Munchausen on the Moon!

Okay, been a while since I did a reading list update.

31. Flashman on the March, by George Macdonald Fraser (2005)
32. The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester (1999)
33. The Star’s Tennis Balls, by Stephen Fry (2000)
34. The Scientific Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by Hugo Gernsback (1915ish)

In brief, all four of these books were worth reading, though #34 is mostly an entertaining curiosity. It’s a collection of magazine articles written by Hugo Gernsback for his old Electrical Experimenter magazine. The articles are based around the idea that Baron Munchausen survived into the 20th century, and has discovered a way to travel through space. He relates his experiences in the ether to the narrator, the questionably reliable inventor, I.M Alier. The stories start as amusing (sort of…) Munchausenesque adventures on the battlefields of Europe, but after a couple of installments they move to the Moon and Mars. At this point, they turn into the usual Gernbackian stuff about rays and giant machines. Munchausen’s role is limited to an observer and lecturer – he alternately tells us all about the phases of the moon (complete with diagrams) or breathlessly reports about superior Martian technology. The stories ended suddenly, and in the afterward the editor speculates that Gernsback was worried about presenting a sympathetic German character. The editor also wonders if Gernsback’s partial prediction, in an early installment, of the enormous tunneling and mining actions that preceded Battle of Messines might have come to the attention of the notoriously sensitive military censors.

The stories were reprinted in 1928 with a hasty conclusion tacked on, but otherwise remained lost to posterity until collected and reprinted as a single book in 2007. The current editor states the opinion that they were lost so long because of Gernsback's negative reputation in fandom as a sharp dealer, skinflint, and…er… really bad writer. I wonder if the real reason was Gernsback’s fetish for technical detail. The stories present a very 19th century view of the planets, and the views of Mars, for example, are heavily dependent on Percival Lowell’s ideas. These would have seemed hopelessly antiquated and laughable by late 40s. Gernsback, who died in 1967, was alive well into the age of interplanetary probes. He may simply have not wanted to admit he ever believed there was an atmosphere on the Moon, for example.

Gernsback’s writing style reminds me of Sir Patrick Moore’s. And, like Moore, Gernsback wore a monocle and had a reputation for being a brilliant curmudgeon. I think it’s the monocle that does it.

I worked like the devil yesterday to get a large document finished – essentially wrote straight through from 8:30 AM till 6:30 PM. As a reward for my diligence, I’m going to take my lunch hour to look at a sort of SF-themed exhibit at a local gallery, with commanderteddog.

1984 and Beyond

So, the art exhibit commanderteddog and I went to see was well worth the investment of a lunch hour. The theme of the exhibit is "Not Quite as I Remember It."

I knew I'd like it when the first thing I saw upon walking in was a working replica of the MONIAC, which used water to model and predict the economic processes of the United Kingdom in the 1950s. I'm amazed I recognized it, frankly, having only read vague descriptions of it in high school. A fantastic version of it appears in a recent Terry Pratchett novel.

The exhibit included such things as a screening of the 1926 film, Bei Den Blindern. This film recounts a visit by blind German students to a graveyard. The exhibit presents photos of their subsequent recreations, in clay, of what they experienced.

The big draw, for us, was the screening of Gerard Bryne's 1984 and Beyond. This is a "re-enactment" of a series of interview panels conducted with prominent SF authors for Playboy magazine in 1963, filmed in Holland in 2005. The authors involved include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Voght, Frederick Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and several more. It gave me a weird thrill to tune in just as one of the actors was talking about Cyril Kornbluth, or all people. The re-enactment is of a wide-ranging discussion of the future, with the interviewer asking fairly dull questions like "How much will a trip to the Moon cost?", but the responses were fascinating. I want to get this on DVD, if possible.

The interaction of the authors was exactly what one might expect. For example, Asimov talks about the Soviets and the need to beat them to the Moon, while Ray Bradbury pipes up every now and again to say something lyrical about Mars while essentially adding nothing to the discussion at hand.

Sturgeon points out that the (then) current ideological conflict will be as meaningless to future generations as the Protestant/Catholic conflicts of the Age of Sail are to us. He posits that the Soviet Union will turn overnight to capitalism sometime after 1980, something that gets laughed at, or is met with "The sooner the better" type comments. Sturgeon then points out that a capitalist Russia is historically as likely to be an enemy of the West as Soviet Russia... except a much more effective one.

While a lot of it was talk about robot butlers and bases on the Moon by 1980, and how everyone would smoke amphetamine-laced cigarettes, there was also a lot of profound discussion about the way mankind would change in the future. Predictably, the more staid authors pooh-poohed the idea that mankind would change in any essential sense, while others looked forward to a transhuman future.

MONIAC and video from yesterday's tomorrow!

The MONIAC replica. It's getting a little... grungy and mossy. But if you add some of those algae eating fish, the base lending rate drops. No one knows why!


In this scene, Dutch actors pretending to be American SF authors talk about electric toothbrushes and robot butlers.


commanderteddog and I appreciate art.