NYNY: FPNY

 

After our visit to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum and the Enterprise Space Shuttle, we head back toward the Lower East Side and the New York Forbidden Planet store, the only North American outlet for the British comic book and collectibles chain.

 

The New York location has a smaller footprint than the London Megastore, and doesn't sell books, specializing instead in comic books, action figures and toys, and comic, movie, TV and video game-related merchandise - but it's just as much of a geek paradise.

 

Karli has generously offered to take care of my purchases as part of my birthday gift, so I judiciously select a couple of graphic novels, and we get into the checkout line so we can pay for those, adding in a Brian Bolland Forbidden Planet New York t-shirt to complement the one we bought at the London Megastore.

My graphic novels of choice are Old Man Logan and The Infinity Gauntlet.  To be completely accurate, they're actually collections of Marvel comics storylines rather than stand-alone stories, although Old Man Logan could easily have been done as a single story.

The Old Man Logan miniseries, originally published in 2008, is one of those alternate universe stories that both DC and Marvel seem to be so fond of* - perhaps more Marvel than DC, although I think that DC's Elseworlds comics from the 1990s and early 2000s are perhaps a bit better than their What If? Marvel equivalent.  (That being said, watch for the animated version of What If? on the new Disney+ streaming service in 2021.)

In this version of Logan's future, the supervillains have won the war against the heroes by forming an alliance and wiping out their opponents, after which the ringleaders have divided up the United States amongst themselves.  Almost 50 years later, a grey-haired pacifist Logan is living quietly as a tenant farmer and father of two in Hulkland, ruled by the Hulk, who has mated with his cousin Jennifer (aka She-Hulk) and produced an inbred cannibal army of greenskinned, rednecked offspring.**

Sworn to never again use his adamantium claws in anger, Logan is savagely beaten by members of the Hulk Gang after he's unable to pay his rent, and the lives of his family threatened if he doesn't make a double payment in a month.  In desperation, he agrees to join the blinded Hawkeye in a road trip across the United States in order to deliver a shipment of super soldier serum to resistance operatives in Washington, where the Red Skull is the new President of the United States.  Over the course of the trip, we learn of the tragedy that caused Logan to renounce violence, as well as getting an overall view of America after the fall of the heroes.

The concept was popular enough with fans that it eventually spawned an ongoing series, but the graphic novel only collects the initial eight issue run.

The collected Infinity Gauntlet series might appear to speak for itself, given the popularity of the two movies derived from the storyline, but that's not necessarily the case.  I say "derived from" but I might as well have gone with "inspired by" - other than the concept of Thanos the Mad Titan eliminating half the life in the entire universe with a single snap of his gauntleted fingers, and the idea of the entire MCU going up against him in battle***, there's not a lot of resemblance to the original comics.

Which, to be honest, is not necessarily a bad thing.  I'm generally not a big fan of massive changes from source material, but in this case, the movie versions offer a much more dramatic and plausible take on the story.  The comics paint an epic and grandiose version of the struggle to defeat Thanos, drawing in the great powers of the Marvel Universe such as Galactus, the Celestials, and the Stranger, and eventually even avatars of the cosmic constants such as Love and Hate, Order and Chaos, and Eternity, the living personification of the universe.  Unfortunately, the story itself is almost ridiculous in its depiction of Thanos and his irrational responses to the possession of infinite power over all of reality.

When we're done at Forbidden Planet, it seems a waste not to make a quick return visit to the Strand, conveniently (and literally) located right next door - which may explain why FPNY doesn't bother to stock books.

 

Because it's a return visit, I only grab a couple of books to add to my previous purchases:  the rapture of the nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, and No Time To Spare, by Ursula K. Le Guin.  For the rapture of the nerds, even if you didn't have me at Charles Stross, I'm obviously going to be intrigued by the possibilities of a geek singularity.  Equally obviously, anything by Ursula K. Le Guin is always a good choice, although the title of this collection of blog postings is sadly prescient, given her death only a month after its publication in December of 2017.

