The Martian Lecture Series
Aug. 1st, 2008 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyatI'm going to try and take part in an August Writing community, writing bits of fiction now and again. It's been ages since I wrote anything but newspaper articles, instructional modules, and game colour text. So, here goes...
"The one thing you've got to realize about Mars is this - It is a desert, the purest desert men are likely to visit.
You chaps have your Atacamas and Saharas and such, and I grant you those are nasty places that would swallow a battalion - captain, band and all - without so much as a belch.
But Mars, now, Mars... there you have something altogether different. Take your Atacama, as dry and dusty a place as you're likely to find on God's Earth, and put it atop the Alps. The air's so thin it takes cookie half an hour to boil a two-minute egg, 'cause the water keeps bubbling off into steam. Not that a chap would do something so stupid as boil water in an open pot on Mars. It's all pressure cookers and the like, there, and no one in the field boils a dem thing anyway, because the water's worth more than gold.
And it's cold! Damned cold, which is why we're always sending Canadians to man the canal pumping stations away from the equator. Now, I was in the Kush with Napier during the 40s, so I know hot and I know cold from both ends of it, and I know the old saw about “easier to put on more clothes in the winter than strip to your bones in summer.”
But the cold you get at night on the Martian plains cuts right through the thickest overcoat and blanket, and you get the whole regiment crouched around coal stoves, and half of them losing toes and fingers to frostbite anyway.
Once, at the equator, the glass reached 58 degrees at noon, and the chaps were stripping to their underthings and dancing about, while the locals gasped like beached fish and called it a punishment of the gods. You're more likely to see 70 below, and most summer mornings the batman had to crack the ice in the basins before we could wash.
But the cold and gasping air are nothing compared beside the desert, the chilly dryness that turns your tongue to cotton wool and stings your eyes. I've read newspapermen saying we wear the goggles and scarves to keep out the dust. That's stuff. We wear 'em to keep in the spit and tears. You go around panting in that poor thin stuff they call air, and the water just wicks out of your belly, and you feel your insides shriveling. There's not a drop o' surface water between Syrtis Major and Aubochon, clear halfway 'round the globe, and nothing comes from the skies, save dust and a thin, keening wind.
The only place to find water is under the Kraags, and the Kraags are home to Johnny Martian, and Johnny Martin isn't sharing.”
- transcript from lecture “Six Months in the Phaethoniis,” by Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.), delivered to the Royal Astronomical Society, August 1st, 1888.
"The one thing you've got to realize about Mars is this - It is a desert, the purest desert men are likely to visit.
You chaps have your Atacamas and Saharas and such, and I grant you those are nasty places that would swallow a battalion - captain, band and all - without so much as a belch.
But Mars, now, Mars... there you have something altogether different. Take your Atacama, as dry and dusty a place as you're likely to find on God's Earth, and put it atop the Alps. The air's so thin it takes cookie half an hour to boil a two-minute egg, 'cause the water keeps bubbling off into steam. Not that a chap would do something so stupid as boil water in an open pot on Mars. It's all pressure cookers and the like, there, and no one in the field boils a dem thing anyway, because the water's worth more than gold.
And it's cold! Damned cold, which is why we're always sending Canadians to man the canal pumping stations away from the equator. Now, I was in the Kush with Napier during the 40s, so I know hot and I know cold from both ends of it, and I know the old saw about “easier to put on more clothes in the winter than strip to your bones in summer.”
But the cold you get at night on the Martian plains cuts right through the thickest overcoat and blanket, and you get the whole regiment crouched around coal stoves, and half of them losing toes and fingers to frostbite anyway.
Once, at the equator, the glass reached 58 degrees at noon, and the chaps were stripping to their underthings and dancing about, while the locals gasped like beached fish and called it a punishment of the gods. You're more likely to see 70 below, and most summer mornings the batman had to crack the ice in the basins before we could wash.
But the cold and gasping air are nothing compared beside the desert, the chilly dryness that turns your tongue to cotton wool and stings your eyes. I've read newspapermen saying we wear the goggles and scarves to keep out the dust. That's stuff. We wear 'em to keep in the spit and tears. You go around panting in that poor thin stuff they call air, and the water just wicks out of your belly, and you feel your insides shriveling. There's not a drop o' surface water between Syrtis Major and Aubochon, clear halfway 'round the globe, and nothing comes from the skies, save dust and a thin, keening wind.
The only place to find water is under the Kraags, and the Kraags are home to Johnny Martian, and Johnny Martin isn't sharing.”
- transcript from lecture “Six Months in the Phaethoniis,” by Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.), delivered to the Royal Astronomical Society, August 1st, 1888.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 07:38 pm (UTC)God, I loved that game. I can't think of anyone who'd ever play it.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 08:12 pm (UTC)I'm afraid I would never be able to think of a good scenario for that one, other than maybe ripping off The Man Who Would Be King and trying to engineer the characters into fighting the equivalent of Rourke's Drift.
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Date: 2008-08-01 09:45 pm (UTC)I was not actually a particularly good GM at the time. Heh. Though, we used the Soldider's Companion minis rules and my vast collection of 1:72 Zulu War plastic figures rather memorably once or twice!
no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 08:03 pm (UTC)Is this from the Space 1899 setting or are you creating it from whole cloth?
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Date: 2008-08-01 08:09 pm (UTC)What I'm imagining is sort of based on the Abyssinian Campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1868_Expedition_to_Abyssinia) or the Retreat from Kabul (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Elphinstone's_army) in the 1840s.
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Date: 2008-08-01 09:30 pm (UTC)Very nice work, very evocative of that 19th c "stiff upper lip" East India Company of memoirs (and Flashman, and Kipling, etc).
The Equatorial Mars Company? The Etheric Expeditionary Force?
Doug.
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Date: 2008-08-01 09:50 pm (UTC)In my highschool Space: 1889 campaign, the players were all members of the Queen's Own 1st Canadian Spaceborne Rifles.
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Date: 2008-08-01 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-01 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-02 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-02 01:39 am (UTC)Is October Steampunk Month?
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Date: 2008-08-02 02:56 am (UTC)One game will be "Wonderland No More," in an adventure based on the Hunting of the Snark. Another will be a scenario with a bunch of "extraordinary gentlemen and ladies" of the Victorian era, with the Nautilus, versus the death tripods of the Martian invaders - mostly just an excuse for me to have a big foam model of a Martian tripod on the table, along with something to represent the Nautilus.
And for a third, I was thinking of stranding some heroes on Noble Island - also known as the Island of Dr. Moreau. However, I'm not quite as attached to the last scenario (even though I ran a version of it for my regular group), so I may swap that out for something else before October rolls around.
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Date: 2008-08-02 01:57 pm (UTC)I want more! No pressure though...
I'd love to talk Space: 1889 with you sometime. A setting I except for the bits that drove me crazy.
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Date: 2008-08-02 05:52 pm (UTC)I'm sure we'll bump into each other some day.
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Date: 2008-08-02 04:47 pm (UTC)Very cool btw :) Your description of the cold had me putting my fingers under my arms :)
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Date: 2008-08-02 05:51 pm (UTC)And thank you! *fuzzles your arms*
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Date: 2008-08-02 07:49 pm (UTC)