Khlûl′-hloo?

The first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness.

H.P. Lovecraft

As we were paying for our purchases at Munro's, Karli glanced down at my little stack of books and said, "Oh, a Cthulhu book, good for you!"

I was a little touched by her comment - it's a testament to her ongoing support that she knows about Cthulhu, let alone being able to pronounce it correctly (insofar as anyone can).

Just when I think I can't find another reason to love you, Karli...

- Sid
 

A cover IS nice. (With apologies to Mary Poppins Returns)

Karli and I are spending the weekend in Victoria, and as part of our visit, we did a little shopping at Munro's, Victoria's excellent independent bookstore.  As I stood looking thoughtfully at the shelves in the science fiction section, I realized that in spite of conventional wisdom, I first judge a book by its cover.

As someone who works in the graphics industry, I appreciate a well-conceived book design, but outside of that, I have all kinds of memories and associations that go with particular books, which is one of the reasons that when I buy a replacement copy, I try to get the same edition - or at least, the same cover.*  As an example, I'm probably on my third copy of the 1965 Pyramid publication of E. E. Smith's Second Stage Lensmen and its unique Jack Gaughan cover artwork.  It's the version that my mother owned, and the one that I read first.

I feel that there's a time in the 60s and 70s when almost everything had a cover by either Jack Gaughan or Kelly Freas**, and a period in the 1970s and early 80s when almost everything had a cover by Michael Whelan - other times, other customs, as the Romans said. (I remember when Whelan generously withdrew his name from further consideration at the Hugos after winning 15 awards - 13 as best professional artist - and a SuperHugo at the 50th Annual Worldcon in 1992 for being the best artist in the last 50 years.)

My Edgar Rice Burroughs collection is all over the map in terms of cover art: green Martians by Gino D'Achille and Michael Whelan for the Mars books, the classic Roy Krenkel Jr. covers from the early 60s for the Venus series, Neal Adams' skillfully muscular take on Tarzan, and a couple of  Frazetta covers for Pellucidar - pretty much a who's who of fantasy art.  It's a little tempting to get some kind of consistent set of editions, but I bought all these books at different times in my life, and the covers all bring back different memories of those times.That being said, I'm a little tempted by the Michael Kaluta covers that I found while researching this posting, they have a great steampunk/art nouveau feel to them that's ideally suited to John Carter's adventures on Barsoom.

Burroughs, by Krenkel, Whelan, and Kaluta.

This posting could easily become a book on its own, there are so many memorable artists: Frank Frazetta's Conans, Josh Kirby's great work on Terry Pratchett's Discworld paperbacks, the Pauline Baynes illustrations that perfectly visualized Narnia and its inhabitants, the incredible mixed bag of Ace Double covers, and so on and so on and so on.

 

As with fans of vinyl and classic album artwork, I mourn the possible end of science fiction and fantasy cover art due to the switch to digital editions. I know that there will still be artwork - the cover artwork by Michael Gauss for the ebook version of my friend Annie's prequel novel, Children of Lightning, is brilliant - but somehow the impact of a 200 pixel thumbnail just isn't the same.

 - Sid

* I've never understood the surprisingly common habit of doing something strange with cover art in later editions of novels - borders, framing, and other little tricks that minimize the actual art.

** This mockup is a deliberate homage to Kelly Freas and his characteristic affection for red shadows on faces.
 

"Now boarding..."

I'm going to Mars.

Okay, not actually me, that would be a bit of a miracle, but my name is.

NASA has introduced a program that allows people to submit their names for the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.  The submissions* will be etched onto a microchip that will be on the Mars 2020 rover when it lands on Mars.

It's a fun idea, and I applaud NASA for the insight displayed in creating this opportunity.

For those of us who will never leave the planet, never have an asteroid or a crater named after them, and never set foot on another world, it's a cool little piece of personal involvement in space exploration.

However, I was saddened to see that I'd missed a couple of other opportunities to participate.  Given the distances involved, I feel that it's going to take a lot more than 300 million NASA frequent flyer points to even get off the ground, let alone qualify for a seat upgrade.