To cap off the day, we have a tasty casual barbecue dinner at The Mighty Quinn, just around the corner and a couple of blocks away on 2nd Avenue, and that's my birthday.  Thanks again to Karli for a great (birth)day out in New York City - I think we managed to ring all the bells in terms of a geek birthday, although it's a shame that we didn't think to bring Dancing Jesus from our London outing, he really does get the party started.

- Sid

* I think that both of these concepts are an inevitable response to new writers and artists coming into their respective comic universes and wanting to take a fresh look at the well-worn trials and tribulations of both heroes and villains.

** It never says whether or not She-Hulk undergoes this experience willingly or unwillingly.  Nor is it explained why the Hulk has joined the alliance of supervillains by killing the Abomination and taking his place, although there's an elaborate Hulk storyline from 2006, Planet Hulk, which  involves the Marvel Illuminati - Professor X, Tony Stark, Mr. Fantastic, Doctor Strange, Namor the Submariner and Black Bolt of the Inhumans - exiling the Hulk from Earth by blasting him into outer space. The Hulk is not happy with them when he makes his inevitable return.  (Parts of the Planet Hulk story inspired the Hulk's career as a gladiator in the Grandmaster's arena from Thor: Ragnarok.)

*** The comic book version pulls a few more heroes into the story  - obviously the movies can't feature the X-Men, the Fantastic Four just haven't made it on the big screen to date, and outside of the world of comics fans, no one has any idea who Adam Warlock is.

NYNY 2019: Virtual Space

In addition to the Enterprise shuttle, the Intrepid Space Shuttle Pavilion provides a wide range of exhibits dealing with the space program in general as well as the shuttle missions:  display panels detailing the history of Enterprise, a Soyuz TMA-6 capsule, dismounted shuttle control panels (which, sadly, don't come close to the real thing), and, for Canadian content, Chris Hadfield's guitar pick and mission patch, along with a video of the commander performing "Is Someone Singing" from the ISS in a video duet with Barenaked Ladies member Ed Robertson on Earth.

 

It also features a couple of VR experiences:  Defying Gravity: Women in Space and and the International Space Station VR Experience.  With no offense to Women in Space (or women in space) I'm a bit more fascinated by the option of a virtual reality tour of the ISS - although it is intriguing to watch headmount-wearing participants walk accurately from location to location in the Defying Gravity area.

The ISS VR program was created by Oculus for their headsets in 2017, working in co-operation with NASA.  The program combines NASA 3-D models and input from astronauts to make the experience as accurate as possible, allowing users to explore the station, check on experiments, dock a capsule, and perform an EVA tour of the station's exterior.

Over half the units are out of order, so Karli and I patiently wait in line for about 25 minutes.  Karli takes a seat first, and then a few minutes later I'm supplied with a sanitary mask, ushered to my module by an attendant, and equipped with the VR headmount and hand controls, after which the VR program starts.

I am instantly spellbound - the illusion of floating in low Earth orbit is compelling and believable.

Space is probably the ideal environment for VR exploration - there's no issues involving movement or walking, it just feels like you're flying.

I spend most of my allotted seven minutes zooming around the station, going out past it into a higher orbit for a panoramic view, and then doing close-up fly-bys of the structure, punctuated by looking down at Earth's distant surface.  Near the end of my session I briefly go inside the ISS, bounce amateurishly along the corridors in zero-G, visit the cupola, and look at some controls, but it doesn't have the same impact for me that the spacewalk did.

 

Higher resolution would have been nice, it didn't have the razor sharpness that I'm used to from my 5120 x 2880 iMac Retina screen at home, but it didn't really matter - I found the experience was so immersive that it was more than a little jarring when the time ran out and unseen hands took the controllers from me.  I could easily imagine spending hours rather than minutes exploring the simulation - maybe it's a good thing that I don't have any kind of VR technology at home.

Although, hmmm...a compatible Oculus Rift S headset comes in at $550 CAD on Amazon™, which is a bit expensive but not ridiculous, but it would also require a substantial upgrade to my PC video card - perhaps more of an investment than strictly practical, regardless of how much I enjoyed it.

 

We make out way out through the inevitable gift shop - yes, even aircraft carriers have gift shops - and Karli buys me a NASA mug and pin as part of her birthday gift to me.  I've had a great birthday morning at the museum with Karli, much thanks, love - next stop, the New York branch of Forbidden Planet.

