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ATLANTIS - NEW LIGHT ON OLD LEGENDS

Words – Andrew Darlington


`ONE PREHISTORIC NIGHT…’

There have been vaguely human-like things shambling around this planet for something like one-hundred-thousand years. Then, if you broaden the definition a little - but not too far, there have been recognisably quasi-humanoids here for up to four million. These time-frames are by necessity imprecise and are constantly being revised backwards. By contrast - civilisation, from its first crude scrabblings clear on up to digital cyberspace, is usually accepted as having taken, at an outside estimate, just ten thousand years. While rationalist technology-based society began a mere two centuries ago. So, by a simple mathematical sleight of hand, it’s possible to lose the entire cycle of recorded human history ten, or on the broader definition, four-hundred times, in the species (or sub-species) total life-span on Earth.
Yet the deep past has been less important an ingredient in imaginative speculation than the future. Robert E. Howard creates prehistoric civilisations in a mythical Hyborian age. While Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels are set during the decline of Melnibone, a decadent empire that supposedly flourished long before the advent of conventional history. L Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith have also loitered in lost antediluvian worlds. But the dawn of human consciousness, and the development of social intelligence is as magical and mysterious a process as whatever awesome wonders and horrors await to mug us in the day after tomorrow.
Colin Wilson’s manically prolific trek from his incandescent lit-crit debut (with ‘THE OUTSIDER’, 1956) through his less academically respectable and increasingly esoteric forays into the Occult, or his explorative penetrations of the Criminal mind, seem to lead inexorably towards these murkily contentious prelapsarian possibilities. And with ‘FROM ATLANTIS TO THE SPHINX’ he applies his patented critical approach to loony-tune zones of evolutionary theory. Wilson’s prose-style high-flying with his usual voracious anecdotal energies over all manner of strange and stimulating territory.
Atlantis, the persistent sunken continent teasingly posed by Plato in his 350 BC ‘TIMAEUS AND CRITIAS’, has had regular cycles of vogue ever since. Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger both fictitiously discover its cities intact on the Atlantic ocean floor. In the 1950’s ‘DAN DARE’ finds Atlantean survivors on Venus while ‘JET-ACE LOGAN’ encounters them in sub-Lunar caverns. Pulp SF writer John Russell Fearn even locates them, rather unconvincingly, on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot ! Around the same time (the late 1940’s), drawing on the cod-mysticism of Madame Blavatsky’s school of artful Theosophist fakery, ‘Amazing Stories’ carried a controversial series of ‘Shaver Mysteries’ which claimed to be based around thought-records emanating from surviving subterranean Atlantean technology. Meanwhile, more factoid commentary shifts the hypothetical location of the sunken continent from Bermuda (Charles Berlitz) to the Canary Islands, then back into the Mediterranean to Santorini (Plato got his sums wrong claims J.V. Luce in his 1969 book).
Colin Wilson has no truck with such trivia. What emerges most strongly from his book, even if you discount the full implications of his more extreme conclusions, is that the ancient world is very imperfectly understood; less so by far than academia would have us believe. This ties in neatly with then-recently televised Egyptological in-fighting concerning the precise age of the Sphinx - which appears to bear traces of water erosion and must be far older than the textbooks say. While even the exact succession of Pharaohs, cross-referenced from Pyramid inscriptions to supposedly concurrent Hebrew texts throws up puzzling inconsistencies. Wilson is quick to pour scorn on (and by doing so, discretely distancing himself from) Erich Von Daniken’s hugely popular ‘Was God An Astronaut’ weirdo cult books of the mid-1970’s. Von Daniken falsified evidence and selectively misrepresented his ‘facts’. But it’s by no means necessary, says Wilson, to impose extraterrestrial interference on human evolution. Early humans were simply smarter than we somewhat paternalistically give them credit for. And if there WAS a proto-civilisation of which no records or remains exist, a culture that flourished and then vanished before the dawn of conventional history, one that passed on fragments of its knowledge to ignite Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus cities of Mohenji-Daro, then we might as well, for the sake of argument, call it Atlantis. A writer called Ignatius Donnelly suggests as much as early as 1882. We could equally call it Hyboria. Or Melnibone. Yet the Atlantis myth is so singularly persistent that it seems most appropriate. So Atlantis it is.

‘ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD…’

The possibilities are obvious. Modern humans emerged during the Pleistocene era. The period of the Ice Ages. This glaciation was responsible for drastic shifts in the Earth’s habitable temperate zones. The Sahara was once forested. So much is fact. But even the exact mechanics of Ice Age phenomena are poorly understood. Wilson suggests as much. Consider this - there’s evidence of partial glaciation more complex than current models allow for. Perhaps there was a tilt in Earth’s axis which had the effect of nudging the Northern polar regions downwards across Europe? The same process would have the linked effect of relocating the Southern Pole somewhere out over the Pacific. In doing so, freeing Antarctica of ice. Throw in a little continental drift, some plate tectonics, and something very like an ‘Atlantis’ emerges while, with the end of glaciation, came a corresponding rise in sea levels, and an accompanying era of land inundation. Hence, conceivably, the race memory of sunken lands, not only Atlantis but Lemuria and Lyonesse too. As well as the Biblical flood.
Too fanciful by far? But although it’s not necessary to impose E.T. interference on human evolution, some of the awkward squad of inexplicable artefacts posed by Von Daniken are worth recycling here. The 16th century Piri Re’is maps, for example - used by Turkish navigators, but copied and passed down from earlier originals, they appear not only to show the then-undiscovered coastline of Antarctica, but show it in a pre-glacial state. Von Daniken saw this as evidence of ancient spaceship surveys. To Wilson, it just might betray the real location of Atlantis. There is, of course, much more. And it taps into multi-disciplinary sources of huge diversity. Colin Wilson is nothing if not obsessively eclectic to the max. He draws extensively on Egyptology through several lenses provided by - among others, Graham Hancock’s ‘FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS’, and beyond.
But in some ways the Atlantis tag is Wilson’s temporary intellectual flag of convenience. What unifies his manically prolific trek from ‘THE OUTSIDER’ on down is his preoccupation with intelligence - its origins and development, its uniqueness and deviance, and most importantly, its potential. What’s important is not whether pre-Ice Age cultures were called Atlantis or Melnibone, nor whether they existed in what is now the Sahara, or Antarctica. It is how they THOUGHT. How they perceived the universe and their role in it. And how that world-view differs from our own. At one point in the evolution of consciousness a decisive split occurred. From the ‘right-brain’ intuitive tribal-collective kind of animalistic perception, to the ‘left-brain’ analytical individualistic mind-set which enables the discovery of TV’s, modern plumbing - and books like this to exist. Atlantis, or more correctly ‘Atlantis’, exists in the time before this shift happened. Wilson conjectures some kind of hierarchical-mystic social structure based around Shamanic Priest-Kings ‘in tune’ with their environment in ways that it’s no longer possible for us to understand, never mind experience. Something like ‘ALTERED STATES’ only more so. Something like waking trance-states or Voodoo witch-doctory carried into the ninth dimension. A state far from the Utopian ideal described by Plato, or allegorised by Francis Bacon, yet - implies Wilson, there’s something we can salvage here. It could be argued that we’ve fought our way through ten-thousand years of growing beyond that state. That not only sub-atomic quark strangeness and charms, or relativistic Big Bang supe-string Astrophysics clear on down to the data-chip computer this book is no doubt written on are pretty convincing arguments for the superiority of our kind of boringly lateral thinking. Or perhaps not.Colin Wilson is seldom less than provocatively opinionated. And ‘FROM ATLANTIS TO THE SPHINX’ is several constellations of contention.

MORE ATLANTIS READING:

‘ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD’ by IGNATIUS DONNELLY (1882), ‘THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU’ by JAMES CHURCHWARD (Rudge, New York – 1926), ‘THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS’ by EDWIN BJORKMAN (Knopf -1927), ‘LOST ATLANTIS’ by JAMES BRAMWELL Corden-Sanderson – 1937), ‘THE SHADOW OF ATLANTIS’ by COLONEL A BRAGHINE (Dutton, New York – 1940), ‘LOST CONTINENTS: THE ATLANTIS THEME IN HISTORY, SCIENCE AND LITERATURE’ by L SPRAGUE DE CAMP (1954, revised in 1970), ‘ATLANTIS: THE MYSTERY UNCOVERED’ by JURGEN SPANUTH (Citadel Press, New York – 1956), ‘THE END OF ATLANTIS: NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD LEGEND’ by J.V. LUCE (1969), ‘THE SECRET OF ATLANTIS’ by OTTO MUCH (Germany 1976/ UK 1978), ‘ATLANTIS: THE LOST CONTINENT REVEALED’ by CHARLES BERLITZ (1984).

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THINK REALLY BIG…WRITE CRAZY SMALL!

If you’re still at school and don’t want to know the results – look away now!

