Winding-up

I have started a substack, Substack-ships on Fire. You could subscribe, if you like!

I have spread myself across a large number of blogs over the years, and it has it has not been the most efficient use of my time and energies. I should consolidate. To that end I'm going to take some of my other blogs private. In the case of blogs that have run their course anyway, such as my H G Wells blog, my Anthony Burgess read-through or my translation of Vida's Christiad, I might as well leave them publicly accessible (it's not as if many people access them, anyway). But with my various other blogs, I will take them offline. 

This blog has been where I (mostly) posted science-fiction-y stuff. Elsewhere is my Morphosis blog, which used to be literature and related stuff, but which has, latterly, functioned as a kind-of Author Website, announcing my publications and so on. Then there's my Notebook on Medium. I've been posting stuff there for a while sometimes quite substantial pieces, original work, essays, reviews of things, some creative work; but I can't say Ive been impressed with Medium as a platform. The interface is limited, in terms of layout and posting, glitchy, and I have not been able to monetize my writing. One must accrue a large number of followers before it becomes possible to do this, and my appeal is too niche and limited to do so. Really what Medium wants is accounts with millions of followers: posting about Taylor Swift or One Weird Tricks or whatever. That's not me.

Since starting Substack-ships I have already received a number of paying subscribers, along with larger number of free subscribers. My aim will be to post about two third free-for-all to one third subscriber-only posts, and by bundling into one place my various interests—SF, literature, poetry, culture, reviews of stuff, this and that—I will be making something of a mixed cassoulet. But there you go.

Harryhausen's Munchausen (1950)

 

We think of Ray Harryhausen as a model-maker, animator and film-maker, which of course he was. But he was also an artist. Here is a watercolour sketch he produced for his planned film of The Adventures in Baron Munchausen, from late 1949 or 1950. In the event the movie was never made, but the designs, paintings and models Harryhausen created remain. The above is a fine image in its own right, owing something compositionally to Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, 1818), although all fog has been blown-away from Harryhausen's scene—even the Earth, looming larger-than-life and displaying the Americas, is entirely cloud-free—and the Baron stands on his barren eminence, looking across the unobscured lunar wilderness. A breeze appears to be blowing his coattails back. Another sketch sees the Baron fleeing, on a penny farthing bicycle, across the same landscape, pursued by a giant three-headed eagle.

The monstrous eagle is in the original story; the penny farthing is not. John Walsh's Harryhausen: The Lost Movies (Titan Books 2019) discusses the unmade film. Here is Harryhausen's model of the Baron himself.

He modelled his Baron on Gustave Doré's edition of Les Aventures du Baron de Münchausen (1862). ‘Gustave Doré, it has always seemed to me,’ Harryhausen said, ‘was a motion-picture art director born before his time. In the early days of film production his influence on many directors, certainly on art directors, was immense. The director Cecil B. DeMille was so impressed by Doré that he borrowed groupings from Doré’s biblical images for use in several of his films.’ Harryhausen's unmade movie would have been a Doréan work; and Terry Gilliam's completed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) followed in the same visual tradition.

The ‘actual’ Baron Munchausen—that is, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen, a Hanoverian aristocrat and soldier, who had a reputation for telling tall tales, some of which were written up by Rudolf Erich Raspe as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in the 1780s—looked like this:

Fox B. Holden, ‘Beyond the X Ecliptic’ (“Planet Stories” November 1953)

 

We're in the year 3024. Earth is a wasteland. Space has been occupied, but humanity is blocked by the ‘X Ecliptic’, which hems them in to the solar system and some light years around it. Our hero, dashing, handsome Cragin, lost his mother in childbirth: she died of thirst on the desert-Earth literally whilst giving birth to him—how he survived, how he was breast-fed, why the people around didn’t give mum a glass of water, none of this is vouchsafed to us. Some years later young Cragin builds a spaceship from junk and flies to the moon. There he is recruited into the space fleet, and sent to chase ‘water smugglers’, which he does with notable success. One day he is summoned to the office of Space Admiral Kirkholland.

"At ease lieutenant. Sit down, cigarette?"

This second character, Cigarette, isn’t mentioned again, but presumably s/he does sit down. The Admiral wants Cragin to go after the famous Earth scientist Fowler Griffin, who has been exploring the X Ecliptic and has vanished. Failing that, to find his daughter, Lin.

Kirkholland handed him a small, smooth, slate-colored rectangle of enamelite with the insigne of Space Intelligence atomically engraved through its molecular structure.

I take it that this means every single molecule in the device is engraved with the Space Intelligence logo. Impressive! The story is supplied with liberal doses of authentic space-gibberish:

“Good luck,” said the Admiral. “Now blast off, lieutenant.”

“A-blast she sails, sir.”

… “Whack up her radar, but not with an axe,” said Cragin. “And warm me up an SP-15 if you've got one, with a ten comp bank. Soup the drive and gun circuits. And beam me when she blasts.”

“When she blasts.”

