Websites
to Surf
On a Dark and
Stormy Night
(Assuming the
Power Hasn’t Gone Down)
by
Wally
Lee Parker
(Copyright © 2013 Wally Lee Parker)
For
us old-timers, anything more high-tech than an old fashion rotary telephone is
just like science fiction.
Hyperbole? Not quite.
With the premiere of the
original series in 1966, everyone was commenting about how Star Trek’s Captain Kirk could flip open his wireless
communicator (just like we flip open our cell phones) and talk to anyone with a compatible device. And we all thought, maybe in a few hundred
years we'll be able to do that right here on Earth. Nowadays
kids take that kind of connectivity for granted. Which begs the question; how many times did
classic science fiction predicted that the switch from organic to inorganic
planetary dominance would take place at a barely noticeable crawl? But then, no one reads the classics anymore. That's why they're called classics.
I have a couple of communication
dishes sitting on my roof. And these
dishes are chatting back and forth with orbiting satellites. Working together these satellites — along with my rooftop
dishes and the ever increasing electronics inside my house — constitute a
computerized automaton; an inorganic organism speaking an internal language
totally alien to me. Skynet, anyone?
When was the last time a storm
knocked you totally off the grid? Oh
sure there was that time last year, but was that actually a total
disconnect? The thing is it’s getting
harder and harder to accidently disconnect via an act of God.
And worse yet, it’s getting harder to want to disconnect under any circumstance.
When did the human species
become so woven into the communication's grid that it’s nearly impossible to get away from
it? And so unsettling when we do?
Exactly what within all this tenacious exsanguination of personal data doesn’t suggest a plot thread seen innumerable times on the Twilight Zone? Which begs the question; would now be a good time to roll over and accept the fact that the human era is drawing to a close?
Exactly what within all this tenacious exsanguination of personal data doesn’t suggest a plot thread seen innumerable times on the Twilight Zone? Which begs the question; would now be a good time to roll over and accept the fact that the human era is drawing to a close?
But I regress.
So — a storm has swept in from
the Pacific, lofted over the cascades, and rushed across eastern Washington’s
scablands toward Spokane. Skittering
gusts of wind rattle the windows and shred a trashcan worth of twigs from the
trees. On top of all this, lightning
dances through the gathering dark and the first splatters of driven rain raise
the smell of damp dirt out of summer’s deep dry.
I decide it might be wise to
unplug my thousand dollar LCD and move over to my laptop. Now — unless the wireless router gets fried
or a tree takes out the power, phone, and cable, I can still surf using the
laptop’s battery — as long as it has any juice left at least. If I had one of those creepy iPhones I guess
I could use it, or something similar to it, to plug into the electromagnetic
spectrum — assuming the microwave system hasn’t crashed too. But I really don’t want to stare at a three
inch screen. I have an 18 inch monitor
for my desktop and even that’s not big enough for these old eyes.
If a summer storm does ionize
the immediate atmosphere and all my portables tell me I’m no longer connected,
my low-tech back-up is a half-dozen oil lamps and several walls of books.
Books were the first form of
solid-state connectivity. You can surf
the world with a well-stocked home library.
The software to run them — to run books — is inside your head. Barring thunder induced hysteria, a lightning
strike to some part of the body, or any of the boot-up problems organic
wet-ware is prone to (fatigue, mini-strokes, psychological conundrums, alcohol
induced electrolyte imbalances, or one of those “real” viruses), the brain
should function even during a storm.
But that reminds me of an
ancient television dramatization — essentially a televised play titled Murder and the Android — telecast the 18th of October, 1959 (possibly a dark
and stormy night) as a presentation of NBC’s weekly anthology series, Sunday Showcase.
This teleplay was adapted by sci-fi author Alfred Bester from his
original short story, Fondly
Fahrenheit (1954). It relates the plight of a renegade android
played by Rip Torn, who, against programing, is developing an emotional bond
with the heroine played by a young Suzanne Pleshette — who appeared a few years
later as Annie Hayworth, the teacher in Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Anyway, in one scene of Murder and the Android Suzanne Pleshette’s character,
Mari Sutton, is showing her collection of antique Tom Swift novels to the android — who will
by story’s end be attempting to pass as human.
Since this is the year 2359, the mass produced Tom Swift novels have become very rare
antiquities.
The android asks, “Have you read
them?”