Words: Josh Davis

Cheating is a skill that, if acquired at school, could see you right for the rest of your life, probably more so than history or chemistry. Of course, it could also land you in prison – it’s a fine line that is very well essayed in a film called `Cheats` that’s recently been released on dvd. Based on the real life exploits of a group of super organised cheaters at a high school in the States, it is fascinating stuff. Between them, the quartet orchestrated some extremely devious methods of finding out the answers to tests and exams becoming the envy of their less stealthy classmates. As well as skill and cunning, their ammunition included a copy of the caretaker’s keys, a set of pre-determined stories guaranteed to distract a teacher’s attention long enough for one of their number to lift the test, high tail it somewhere else, copy down the answers and bring it back. Best of all was creating new lyrics for established tunes, each line of which was alliterated as to give them the appropriate A, B, C or D for the questions. Only works on multiple choice but even so, you have to admire it. The best thing is that you’re thinking that such things couldn’t possibly happen yet they did. Only the names of some of the characters have been changed. The other amazing thing is that the ringleaders were really fairly intelligent, each possessing enough skill to perform particular tasks whether the more physical clambering about in ceilings or the precise ability to write “crazy small” so that answers could be smuggled into exam rooms microscopically scribbled on paper that could, if necessary, be eaten.
The film also lists the absolute essentials when it comes to cheating, which is all about confidence, not sitting anywhere near your fellow cheaters and always having some method of destroying the evidence, eg edible paper.
Perhaps you’re wondering why these people didn’t just spend their energies studying; in which case you’ve forgotten what school is all about. Learning. They should really give extra marks for the sheer genius of a good cheating scheme; after all people do have to be enterprising in the real world. Plus there is little evidence that cheating in school tests or exams automatically leads to a life of crime. In fact there are plenty of examples that state the contrary; many self - made business people didn’t get where they are today without a healthy grounding in school time deception of some sort or other!
Cheating is/was always there in school and beyond so don’t kid yourself that you didn’t do it because you were morally opposed to it; most of us were just not that inventive as the kids from the film. It is worth pointing out that the whole thing came crashing down in the end and in the accompanying documentary, the real life writer/director Andrew Gurland on whom the film’s main character is based visits on of his fellow ex-cheaters for the first time in years and in the documentary on the dvd, explains how the cheating scam broke up the friendships.
The internet being what it is – full of information that is either useless or dangerous – there are a number of interesting websites offering cheating suggestions aplenty and people are invited to submit their ideas. Many are obvious, some impractical and some so ingenious that you wonder why the kids who thought of them don’t just learn the work as it would be easier than the cheating! Amongst the general advice offered is to make sure nobody is looking when you cheat, keep an eye on the teacher and don’t look puzzled or confused. Actually that would probably make you look more genuine as such expression frequently pass across the face of people sitting exams! Plus, of course, teachers aplenty will have viewed these sites so they’ll know exactly what you’re up to!
Here’s a few of the best miscellaneous tips but be warned boys and girls – don’t try these at home; wait till you get to school!

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BIG SECRETS

Harry Potter’s second big screen adventure is a better movie but a less careful adaptation says John Connors

One of the most remarkable things about Harry Potter is how rarely his glasses fall off. Whether dangling perilously out of a flying car or being knocked giddy by a great big snake, his spectacles remain firmly strapped to his face in defiance of gravity. Yet he doesn’t really have to worry too much whether they do or not; a quick “occulus repairus” and they’d be right as rain again. Yesterday a tiny screw fell out of my glasses causing one lens to promptly plop onto the magazine I was reading and no amount of colourful words on my behalf could cause them to repair. I had to resort to a screwdriver and much fiddling about. So that’s why we like Harry and his ilk; they can defeat evil and save the day but they can also deal with smaller problems without getting into a panic. JK Rowling is a subtle writer; on the face of it her books are barely detailed enough to enrapture the over 12s but dig deeper and you’ll find all sorts wrapped up under the surface. She is also canny enough to ensure we have to read all seven instalments of the boy wizards’ story to find out everything and, believe me, once you start there is no going back. You will want to read all those seven books, make no mistake.
Second chapters are tricky things and `Chamber of Secrets` is really a bridge between the opening of this new magical world and the darker stories that start to unfurl from the third book. In some ways it is basically a broader version of its predecessor so it isn’t too surprising how soon the wider public have hit that `oh, it’s Voldemort again` barrier` but once you get over that, only then does the wonder of the Potter story start to spring to life. Simply waiting for the climax of each book (or film) with baited breath is not the point; it’s the journey by which you get there that counts

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Harry is spending another summer at the Dursleys, wondering why his friends haven’t written to him (no computers to spoil this story) though at least he has a room this time instead of a cupboard. Then, a house elf called Dobby warns him not to go back to Hogwarts lest danger befall him and when the boy shows no signs of heading the warning; Dobby makes mischief with a cake before vanishing. Uncle Vernon promptly seals him in his room until the Weasleys rescue him in a flying Ford Anglia car. This portion of the film is nicely done; the Dursleys are cartoonish and grotesque characters who’s on screen time needs to be limited and this is effectively achieved, not for the last time a little extra comic mileage is added to the book; Vernon’s fall from the window seals the scene perfectly. Dobby is CGI but thanks to an expressively rendered face and amusing rather than grating vocals is certainly a welcome addition to the proceedings. We then catch glimpses of the Weasley family cottage; here Daniel Radcliffe starts to show just how much he’s improved from the first film as he eyes the house and it’s gimmicks and then it’s off to Diagon Alley courtesy of Floo powder and a quip I found funnier than anyone else in the cinema. Unfortunately little is made of Harry’s Knockturn Alley detour; like the first film, the writers seem anxious to avoid too many confrontations with the Malfoys and this also means that the giant ruckus that breaks out in Flourish and Blotts in the book is reduced to some stares. A shame cos the whole bit about Malfoy putting the diary in Ginny’s basket gets lost here and there just isn’t enough dialogue amidst the staring. I’m not sure about Jason Isaacs either; he lacks the steely malevolence I was expecting from Lucius Malfoy and his hair is ridiculous (I know that’s saying something in this film but Rowling’s original description is not really met here).
The film’s first set piece is the car flight to Hogwarts. Unable to get through the barrier to platform Nine and three quarters Harry and Ron resort to using the Ford Anglia and in an exhilarating sequence Chris Colombus and co add to a scene that passes almost as a means to an end in the book. Here, it is quite rightly expanded to include a moment when they can’t see the train and it lurches up behind them whereupon when pulling the car upwards, Harry falls out and is hanging out of the open door in mid air! The effects are certainly much better all round this time and the impressive thing about his sequence – and the later Quidditch match – is the broad daylight doesn’t show up any blurring. The whomping willow sequence is very effective too, largely due to the sound effects utilised that make the attacking tree sound thunderous and very dangerous indeed.
As they settle back into Hogwarts life, a series of attacks leaves pupils literally Petrified (done well too; did they really freeze the actors!?) while Harry starts to hear voices coming from the walls. We also get another Quidditch match; again the book is outdone by the addition of a thrilling chase underneath the bleachers as the rogue bludger pursues Harry while he races Malfoy for the Snitch. This is driving, edge of seat stuff and it’s a pity the scene doesn’t occur later on as it is probably the bit most non Potterfiles will enjoy the most. By now the cast are starting to make an impression and it’s Kenneth Branagh who snags the prime part this time round. He’s perfect casting as the narcissistic Gilderoy Lockhart preening about the place showing his pearly white teeth at every opportunity and quite funny he is too, especially when Lockhart’s true nature is revealed. With the kids more centre stage there is less chance for the starry adults to shine; at times you do feel they are being wheeled on for a turn each, an impression not helped by one of the kids saying their names each time they meet. Nevertheless Richard Harris does twinkle enigmatically as Dumbledore and will be harder to adequately replace than people think.
Inevitably parts of the book are truncated to fit the running time and Nearly Headless Nick’s Deathday party is cut altogether but rather more disappointing is that the script writers decided not to go into any of Rowling’s musings on fame and celebrity. In the book there are a few incidents where Harry appears to others to be intent on pushing his celebrity and this ties in well with Lockhart’s abuse of it. Even more importantly, when Harry appears to control a snake to attack another pupil, the students’ reaction, which simmers for a while in the book, is forgotten five minutes later. Considering it was established at the very start that Harry is already famous, why back away from discussing this now? It also makes Colin Creevey’s continual photo taking look pointless when in the book his hero worship of Harry was an interesting sidebar to the issue. Anyway I was pleased to see they did leave in the polyjuice potion which adds a bit more humour as Harry and Ron `become` Draco Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle for an hour. Even more than in the book, the film does show up one weakness in the tale; exactly what Draco is for. Yes, he provides a bully type character in the first book/film but as evidenced by their sneering exchange before the duel, Harry is no longer intimidated by him and I think Draco needs to be brought closer to the centre of things. You can’t have a nasty character if he drops away in the second half of each story; it renders him less effective each time.
The movie's latter half is pivoted around two brilliant sequences. Firstly, Harry and Ron in the den of spiders is scarier than in some of some spider films I’ve seen; the eight legs themselves are rattlingly dangerous looking and the pace of their pursuit of the kids is gripping. Later, in the chamber of secrets itself there is the Basilisk, which looks powerful, and a far better climax ensues than the first films rather short one. As Tom Riddle, Christian Coulson just about manages to get across the contempt of the character but he lacks the sheer nastiness of poor Tom Fenton who gets to sit out the climax again. The last 20 minutes also miss Emma Watson, whose sparky Hermione is always a highlight.
Daniel Radcliffe has matured considerably as an actor and he really grabs this film properly coming over as more traditionally heroic and less humble than the book version while Rupert Grint’s comedic skills are once again used to lighten moments of tension and add a recognisably normal character into the mix though he is starting to overdo that expression of disgust a bit! Undoubtedly this is a better film than the first, but in some ways it is not quite as good an adaptation. While the bits added are all successful expansions of Rowling’s own vividly imagined action sequences, it’s what’s missing that shows something of a misunderstanding of what drives this story along. The school timetables have perhaps understandably been abandoned, but there is nary a mention of how Harry, Ron and Hermione have to sneak about under prefects and teachers’ watchful eyes, instead it looks like they have the run of the place. Qudditch is used to frame a terrific action piece but no more while the rivalry between Messrs Weasley and Malfoy senior is understated too. More important even than this, Ginny is left as such a sideline that we have actually forgotten about her by the time she’s kidnapped and this underlines the way Harry is treated as a central hero character but nothing more. In the books, we see the story from his perspective and Rowling wrote Creevey, Ginny and Lockhart to offer different views of how Harry treats his fame and his past but the subtlety of this is lost in the film. Where it not an important part of Harry’s development as a character it wouldn’t matter but this is no James Bond franchise where the re-set button is pressed at the end of each film. I also missed the ritual of the school, brought to life so beautifully in the first film; I’m not advocating repetition but in the books Rowling manages to weave it all in nonetheless.
That said, it does all work well as film and contains much more excitement, dynamism and humour than its predecessor. Plus it leaves you gasping for more and that can only be a good thing.