- Sid

Sidebar: Space Shuttle.

It's a shame they don't give visitors access to the space shuttle cockpits at the Intrepid Museum or the Kennedy Space Centre, how cool would it be to see this in person?

- Sid

NYNY 2019: Enterprise.

Birthday card courtesy of Cloin, the pretty Campbell brother - who
is, in fact, even older than I am.

It's my birthday today, and as in previous years, we're having a bit of a geek day in the middle of our New York vacation.

We start out with a visit to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, located on the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned Essex-class aircraft carrier moored at Pier 86 in the Hudson River. Intrepid is the current home of the Enterprise space shuttle, as well as having been the primary recovery ship for the Aurora 7 and Gemini 3 orbital missions.

We do a quick tour of the flight deck - I'm disappointed to see that the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, stealth aircraft of choice for the X-Men, is not in the best of condition - and then proceed to the Space Shuttle Pavilion for the main event.

Admittedly, in this case the word "Space" is only there as a courtesy. Completed in 1976 and making its first flight in 1977, Enterprise was designed to be a test vehicle for atmospheric operations with the modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, and it was never used for orbital missions.

As a result, it lacked most of the elements necessary for use in space: no orbital manoeuvring pods or reaction thrusters, no thermal tiles for re-entry protection, no radar - and no main engines, the shuttle was intended for unpowered "dead stick" landings.

Although it had been planned to refit Enterprise for orbital missions following testing, NASA had modified the shuttle design to such an extent when constructing Columbia, the first operational orbital shuttle, that it was more cost-effective to start from scratch on an alternate test chassis rather than update Enterprise.

After additional test usage, Enterprise was stripped for parts for the other shuttles, and then sent on an international promotional tour, after which it was donated to the Smithsonian Institute in 1985. In 2011 it was moved again, and put on display at the Intrepid museum.

Enterprise was originally going to be named Constitution, but the Star Trek fan base successfully launched a letter-writing campaign to change the name, and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and most of the show's cast* were guests at the shuttle's unveiling.**

And you know what?  If we keep doing this sort of thing for long enough, Star Trek fans yet unborn will eventually persuade some future government to name an actual starship Enterprise.

- Sid

* Explanations for William Shatner's absence vary - he was either shooting a movie, trying to avoid high-profile Star Trek events in an attempt to escape type casting, or his agent demanded an appearance fee.

** If you spend a lot of time looking for images on the internet, as I do for the purposes of blogging, you quickly discover that there are some photos that are THE image of choice for a particular topic or event. As an example, this is THE photo of the Star Trek cast and Enterprise.  And, my god - look at the leisure suits!!

NYNY 2019: Choices.

We start out our second day in New York by taking the subway to the redeveloped Hudson Yards area and its controversial centerpiece, the Vessel.  It's a fascinating structure, reminiscent of alien spacecraft and M. C. Escher drawings* - 150 feet in height, and made up of 2,500 steps, 154 staircases, and 80 landings.  In spite of those daunting totals, the short staircases and frequent landings make the climb to the top an easy one, even for people like Karli who suffer from knee problems.  

After our visit to the Vessel, we take advantage of the sunny weather and wander down the High Line, Manhattan's converted rail line/elevated park, toward Chelsea Market.

When we leave the High Line and head down to street level to enter the market, we happen to pass by a book vendor who is just starting to put out his inventory - but it's still enough for me to pick up a couple of unique additions to my library.

The first book is America in Space, a slightly faded black and white NASA publication from 1964, complete with an inspirational introduction by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who couldn't have been president for very long when production began on this book.

It's a fascinating window into the state of the nation for the early days of space exploration, which starts by announcing that America's space program "took a great step forward" with L. Gordon Cooper's 1963 22-orbit mission in the Mercury Faith-7 capsule - perhaps the first time someone at NASA talks about giant steps (but not the last).