- Sid

* The submitted names are vetted before addition to the list, presumably to avoid Bart Simpson sneaking I.P. Freely or Mike Rotch onto the chip.

The Final Frontier.

“I wanted to do a Western. Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion – obviously after other people – that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space. I wanted to make a film about the frontier. Not the wonder of it or the glamour of it: I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was." 

Peter Hyams on Outland

Every now and then, the Space Channel loses sight of its mandate.  I just can't get it to make sense - in my mind, if you're a science fiction and fantasy specialty channel, you show science fiction and fantasy content.

In spite of this obvious corollary, they have a well-established habit of showing movies that have NOTHING to do with science fiction or fantasy: Jaws, The A Team, Dead Calm, Treasure Island, and so on.  This actually puzzles me quite a bit - is it because of budgetary reasons or some kind of unfortunate contract for package purchasing of programming?  It's certainly not lack of more appropriate content existing.

The most recent example of this odd predilection is their showing of The Magnificent Seven, in the form of the 2016 remake of the classic 1960 western, which was in turn based on the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai.  The 2016 version has a good cast and does an acceptable job of reworking the original, but with the best will in the world, it's certainly not science fiction.

 

What makes this an even stranger programming decision is the fact that there actually is a science fiction remake of the 1960s version:  the 1980 cult classic Battle Beyond the Stars, produced by Roger Corman, the king of B-movies.  Admittedly, calling Battle Beyond the Stars a B-movie is generous, it's probably a C+ at best, or maybe even a D, but it has the minor cachet of featuring Robert Vaughn, one of the actors from the original western version, playing essentially the same role as 20 years earlier.

The idea of remaking westerns as science fiction films is not as odd as it sounds.  It's easy to see the parallels between the Wild West and the colonization of outer space:  an unexplored frontier full of unknown dangers and potential riches, plagued by extended travel times, limited communications, enforced isolation and, in some situations, the perils of an indifference to civilized laws and strictures in the interests of money.

One of the best examples of this comparison would have to be Outland, a deliberate reimagining of High Noon, the classic 1952 Gary Cooper film.*  Outland, a 1981 release from writer/director Peter Hyams, features Sean Connery as Federal District Marshal William T. O'Niel**, who is charged with keeping the peace on an isolated mining colony on Io, Jupiter's fifth moon.  As in High Noon, O'Niel is abandoned by friends, family and colleagues and left to fight on his own when a corrupt mining administrator sends for hired killers to eliminate him.

Joss Whedon's space opera series Firefly owes a similar debt to the past - part of his inspiration for the concept came from John Ford's 1939 movie Stagecoach and its ensemble cast, as well as the situation facing Confederate soldiers following their loss in the United States Civil War.

All that aside, if they just had to show something with a Western feel to it for some reason, Space could have shown Westworld, this doesn't have to be complicated. Or Cowboys versus Aliens. Or, if they were really desperate, Wild Wild West.

Okay, I was bluffing - if Wild Wild West is my only other choice, Magnificent Seven it is. After all, have you ever noticed how much the exploration of the West is like the colonization of outer space...?

- Sid

* And the film's gritty art direction is heavily influenced by Alien, to the point where people sometimes think that the two movies are somehow in the same timeline.

** Or O'Neil, the name tag on his uniform actually changes from shot to shot. 

Two by two.

As a bit of a collector, the prospect of owning a piece of original comic artwork is certainly an attractive one, but I've never quite been able to justify the cost to myself.  (Although I've been very tempted by some Jack Kirby pages.)

This is apparently not a problem for everyone. The recent sale by online auction house Heritage Auctions of Egyptian Queen, an original 1969 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, set a new record for comic book artwork* with a final price of 5.4 million dollars.

Yes - 5.4 MILLION.**  Now, to give this some perspective, we're talking about a painting that was produced for the cover of a comics magazine that featured black and white stories about zombies, monsters and vampires, and sold for 50 cents a copy.

 

In saying that, I don't mean to denigrate Frazetta's talent as an artist, but you have to admit that it does sound like a lot of money, even in the world of artificially inflated comic book art pricing

On the other hand, maybe this is history starting to make its decision about this kind of artwork.