Then it was just a matter of sweating her out.

Sweating doesn’t take long. Several light years from Earth Cragin encounters Lin Griffin, daughter of the famous Earth scientist Fowler Griffin, in her own spaceship. She guides him through the supposedly impenetrable X Ecliptic, and they make their way to the Machine Planet: ‘hardly half the size of the moon of earth. It glowed, somehow, radiating a pale phosphorescence of its own, and its surface seemed entirely without configuration. It was in a definite orbit, yet around—nothing. It circled in an ecliptic described in three dimensions.’ Around what is it orbiting? Madly, the answer is: our solar system. Lin Griffin explains:

“You wonder where its center is. It has a center. What did you say your name was? Cragin. It has a center, Cragin. Around which it has revolved for untold millennia. Only by accident, while he was searching for an almost negligible mass error in one of his computations, did my father discover that this ecliptic must exist, and must contain at least one revolving body. He found it. He determined its orbit. He found that the solar system itself is the center of the machine-planet's orbit. It has neither aphelion nor perihelion, nor does its ecliptic ever shift. It is always perfect … It wasn't built to serve men. It rules them. For want of a better term, call it a control point. Because the machine-planet has absolute control over the axial rotation and orbital revolution of every planet in the solar system; over the heat emitted from its sun; over the physical laws which are peculiar to each of its planets.”

I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but there you go. They land on the Machine World and trek across its featureless metallic surface.

She produced a small, circular thing. "A vibrokey," she said matter of factly.

This (we can assume) broken vibrator permits them access to the innards of the Machine World. They pass through metallic tunnels, past unimaginable machinery, until they reach a chamber.

In the center of the chamber, just at eye level, was what Cragin knew must be the “brain” of the entire assembly. A cylinder within a cylinder, its inner workings thoroughly screened by a shifting yet motionless opalescence through which he could not see. What lied in the heart of the thing would be as completely beyond his knowledge.

Lied, not lay, you’ll notice. Machine intelligences are unconcerned with your ‘grammatical correctness’, or ‘proper use of the past tense’, Earthperson. Nor are they bothered by machines that are simultaneously shifting and motionless. Nor are they happy that Earthlings are in their Machine Planet, tampering with their machinery.

“You have tampered with a work of the Owners," the voice said, "and have thereby broken their law.”

“That takes a death penalty in your book I suppose,” Cragin said.

“There is another kind?”

Another kind of penalty, or another kind of book? Cragin is too scared to clarify.

Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his neck.

Does he sweat anywhere else than behind his ears? Is this an evolutionary development of future humanity? We are not told. Captured by the Owners, Cragin and Griffin are taken to a space gateway, where they must wait: ‘the minute hand on Cragin's wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding.’ Is that seven minutes, or seven hours? I'm not sure.

And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed.

Indeed it must. At the other end of this journey they find themselves on ‘a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers, which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.’ But Craigin has a plan: to fool the Owners by pretending to be an idiot. At no point in the story is it explained what the logic of this plan is, how it is a good idea, or why convincing the most powerful entities in the universe that you’re a thicko would be advantageous. But that’s the plan they go with. Griffin objects that she has an IQ of 157, but though Cragin accepts that she is cleverer than he (‘you have got more circuits upstairs than I can ever be wired for’ is how he puts it) he nevertheless persuades her to act dumb. They convince the Owners that they are morons, and accordingly are sent to the lowest level of work: ‘as servants of the twelfth, and lowest, rank, your duty will be the mining of unconsumed zronon. Death awaits that servant who lags in his output. Your destination will be the eighth mining planet, nearest the edge of the Trespass Limit.’ No sooner has Cragin arrived at the mining planet than he kills his guards, steals a spaceship and escapes. That he is able to do this amuses him.

Cragin laughed and laughed until he fell unconscious.

Nine years later, he arrives back at Earth. (Wait: nine years? Yes, that’s what it says). More authentic space-gibberish:

There was no ack. He had his space-helmet dogged tight as he slid alongside the slender, dark-hued craft whose jets had been choked to the lazy, red-hued combustion of idling speed, and reached for his Krells.

He meets up again with Griffin, who has, for some reason, taken forty years to get home to Cragin’s nine, although they arrive at the same time (she explains: ‘it took this long, for a woman lacks the ready brute strength which so often turns impending defeat into quick victory.’) Cragin is no more comprehending of this than are you and I.

“I don't get it. Somehow you're still alive. But somehow—well, you—”

“Aged? Gotten old? Don't be afraid to say it. The vibrokey did most of it. Residuary effect.”

Ah, the vibrokey. That explains it! Then a hurried denouement: Griffin saves Earth from the machine planet in a random, unexpected deus ex machina: ‘I intend to activate the key from the machine-planet itself with nothing more complex than a simple radar beam, after I have restored the solar system to its original values.’ Factory reset, no less.

The story ends with Earth green again, and Constant Reader genuinely confused. Planet Stories not only bought this piece, they put it on the cover. What?