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BLOOD ON THE LENS

Words – Oliver Wake

With some months having passed since the official end of the war in Iraq, now seems a good time to reconsider some of the conflict’s news coverage. It is unnecessary for me to point out the extent to which the media were involved in the war, or how appropriate it was that – in a resurrection of an old term – the sphere of hostilities was regularly referred to by military types as the ‘theatre’. The trend towards saturation war coverage has been with us for a while, but this conflict more than any other saw reportage and ‘reality TV’ converge into one horrible but transfixing ‘rolling’ news story. Who else wondered how long it will be until the journalists in the ‘theatre’ outnumber the troops, or the soldiers have to be ‘embedded’ with front line units of reporters? And didn’t we all follow the news avidly, fascinated yet aware of the inverse ratio between the quantity of coverage and the actual information communicated?
Of course, accurate information from any front line is next to impossible and nobody expects sensitive military intelligence to be broadcast to the world (well, not since the BBC’s hiccup during the Falklands war). Instead we are treated to slice after slice of ‘actuality’, to use a hideously inaccurate word, from camera and microphone. These glimpses are often meaningless when divorced from their specific circumstances and locations, or emotive and calculated. That’s what I’m interested in here; the pictures and sounds, the way the war is divided up into chunks and presented to us at home. More particularly, I’m interested in the power certain images can have, and how the ‘correct’ ones are labelled and regurgitated. Propaganda of this sort is expected from any war front – the practice must be as old as war itself - but I’m a little worried by the willingness of many to embrace it, both the media and the audience itself. The coverage of the toppling of the Saddam statue best illustrates my point. When the universally distributed shot of the falling statue hit our television screens, many commentators were quick to label it an ‘iconic image’, as if the destruction of one statue really told us anything about the war, or the process of liberation. For me the sequence is hollow; the jubilant crowds and apparent spontaneity don’t ring true; it is too forced, too controlled. When I saw it I couldn’t help but notice all the soldiers standing close at hand, anxious to ensure that the spectacle wouldn’t be ruined by anyone getting hurt in the excitement.
In 2003’s Hew Weldon lecture, Rageh Omaar – one of the BBC’s many war correspondents - recalled the manipulation of the statue toppling incident, nicely confirming with his ‘on the spot’ perspective what some of us had thought all along. More recent reports have revealed the incident to be little more than a US Marines gang-show and photo-call. But it did make for a good picture, didn’t it?
A couple of months ago a photographer interviewed on Radio 4 told how he and others felt the need to frame their photos in imitation of famous war film images in order to satisfy a public familiar only with the simulacra of the big screen. That’s the problem; it’s not that the media machine itself wants to deceive us (in Britain at least), but that we are asking it to. We want nice pictures, each with a clear meaning and no burden of interpretation. We don’t want the reality of the war, but the hyper-reality of the tacky Hollywood simulation. Jean Baudrillard recognised the result of this when he controversially asserted that the first Gulf War did not take place, being instead, to all intents and purposes, a media construct. I can only assume this latest one didn’t happen but even more so. But I digress…
If many of these war images are misleading or downright dishonest, at least we are aware of it. And of course, not all reportage is tainted by the counterfeit. Moments of true insight and power can be caught by the camera or microphone. For me, the iconic images of any reported conflict are those that come unexpected, surprising broadcasters and audience alike. Crucially, these things can’t be engineered to suit. That’s what this article was meant to be; a recollection of particularly memorable or telling moments, and how they made their mark.
Of the early stages of the war, I recall the reports from stationary army units suddenly turning surreal with shouts of ‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’. One minute a bored journalist is commenting on the heat and the feeling anticipation in the air, the next it’s a mad scramble for protective clothes, and then… Well, then absolutely nothing happens as those elusive NBC weapons fail to materialise. What was most amusingly strange was when a live news programme would cut to its Iraq reporter, glimpsed earlier composed and professional, only to find a blank goggle-eyed gas mask anxiously addressing the camera, usually inaudibly.
Night-sight shots of rockets over Baghdad were passé after the first Gulf War, but other such green-tinted images would still have an impact. One TV report included footage shot late at night showing two figures running furtively right to left along the skyline but being forced to turn back without completing their journey. Undramatic in itself, but the context provided by the voice-over made it chilling. They were would-be Iraqi deserters; finding themselves unable to cross the lines they were captured by their own side and executed the following morning.
The impression of sounds as well as images should not be underestimated. I remember clearly listening to the radio one afternoon and hearing Andrew Gilligan reporting live from the Palestine hotel in Baghdad. Mid-flow he’s interrupted by the noise of an explosion very close by and for several seconds we hear a rain of plaster falling from the ceiling, and other debris nearby. Gilligan continues his report despite the concerned studio presenter commenting that it sounded like they had ‘taken a hit’. After a moment, Gilligan agrees to sign-off and resume at a less precarious time. Later he is able to report that a US tank in the street below had blasted their hotel, killing three journalists. It’s the sound of plaster falling around the microphone which brings home the proximity of the danger. For Gilligan though it would soon be a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ when he turned to the UK and caused the dossier scandal.
It is an image however that sticks most in my mind. It hails from the notorious friendly-fire incident of April 6 when a combined US/Kurdish convoy, followed by John Simpson’s BBC news crew, was bombed in northern Iraq. Seconds after the attack Simpson’s cameraman is recording, even as he drops to the ground injured. From his fallen position we see blackened bodies and the remains of the convoy, all flame, smoke and devastation. What makes it so memorable is not the images of destruction the camera is taking but that these sights are captured through a grisly streak of blood on the lens. I only saw those few seconds of footage once on television during the war, though Simpson’s address to camera shortly after (minus blood) was shown several times. I’ve seen blood splattered on camera lenses in war films; a cinematic device used to punctuate an otherwise passive depiction of violence. But it is always a carefully controlled special effect, obviously fake, and – importantly – gone in the blink of an eye as the shot changes with the magic of the cutting room. There is something deeply unsettling about witnessing it for real; even seeing someone smear the blood further while attempting to clean it from the lens with their fingers. Life imitates arts, encouraged for once.
Panorama have since built a programme around this incident, using sections of the footage that were previously considered too shocking to show. It begins as the upturned camera is turned on; for a split second a face is visible, and blood drips from it onto the lens. The camera is levelled and the blood streaks down. We briefly seen dense black smoke billowing out of burning vehicles before the view shifts as the cameraman collapses. In a shot angled from the ground we see the devastated convoy for a moment, then a hand wipes the lens, thinning the blood rather than removing it. Someone turns the camera on the original cameraman, his face streaming blood, one eye completely obscured. By this point other cameras are recording and we can see the full extent of the devastation. Blackened bodies lay by burning vehicles. The immediacy of the footage draws you in, disorientating you, making any objective account difficult. As I watched I could almost smell the burning.
The recording continues as survivors take cover from ammunition ‘cooking off’ in the burning convoy. Simpson and another man breathlessly comment, in distinctly non-BBC English, on having watched the bomb as it fell. Small groups start to tend to the wounded and the charred bodies of the dead and dying are pulled from the wreckage. One of the BBC crew is seriously wounded, another dead. There’s nothing forced or controlled about these pictures. For all our complicity with the media in trying to ‘consume’ the war in familiar images, nothing can lessen the impact of an on-the-spot view of real death as it happens. Even the pictures of Saddam Hussein’s dead sons, bloody and gruesome though they were, failed to have such an impact. Those photos were circulated as a propaganda exercise rather than as any form of journalistic endeavour. Had it been legitimate reportage we might also have seen the body of Saddam’s grandson too, but dead kids are bad press.
Earlier I suggested that this might be a safe distance to reassess the media coverage of the war, but perhaps I’m wrong. Hostilities continue, and striking new images have appeared recently. The picture of the captive, bearded and weary Saddam has supplanted the statue falling shot and may, depending on his ultimate fate, be the one for the history books. And though perhaps more an epilogue to the conflict, the David Kelly affair, by situating death in rural England, has brought the war closer to home, providing a figure more tragic than any of the soldiers killed in the distant ‘theatre’.
Perhaps even greater ‘iconic’ images are still to come, but for me I think the sequences of the bombed convey will remain the most haunting: unexpected, uncontrolled, bloody. Is it ironic or just appropriate that this sequence stems not from a clash of the two sides in the war, but from a ‘friendly-fire’ incident? A ‘bad own goal by the Americans’, as John Simpson put it. Super-power fire-power gone wrong, as I would have it. Ironic or appropriate? You decide.

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THE GRAVITY KING

Isaac Newton – he discovered everything

Words: Adam Hope

When Isaac Newton was eleven, he made a kite and tied fireworks to it before taking it out at dusk and flying it, much to his neighbour’s shock; they thought it was a comet and in those days, comets foretold disaster. How cosmic is that though; a kite with fireworks going off as it flew. Some accounts claim is was a lantern, which isn’t quite as exciting. The BBC’s recent `Great Britons` series has had its moments, though not those you’d expect. Apart from the puzzlement as to why John Lennon is in the top 10 at all (at least on his own and not with McCartney) the main things has been how passionately various celebrity experts have fought their corner, making even the most mundane characters seem amazing. Like Oliver Cromwell; a fascinating figure who laid the foundation for parliamentary democracy but has languished in the historical sin bin because of one massacre. But, for a fanzine like this, Cromwell’s a bit dry. Isaac Newton, on the other hand is like a pop star from before pop music existed; he’s a trailblazer who went crazy and spent a lost decade fiddling with alchemy yet ended up knighted and feted. A man who worked out – well not entirely on his own but it takes a genius to stitch the clues together – what the Universe is all about and, for good measure, also invented telescopes and lots of other scientific things Iike calculus (thanks for that!) that I don’t understand at all. Not that it matters – I voted for him and here’s why.
Born prematurely on Xmas Day 1642, he was so weedy he wasn't expected to survive and his mother later said he was tiny enough to "fit into a quart mug.” Isaac’s father had died a few months before he was born and when his mother, Hannah Newton, re-married two years later she just left her son behind with his grandmother even though she was only living a mile away.
As a child Newton on his grandmother's farm in the small village of Woolsthorpe, little Isaac Newton kept himself very busy. At school he studied mostly Latin but at home he studied everything. He particularly liked to build things such as kites, water clocks, sundials, waterwheels, and even – yes - windmills. At King’s School in nearby Grantham, he stayed with friends of his mother who were druggists and also developed an interest in chemistry. Yet there was no sense of the intellect that would later surface; in fact he was a poor pupil, often spent lessons staring out of the window thinking of ideas for experiments which he would later try, such as the kite episode. Or his waterless windmill powered by a mouse on a treadmill. Unsurprisingly the other children found him odd and unfriendly but were in for a shock one day when he turned on a bully beating him into a pulp and then, displaying the nature of his character decide he had to beat him academically too. Pretty soon, he was top of the class. This pattern repeated itself throughout his life; he could never accept criticism and strained to better his rivals to the point where he ended up conducting bitter feuds, sometimes in public, which would also cause mental breakdowns on at least two occasions
As a teenager, Newton was taken out of school by his mother because her second husband had died and she now wanted him to help run the farm but he proved hapless at such a mundane task and instead spent his tile scribbling in notebooks on such topics as making gold ink, a phonetic alphabet, magic tricks and even medical recipes.
Much later, after he had attained wide fame for his many achievements, he was how he had managed to come up with so many brilliant discoveries. He replied: "By always thinking about them." But this constant thinking when he should have been concerned with farming matters drove his mother to agree to send him off to Cambridge where he was admitted as a "subsizar," a student who earned his way by working part time as a servant to other, wealthier students. His first years at Cambridge were quiet and unremarkable. By the time he went there, the scientific revolution of the 17th century was happening in a melting pot of new ideas; Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes had all helped develop a new view of nature that operated under specific rules and mathematical principles. Yet at Cambridge everyone was still studying the old science -- the science developed by the ancient Greeks 2000 years before. Newton studied it too but his head was elsewhere as usual. He kept to himself and studied, avoided parties, and conducted lots of experiments in his room. In one he almost ruined his eyes by watching the sun for hours at a time to observe its colours. He had to spend several days in complete darkness before his eyes regained their normal vision.
Newton earned his degree in three and a half years and then made plans to stay on but those plans were interrupted by The Great Plague which had begun in London in 1664 spread to Cambridge by the following summer causing the University to be closed and Newton had to go back home. Yet it was this hiatus from 1665 –67 that became the platform for all his greatest work. He had time to do what he did best think and came up with this little lot -