Suzanne’s character
replies. “No. I’ve never learned how to read.”
Why should she learn to read —
why should she go through the work of programing her own brain to read when
there are thinking machines all around programed to read everything for her?
Unable to curl up with a good
book on a dark and stormy night? Now
that’s disconnected.
Admitting that a total
disconnect from the world’s communication network is unlikely — even when a
rattling sky suggests you should hold yourself just a smidge beyond sparking
distance of anything hardwired to the grid — it’s probable you can still reach
the outside world with one of your other linked devices. And that’s good, considering that the
psychological discomfort of being disconnected grows every year. In the not so distant future, we’re likely to
see physical symptoms as well. When we
reach that state, it’s doubtless too late.
Most likely it’s already too
late. So, succumbing to the inevitable,
here are a few thoughts regarding what to surf on a dark and stormy night — as
if you could do otherwise.
Transolar Galactica
I forget the circumstances under
which I stumbled across the internet’s Transolar Galactica video podcast, but what I found was a loosely episodic
series of parodies skewering the more popular franchises within cinematic
science fiction — including Star
Trek,
Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica.
Anything sci-fi seems to be fair game.
And yet, it was clear within a few short chapters that something
different was going on here.
Reportedly created on a budget
of less than two hundred dollars, the imagery within the first ten episodes —
the visual storytelling within each episode — seemed uniquely cohesive. As for the writing, the barely connected
narrative (practicing what is occasionally referred to as negative continuity
or the “James T. Kirk loophole”) tracks unerringly toward those questionable
plot-points within mainstream science fiction that true fans — especially those
appreciating the “science” within sci-fi — love to pick apart.
And what makes it even more
interesting is that this award-winning podcast is produced right here in
Spokane.
To find out why this deceptively
simple podcast is more than it has any right to be, we need to analyze the
backgrounds of the five young gentlemen putting it together.
The Internet Move Database (IMDb) identifies Adam Harum as Transolar Galactica’s director, and one of its
writers. He’s also noted as playing
“Samson,” communications officer (8th class) of the starship S. S. Transolar.
Harum graduated from the film program at Eastern Washington University
in 2010. He, along with two others of
the Transolar’s crew, makes up Spokane based
Kinetic Energy Productions — an award winning video production company.
Another Kinetic Energy associate,
Jade Warpenburg, also attended the university’s Electronic Media Arts and Film
program, and then went on to further studies in cinematography at the Vancouver
Film School in British Columbia. He
plays Charles Sang-Soo Yasaki, pilot of the S. S. Transolar, and likely the only sane member of the starship’s crew.
Also from Eastern’s film program
and Kinetic Energy Productions, Isaac Joslin plays the starship’s captain,
Elliot “Remmington” Trigger. Trigger
carries Captain James T. Kirk’s trait of bullheadedness to the extreme through
each episode, often issuing orders that result in the death of the crew. Due to the “negative continuity” of the
series, this has zero impact on following episodes.
Petty Officer Martin Paul McCall
III, known as Adam C. Boyd in the real world, is a EWU film program graduate
currently with Spokane’s Purple Crayon Pictures. Purple Crayon, in association with Hamilton
Studios, is trying to kick-start an “adult-comedy” web series using Muppet like
creatures filmed against real backgrounds to tell stories about the students of
fictional Felt High School. It looks
like an interesting concept, behind which Boyd seems to be one of the prime
creative forces. As to whether it will
work, finances seem to be the current issue.
Graduating from EWU in 2006 with
a BA in Electronic Film and Media Production, Clancy Bundy — a.k.a. Reginald
Murdock, Chief Security Officer of the S. S. Transolar — is a cartoonist, graphic designer, and copy editor
working both freelance and with several area groups, including Spokane’s ILF
Media Productions. Another of Clancy’s
several jobs within the Transolar team is using Photoshop to create
the green screen backgrounds — a laborious task since the majority of the first
ten episodes were shot with digital backgrounds added later.
Originally intended as a
one-shot video podcast, the response was so positive the group decided to
continue on with nine more episodes.
For season two, the group
decided things would go much better with a budget, and settled on thirty
thousand dollars as a reasonable figure.
They set up a 40 day internet Kickstarter campaign, and with only a day
left, climbed eight hundred and fifty five dollars over their goal.
You can watch season one for
free at http://transolargalactica.com/, just to see for yourself.