After all, what is the role of realistic figurative illustration in the modern era?  Given that it doesn't seem to have a place in the altermodern art world of conceptual abstraction and surrealism, it may well be that if Da Vinci or Michelangelo were alive today, they might have ended up following their interest in light and the human anatomy into the comic book industry, and could easily have followed the same path as Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta, who passed away in 2010, is a legendary figure in the world of fantasy artwork.  Born in 1928, he began formal art training at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 8, where he was taught by Italian artist Michele Falanga.

Following his time at the Academy, Frazetta worked on a variety of comic books and daily strips, and after doing some movie poster work in the early 1960s, came to sudden notoriety for the epic covers that he created for the Lancer editions of the Conan the Barbarian stories published in the late 1960s and early 70s.  His cover painting for the 1966 edition of Conan the Adventurer put an unforgettable face on the Robert E. Howard's grim barbarian hero, and firmly established his career as a leading fantasy artist.  His subsequent work for posters, book covers and album artwork was equally well received - apparently so well received that someone decided that his original painting of Egyptian Queen was worth $5.4 million.

When I mentioned this to Karli, she pointed out that this was an auction, so really, there were actually TWO bidders who decided that this painting was worth that much money.  Who knows, this may just be the way that popular culture makes the transition to fine art - two people at a time.

- Sid

* Frazetta's work also held the previous record of $1.79 million for the sale of his original painting of Death Dealer 6 in May of last year.

** This is a little deceptive.  The actual sale price was $4.5 million, but winning bidders also pay an premium to the auction house, which in this case brought the payment up to $5.4 million.

Exploration: Part Two

(This posting is the second of two on Chris Hadfield's Exploration talk at the Orpheum Theatre - Part One can be read here.)

After a brief intermission, Chris Hadfield returns to the stage to continue his look at the future of space exploration.

What does he see as the most important factor in the exploration of our solar system? Water. It's the key element of life on Earth, and an equally key element of space exploration. "With enough water, we can survive anywhere."

He then asks the question, "Where should we explore in our own solar system if water is the key to survival?"

One place to start is Mars. The Martian polar ice caps are an obvious resource for extended stays on Mars, and satellite images have shown sublimating water, places where water ice* has evaporated and recondensed. The Opportunity probe discovered examples of sedimentary rock, evidence that Mars used to have oceans and lakes.

"InSight is a rectal probe for Mars."

NASA's current mission, the Martian InSight lander, is drilling into the surface of Mars in order to taking temperature readings to determine how deep the ground is frozen and where liquid water might be found.

The Commander points out that there is water all through our solar system. Comets are primarily water, a building block for water in the solar system. "We're trying to understand what are asteroids made of - the Japanese Space Agency recently sent a little probe to an asteroid called Ryugu." The Hayabusa 2 probe successfully landed on the surface of Ryugu and conducted experiments to examine the asteroid's interior.

Jupiter's moon Europa was examined by the Galileo probe, which discovered that the surface of Europa is covered with cracks that appear to be healing over time, a process consistent with ice and liquid water.

"Europa is a water world - in fact, there's more water under the ice cover than there is water on Earth."

The combination of heat and liquid water leads to the possibility of life - "the same processes that produced life on Earth four billion years ago could be happening on Europa." Hadfield mentions the Europa Clipper probe under construction by NASA, with a planned launch date sometime in the 2020s, which will take a closer look at the moon.

Saturn is also a hotbed of possibilities. NASA's Cassini probe revealed in 2017 that the moon Enceladus is covered with deep crevices, and is spewing plumes of water into space, water which ends up becoming part of Saturn's ring structure. As Cassini neared the end of its lifespan, NASA flew the probe through the plumes to confirm their content.

As with Europa, the combination of heat and liquid water creates the possibility of life on Enceladus.

"These are all definite destinations for exploration."

However, to reach these destinations, Hadfield sees the need for innovation and invention.

"Who is Henry the Navigator now? Who is the inventor of the wheel? Who is trying to come up with better ideas so that we can explore further?"

Hadfield cites the three billionaire tech entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk as frontrunners in innovative and creative thinking in the area of space travel.