SCIENCE BIT#1 OPTICS

Before Newton, scientists still believed Aristotle's ancient theory that white light is a simple, pure entity with no parts or multiple qualities. Newton proved differently. His work with colour began with experiments with prisms. At the time scientists believed that a prism changed the rays of the sun as it passed through creating the variety of colours that spilled out. They thought light started out white and was darkened by the prism to shades of blue, green, violet, and the rest. Newton had a different idea -- he believed the prism didn't change the light, it only reflected what was there to start with. Sunlight was already a blend of different colours and each emerged as they were bent differently through the prism. He conducted different experiments that proved his point and then identified the various colours of light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Today, indigo and violet are considered as one (violet) but Newton separated them because he liked the idea of having seven colours to match the notes of the musical scale. He called this array of colours the SPECTRUM, which is what they've been called ever since.
With Newton, as with most scientists, one discovery always led to another. In this case, his work with prisms and lights led him to invent a new telescope. As he studied light he
realised that telescopes of his time were defective -- if they focused on one ray of light passing through the lens, say a violet ray, other rays would be out of focus, such as the orange rays. The solution, he decided, was to build a telescope that focused with a mirror instead of a lens. In a mirror, all colours are reflected the same and would focus together. With that inspiration, Newton built the first reflecting telescope. Spectrum was indeed go!

SCIENCE BIT#2 CALCULUS

The second major discovery Newton made at this time was calculus that he called the "method of fluxions." He came up with simple analytical methods that brought together a whole range of different techniques that had been developed to solve problems such as finding areas, tangents, and the lengths of curves. Those methods became a powerful tool of problem solving in both mathematics and physics. And still nobody understands them!

SCIENCE BIT #3 GRAVITY

This is the famous one - the theory of gravity. Sitting under a tree he watched an apple plummet to the ground and he had his Eureka! Moment though it helped he was thinking about the forces that keep the moon in orbit. This set him thinking whether it could be that the same force that caused the apple to fall to earth might be the one that holds the moon in orbit round the Earth? This led him eventually to the law of gravitation. Or something.
Whether the apple thing was true or not (and eggheads and historians have debated for yonks) there is no doubt about the three Laws of Motion that he did discover viz:
Law of Inertia: If a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it's acted upon by a force.
Law of Force. The speed or acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the force (F) and inversely proportional to the mass (M). The larger the force, the larger the acceleration; the larger the mass, the smaller the acceleration. This is his most important law. It is the one that leads to all other basic equations of dynamics and has served as the framework for natural science ever since.
The Other one (this doesn’t have a catchy name) The actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and directly opposite or, more commonly put, "to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." It means simply that the downward force of a book slammed onto a table is equal to the upward force of the table on the book. Mmm, simple enough then.
It was Newton who originated the term gravity, using the Latin word gravitas, which means "heaviness" or "weight." He also discovered centrifugal force - the force away from the centre - of a body moving in a uniformly circular path.
The tremendous insight that came with all his work on gravity was Newton's idea that the Earth's gravity extended all the way to the moon, offering a counterbalance to its centrifugal force. He was able to figure out that the centrifugal force of the moon (and any other planet) decreases as the inverse square of its distance from the centre of its motion. But you knew that….

In 1684 Newton took all these findings and published what's considered his greatest work entitled the `Principia`. Inspired partly by Halle (of Comet fame), Newton spent 18 months on what was a treatment of new physics and their application to astronomy. It’s full title was "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" or, as it's known today, "Principia." Almost ever boffin agrees that "Principia" is the greatest scientific book ever written and it’s been called “the fundamental work for all of modern science.”
In "Principia," Newton analysed the motion of orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendula, and free-fall near the Earth and demonstrated that planets were attracted to the sun and that all heavenly bodies mutually attract one another. He expanded his law of universal gravitation -- that all matter attracts every other piece of matter with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. All the disparate theories that had gone before were this transformed into one unifying one.
Oddly, despite this, his academic career had been less than amazing; after the plague he returned to Cambridge and by the time he was 26 was a mathematics professor although by all accounts his lectures were not too good.
But he was a genius so it didn’t matter, he preferred to work on his own ideas, hardly sleeping and eating poorly. There is an even a story that one person at Cambridge claimed to have only seen Newton laugh once. He would however indulge in public feuds with other experts, who dared criticise papers he wrote, notable Robert Hooke with whom he had a lifelong rivalry
It was after one of these spats turned to fury that he went into a hiatus for several years, turning to his interest in alchemy and pottering about with it in seclusion. But all that changed when the `Principia` was published and Newton became as famous as a pop star would be today. But just like our most cherished pop stars, he was unpredictable and in 1693 Newton suffered another nervous breakdown. He began to send angry letters to his personal friends, accusing them of things that were completely imaginary. Then, he recovered again, retired from research and moved to London. Three years later, when he was 54, the government offered him a prestigious position as Warden of the Royal Mint and a short time later, Master of the Royal Mint. When he was 61, The Royal Society elected Newton president. They had offered him the post earlier but he refused to accept it until Society member and foe Robert Hooke had died.
In later years, Newton did most of his work at home in the study above his bedroom and still indulged n feuds with other noted scientists. Many years later, it was suggested that much of his erratic behaviour was caused by exposure to mercury during his alchemy years; recent studies of a hair sample from Newton showed he had forty times the level of Mercury considered normal. Knighted when he was 63, Newton lived until he was 84 and was
buried at Westminster Abbey, where the inscription on his tomb reads: "Let Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race."
Shortly before he died, he is quoted as having said "I have been but as a child playing on the seashore, now finding some prettier pebble or more beautiful shell than my companions, while the unbounded ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."

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A LONG WAY FROM THE SUN

Is this the end then for Pluto? Discovered in 1930 – and relegated out of the planet’s club in 2006.

Our chief scientist Ben Finlay looks at the story of the little planet that caused a big fuss.