Star Trek Podcast
726 Television
Episodes
In sum, the six unique television
series of the Star
Trek
franchise have broadcast 704 live action episodes and 22 half hour
cartoons. Now — just suppose you decided
to tap into this vast archive by doing a weekly, hour long podcast, each
podcast critiquing just one of these episodes until all 726 of them had been
thoroughly dissected. Assuming that the
creators of these podcast don’t trim things down by doubling up on a few of the
less dazzling episodes, at the one a week rate it would take just shy of 14
years to review everything now on file.
Two gentlemen, Ken Ray and John
Champion, both professional podcasters and longtime science fiction geeks —
with the help of their friend and sponsor, Eugene Roddenberry — propose to do
just that. And as of this writing they
have recorded the first 44 episodes of the original series — #44 being The Trouble with Tribbles.
If you want to hear the latest,
you can type “Mission
Log: a Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast” into the “Search for people, places and things” line at the top of your Facebook
page. Among the extras found on the
Facebook page will be the plethora of comments made by fans taking issue with
something — or quite often taking issue with just about everything — in any
given podcast. If you’re only interested
in hearing what the podcasters have to say about your personal favorites, then
your best bet is http://www.missionlogpodcast.com/archive/.
That should take you directly to the webpage listing all previously
recorded podcast. For an overview of
everything this particular website has to offer, the link http://www.roddenberry.com/entertainment should take you to a page that
acts as a portal to a number of Roddenberry related items — including whatever
the current podcast happens to be.
As for the quality of the
podcasts, this is not an amateur production.
It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to radio — which this
essentially is. And back then I listened
sitting on my tricycle in front of a massive RCA console with its five pound
electromagnet throbbing the beautiful base of the Green Hornet’s voice out of a twelve inch
speaker. With these podcasts, I found
myself sitting in front of the computer, watching the seconds remaining tick
down on an otherwise unmoving screen.
I’d forgotten that with radio you can do other things, as long as those
things are repetitious enough for you go on autopilot — braiding rugs or
shucking oysters being only two examples of possible autopilot activities. So if you’re able to pipe these podcast into
an amplifier and listen while doing dishes or folding clothes, that would be
just perfect.
Even if you can’t find something
to occupy your eyes and hands, listening to what the gentlemen have to say
about your favorite episodes will, most likely, still prove a comfortable way
of passing time.
Dreams of Space:
Books and Ephemera
Non-Fiction Children’s Space Flight
Stuff
1945 — 1975
I remember an argument I had in 7th grade — this taking place just a
few weeks before the Russian’s launched the Earth’s first artificial satellite
in the autumn of 1957. For my science
project, I’d presented a hand-drawn diagram of a moon lander — a lander loosely
based on designs put forward in the early 1950s by Dr. Wernher von Braun. One student, a socially popular young lady —
top of the class, relatively wealthy family, and, most importantly, a regular
church goer — strenuously objected to my presentation.
“This thing obviously won’t
work. In fact, flying to the moon is
impossible.” she uttered with strident certainty. “Everyone knows there’s no air in space for
the rocket blast to push against. So the
rocket can’t move once it’s above the atmosphere.”
I tried to point out that rockets
don’t need anything to push against; that they work on the principle of
reaction — the concept that for every action there’s an equal and opposite
reaction. But she would have none of it,
insisting a flight to the moon was impossible.
I’m not sure why our teacher, a
gentleman who had already demonstrated a good knowledge of basic science,
didn’t intervene in the reaction motor controversy. But I do recall that this same young lady had
strongly objected to anyone taking Charles Darwin’s thoughts regarding the
relationship of humans and apes seriously.
During that episode the teacher had also remained quiet, and everyone
other than stupid me backed down (as if anybody even noticed my recalcitrance
with all the fundamentalist wrath frothing around the classroom).
Public school teachers have
always faced a very real degree of risk when faith-based “science” is added to
the mix. So maybe it was just the ghost
of John Thomas Scopes curbing my teacher’s tongue.
Regardless, in the 1950s the
general public’s tendency to view anything having to do with space travel as
“Buck Rogers stuff” was being replaced by something more akin to dread. It was noted that the recently defeated
German military had plans on their drawing boards for multi-stage
intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering warheads to New York
City. Considering the demonstrated
effectiveness of the V-2 rockets, and the very real fear that — had the war
gone on long enough — those drawing-board rockets would have been tipped with
nuclear warheads (the Germans were close) and flung at America, few knowledgeable people were laughing at that “Buck Rogers
stuff” anymore. And even worse for
America, many of those knowledgeable people were Russian.
