C'est un petit pas pour un homme [Review: From The Earth To The Moon]

The members of the Baltimore Gun Club, bitterly disappointed by the outbreak of peace seek a new outlet for their passion - a cannon that will fire a shot to the Moon. Buoyed by public support across the US and around the world they defeat obstacle after obstacle in their quest to build and fire the cannon - until they are thrown an even greater challenge by a French explorer Michel Ardan who wishes to ride inside the shot and emigrate to the Moon, along with Barbicane, the President of the Gun Club and his lifelong nemesis Nicholls.

Jules Verne's novel, De la Terre à la Lune, was written in 1865, almost exactly 100 years before the actual Moon landing. The novel deals with the engineering and human challenges in designing, constructing and preparing the cannon, leading to the firing and then the voyage itself which is the subject of the sequel, Around The Moon. Verne is neither the first nor the only writer to send fictional astronauts to the Moon but most of these lunar romances rely on magical or unexplained methods of transport - Verne's genius was to come up with a credible means of getting there, indeed the novel could almost be used as an engineering manual for aspiring rocketeers. Amongst the challenges faced by the engineers include the shape, size and construction of the cannon and shell, the position, date and timing of the shot, mediating the shock of launch to prevent the crew from being crushed, providing air, water, heat and food to the crew, slowing the craft for landing, and how to monitor the voyage and landing from Earth. One challenge that is simply thrown aside is that of returning the astronauts - the plan is for a one-way trip.

Verne also takes on scientific uncertainties - the crew hope to find an atmosphere and water on the moon, but this is by no means certain as the authorities of the time held differing views, played out in Michel's debate with Nicholls.

Verne notably criticised H.G.Wells' novel, The First Men In The Moon written in 1901, a few years before Verne's death, for exactly this reason - Wells' voyage is made possible by a fantastic element (the gravity-defying Cavorite). However to give Wells his credit, when a few years earlier in 1897 he wrote of his Martians crossing the expanses of space to wage war on Earth, they did so in cylinders fired from a gun.

Like many science fiction writers Verne never saw his work as a prediction of the future - he is on record as saying that the ideas featured in his books are there to facilitate his character's journeys - for example, imagining a steerable hot air balloon as a way for his heroes to traverse the whole of Africa. Many of Verne's novels depict physical journeys and are full of speculative vehicles from floating islands to the formidable Nautilus.

However, intentional or not, when we compare Verne's novel to the actual NASA moon shot a century later, Verne was absolutely right about a lot of things:

• Military engineering drives the space programme
• The launch site in Florida, together with the intense competition between states to host the enterprise
• The national and international excitement that follows the mission and turns its' figureheads into celebrities
• The three-man crew
• The 3-day voyage

Some aspects don't quite ring true in the same way - whoever heard of Americans obsessed with guns? Verne was also a little optimistic with the price-tag as well - his cost estimate is for 5 million dollars, whereas the Apollo programme cost about 25 billion. Of course, coming in a century late and five thousand times the original budget isn't so unusual for the space programme...

A Mind Forever Voyaging [Review: A Man Of Parts]

“It would be no more than justice to give his name to the twenty-five years between the ‘nineties and the War. For it was he who largely wove their intellectual texture.” - Odette Keun, 1934

As a writer of fiction, the subject of this quote and David Lodge's "fictional biography" created genres and concepts including alien invasion and the time machine, pushed the scientific romance firmly into the literary mainstream, helped to shape the modern novel and increased the division between popularist and artistic literature - while predicting the role of air supremacy and nuclear weapons long in advance of their development. As a writer of fact his account of the history of the world commanded international respect until it was superceded. As a politician he was present and influential in the early days of the Fabian Society, and as a celebrity and socialite his scandalous love-life and general misbehaviour was never far from the public eye. Oh, and he invented table-top wargaming too.

David Lodge's "fictional biography" of H.G.Wells is in fact a fastidiously-researched and well written account, putting Wells' fictional and non-fictional writing into context: Lodge’s evidence entirely justifies Keun’s statement, while advancing the argument that he could have achieved far more in any of his endeavours, were it not for the consequences of his scandalous personal life. The "fictional" status of the book allows the author to take two liberties: to imagine the internal dialogue as an elderly and physically frail H.G. looks back on his life, and to take the reader behind closed doors imagining the intimate relationships between H.G. and his wives and lovers. H.G. is his own sharpest critic, whether commenting on the racism that surfaces in some of his novels, or dividing between those women he loved and those he did not.

Many of the real-life characters in the novel are brought to life in a very personal way: not only familiar authors such as Henry James and E.Nesbit, but in particular Amy Catherine or "Jane", H.G.'s wife. She emerges as a complex character herself, choosing more than just to tolerate her husband's behaviour, often befriending and supporting his mistresses after he had abandoned them. At times it is possible to see H.G. as a true believer in libertine values but overall, on balance he appears to have been more of an opportunist accepting female attention as a consequence of his fame, and his attitude to women was a long way from any present-day semblance of equality.