This year there’s been a right hoodoo happening up there in the Milky Way because boffins have been re-drawing the planets and the results of their work mean that what most of us have been taught- that there are 9 planets in our solar system- is now wrong. Without recourse to a fleet of spaceships or even a nifty destructor ray, scientists have destroyed Pluto, at least as far as its planetary status is concerned. In late August, a new definition of a planet was approved by a seemingly self appointed clique of scientists with presumably nothing better to do.
It all happened at the grandly monikered General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (AIU) held in Prague. 424 astronomers (who knew there were even that many?) voted on the definition after the sort of horse trading often seen at the UN over more serious matters. An initial proposal by the AIU’s planet definition committee chaired by Owen Gengerich, would have added three more planets to the roll call, perhaps assuming that Pluto’s position was unassailable. The suggestion was based on the fact that these bodies were the same size or larger than Pluto, one of which, the modestly named 2003 UN313 had been hailed as “the tenth planet” due to being slightly bigger whilst the other two new planets would have been the asteroid Ceres and Charon, in a promotion from being one of Pluto’s moons. This proposal caused a furore and after several days wrangling four alternative proposals were put forward.
Eventually the decision was taken that would relegate Pluto to the status of “dwarf planet”. This was based on several criteria including that a planet “must have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” which reflects the fact that larger objects either aggregate or fling away material in their path; Pluto fails this as its orbit overlaps that of Neptune. Unsurprisingly this caused an outcry and led to accusations that the vote was rigged; it was claimed that only 10% of the astronomers attending the event were able to vote; “you can’t even claim concensus” fumed the US space agency’s Dr Alan Stern. Even Gengerich was unable to vote as he had to return home and it was claimed that the vital vote had been scheduled deliberately at a time when people would already have left.
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh of Lowell Univeristy in Arizona. Calculations which later turned out to be in error had predicted a planet beyond Neptune based on the motions of that planet and Uranus and unaware of the error, Tombaugh undertook a survey which pinpointed Pluto The name comes from Roman mythology were Pluto is the god of the underworld and was selected for the new planet because it is so far from the sun as to be in perpetual darkenss. Pluto's orbit is in fact highly eccentric. At times it is closer to the Sun than Neptune and rotates in the opposite direction from most of the other planets. Pluto's orbital period is exactly 1.5 times longer than Neptune's and its orbital inclination is also much higher than the other planets'. Thus though it appears that Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's, it really doesn't and they will never collide.
The former planet is 5,913,520,000km from the Sun (ie a long way), has a diameter of 2274km and a surface temperature that varies between about -235 and -210 C (38 to 63 K). Not recommended for holidays then! It's composition is unknown, but its density indicates that it is probably a mixture of 70% rock and 30% water ice much like Triton. The bright areas of the surface seem to be covered with ices of nitrogen with smaller amounts of (solid) methane, ethane and carbon monoxide. The composition of the darker areas of Pluto's surface is also unknown but may be due to primordial organic material or photochemical reactions driven by cosmic rays.
Pluto's atmosphere is also, as you’ve probably guessed by now, a bit of a mystery, but probably consists primarily of nitrogen with some carbon monoxide and methane and is extremely tenuous, the surface pressure being only a few microbars. Pluto's atmosphere may exist as a gas only when Pluto is near its perihelion (this issue’s new word – it means the point at a planet’s orbit when its nearest to the Sun). For most of Pluto's long year, the atmospheric gases are frozen into ice and near perihelion, some of the atmosphere escapes to space perhaps even interacting with Charon. To try and gain more solid facts than all this supposition the first ever spacecraft to Pluto was launched in January 2006 with the intention of arriving in 2015 and presumably the recent change in status will not mean its called back!
Some mapping of Pluto has been achieved thanks to a satellite called Charon discovered in 1978 just before its orbital plane moved edge-on toward the inner solar system. It was therefore possible to observe many transits of Pluto over Charon and vice versa. By carefully calculating which portions of which body would be covered at what times, and watching brightness curves, astronomers were able to construct a rough map of light and dark areas on both bodies. In 2005, a team using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered two additional tiny moons called Nix and Hydra that are estimated to be between 60 and 200 kilometers in diameter.
The allure of Pluto as an exotic and mysterious place about which speculation can run riot has made it an understandable magnet for science fiction writers with many books and stories involving Pluto. Amongst the myriad of examples are Stephen Baxter’s 1997 story`Gossamer` in which staranded astronauts discover a life from on Pluto during perihelion. Larry Niven’s `Wait It Out` has its protagonist trapped on Pluto and he discovers a super fluid form of life. Robert Heinlen seemed to love the place; his 1958 novel `Have Space Suit, Will Travel` showed it as an alien base used for exploration of Earth while `Starship Troopers` inculded a research station on Pluto. He also included the place in a 1953 story called `Sky Lift`. John De Chancie’s 1980s series of `Starrigger` books had Pluto as the location of a dimensional gate to an intersteller Skyway whilst Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1985 novel `Icehenge` centres around a mysterious structure found on the planet, oops dwarf planet. More recently `Vaccum Diagrams` written by Stephen Baxter had a portal in the orbit of Pluto and suggested a form of life there that is a bit like a snowflake.
Some TV sci-fi has plundered Pluto too; Doctor Who got in on the act in 1977 with `The Sunamakers` which had the place covered in colonies lit by artificial suns that made it look remarkably like England while in Futurama the place was inhabited by penguins! Back in the 60’s Space Patrol had an episode in which there was a colony on Pluto where conditions were freezing which begs the question of why they settled there at all!
Music-wise of course there is the tale of `The Planets`, Gustav Holst’s well known classical smorgasboard composed a decade before Pluto was discovered. In the late 1990s, the Halle Orchestra took it upon themselves to commission Colin Matthews to add a Pluto movemnet, entitled `Pluto- The Renewer` which had its first performance in 2000 and which preumably won’t be getting many more airings.
Despite the controversial vote, Pluto does have its allies and after the AIU’s decision, some astronomers were fuming; Gengerich put the blame for the decision on dynamicists who are astronomers who are experts in the motion and gravitational effects of celestial objects. His definition was one favoured by planetary geologists and he reckoned it was all down to the dynamicists being insulted. “Its sloppy science” said Alan Stern, “its inconsistent”. He pulled holes in the definitions claiming for example that Earth, Jupiter, Mars and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones, Jupiter in fact is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its rounds. He added with a common sense that even non scientists can grasp; “If Neptune had cleared its path, Pluto wouldn’t be there”. Stern started a petition to try and get Pluto reinstated
The arguments for the decision seem rather weak willed by contrast; Professor Iwan Williams the IAU’s president of planetary science commented with childish smugness; “Pluto has lots and lots of friends, we’re not so keen to have Pluto and all his friends in the club because it gets crowded.” His main argument seemed to be against having too many planets; “By the end of the decade we would have had 100 planets!” he rather overstated.
Whatever the pros and cons, it seems that the change is here to stay and no amount of blustery statements and grave pullover clad pronouncements are likely to change minds.
By way of a postscript, that icy rock whose discovery started all the kerfuffle, our old friend 2003 UN313 was finally named by the IAU in September as Eris appropriately enough after a Greek goddess of chaos and strife. Amidst all the arguments it’s refreshing to see that there is still a sense of humour in the astronomical community.

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Never Mind The World Wide Web, Here’s The Grid

Because that’s what’s just a few years away. Our chief scientific advisor, Roger Jones explains…

Once upon a time, most computers were sad and lonely; rarely talking to each other and, in the way of sad, lonely things spent a lot of their time cataloguing record collections. Then came the Internet that allowed a few more adventurous computers to swap the occasional letter and large packages. Even so, for most it was all too expensive and difficult, and like having to hire your own courier. Then, some especially sad computers and their users, banging their particles together in the far off land of the Swiss, decided that in order to communicate with their few friends around the world, they would devise a better way. And so, the World Wide Web was born. What it introduced was not a radically new idea, but made sending mail and hearing the news and reading other people’s documents so much easier than before. Strangely, this turned out to be hugely popular with all sorts of other lonely people, and before you know it the whole world was buying things without going to shops, reading Uzbeki newspapers and arguing about the finer points of the Voord without ever actually having to meet people. This was rather a surprise to the people banging particles together. So then they wondered if the world would be interested in another bright idea they were playing with…
The above may be a little harsh, but as someone who was one of the sad people at the time, I’m allowed to mock myself! Essentially, the simple idea of providing a uniform way of sharing all sorts of documents between computers, via the Internet or other networks has had a huge impact on the real world. (One of my truly sad bugbears is when supposedly informed writers confuse the Internet – which has been around for decades – with the World Wide Web, which is just over 10 years old and works over many forms of network.) This was a surprise to its creators as much as anyone, and as one of the early users and developers, this makes it clear you should not come to me for predictions about the future use of technology.
However, what the World Wide Web can do is really very limited. It shares documents, and that’s about it. OK, through CGI scripts and Java servelets you can run small programmes on remote machines, and through Java applets you can, if you are rash allow things to run on your own machine; but in essence, the Web lets you read other people’s newspapers, and send mail easily.
This is where the Grid comes in. In 2007, the self same particle physicists will be starting a new series of experiments using the Large Hadron Collider. These experiments will produce about 30-40 Petabytes of data each year. (That’s 40 million Gigabytes.) That data has to be processed, stored and analysed, and out of the trillions of events, a handful of rare events such as Higgs decays are being sought. That will take a lot of computing, far more than can fit in one site.
Interestingly, other scientists face a similar challenge. The Human Genome Project has very large databases, which require complex cross-referencing and search facilities. The databases are often in completely different formats, and the computers running different operating systems. So, in many ways, they face similar problems. In fact, the more you look, the more you see large-scale computing challenges everywhere.
The Grid as a term and idea was popularised in the late 1990s by Foster and Kessleman, but the idea of Grids has actually been with us since the early 1990s. Particle physics and others have several times linked computers over a large geographical area together in a way that allows a user to access all their computing and storage resources. In fact, you may have joined such an effort yourself. The SETI project persuaded many people to give over `idle’ time on their PCs to search for extraterrestrial intelligence in radio telescope data, running as a screen saver. Just as a human body harnesses the capability of individual cells together to achieve things a single cell could not, Grids try to link many computers to address problems that would otherwise be impossible.
The thing that makes the current Grid projects different to the distributed computing in the past is similar to the advance that made the Web so much better than the old Internet days; simplicity of use and reuse. All of those older projects were `one-offs’, but this time the tools are being made reusable and simple interfaces are being made through your Web browser. Added to that, the sudden growth of really high-speed networking means that many of the boundaries between computers start to disappear. That fast networking may not be in your own home just yet, but it soon could be. Lancaster University has just negotiated networking for public service sites through the North-West that allows up to 80 Gigabits per second for instance, and at reasonable cost through commercial partners.
So how will all of this affect our lives? I have no idea! Particle physics is done mainly for curiosity (although Thompson thought his discovery of the electron in 1897 was a mere curiosity, which shows particle physicists have been lousy prophets for a very long time). However, the Web has shown how a good idea finds applications, and the uncomfortably eager involvement of Microsoft and IBM indicates that they can see applications, from breast cancer screening to real-time diagnostics of aircraft in flight worldwide. I only hope that, unlike almost all other new media including the Web, the breakthrough application for the home is more inspiring that pornography! Teledildonics, here we come? Now that really would be sad and lonely.