"All three of them think that this is the time in history to design a new ship...maybe this is the time in history when we're able to leave the earth like we've never done it before."

He focuses on Elon Musk's SpaceX company and its innovative plan to reuse the first stage boosters from its Falcon 9 rockets by landing them on floating platforms, thereby creating a more economically sustainable model for orbital launches.

SpaceX conducted its first test launch in in April of 2015, making an unsuccessful attempt to land on a barge near Florida, which, interestingly, Hadfield doesn't view as a negative outcome.

"They learned a lot - it's really good to fail early - if they'd gotten away with it the first time, they wouldn't have learned anything. Through failure comes rapid learning."

One year later, SpaceX successfully completed a booster landing on a floating drone ship. SpaceX has flown 70 missions using this system, and "now owns the world's launch market".

Musk has upped the ante by taking three of SpaceX's used Falcon 9 boosters - "...that didn't used to be a thing, used rockets" - and combining them to create "the biggest rocket that exists", the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which Musk views as a potential platform for a mission to Mars. Hadfield sees this as "opening up opportunities in exploration that we've never seen before, taking the next level in invention."

However, at this point in time he sees the Moon as the next immediate destination - "not just to visit, not to just go camping, to permanently live there."

He points out that as part of the Chinese moon landing at the start of this year, one experiment grew cotton, the first time any sort of cultivation has taken place anywhere other than Earth. "It's just a first step, but it's a pretty interesting step."

"Everywhere you see light blue, those are glaciers."

The discovery last year of underground glaciers on the Moon "almost changes the game completely" in Hadfield's opinion.

"By our best estimation, there are 600 billion liters of water on the Moon, a huge amount of water. A natural place for us to go next. Water to drink, oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen for fuel.

"So now, everyone's thinking about going to the Moon."

NASA, in cooperation with Canada and its other international partners, has already announced its plans to construct a permanent orbiting space station around the Moon. "And of course, Elon is thinking of going there as well. He's building this great big rocket, the BFR: the Big...ah...Flying...Rocket - and then just landing it on the Moon.

"We'd have a whole new place that humans can go."

Hadfield considers the International Space Station to have been a pivotal element in advancements in space exploration. "The Space Station has taught us so much about our planet - living there continuously for nineteen and a half years. The ISS is the great exploration vessel of our generation," helping us to understand our planet and develop the technologies to go further, as well as learn what happens to the human body during extended periods of time in space.

This knowledge is a crucial element as we move forward in the exploration of our solar system.

"It's not far away that our technology will be good enough to live on Mars. The amount of water trapped in the polar ice caps of mars is immense. If you could somehow melt all the water on Mars, it would cover the planet ten meters deep."

In summarizing, he takes a philosophical look at what exploration means to us as a species:

"These things are possible. We only think they're impossible because we haven't done them yet. To be able to harness the energy, to be able to go further out, with higher speeds, to make it easier to explore, to be able to live in other places, to get our eggs out of one basket - we're on that edge of exploration right now, just limited by our own imaginations.

"We need to solve the problems on Earth first, we need to think about who we are, but it really comes first circle. What we can do in one lifetime is just amazing, to push ourselves, where we learn to walk, and we learn to walk in places we've never been.

"The human brain is the greatest exploration engine, to be able to imagine things that don't exist, and to be able to understand the problems we're facing. We are an incredibly clever species, we just have to see the world as one place, and see our place in it.

"We have to solve these problems, for the next generation. What is going to be normal for them that wasn't for us? We need to put examples in front of our kids of opportunities that exist. You limit most of your choices in life because of the example of the people around you."

"We need people like Joshua, and Jenni, and David, and Jeremy."

For Hadfield, the positive results of putting the right examples in front of the next generation is typified by Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, one of the new astronauts selected in 2017. "She saw Roberta Bondar fly in 1992, and thought, 'Wow, that's something I can do? I want to do that.'

"It's very close to a Canadian flying in space and going to the Moon, and there's a very good chance that it will be Jenni."