Unearthly Children [My Favourite Martian bloghop]

Our galaxy is now known to be full of planets of all sizes, including small rocky worlds a little like our own. It’s no longer unreasonable to say that the chance of life emerging elsewhere in the galaxy is pretty good.

However there’s no reason for that alien life to resemble our own human civilization. Our own intelligence is just a good survival trick that helped us to colonize a particular niche. Most of the Earth’s other inhabitants manage just fine without smarts, or, in a few cases (dolphins, octopi, social insects and certain plants) they seem to use them in a different way.

In my opinion many aliens in science fiction appear too human, in both appearance and motivation. Sometimes this is to the good – after all, a lot of sci-fi is metaphor or allegory, but sometimes, frankly, it’s just lazy. Cat-like aliens are another issue – I’ve blogged about them in the past and will do so again. However it’s always good to see, or read about the exceptions: this post is dedicated to my favourite aliens who are truly alien.

[Tripod: Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds stage show. Photo: Sci-Fi Gene]

H.G. Wells’ Martians: the blog hoppers amongst you will be pleased to discover that my favourite aliens are indeed Martian. In his classic novel of alien invasion, Wells imagined an ancient species shaped by the environment of Mars and by their own evolutionary history: mentally supercharged but physically frail after tens of thousands of years of dependence on their machines.

Runners up:

Alastair Reynolds’ Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers, the aliens of Revelation Space. Shrouders are inscrutable hermits, hidden behind deadly shields, while the Jugglers hide in plain sight: an intelligent sea capable of communication, exchange and barter but still unpredictable and equally mysterious.

The Borg: most of Star Trek’s aliens are just people with prosthetic skin features or pointy ears and mullets. When the Borg first appeared, for a while they were something genuinely different – even though Borg units still have a humanoid shape (fair enough, they are the absorbed bodies of other Star Trek species) the Borg collective intelligence was an unstoppable force unlike anything on Earth. Sadly later episodes featuring the Borg Queen or liberated units such as Seven of Nine gave the species back too much humanity.

The Xeelee: Stephen Baxter’s aliens are master engineers, working on galaxy-wide projects with purposes utterly beyond human imagination – so our predictable response, since we can’t understand them, is to throw stuff at them.

Finally the Alien itself, the xenomorph which has no humanity, just a hunger to seek out prey and complete its lifecycle. Its appearance, while designed to play on basic human fears, is perfectly unearthly.

I concede that it’s hard to write or portray something truly alien, just as it’s hard for a writer to come up with any character that is not, somehow, a facet of their own personality. But it’s not impossible – and it’s worth going that extra light-year to make your alien species a little more credible.

We are not alone! This post is part of the My Favourite Martian bloghop, hosted by http://www.thegeektwins.com, http://justadashofgeek.com, http://lkhill.blogspot.com and www.comicbookandmoviereviews.com. You can find out about the bloghop and other participants here.

Red Weed

"Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.

"The red weed grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance. It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window. And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.

"On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured obscurity.

"Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound of rubble.

"I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the still living stems.

"The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms.

"(I) went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew - it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops...

"Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily choked both those rivers.

"At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red swamp...

"The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters." - H.G. Wells

[photos: Sci-Fi Gene]

The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars [Review: Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds]

Following my close encounters with Skyline and Monsters, I completed an alien invasion hat-trick with a return to the source: Jeff Wayne's musical adaptation of The War Of The Worlds. It was bitterly cold at London's O2 arena on Sunday so I was glad of frequent blasts of hot air from the Heat Ray.

You probably already know that Jeff Wayne composed The War Of The Worlds in 1978, basing it on H.G.Wells' novel, and that it was released as a concept album narrated by Richard Burton and sung by Justin Hayward and other artists. You may also have seen the iconic album cover and other illustrations from an accompanying booklet, with their easily recognizable depictions of the Martian Fighting Machines. And you may well be aware that a stage version of this composition is currently touring arenas and stadiums around the world. The leitmotifs and musical movements of this rock opera are also very familiar.

This production is conducted, with typical high energy gesticulation, by Mr. Wayne himself, and thanks to the magic of CGI is narrated by the detached, floating head of Richard Burton. Also returning from the original recording is Justin Hayward, accompanied by six more stage players including Liz McClarnon in a brief but heartbreaking appearance as the doomed parson's wife, and Jason Donovan as a superbly demented Artilleryman. The stage is dominated by a giant tripod Fighting Machine and the performance is accompanied by film incorporating new animation, as well as the previous illustrations. This remains primarily a concert performance and all the arena show trappings add to the experience - and are a lot of fun - without overshadowing the music at all.

Of all the adaptations of The War Of The Worlds - including at least three films and a radio mockumentary that sent Americans running for the coast in fear - Jeff Wayne's is both the most inventive, and the most faithful to the novel. The narration is taken wholesale from the text, the story remains set at the turn of the century, the creatures - bigger than a bear, made entirely of brain, building machines that take the place of bodies - are unchanged, and Wayne's powerful music takes its cues from H.G.Wells' soundscape including of course the triumphant cry of the Martians.

