusiasts have tried something similar, but on a far more modest scale. The Messy Nessy blog writes a long piece about their maritime endeavor in Venice in 2009: The Swimming Cities of Serenissima (link >>>).
There is a great collection of HD photos from that event by Todd Seelie here >>>
Min bok Iskriget och andra berättelser recenseras av Patrik Centerwall på hans blogg. Det är trevligt att få ett så positivt omdöme. Länk >>>
Here in Sweden there has been a notable resurgence for old-style role-playing and board games during the past several years. This web article (link >>>) reveals that the renaissance is not limited to our country. Perhaps it is the children of the original RPG enthusiasts that now are poised to enter the mythic lands once explored by their mothers and fathers?
Pour exécuter de grandes choses, il faut vivre comme si l’on ne devait jamais mourir.
Marquis Vauvenargues
Travel poster from GeekTyrant
Currently in Brussels, there is an exhibit of Leondardo da Vinci’s inventions and ideas with plenty of models and replicas on display. The steampunk website The Gatehouse reviews it from a steampunk/clockpunk perspective. Link >>>
Reviewer Hilde Heyvaert has also placed a great set of exhibit photos on Flickr. Link >>>
Fifteen years ago, when I wrote the renaissance fantasy game Gondica, devices like this served as the major source of inspiration for the setting’s “weird” technology.
Fictional Mars, one of my favorite subjects in science fiction, is a place that has been presented in many guises over the years. This post is going to take a look at a “realistic” version of the Red Planet.
British-Lankese author Arthur C Clarke was one of the titans of science fiction when I was young in the 1970s, together with Americans Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. As I see it, Clarke was at his best from the late 1940s to the end of the 1960s, a period during which he for instance wrote the famous short-stories “The Sentinel” and “The Nine Billion Names of God”. Around 1950, he wrote The Sands of Mars, a sand-in-the-spacesuit novel about one man’s exploration of Mars and of himself, a story of growth and transformation, of becoming an adult and responsible individual.
Clarke possessed a talent I have come to like more and more with advancing age, the ability to write an interesting yarn without introducing violent conflicts or bad-guy characters. The Sands of Mars is a prime example: it deals with saving lives (futuristic medicine), making deserts bloom (well, sort of), and the constructive handling an old mess (no spoiler here). The main character, a science fiction author named Martin Gibson, grows in a credible manner from being immature and egocentric to assuming great responsibility.
I found the novel in a bargain bookshop in my hometown Gothenburg in the late 1970s and it has remained in my bookshelf ever since. I have read it so many times that I can summarize it “on the run”. At the time of the purchase, the novel was about 25 years old and its description of Mars had been rendered obsolete by the detailed photo-mapping of the Red Planet by Mariner 9 in 1972. But that did not matter much, because I liked it from the start.*
Clarke sends the reader to a worn-out Mars covered by rolling deserts without exciting topology. Its carbon-dioxide atmosphere is reasonably thick and its dunes are home only to hardy plants — not a Martian in sight. One of the main themes is the interaction between the colonists and the planet, how people’s mindsets get “martianized” while they are busy making the planet more human-friendly.
Another interesting matter that Clarke deals a lot with is the significance of administration and efficient use of scarce resources. Establishing a permanent human presence on Mars is an expensive and time-consuming project and, in order to succeed, it must be managed in a professional and unheroic manner. Therefore production statistics and balance sheets get as important as back-breaking labor. Scientific progress — i.e. in physics, chemistry, and xenobiology — is the underlying key to success and Clarke uses this trope to create suspense: every now and then protagonist Martin Gibson asks himself “What the heck is really going on here?”
Does the novel have any weaknesses? The gender roles are antiquated and the story fails the Bechdel test. But that’s what Europe in 1950 looked like. And it is hard to criticize Clarke here, because he does show how working women participate in the colonization of Mars even though they get almost no speaking parts in Martin Gibson’s adventures. From literary standpoint, the prose suffers from occasional Clarke-isms (quasi-philosophical expressions like “the stream of time”, not-so-funny humor, etc) that disrupt its otherwise smooth flow.
In the 1950s, the readers must have seen The Sands of Mars as a plausible description of what interplanetary colonization could be like. Today, six decades later, the story’s technology is partially outdated (e.g. Martin Gibson uses a typewriter and carbon-copies; radios have tubes instead of transistors) and partially futuristic (e.g. the well-described nuclear-powered passenger ship by which Gibson travels to Mars). But despite its age, the novel remains a piece of solid craftsmanship because it deals with an issue that always is with us: how to build a better world for our children, be it on Mars or on Earth.
*The novel also helped me in my German studies in my last year in school in 1977-78. During that spring semester we got a standard assignment: write a long essay about a journey. Being inspired by Clarke’s novel, I wrote several pages about a Gibson-style trip to Mars. For that particular teacher, the genre was a novelty and he therefore raised my final mark one step as a reward for originality and quality.
I’ve seen things you hobbits wouldn’t believe. Corsair ships on fire off the port of Pelargir. I’ve watched will-o-the-wisps glitter in the dark near the Black Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears … in rain. … Time to die.
Sorry, irresistible cross-over.
BBC has made a short piece summarizing what the Mars rover Curiosity has found during its first year in action. In the distant past, Mars appears to have been a fairly hospitable place before its magnetic field faded away.
Follow this link >>>
It is not only Star Trek that experiences reboots these days. My Traveller 5 package (the brand-new reboot of the 35 year-old science fiction role-playing game) arrived today. I had ordered the light-weight CD-ROM version to reduce the horrible cost of transatlantic mail. I intend to review the game on here The Dream Forge somewhen in the early autumn, when I have more time at hand.
The Dream Forge 