He ends with a quick version of his well-known cover version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, then actually looks a bit embarrassed as we give him another standing ovation, waving goodbye and bowing repeatedly as he makes his way off stage.

Thanks for your commitment and your passion, Commander - and thanks for being so Canadian. You make us proud.

- Sid

* This is not a casual distinction. The Martian polar ice caps are covered with a layer of frozen carbon dioxide - more commonly known as dry ice. The northern ice cap has a layer of approximately one meter, and the south pole is covered with a permanent layer eight meters in thickness.

Exploration: Part One

A spotlight illuminates a spare, unadorned stage, empty except for a guitar and its case, a microphone, and a black-draped table with a bottle of water and a glass.  Then an exuberant Chris Hadfield makes his entrance, greeted with an enthusiastic standing ovation from the audience.

He responds with equal enthusiasm: "I'm excited too! We've got so much to talk about," and proceeds to deliver a passionate, dynamic and inspirational three hour talk* on his topic of choice: exploration.

He starts with the analogy of the single step that is at the beginning of all exploration, comparing it to the first uncertain steps of a baby, then progressing to learning to ride a bicycle, the first machine that we use to increase our speed and distance, culminating in the Eagle Moon Lander, "one of the best bicycles we have ever built."

"Michael Collins took this picture of the Eagle in 1969.  Every human being that has ever lived in in that picture - except for Mike."

Looking at the background of the Apollo program that produced the Eagle, Hadfield quotes the famous 1962 speech by John F. Kennedy in which he announced, "We choose to go to the Moon" commenting that “JFK was challenging us to do something we had never done before, to use this new technology and have it take us somewhere we'd never been before. Seven years later, we took our first step onto the Moon."

"Our imprint, our visible exploration of someplace other than our own planet."

He goes on to speak about the effect that watching the first moon landing had on him, on how it changed the course of his entire life: "The moon landing did something for me - it gave me permission to imagine myself as someone completely different. What might I be able to do? What are the limits in my world? Where can we go in a lifetime?"

Some people would ask why would you explore?  For the Commander, exploration puts the world in perspective - "It's so tiny by the standards of the universe. The better our machines get the better we can understand the perspective of where we are."

"That bright dot at the lower right is Earth from 1.5 billion kilometers, shot by the Cassini probe in 2013."

"The best exploration machine we've come up with is Voyager, which left in 1977.  There's actually two of them, Voyager I and II.  They went beyond Pluto and now out beyond the influence of our sun, the Voyager probes are 22 billion kilometers away.

”Through Voyager, we have left our solar system. If you stuck your hand out the window of Voyager - which would be a bad idea - you would no longer be able to feel the solar wind from our sun.

"How did we do that? How did we explore that far away?"

To look at how we’ve reached so far, the Commander first takes a look at where we started, detailing the history of exploration and technology here on Earth. To Hadfield, it's all about speed, starting with the six kilometer per hour walking speed of homo sapiens that spread humanity around the planet, and working up through the domestication of the camel and the horse, the invention of the wheel in the Ukraine, then the development of boats and sailing and early exploratory trips by the Vikings around the year 1000.

500 years after that, humanity needed “a better spaceship”, leading to the development of the caravel in Portugal, “the great exploration vehicle of its time”, capable of 15 kilometers an hour.  The Cape of Good Hope was transitioned in 1487, and Columbus travels across the Atlantic to North America five years later. These voyages needed more than just improved ships, they required improved mathematical and navigational tools, technology like the sextant and astrolabe: “…the computers of the time for navigation, a tremendous technical achievement.“

The steam engine catapults humanity into the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, followed fast by the airplane, the jet, the Saturn V rocket, which reaches a speed of 9,920 kilometers per hour, the 60,000 kilometer an hour speed of the Voyager I and II probes as they passed Pluto on their way out of our solar system, and the planned Solar Probe, which will need to reach a speed of 700,000 km per hour to successfully pass within 6 million kilometers of the Sun.

He also looks at some of the people who helped to explore our world and increase our understanding of it, early explorers like Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world in the 1760s – “tough and self-reliant”, and the Montgolfier brothers and the first manned balloon flight by Étienne Montgolfier in 1783.  He also notes Charles Darwin’s voyage of exploration, circumnavigating the world in the Beagle in the 1830s, visiting the Galapagos Islands, and eventually publishing The Origin of the Species in 1859, his groundbreaking work about the fundamental nature of life.