The publication comes from a point in time when the planned Apollo missions were in the earliest of planning stages, with work just beginning on the Saturn V rockets, and Neil Armstrong one of nine unproven astronaut trainees brought into the program two years earlier, in 1962. It's an odd little cultural artifact, and I have to wonder what its path has been to this sidewalk tabletop.

My second purchase is, in its way, an equally odd cultural piece: a 1989 Malibu Comics collection of Fu Manchu newspaper comic strips that were originally published in the 1930s.

The character of Fu Manchu, Chinese super villain and master criminal, was created by British author Sax Rohmer in 1913, and is a perfect example of the "Yellow Peril" fears of the late 1800s and early 20th century.  As Nayland Smith, hero of the stories, describes it to his Watson, Dr. Dexter Petrie: "Fu Manchu knows that I alone recognize him as the most evil and formidable personality in the world today, and understand how the yellow hordes of the East plot to destroy Western civilization."   The cartoons also feature the full array of derogatory cliches regarding China:  pidgin English, opium dens, exaggerated physical characteristics, and so on.

At the time of purchase, I was excited to see the collection, but in retrospect, I'm having second thoughts.  In their way, the comics are much a window into a historical state of mind as the NASA publication, but I'm not sure that outweighs the nature of the view through that window.  It may well be that this book will end up in recycling rather than a bookshelf when we get home.

- Sid

* It's also frequently been compared to a shawarma roast - it all depends on your references, I guess.

NYNY 2019: "Thank you for your service."

After a long search, I managed to find some suitable hats for the collection of patches that my friend Chris gave me for my birthday in 2015.  I brought one of the results to New York with me as a backup for my NASA hat, but now I'm afraid to wear it - I'm worried that someone is going to think that I actually served in the armed forces, and I'm not sure how to answer if they ask what my rank was.

- Sid

NYNY 2019: "We'd be toast!"

"Hey, she's tough.  She's a harbour chick!"

Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters 2

On our first real morning in New York, Karli and I make our way down to Battery Park, at the south end of Manhattan Island.  It's a bit of a sentimental spot for us from our first trip, and it's a pleasantly low-key way to start the day - we take some pictures, ride the underwater-themed SeaGlass carousel, stroll along the water's edge, and then take advantage of the city-supplied seats to just sit in the park enjoying the morning.   We've arrived in the middle of a heat wave, so the temperatures are more reminiscent of Miami than Manhattan, but it's still pleasantly cool at this point in the day.

As we sit looking through the trees at the Statue of Liberty, Karli breaks a companionable silence.

"You would NOT want to be in New York in case of an apocalypse." *

​​​​​"I've seen all the movies - even Cloverfield started at Coney Island!   And we’re close to the Statue of Liberty - we’d be toast!"

 

She's not wrong. There is no version of the apocalypse that I want to experience in New York. Just ask Robert Neville.  Or Snake Plissken.  Or Larry Underwood. Or Gerry Lane.  Or the Avengers, come to think of it. 

Second, to quote Jeff Goldblum from the second Independence Day movie, "They like to get the landmarks," and let's face it, New York is full of iconic structures that provide an instant recognition factor when the aliens are looking for something to destroy. (Although film makers may have been pulling back from that kind of destruction in Manhattan since 9-11.)

As Karli points out, the Statue of Liberty has been a frequent flyer in terms of apocalyptic destruction - if you're going to show that the end times are here, you'll probably feature Liberty's fallen head as part of the scenery.

 

However, there's one small problem with all of this.  Did any of these people look at the actual location of the Statue of Liberty before deciding to stick the poor woman's head in the middle of a New York thoroughfare?  Liberty is located almost three kilometers from Battery Park, the southernmost part of Manhattan, it's not like her head would just fall into the middle of the street during the downfall of civilization.  (Yes, I'm looking at you, Escape From New York poster.) However, let's be fair: it's not impossible that the monster from Cloverfield would be able to toss the statue's head into the city, although lord knows why it would bother.

 

On the other hand, the Cloverfield creature may have gotten off easy.  Remember Ghostbusters II?

- Sid

* These are the moments when you know you're married to the right person.