[pictures are courtesy of The War Of The Worlds production team]

Lovecraft, science and the supernatural

Some thoughts on reading H.P. Lovecraft's short stories: initially I was reminded of H.G. Wells, who both preceded and outlived Lovecraft. Both writers took the traditions of fantastic fiction and completely transformed it into something new, and of course both have had a huge impact on twentieth century fiction.

There are similarities in the writing style but also the frequent presence of scientific characters and themes. Both writers seem to have a high regard for scientists and scientific method. However science plays a different role in each. For H.G. Wells it's all about the scientific ideal - there can't be anything in Nature, or the Universe that isn't understandable.

For Lovecraft science has kind of the opposite meaning. The role of the scientist in his fiction seems to be firstly to prove by scientific method that the protagonist is not simply mad, at least at the beginning - being driven mad by exposure to horror is a common theme; and secondly to prove by failure that the phenomenon is not explicable in scientific terms, usually as it originates from another planet or dimension where our physics does not necessarily apply. So, while for Wells there is no supernatural, for Lovecraft the supernatural must be proven.

Whether they are actually scientists or not Lovecraftian protagonists tend to be sceptical until faced with insurmountable evidence of the awful reality. A typical Lovecraftian plot is basically the gradual realisation that the horror is actually real, with the gradual revelation of the complex vision - for example the pivot that changes The Call Of Cthulhu from a good old yarn into something more powerful is the moment where the protagonist connects all the simultaneous events around the world.

Lovecraft's horrors vary from the intangible creeping liquid or gas (The Colour Out Of Space) through creatures never quite seen but hinted at by mysterious footprints, through complex conspiracy scenarios and alien encounters (The Call of Cthulhu). Creatures tend to combine elements of different known Earth species, although scaly wings capable of traversing the ether are a frequent adaptation. The creature (or intangible) is only the start - the horrors extend heavily into locations which are utterly overgrown by evil auras, lead to subtle or not so subtle mutations in the landscape, plants, animals and people around them (The Colour Out Of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth), cause psychological mayhem through dreams, hallucinations and unexplained dread; and supernatural horrors are surrounded and augmented by horrific human cults.

At time of writing you can find out more about Lovecraft here; also many of the stories are available as free e-books here, or on any number of other websites. If you have a preference for the white stuff, all stories I refer to here can be found in The Call Of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories (Penguin).

(The Sandcastles of Cthulhu)

The Machine

While time travel appeared in stories before H.G. Wells, it is Wells who introduced the idea of the Time Machine. By making time travel a mechanical process relying on the ideas of a scientist he brought the idea into the sci-fi genre he was busily making his own. Wells' story uses the time travel plot device in order to explore evolutionary theory - the upper and lower class trends of the day are extrapolated into the distant future in which humanity has diverged into two distinct species, the childlike Eloi and the more animal, although possibly more intelligent Morlocks. Wells didn't introduce any ideas about changing the future or time travel paradoxes - change was of course offered to Scrooge by Dickens while the paradoxes are a more recent time travel theme.

The classic 1960 film starred Rod Taylor and was directed by George Pal. More recently, Simon Wells, great grandson of H.G., directed a re-make with Guy Pearce and Samantha Mumba. This was disappointing in some ways but introduced a version of the time travel paradox - the traveller is only driven to complete his invention following the death of his girlfriend, and tries repeatedly to save her life - each time, she is killed in some other, quite different but equally unexpected way. Eventually he stops trying and instead sets off for the future, where he is finally given a sad explanation for the paradox.

There's also an official, Wells-estate-sanctioned sequel written by Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships. In this book time travel has consequences: the traveller has returned from the future and shared his experiences and this has changed the future. Baxter's story uses the time travel device to explore a range of imaginative scenarios including a First World War that has persisted for decades, and a future where the Morlocks developed very differently from Wells' description - all the while developing Wells' ideas about class and evolution.

Kew Gardens - the novel

Billions of years in the future, when the Sun is big and red and close to death, who will be there to see it? H.G. Wells in The Time Machine explores this scenario briefly, imagining a bleak future inhabited by crablike creatures. Jack Vance is more optimistic - humans live on although past their prime.

I'm currently reading Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. Like Jack Vance Aldiss sets his novel in the distant future where the sun is close to dying. This is sci-fi and fantasy of a different kind though - the earth now belongs to the carnivorous and fast-moving descendents of the plants, with tree-running humanity one of just a handful of surviving animal species. It's a harsh reality - the members of the human tribe constantly face danger and death, while the vicious battles between different plants make the animal kingdom, or the human heyday, seem tame by comparison. Aldiss creates a world with detailed and internally consistent descriptions of the flora and fauna, and uses it to tell a story about the necessity, the inevitability and the fear of change. There is a great deal to uncover as the reader explores the setting, although much of this is lost on the protagonists who are only interested in their own survival.

Aldiss' setting has been criticised as implausible, but this is missing the point of the powerful and eerie central symbol of this novel - the tidally locked Earth and Moon and the webs of the Traversers connecting the two.