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THRILLING ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE

Oliver Wake looks at some early stories of British sf master John Wyndham

In a recent spring clean I came across a box of old paperbacks that I’d forgotten I owned. Amongst them was a collection of five stories by British science-fiction master John Wyndham. Originally written under his real name, John Benyon Harris (minus his seventeen million middle names), and hailing from the period he spent writing for the popular American pulp magazines, the stories are fascinating examples of an author slowly finding his feet in a young and uncertain genre.
The opening story is Wanderers of Time, from which the collection also derives its title. After an oddly irrelevant opening, the story sketches an intriguing tale of time travellers stranded in the distant, post-human, future. All the travellers have damaged time machines, and Wyndham (as I will be calling him for the sake of convention) develops the interesting concept that this is a sort of desert island in time. As one character surmises: “This must be a kind of “dead” spot in time. It is as though our machines had been thrown into the flow of time and swept along until, for some unguessable reason, they met at an obstruction at this point”.
This future earth is dominated by two species of machine creatures; giant two-legged red ones, and smaller white six-legged ones. The whites and reds are at war, but, seemingly consisting of merely the occasional hurled boulder, it is a rather pedestrian conflict. The time travellers are captured by the whites and incarcerated within their hive-like habitat, where they meet further human prisoners. Most interesting of Wyndham’s time travellers are the trio of scientist from beyond the year 10,000 and the ‘Numan’, who, apart from the rather dull twentieth century ‘everyman’ couple, carry much of the action. The scientist are bald and dwarfish, their future strain of humanity having atrophied physically as their intellectual capacity grew. The ‘Numen’ are quite the opposite; large and stupid men created through selected breeding to represent the reverse characteristics (presumably to do all the hard work as sub-human drudges; very Huxley).
Fortunately, several of the time travellers have brought with them weapons of their own era. While the twentieth century hero’s revolver is of little use, the ‘heat rays’ of those from later times prove formidable. Turning these weapons on their captors, the true nature of the machine creatures is revealed. As beams of white heat slice into the robotic shells, seas of thousands of stinging black ants pour from the white machines. One of the slow-witted Numen perishes under the onslaught of ants, while those equipped with heat rays concentrate on frying the insects and cutting their passage out.
Having escaped from the hive, the time travellers trek through a forest in search of sanctuary. One character reflects on the amazing civilisation fashioned by the ants: “It was inevitable, sooner or later. They’ve always had a far better organisation than man, even in my century – no wasted effort, no need to struggle continually with subversive factors. The only thing which stopped them being masters of the world, from the beginning, was their size. Now, they have found a way of overcoming that disability… [constructing machines] is the natural way out of the difficulty. After all, we did the same. Where would man have been without his machines? If you want a parallel, just think of one of the warships of your own time – twelve hundred or more men working a great floating metal monster, just as the insects in their thousands work their scuttering metal machines.”
He is equally philosophical about the seeming absence of humanity in this far distant time, and does not suspect the ants to have helped them on their way: “Men did not kill off the great reptiles who ruled the world before them – the reptiles just stopped. It seems to me that man, too, has “had his little day and ceased to be”.”
Meeting yet another time traveller in the forest, the group finally set up camp in a cave inaccessible enough to make it difficult for the machines to reach them. There they then set about using what parts they have managed to salvage from their various damaged devices to create one working time machine to return them home. When one of the party is re-captured a bold rescue mission is staged. Repairing a previously incapacitated white machine, and managing the unlikely feat of adapting it to human control, a successful assault is launched against the ant hive. Finally, the rescue effected and time machine built, the party are returned to their own periods; or, in one case, the period of a new-found partner.
Wyndham’s story reads at times like a first draft, and leaves unanswered questions, most notably: what are the red machines? Red ants is my guess, explaining the colour of the machines and the war with the whites. Many characters are also under-used, and the time travel implications of the heroine’s disappearance halfway through the story aren’t as clever as the author thinks; arguably, they were at least original at the time of publication. The story also owes a debt to HG Wells, sharing many characteristics beyond its entail premise with The Time Machine.
Pulp fiction magazines of the period are remembered for their lurid pictures, and at times the story feels as if Wyndham is writing for the illustrator, not the reader. The vivid descriptions of repetitious battle scenes, and the unusual incident in which the heroine has her red dress snatched away by a red-hating white machine, leaving her in her underclothes, suggests that the this story may have been colourfully embellished on original publication.
However, Wyndham’s fascinating concepts make up for the amateurishness of some of the story. The distant time at which all time travellers are liable to beached is worthy of further exploration (did he have a sequel in mind?), and the elevation of the ants is prophetic, foreshadowing more recent scientific claims that insects will outlive humanity in the event of catastrophe.
A Child of Power is a simpler tale about a boy with an unusual sixth sense, as recalled by a doctor during a bar room discussion about ‘freaks’ and human evolution. The boy can hear radio transmissions within his head and ‘see’ electricity, as if it were another colour in the spectrum. Most intriguingly, he can hear an unintelligible babble coming from beyond the Earth. Whilst his quarryman father thinks the child can make the best use of his talents by going on the stage as a music hall act, or putting his unusual abilities with electricity to use in a radio repair shop, the doctor fights to get the boy an education, through which he hopes he will learn to harness his gift. To prevent his extra sense distracting him from sleeping or school lessons, the doctor works out how to ‘earth’ it, by giving the boy a cap with a copper head band and a wire running to his the soles of his shoes. Then, with this ‘earthing’ device snatched away in a childish fight during a thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning strikes the boy. He is not killed, but his extra sense is burned out by the huge electric charge, and child reverts to normal. “But ‘e’ll be ‘appier that way, you know”, remarks one listener to the doctor’s tale, “Freaks ain’t ‘appy”.
The Last Lunarians, again with an extraneous framing device, tells the story of man’s first trip to the moon. There, the explorers discover the burial chamber of an entire lunar race, but in the great horror tradition, the natives are not really dead. The awakened Lunarians attack the astronauts, who narrowly escape in their rocket, leaving the entire native race to die in the lunar winter through which they had been hibernating. However, in their hurried defence and take-off, the humans have forgotten the alien sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) that they had earlier stashed in the hold. Taken off their guard, the crew are slaughtered, all bar one man, who relates how the rocket crash landed on a remote Pacific island, where the Lunarians make their new home.
It is impossible not to recognise outdated concepts and ideologies behind several of the tales in this collection. Like those who originally discovered the great treasures of lost civilisations on our world, the Luna explorers (British, naturally) of The Last Lunarians happily smash their way into sealed burial chambers, break open dozens of sarcophagi and carry off more without a second thought. Then, rather unconvincingly given their suspended animation technology, the Lunarians take on the role of primitive knife-wielding natives to the rifle-toting British force in a Rorkes Drift-like pitched battle. And the extinction of a whole race is merely a side effect of heavy-handed, gung-ho exploration. All very colonial. The casual sexism of Wanderers (‘What a clever girl you are!’ is one gem), and the class divide implicit in others, makes these stories very much of their era.
It’s easy to recognise these traits as merely indicative of a simpler, more naïve time. However, I had quite a surprise when I realised that their vintage was rather grimmer than I’d imagined. When I began reading I had no idea of when these stories were actually written (it isn’t stated explicitly) and unconsciously set my reading mind into the 1950s groove of the Wyndham novels I had previously enjoyed. My suspicions that something was amiss were aroused a little way into the second story, Derelict of Space, with talk of German militarism and Nazi plots. Was Wyndham inventing the parallel universe cliché of Germany winning the Second World War, or predicting a future Nazi restoration? Neither, it turns out. The story was written in 1939, a time when a political solution to the conflict in Europe may have been considered more likely than the outright defeat of Nazi Germany. This is Wyndham’s prediction: that, at best, the Nazis will be forced to retreat back into their own borders and hit with sanctions, leaving them bitter, preparing for future campaigns in the age of space travel. A more subtle hint of its period is Wanders of Time’s briefly mentioned experiments in Eugenics, a disciple now largely associated with the Nazis and their notion of creating a ‘master race’. In Child of Power Wyndham has the boy listen in to a broadcast of a German voice gabbling ‘bolts of impassioned rhetoric’. Originally published in the late 1930s, we can easily guess which orator Wyndham alludes to.
Of all these stories Derelict of Space has the least science-fiction concepts at its core, despite some fascinating, though largely irrelevant, opening chapters describing the process of returning a derelict spaceship to Earth. Despite these futuristic trappings, the story is a farcical tale of espionage-by-accident turned sinister. A space salvage crew locate and enter the derelict Excelsis, a ship carrying a salvageable cargo of record value. Due entirely to chance, the controlled drop of the spaceship goes disastrously wrong. Instead of falling into the Irish Sea it hits what should be a small German town. In fact, the town is a top-secret military facility manufacturing a devastating new explosive, and the resulting devastation and loss of life is enormous.
With their scheming exposed and many of their elite personnel dead, the German authorities denounce the innocent salvage men as Jewish terrorists and demand their extradition for confession, show trial and execution. Even as this is done assassins kill one crew members and wound the captain back at home in Britain. Under diplomatic pressure to hand the men over, the British authorities can only save them by stage-managing their escape from custody and disappearance. It’s an intriguing story and one which, without a spaceship as catalyst and talk of ‘liquid oxygen bombs’, could have hailed from a different genre entirely.
The issues of Empire are again pushed to the fore in the last story of the collection, this time via the Middle East. Though set in the 1930s, recent events give it a contemporary resonance for new readers. The Puff-Ball Menace opens with Prince Khordah of Ghangistan bemoaning western colonial power in his region: “These English, and other foreigners, trifle with us. They do not so much as stir to consider our demands. We are treated like children … We offer them war, and they laugh … Here we must sit, impotent, while they pour over our country the froth and ferment of their way of life, in mockery of the wisdom of our sacred ancestors”. Unable to combat their enemies with conventional weapons, the nephew of one of the Prince’s advisers is able to come up with something to effectively level the playing field. And the threat posed to mainland Britain by his deadly biological weapon proves rather more substantial than that of a real-world Middle Eastern leader of recent years.
The story continues in England, where horticulturalists across the West Country have been receiving seeds in the posts and an invitation to grow them as part of an exciting and secret trial for a new vegetable. One such green-fingered enthusiast is the father of Ralph Waite, the hero of the story. He is a solid, Boys’ Own, Oxbridge type working for a London chemicals company. It doesn’t say that he has a square jaw and played rugby for his school, but it might as well do. Intrigued by the unusual growths - evil looking balls of fungus - he has a work colleague analyse a seed. The expert reports that the organism is a new form of fungus, both parasite and saprophyte, which “flourishes equally well on decay, or on living flesh”.
Soon the puff-balls are everywhere, the spores from those accidentally broken having caused new growths throughout Cornwall and West Devon. When locals coming into contact with the spores develop a rash and die, officialdom finally takes notice of the threat. Much of the area is evacuated and the army move in. Ralph, panicking that Dorothy, his fiancée, is trapped in the effected region, rushes to Cornwall, only to find all routes sealed by the military. Having failed to penetrate the blockade, he is left little choice but to throw in his lot with the army. Days are spent erecting fences and digging a large trench to hold the puff-balls at bay when the forecast violent winds threaten to scatter them further east.
The trench is filled with oil and wood and set ablaze in an effort to kill the spores as the gale sends thousands of puff-balls rolling and flying across Dartmoor, piling up or bursting against the fences. As the winds die down, soldiers armed with flame-throwers set out to destroy the stacks of up-rooted puff-balls littering the countryside. Ralph uses the carnage to hide his escape, volunteering for flame-thrower duties and going in search of his fiancé. He battles through the desolate, deserted villages that would later appear in many of Wyndham’s full-length fictions. He finds his fiancé’s house empty, and falls into an exhausted, feverish sleep. And there the story effectively stops, rather prematurely. In a conclusion so rushed that I can only assume Wyndham had hit his word count early, Ralph awakens to find his fiancé with him, explaining that suddenly all is well.
Back in Ghangistan, Prince Khordah is told that the fungus (having presumably been artificially bred), had reverted to a common, harmless organism after just two generations. The Prince is not too dissatisfied with the results of his anonymous assault, and looks forward to employing his adviser’s ‘other means’ of attack in the future.
This conclusion is unsatisfying, and hardly original, owing much to Wells’s War of the Worlds, both with nature’s immolation of the threat and the miraculous reappearance of the hero’s loved one. There are also questions raised by the plot which remain unanswered, such as why does the Prince’s scheme target only the West Country? Surely, using the tactics of distributing the seeds via amateur gardeners, the whole country could have been threatened? Perhaps Prince Khordah had a particular grudge against Cornishmen.
It is interesting to see in The Puff-Ball Menace how effective Wyndham paints the British army in dealing with an entirely new threat posed by nature and science combined. This tale is one from probably the last crop of British science-fiction which, before the shock of the retreats and defeats of the early part of the Second World War and the loss of the Empire, still envisaged the supremacy of conventional British forces over any enemy. The story itself might have proved to be an inspiration for another writer made famous by his work in the genre. Nigel Kneale’s 1953 BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment also features a fungal growth threat (albeit alien), the danger of sporing and the flame-thrower equipped British army, although in a more modern twist the latter prove futile, with words prevailing over force.
Perhaps what’s most interesting thing about these five stories is how they foreshadow Wyndham’s later, full-length work. Wanderers’ vision of a post-apocalyptic world, in which something familiar but previously harmless has become dominant, is suggestive of Day of the Triffids’ land of the blind and killer crops, and The Kraken Wakes’ drowned landscapes. Child of Power prefigures the mutation/evolution themes and super-children of The Midwhich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids and Chocky. The Puff-Ball Menace is a clear forerunner of Triffids in many respects, from the fungal/vegetable threat, to its solid, dependable hero and deserted villages.
Written in the dying days of the British Empire, during a period in which stability turned to all-out war, this collection demonstrates how science-fiction can reflect, consciously or inadvertently, the socio-political landscape of their time. Each of these stories, written between 1933 and 1939, is a fascinating document of a world in a precarious position, soon to change for ever. On the strength of these imaginative, highly readable and prescient, if imperfect, stories, I feel the early work of John Wyndham deserves to be illuminated occasionally from the shadow of his later, more famous novels.