1911 sees the first real exploration of Antarctica by Roald Amundsen, American test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in 1947, and 14 years later, five foot two Yuri Gargarin is the first man in space, “opening the door”. Eight years later, Apollo 11 puts the first man on the Moon.

Hadfield then speaks to the immensity of space, and the challenges of finding a way to cross the vast distances involved in the exploration of space, illustrating the point by comparing our solar system to the recently discovered M87 black hole.

From XKCD

"Our galaxy is vast. Our best telescopes show us that the Milky Way*** is 200,000 light years across - it's huge. If you start counting stars, there are about 400 billion stars just in our galaxy, and we've discovered in the last ten years that each of those stars has, on average, has one planet, and one in ten is like Earth.  So about 40 billion potential earthlike worlds in our galaxy."

He pauses for a moment then makes a deadpan observation: "That's pretty intriguing..."

"Then there are other galaxies, the scale is incredible, the number of stars, the number of things that exist - all the possibilities that exist, the unimagineably huge number of possibilities!

"How can we understand it?"

He takes a moment to look at the work of Vera Rubin, the first woman astronomer to work at the famous Palomar Observatory in California, who looked at the Andromeda Galaxy and realized that there were too many stars.

"There isn't enough gravity to hold all those stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and from that she theorized the existence of dark matter - she could have called it Ralph - everything we know about only accounts for six percent of the universe.  The other 94 percent is unknown."

"Can we even explore these places - what is the fastest ship we can imagine?  There's the Enterprise - Kirk was always calling on Scotty for more speed, faster, Scotty."

Using Star Trek's USS Enterprise and its faster than light warp drive as an example, he first explains that the warp drive system is based on the cube of the warp number****, which makes Warp 9 equal to 729 times the speed of light.

At that speed, he calculates that it would take Starfleet's proudest ship 274 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy, adding, "They were only on a five year mission!! They didn't go anywhere! They were just driving around the neighbourhood!!"

More seriously, he looks at the practicalities of how we are going to explore the universe.

"Maybe we're going to have to get into the very essence of not huge but small, maybe that's the only way that we'll be able to do it - to accelerate very small particles to speeds that will push us to unimaginable velocities."

As an example, he cites Costa Rican ex-astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, a PhD in applied plasma physics who visited space seven times.  After leaving NASA in 2005, Chang Díaz started the Ad Astra rocket company, which is researching plasma-based propulsion systems for space exploration.

But propulsion is not the only issue - Hadfield contends that new sources of power will also be a crucial aspect of future exploration.

"We need the power of the atom to make it work. We need not just fission, but fusion, to understand how the atom works In order to break the bounds of our own solar system let alone our galaxy."   He points out that many people are working on fusion reactor research, with General Fusion, one of the key players, located nearby in the Fraser Valley.

“They hope to create enough pressure inside this device to fuse two light atoms into one heavier atom which would release an enormous amount of energy - maybe that's the right idea. That's how the sun does it."

Other crucial research is underway at CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.   "The underground CERN particle accelerator accelerates individual bits of matter and slams them into each other not only to understand what an atom is, but what makes up neutrons:  subatomic particles, quarks, muons, bosons, trying to understand the very nature of matter itself.  

"If we truly want to explore, we can't just rely on horse power or cannon power or steam power. Being relentless inventors is the only way to travel even further and to understand even more.  We need a better power source, better than burning oil and coal and wood, and maybe the answer will come from deep underground."

At this point, the Commander took a break - and, based on the length of this post, we're going to do the same thing. In the second half of his talk, Hadfield looks at the crucial role played by water in exploration, and where we may go next.

- Sid

* I have to give the Commander** full points - unless there's a really well concealed teleprompter somewhere in the theatre, he speaks unaided for the entire three hours.

** I know that he's actually a Colonel, but really, I think he'll always be Commander Hadfield to the general population. And it's also his Twitter hashtag - @Cmdr_Hadfield - although it's colchrishadfield on Instagram.