Science — the technological part
of it for certain — had created a problem.
It had largely dissolved the once vast distances protecting America from
the rest of the world. The assumption
was — or perhaps more correctly the hope was — that science could and would
provide a solution. But that solution
would obviously require lots of engineers and scientist; both of which were in
short supply in post-war America. So the
powers that be set to convincing young people to study science. The result was a blooming of all kinds of
scientific literature aimed squarely at young people — including cartoons,
coloring books and television programing.
Added to that was a healthy dose of remedial educations for adults.
By the late 1950s science had
become the new benchmark of national prestige for both the Russians and
Americans — with military technology the clearly evident subtext.
As regards the above noted bloom
of children's literature, in the 1990s John Sisson, Biology Librarian at the
Irvine campus of the University of California, began gathering a nostalgic collection of
illustrated post-war science books — specifically those intended for children and teenagers and
dealing with space and space travel.
Eventually he limited his collection to volumes published between 1945
and 1975 — likely the most artistically expressive of the genera.
His original intent was to
publish a compendium containing examples of the best of the era. But then, worried that too much of value
would have to be left out, he began posting a wide swath of his materials
online. By using the embedded hyperlink,
or by typing http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/ into your search engine, you
should find yourself at the most recent posting on John’s site.
I stumbled on John’s site, Dreams of Space, Books and Ephemera, while pursuing a misplaced science fiction story written
in the late 1950s or early 1960s by (at least in part) Dr. Wernher von Braun —
the same Wernher von Braun largely responsible for the German military’s
multi-stage intercontinental ballistic missile design as noted above.
Dr. von Braun was one of over a
hundred German scientists brought to the United States in 1945 and ’46 under Operation Paperclip — brought to the United States to
kickstart this nation’s ballistic missile program. Though Paperclip specifically barred the import of any scientist with Nazi Party affiliations, von Braun’s dossier
was “bleached” by the Joint Intelligence Objective Agency — that being a sub-agency of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the OSS being a WWII
precursor to the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). If this were not done — this bleaching —
specific directives within the Presidential order authorizing Operation Paperclip would have denied entry for most
of Germany’s top rocket scientists — including von Braun.
As for what the world’s most
eminent rocketeer was doing writing science fiction, it was all part his
life-long effort to interest the general public — first the German public, then
the American — in the possibilities of space travel.
As part of that personal
campaign, Dr. von Braun became a major contributor to the speculative
spaceflight series published in Collier’s magazine between March of 1952 and
April of 1954 under the collective title “Man Will Conquer Space Soon” — a spaceflight series featuring
the stunning artwork of Chesley Bonestell.
This entire eight part series is being restored, digitized, and made
freely accessible through Horizons
Newsletter,
a publication of the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. A listing of high
resolution PDFs of past issues can be obtained via the following hyperlink — http://www.aiaahouston.org/newsletter/.
Dr. von Braun collaborated with
entertainment industrialist Walt Disney in the production of three Tomorrowland segments — Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars
and Beyond —
first broadcast on the television anthology series Disneyland between 1955 and 1957. All are available on Amazon.com in a DVD set
titled Walt
Disney Treasures: Disney in Space and Beyond.
 |
| Walt Disney and Dr. Wernher von Braun — 1954 |
Anyway, regarding the misplaced
science fiction story that drew me to Sisson’s site; in the late 1950s to early
‘60s a small newspaper supplement called This Week Magazine was added to each Sunday edition of Spokane’s Spokesman-Review — just as the supplement Parade Magazine is today. A serialized science fiction story was
printed in This
Week
beginning in May of 1960. I'd clipped the story, but lost my copies somewhere during
the intervening half century.
Other than the title of the
supplement and an approximate idea of the era — that being after grade school
but before learning to drive — all I could recall was a really bad story about
finding an advanced civilization living under the surface of Mars, and some
really cool illustrations of the same.
Then I discovered that John Sisson has uncovered, digitized, and posted the entire series online. Beginning at http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.fr/2012/09/life-on-mars-from-this-week-may-8-1960.html, you can follow the subsequent
links on John’s blog to find the rest of the series.
As noted, the fiction’s
primarily an educational dissertation, but the artwork’s exceptional.
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