NYNY 2019: "On the first day of Christmas"

After spending our first night in New York at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport - a useful approach if you're arriving in a foreign city late at night - Karli and I experience an excruciatingly slow airport shuttle trip into Manhattan.  To be fair, it's not really the fault of the shuttle company, LaGuardia is being rebuilt from the ground up, and construction has slowed traffic to a literal crawl around the airport - it actually takes us longer to get from LaGuardia to downtown Manhattan than the flight from Toronto to New York.

Having finally arrived at our destination, and settled into our charmingly decorated Lower East Side Airbnb apartment, we decide to check out the neighbourhood, get some lunch, and perhaps do a little shopping.

Although our street is perhaps a little more, ah, colourful let's say, than we expected, our lower Manhattan pied-à-terre is perfectly located, close to two subway lines and within walking distance of several of our planned activities for the trip, including the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, where we make the first stop of our orientation tour.

Shopping at the Strand is a bit like drinking out of a fire hose, and as such I don’t attempt a scientific approach to perusing the closely-spaced 10-foot tall bookshelves of the Science Fiction section (which, to be honest, don’t lend themselves to casual browsing anyway – I’d be curious to see statistics that correlated shelf placement with sales figures).  However, a few interesting choices catch my eye, and it doesn’t take long for me to reach my self-imposed cutoff of buying only as many books at a time as I can grip in one hand.

First into the stack are Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves, the second and third books in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence.  I read and enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first in the series, in 2014, but for some odd reason I wasn't able to find the next two books together, so when I spot them here, I instantly add them to my handful of books.

I always try to pick a random book on trips like this –  this time it’s Version Control by Dexter Palmer, which is apparently a novel about causal violation (or, as the rest of the world calls it, time travel).

A used copy of Good Neighbours and Other Strangers, a 1972 hardcover collection of Edgar Pangborn short stories, catches my eye next.  Pangborn, best known for his 1965 post-apocalyptic novel Davy, was an accessible humanist author whose work was driven more by emotion than science. I have another collection of Pangborn short stories at home: Still I Persist in Wondering, published two years after his death in 1976 - I'll have to revisit that after I read this collection.  (Come to think of it, I haven't read Davy for a long time either.  So many books, so little time...)

I finish out my handful of shopping with China Miéville’s fantasy novel Kraken, which won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.  I've already read it digitally, but I'm happy to support the publishing industry by purchasing a paper copy.  Kraken is characteristic of Miéville's unique and dark creativity, but with more of a whimsical feel than his other writing - I look forward to a re-read. 

Surprisingly, I don't see the one book that I do look for: Joe Abercrombie’s new book, A Little Hatred, which is the first book in a sequel trilogy to his memorable First Law series.  How strange, I'm positive it's been released - I wonder if it's on a new release display table someplace...no matter, I've already reached my quota.

However, now I face a bit of a moral dilemma – if we happen to pass by the Strand again before we leave nine days from now, is it breaking the rules to buy a second handful of reading?

- Sid

NYNY 2019: Two names twice.

 

“In return I owe you the answer; are you good at riddles?”
“Riddles?”
“Raetseln,” Amalfi translated.
“Oh—conundrums. No, but I can try.”
“What city has two names twice?”
Evidently Specht did not need to be good at riddles to come up with the answer to that one. His jaw dropped. “You’re N—” he began.”

James Blish, Earthman Come Home

Although it's only been a couple of years since our last visit, Karli and I are off to New York once again as of this coming weekend.   And, really, how could a return visit be a bad thing? Our first two-week visit barely scratched the surface of New York's vibrant historical, cultural, culinary and architectural presence - its status as one of the world's great cities is undeniably well deserved.

One of the more epic and well-known examples of New York as a science fiction setting is James Blish's epic Cities in Flight series, although, surprisingly, the series relies very little on the aspects of the Big Apple which have made it so justifiably famous.

The title of the series says it all:  a future in which Earth's cities have abandoned the planet to travel between the stars.

The underlying technology that makes this possible is the spindizzy -  mammoth gravity-controlling mechanisms that power and drive the cities' flight across the stars. The spindizzies allow for faster than light travel, but even then, transit between solar systems can take decades, which makes anti-aging drugs, or anti-agathics, one of the crucial resources of the migrant cities.