*** I'm never sure about things like this - does everyone know that our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy? I've known for as long as I can remember, but not everyone has the advantage of being a science fiction fan.

**** Again, you all knew that already, right?

Reading Week: Keeping Score.

Installation, East Jesus Art Garden, Slab City

And so, in the fullness of time Palm Springs Reading Week came to an end.  The final list of books read was as follows:

The Brain Stealers, by Murray Leinster;
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury;
Ringworld, by Larry Niven;
Cowl, by Neil Asher;
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;

And last but not least, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, not to mention the purchase of $150 CAD worth of used books.

All that and the Cheesecake Factory, too - what more could you want from a vacation?

- Sid

Reading Week: "Them! THEM!"

Robert Graham: And I thought today was the end of them.
Dr. Harold Medford: No. We haven't seen the end of them. We've only had a close view of the beginning of what may be the end of us.

Them!

Following our book store visits (and a quick lunch break in a crowded biker bar) Karli and I do a driving tour through the northern half of Joshua Tree National Park.

Looking out at the arid landscape, it takes me a minute to realize why it feels unexpectedly familiar:  it's the same desert backdrop featured in the classic 1954 science fiction film Them!  The movie is set near Almogordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945, but was actually shot near Palmdale, about 120 miles from where we are.

Them! isn't the first atomic radiation monster movie - the preceding year's Monster from 20000 Fathoms takes first place - but it's certainly the first to introduce the possibility of giant radioactive mutant insects.  Released in the same year that Japanese movie makers first unleashed Godzilla on the world, Them!, like Godzilla, is a cautionary tale about the dangers released from the new Pandora's Box of atomic energy, and sets the standard for these films, in which science is both the villain and the hero.

Considering its subject matter, Them! is oddly plausible in its slow build from two police officers finding a traumatized little girl wandering alone in the New Mexico desert, through to the final battle with a nest of giant ants in the storm drains beneath Los Angeles.  The movie creates an air of suspenseful menace by delaying the reveal of the giant ants themselves, relying instead on the shrill keening noise made by the gigantic insects to suggest their presence.

The giant ants themselves are a bit of a weak point, at least by modern special effects standards - I can only guess how the original audience reacted to the giant ant models. The practical effects look somewhat clumsy and obvious now, but the scene where we first see the giant head and mandibles of an enormous ant appearing out of a sandstorm behind an unsuspecting victim is still an effective piece of filmmaking.  Later there's an equally effective moment where the scientists, having found the ants' nest, see one of the giant creatures carelessly tossing away a human ribcage.

The cast features a grim James Whitmore as police sergeant Ben Peterson, and James Arness as the FBI agent assigned to the mystery, with Edmund Gwenn as Formicidae expert Dr. Harold Medford and Joan Weldon as his daughter, Dr. Patricia Medford, originating in this movie the part of the female scientist who also occupies the role of chief screamer when necessary.*

 

The movie also showcases Fess Parker as a bewildered small plane pilot who thinks that he has seen UFOs shaped like huge flying insects**, and a startlingly young Leonard Nimoy makes an uncredited appearance as an air force sergeant.

One of the great strengths of this movie is the absolute seriousness with which the premise is handled, with the exception of a few quips in the dialogue that actually feel a bit misplaced due to the earnest nature of the rest of the script. Them! is actually plotted more as a mystery than a horror movie, with the first half aimed at solving the enigma of missing and murdered people and stolen sugar, and the second half dedicated to discovering the whereabouts of two queen ants who have left the original nest before it was destroyed. 

In spite of the numerous films dealing with the horrifying possibilities of the atomic bomb, none of these monstrous nightmares appeared in the real world over the succeeding 74 years.  In some ways, it's a shame - the appearance of a few giant insects or a giant lizard breathing radioactive fire might have had a salutary effect on early arms limitation treaties.

- Sid

* Monsters Versus Aliens does an excellent little sendup of this particular trope.

** It says a great deal about the mindset of 1950s America that he doesn't think he's seen huge flying insects, but rather UFOs that look like insects.