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THE X PRIZE FILES

Matt Salusbury isn’t a rocket scientist but if you are then how about competing for the X prize…

Once again, science fact is proving to be stranger than science fiction. You may have read press reports on a real-live rocket called Thunderbird, which a British team working just outside Manchester are hoping to put into space sometime later this year. (The press have been a little too enthusiastic in their patriotism here - it¹s a British team making the engines for an American team based in Virginia. It¹s a similar deal to British films.)
Thunderbird¹s final pre-launch test firing is due to take place somewhere in the great Australian desert near Woomera in March, and space pilot Steve Bennett¹s Starch Asher Industries team that are putting the project together is the favourite to take the X-Prize.
Nothing to do with Mulder and Scully, the X-Prize is a $10 million pay-out to the first team who can put a space craft 100km into space, with three passengers, bring it down again and safely repeat the feat using the same equipment two weeks later. All the entrants are private companies, and the prize is designed to stimulate the space tourism industry, as well as cheap satellite delivery and - I¹m not making this up - same-day freight forwarding!  Presumably, there¹s people out there who are happy to pay an awful lot of money to get their documents delivered by hand from London to Sydney in a couple of hours.
The X-Prize takes its inspiration from the prize that was offered for the first non-stop air crossing of the Atlantic back in the 1920s, a prize taken by Charles Lindenburgh in Spirit of St Louis. As well as freight forwarding, the sponsors - who include Arthur C Clarke and the thriller writer Tom  Clancey - have the stated aim of creating a new generation of heroes. UK press coverage has focussed on the plucky Brits who are in the running to take the prize - Thunderbird and the Bristol-based space plane Ascender, which continues the city of Bristol’s tradition of aeronautics going back to the Rolls Royce aero-engine factory.
So far so inspiring, and some of the contestants for the X-Prize are getting into the Right Stuff spirit with evocative names like Proteus, Starchaser, Pathfinder. Most of the entrants featured in the press so far have been designed following tried and tested ideas - going up in a re-useable vertical take-off rocket (as in Russia`s Soyuz programme) or taking off from a runway in space plane¹ - a scaled-down space shuttle. So far, so predictable.
But weirder forces are at work down among the sheds, hangars and warehouses where the magnificent men in their flying machines are at work tinkering away at their pet projects. Up there with the romantic names are bizarrely mundane names chosen by teams - Space Tourist, Thrifty Space and Scaled Components. Look closely at the list of proud sponsors, and you¹ll see that one of the biggest spenders is the director of a Mid-West car hire company.  Rubbing shoulders with the stargazing poster boys, their eyes fixed on the Final Frontier, there¹s the spirit of EasyJet or The Cannonball Run as much as the Spirit of St Louis.
There are some truly inspiring attempts to get into space on the cheap. One X-Prize entrant, Sabre, is just a souped-up Air Force surplus fighter jet. Another team plans to go up in a modified jet to be refuelled by a hired military refuelling plane on the edge of the atmosphere, while yet another plans to glide most of the way up, towed by a Boeing before it fires its engines at the last minute.
 The Romanians are getting in on the act with ARCA - their last-minute extremely simple entry, which resembles the conventional three stages of a rocket rammed onto a pole like lumps of cheese jammed onto a cocktail stick. It certainly wouldn¹t leave much room for top-dollar paying space tourists to bounce around in zero gravity.
 Fans of Star Trek will notice the resemblance to the guy who turned an old nuclear missile into the first warp drive rocket in First Contact, but such approaches aren`t so science fiction anymore. The non-profit Planetary Society recently sent its solar yacht Star Sailor into space as the modified warhead of an ICBM launched from a Russian submarine in the Arctic.
Perhaps the most inspired space or bust X-Prize attempt to get into orbit on the cheap will float up tethered to the world¹s largest hot air balloon and fire its engines as it scrapes the upper atmosphere. This is where the X-Prize really revives the true romance of space - not in the boring sensible approaches, which will probably take the prize, but in the utterly bizarre also-rans with their baroque Jules Verne weirdness machines. A look at the plans is enough to make the jaw drop in disbelief and raise the question `Why?` Well, why go into space the obvious way when you can do it in style. Some of these guys seem to have been inspired more by Wacky Races than by The Right Stuff. While looking at some team specifications, you get the sneaking suspicion that they aren¹t going into space at all, they¹re just taking the piss.
Take for example, Lucky Seven, the pet project of a millionaire. Its web page shows just one illustration of a 1950s  B-movie  sci-fi pointy silver rocket lander, complete with those long 1950s table legs for it to land on. The craft is depicted resting in some green field with a happy blonde couple running arm in arm towards it, like some illustration out of a Jehovah¹s Witness pamphlet. I¹m no rocket scientist, but the specs are a bit vague on how exactly it¹s going to get up and come down again. Someone else appears to be having a laugh with us on the X-Prize site, because the third UK entry is just given as Professor Dorrington, and shows grainy old black and white photos of a man in a pullover tinkering around with motors from some ante-Deluvian British rocket programme from way back when, and there¹s no contact details.
But the possible X-Prize piss-takers are not as funny as the deadly serious but deadly weird entries. Take Advent  for example, one of the many Canadian entries (,for some reason the Canadians are very well-represented in this enterprise). Advent  launches vertically from the surface of the Atlantic, leaving behind the world¹s biggest water bubble as its engines fire. This isn¹t actually as daft as it seems - in the last days of the Soviet Union, the Energian corporation experimented with sea-based launch platforms for much bigger craft. Then there¹s TGV  Rocket, which after a relatively conventional launch, bursts out into a sort of giant umbrella shape so it can gradually descend in the manner of Mary Poppins  - or something like that, anyway. Whatever the physics behind it, its a very beautiful craft to behold.
There¹s also Space Tourist, another space plane with a discoid shape - it resembles a cross between a flying saucer and a Stealth fighter. Then there¹s the plucky little Argentinean rocket Gauchito (Little Cowboy), which shows that, even in these troubled times, there¹s a Third World country getting in on the space act.
Late entries for the X-Prize are popping up all the time. One of the new hopefuls is Armadillo, a Texas-based project. It should take the prize for sheer optimism. Still very much at the concept stage, the only photo so far released shows a grinning astronaut in a crash helmet strapped into a chair, which is mounted on a frame with wheels and a couple of fuel pipes and nozzles behind him which end at a couple of fuel tanks. The safety of space flight is on our minds after the recent Columbia disaster, but let¹s not forget that a lot of the people behind these projects intend to pilot their craft into space themselves - twice. It¹s much easier to be absolutely sure about how safe your homemade space ship is with a couple of friends in a hangar than with a whole politically-charged bureaucracy like NASA.
The shuttle disaster has, if anything, given a boost to the X-Prize. The Russians at Baikanour are taking up the slack from the grounded shuttles and are using all their flights to bring up astronauts to the International Space Station, so they¹ve cancelled all the tourist flights. The likes of South African millionaire Martin Shuttleworth and that bloke out of N Sync who was supposed to be going up on Soyuz for $13 million could probably get better value for money from some cut-price Romanian RyanAir-type trip anyway. Optimistic projections anticipate  15,000 space tourists going up there by 2021, generating a  total of $700 million.
There is also - as I discovered - a Dick Dastardly element to all these cute Wacky Races. A colleague was inquiring as to the exact date of Thunderbird¹s  earlier first test-firing somewhere in the Nevada desert. Starchaser Industries refused to give details of the day or venue for `security reasons`. An organisation like Al-Qe¹eda could, I realised, very easily commission an X-Prize space tourism vehicle and at the last minute turn it into one hell of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Presumably, NASA¹s space-tracking facilities are keeping a very close eye on X-Prize entries, looking for signs of a lot of mullahs suddenly turning up at the hangar, or of teams suddenly cancelling at the last minute.
Come to  think of it, the X-Prize could offer a face-saving way out of Saddam Hussein`s little (alleged) WMD problem. He could come clean at the last minute and say to UN Chief Inspector Hans Blix: “ Whoa! Whoa! OK guys, you got me. Iraq¹s building a late entry for the X-Prize! We want to promote space tourism and freight forwarding, and we badly need ten million bucks.” And George W. Bush would have no choice but to let him go ahead with his space rocket made from eight Scuds stuck together end-to-end, controlled by a cluster of a dozen Play Station 2¹s (if rumours are to be believed).
The recent shuttle disaster hides the fact that there is a space renaissance going on, and for a change it ain¹t an American one. The European Space Agency’s projects are getting increasing ambitious - it¹s planning to land a probe on a comet in a couple of years, and no one seems to have noticed they¹ve just launched the first in a series of robot cargo carriers to deliver supplies to the International Space Station(ISS). In view of NASA grounding the shuttles, this could just end up saving the ISS¹s ass. China has just successfully completed the last in a series of test-launches of Shongzhou -  a scaled-down copy of Soyuz - and hopes to send a man into space some time soon. Expect to see more private vehicles like the X-Prize pack taking up the slack as NASA gets cold feet and its budget goes instead on half a dozen simultaneous wars with all the countries beginning with the letter I. Expect also to see more of the Third World mini-nuclear powers putting people into space on the cheap - hell, if Argentina can do it, why not Israel and Pakistan. If they concentrated on a space race instead of a nuclear arms race, we¹d all be happy.
The X-Prize brings to life the old sci-fi dream of people going into space in little homemade craft made in their sheds with the help of eccentric uncles, like so many comic books back in the 1940s or 1950s, or going back even earlier to the original Flash Gordon, when Dr Zarkoff heads for Mars in a back-firing rocket ship the size of a school bus and held together with rivets.  Curiously, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA)- the anarchist collective who have done so much to promote the idea of a people¹s space  programme without governments or militarism - are not happy with the X-Prize. They see it as a surrender to commercialism, a sell-out to capitalism. To reflect their own philosophy of raves and sex in space, they have offered their own XXX Prize for the first team to successfully perform a sex act in the zero gravity of space - with no restrictions on the number of people involved.
The X-Prize, for all its macho rocketry and explosions, for all its thrust and adrenalin and noise and bravado and danger, has a sop to environmentalism in its rules. The space flight up to 100km altitude has to be repeated again two weeks later to promote the use of re-usable components. Not that the cash-strapped contestants need much encouragement to save on expensive bits like boosters. But the whole  X-Prize circus may prove to be the last flowering of the romance of rocketry anyway. In Seattle, a company called High Lift Systems are in all seriousness putting together another science fiction dream: a giant space elevator to carry people and freight from a sea platform in Ecuador to a counterweight 100,000km up in space. By around 2020, the golden age of cut-price water-launched giant discoid hot air balloon-assisting umbrella-descending rockets built in people¹s garages will have burned itself out, the deafening roar of rocket engines replaced with a recorded voice saying “Stand clear of the doors, please.”