The series relies heavily on a varied selection of historical and cultural influences, and finds some of its inspiration in Spengler's Decline of the West and its analysis of the characteristics of different types of cultures - which sounds a bit intimidating, but the books are actually quite readable.

The series is made up of four novels: They Shall Have Stars, A Life For the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (in chronological order).* 

They Shall Have Stars lays the groundwork for the other books: the creation of the first anti-agathics, and a massive research project on Jupiter that provides the data on gravity necessary for the development of the spindizzy, all conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue due to a repressive and totalitarian government, and finally resulting in an opportunity for escape to the freedom of the stars.

The second book, A Life For The Stars, is one of those traditional "teenage boy makes good" stories, which takes place over a thousand years later.  It starts on Earth following a global economic collapse, where relocating to space, "going Okie", in the parlance of the Dustbowl and the American Depression,  will hopefully offer a better alternative than a dead-end existence on an impoverished planet.  The 16-year old hero, Chris deFord**, is press ganged by the city of Scranton, PA as it prepares to leave Earth, but is eventually transferred to New York***, where he is adopted by a conveniently narrative couple, and enrolled in school in hopes of achieving citizenship and access to anti-agathics.

Although he seems to lack any skills that will earn him citizenship, even after endless rounds of education, deFord defuses a dangerous situation involving Scranton by analyzing the cultural analogies involved in the situation, and finally becomes the city's first cultural morphologist at the age of 18, under the job title of City Manager.

Earthman, Come Home, third in the series, is a collection of somewhat picaresque adventures on the part of New York and its immortal mayor, John Amalfi, made up of stand-alone stories that originally appeared in pulp magazines between 1950 and 1953 - a common publishing strategy at the time.

As laid out in A Life For the Stars, the economic model occupied by the travelling cities in Earthman, Come Home is that of depression-era migrant workers - the cities provide technological and industrial solutions to Earth's far-flung colonies for a fee, then move on to the next star system in hopes of finding more work and thereby staving off starvation.  The motto on this New York's City Hall is "Lady, mow your lawn?" and the stories borrow the terminology and mores of depression-era migrant workers:  good cities are hobos, tramp cities steal from their hosts, and bindlestiffs are cities that have gone rogue and prey upon other cities.

Throughout the various episodes that make up the book, Mayor Amalfi and Mark Hazelton, his current city manager, resolve the challenges facing the city by understanding and subverting the socio-political matrix of their opponents, based on analogies from other societies. In the final adventure, Amalfi saves Earth from a remnant of the defeated Vegan empire, then New York leaves the galaxy.

And the fourth book?  Time and space come to an end. And begin again: fiat lux, the end. (Or, presumably, the beginning.)

When I first read the series in my teen years, I was far less critical than I am now - I just took it all in. Re-reading the books now, I'm surprised that Blish chose Manhattan for his setting. Its primary claim to fame is as a port and trade centre, rather than being an industrial hub like Pittsburgh or Detroit - or Scranton, for that matter - and I feel that Manhattan would need to substantially up its game if it wanted to be competitive with other cities as an industrial resource.

I'm also a bit shocked by some of the solutions chosen by Mayor Amalfi, for whom the survival of the city outweighs all other concerns.  Amalfi makes some startlingly amoral decisions, such as using women as expendable bait to lure in a bindlestiff city, casually deploying fusion bombs to eliminate a small garrison, and callously hijacking a dying city without concern for its remaining inhabitants.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the series is that, other than a street name dropped here and there and the reputation attached to the city's name, Blish doesn't look very much at life in New York as such.

Over the course of the three books that deal with New York's voyages in space, there's surprisingly little detail about daily life as Manhattan travels between the stars. In A Life For the Stars, there's a brief reference to the rumble of the subways as they travel through the city's bedrock foundation, and Chris Ford's adoptive parents live in a conventional apartment, but Blish never looks at how everyday life in the city has altered in order to reflect its status as a hobo city-ship - even though "...the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats.”

Regardless, in my mind it's a sort of perpetual starlit summer night in Manhattan - bright lights, crowds on the streets, Broadway shows, people talking and shouting and eating and drinking, hustle and bustle, Times Square and Central Park, Greenwich Village and Harlem, all the myriad of things that go into the distinctive energy that informs life in the city with two names twice.

It has to be like that - otherwise, it wouldn't be New York.

- Sid

* The actual order of publication is:
Earthman, Come Home - 1955
They Shall Have Stars - 1956
The Triumph of Time - 1959
A Life For the Stars - 1962.

** Given the sequence in which the books are written, the selection of Chris deFord as protagonist is an odd one, given that his eventual execution by firing squad is casually mentioned near the start of Earthman, Come Home.

*** To be completely accurate, it's only Manhattan Island, not New York. We are never told if Brooklyn, Staten Island or Jersey City have also gone Okie.

Like it's 1999.

As a follow-up to last month's discussion of a permanent base on the Moon, today we commemorate the tragic events of September 13, 1999, which saw the Moon permanently leave Earth's orbit following a catastrophic explosion at the nuclear waste disposal site located on the Moon's dark side.  Sadly, the 311 personnel of Moonbase Alpha were lost in the accident.

Of course, this is all in reference to Space 1999, a British-Italian* science fiction collaboration which debuted in 1975 and ran for two seasons.  The series was the culmination of a long series of increasingly sophisticated SF-action programming created by the legendary partnership of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who were best known for their Supermarionation** children's shows such as Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet.  In 1960, they produced UFO, their first live action series, and wrote and produced a full length film, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, in 1969.

Space 1999 offers what is probably the most detailed view of a lunar station in television or movies, and, in its way, it's a fairly well thought out view.  I rewatched the first episode as part of my research for this posting, and I have to say that it all seemed very logical in terms of how the base was set up.  I haven't seen any sort of preliminary plans for the permanent base planned as part of the Artemis program, but NASA could do worse than to take a look at Moonbase Alpha for ideas as to how to put together a lunar colony.

Alpha is made up of a combination of surface and underground structures arranged in an open wheel system, and split into four levels, most of which are underground.  The various sections of the base are connected by a network of travel tubes, which are rather like horizontal elevators.

For aerial transportation, they rely upon zero-G lifters – called Eagles** in homage to the Apollo 11 lander – which utilize a modular system to add medical, cargo or living space to the basic Eagle superstructure, a concept that the Andersons introduced in the Thunderbird series. In addition to surface landing stages and docking tunnels, the Eagle fleet is stored and maintained in underground hangars accessed by elevator platforms. Surface travel relies upon six-wheeled moon buggies and a variety of specialized vehicles.

The base, which is powered by four fast breeder fusion reactors and a solar energy plant, includes a hydroponics unit, research labs, recycling centre, two water purification plants, and a life support complex, all controlled from a central command section.  As is common with science fiction programs, Space: 1999 cheats the lunar gravity situation, in this case through artificial gravity generators that somehow create Earth-normal gravity within the base. (To the credit of the Andersons, they do their best to mimic the effects of lower gravity in outside surface shots.)

Personnel arriving on the base are provided with a commlock, a hand-held device that locks and unlocks doors, as well as acting as a communications device.  In addition, the base is equipped with communications posts, which contain internal communicators, clocks, and data displays.

Space: 1999 is also an unlikely cautionary tale regarding the potential use of the Moon as a dump for hazardous materials.  In the first episode, unknown radiation causes a massive nuclear waste disposal area to reach critical mass, resulting in a massive explosion that propels the Moon out of its orbit and out of the solar system. Ignoring the practicalities of shipping huge amounts of nuclear waste to the Moon, it’s certainly a strong argument for a self-sustaining base: you certainly wouldn’t want that sort of thing to happen if you were still relying on weekly food shipments from Earth.

- Sid

* I gather that, to the educated eye, the base's decor is a catalogue of modern Italian furniture design.

** If you're not familiar with the camp appeal of the Supermarionation shows, you really need to see it to believe it.  YouTube™ is full of examples.

*** There’s also a militarized version called the Hawk.

Heroes.

 

The Amazing Spider-Man #36 - one of the most heartfelt tributes to 9-11, from people who knew what heroes were when they saw them.

 

- Sid