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UNQUIET SLUMBERS

John Connors looks at Martin McDonagh’s most macabre play- but will he open the box…

In an unnamed autocratic dictatorship, a young writer called Katurian finds himself in police custody but has no idea why. Is it perhaps because of his macabre short stories in which children meet grisly fates yet always at the behest of a moral?

Martin McDonagh is notorious in literary circles for once telling Sean Connery to “Shut up, you’ve only made three good films” when the original Jamesh Bond berated him for being drunk at an awards ceremony. The son of an Irish construction worker and a cleaning lady, McDonagh left school at 16, spent ten years on the dole watching his brother attempt to become a writer before having a go himself. Eventually, the Druid Theatre Company picked up his work and he found himself acclaimed as `the most promising playwright to emerge in Britain in the last ten years`. Plays like Beauty Queen which featured an old woman doused in chip fat, The Lonesome West where a priest put his hands into molten plastic and The Lieutenant of Inishmore in which bodies were seen being hacked up on stage have earned him a reputation as theatre lands’ Tarantino but all his work has a strong moral point to make and doesn’t mind making the audience feel uncomfortable in the process.

The Pillowman asks us to think about responsibility; is a crime justified in extreme circumstances? Is a writer morally responsible for what happens as a result of his words? At a time when theatres have twice recently been threatened with violence for staging `provocative` work, it’s certainly a timely reminder that once a drama is unleashed it is very difficult for its writer to control the results. Premiered at the National Theatre in November 2003, with a cast that included Jim Broadbent, a three month provincial tour last year saw The Pillowman playing to packed, enthusiastic houses even if the venues were sometimes off the beaten track. For example, sitting in the bar of the slightly surreal, ultra modern Salford Quays theatre, a few miles from the centre of Manchester, I was surprised to see a fully working barge pumping past but that was not to be my only unusual sight of the evening.

Not for the faint hearted but no bloodbath either, The Pillowman is a dextrous work that manages to amuse as much as it does to shock yet there is a bitter undertow that might make you wonder what sort of nightmares McDonagh himself endures. Grimmer than the grimmest Grimm fairytale Katurian’s stories are the amazing backbone of the play (see boxout) and it is the reading of them that does the spade work in getting to grips with Katurian himself. Through a story called `The Writer and the Writer’s Brother` we learn that the Katurian brothers endured a bizarre childhood. While Katurian was given everything and treated with love and care, Michal was locked in his room and tortured nightly with electrodes. His screams and the sounds of the torture turned his younger brother’s prose and themes darker by the day. After seven years of this he investigated, discovered the truth and promptly killed his parents, smothering them with a pillow. Thus the motif of pillows is established and it is this very same fate that awaits Michal later albeit in different circumstances. Then there is `The Pillowman` story itself; in this tale, a man made entirely of pillows visits adults about to commit suicide, slows time and re-visits them in their childhood, telling them what will become of them and offering to kill them off now.

It's difficult to see if there is a lot of logic in the circuitous turn of events that the play depicts – on the one hand can any writer really be held responsible for the effects their words have on unstable individuals? Can Katurian’s murder of his parents ever really be justified whatever the circumstances? McDonagh doesn’t make it easy because he challenges the arguments from both sides. He dares us, on the one hand, to feel empathy with the brothers who are surely victims themselves. Yet on the other hand, his settings are so theatrically gothic and in some ways so absurd that it’s hard not to search for a deeper allegory at work.

The way he wrong foots our expectations makes for a rollercoaster evening though. At first it seems as if he is showing a typical old style Iron Curtain state at work; the shifty glances between the policemen, the air of mystery and subterfuge, the ambiguous questions that confuse rather than clarify - it all brings to mind the former USSR. Once the true nature of the investigation is established, the emphasis shifts to a debate about the influence of Katurian’s stories. Once Michal is added to the mix, we are duped into believing he couldn’t possibly do it; at one point Katurian even suggests there may not have been any murdered children at all and it’s all a stitch up. Then when Michal casually admits he did commit the murders, the play turns into a brotherly two hander for half an hour, full of poignant moments and real anger. You kind of know what’s coming when Katurian lulls Michal to sleep with his favourite story but it doesn’t make it any less shocking. That leaves the last part as a cat and mouse game between both detectives and Katurian.

Another powerful force at work is McDonagh’s feisty dialogue, twisting and turning from brutal threats to casual sarcasm at the drop of a hat. Right from the start this is evident when Katurian tries to show how much he respects the police and that his work has no political agenda that he thinks they think it might have (the play is full of delightfully threaded sentences like that!). He can’t believe he’s actually in trouble, “I’m helping you with your enquiries, I thought” he offers, suggesting they are not friends but neither are they enemies. Ariel, the more aggressive detective counters; “You’ve had your rights read. You’ve been took out of your home, You’ve had a fucking blindfold on. Do you think we do this to our good fucking friends?” Throughout the interrogation Ariel and his subordinate Tupolski exchange some frustration with each other, which adds another humorous undercurrent; early on Tuploski sardonically points out they are bad and good cop. The policemen start to identify the theme of murdered children in Katurian’s work. Once his brother Michal is mentioned, casually, as being held in the next room, Katurian becomes more agitated especially as Tupolski starts to question the minutiae of his stories trying to identify motivations and themes. It’s as if the policeman is enjoying the intellectual exercise and the writer is defending it on a purely literary level. Of one Katurian declares, “It’s a puzzle without a solution” to which Tupolski says, “I think there’s a solution. But then, I’m really clever.” The dialogue is interrupted when simultaneously the sound of Michal screaming drifts into the room and Tuploski demands Katurian looks inside a metal box he produces. Katurian is bewildered that his brother is being hurt, “You said you wouldn’t touch him” he pleads prompting Tupolski’s smart reply; “I haven’t touched him”. Katurian: “But you said he would be fine. You gave me your word.” Tupolski: “I am a high ranking police officer in a totalitarian fucking dictatorship. What are you doing taking my word about anything?”

The dramatic tension is upped by now; the box seems to contain five toes, allegedly pertaining to a story of Katurian’s and it is revealed that Michal has confessed to three child murders.

After a flashback depiction of Katurian’s background as described above, Act two sees Katurian, after being beaten up, thrown into the same cell as Michal who has actually not been beaten up. This is a brilliantly composed and lengthy scene during which we find out that Michal has committed the murders, which shatters and horrifies Katurian especially when Michal intimates that the missing third child has been despatched in the fashion of `The Little Jesus`.
Initially we are led to believe that Michal really is incapable of anything bad; he simple mindedly tells Katurian he’s bored and he also swears that he didn’t kill the kids. Katurian starts to doubt whether any crimes have really taken place; “We don’t even know that there were any children killed at all” he tells Michal, just because they’ve been told about it doesn’t necessarily make it true. This is when Michal gets Katurian to relate `The Pillowman` story to him, at the end of which Michal says; “but I still can’t figure it out”; Katurian thinks he’s talking about the story but then – and this is the moment the play really starts to get dark – Michal says; “The box with the little boy’s toes in it.”

Through his numb shock Katurian tries to find out exactly what heinous things his brother has done but the latter’s excuse seems to be “Because you told me…every story you tell me something horrible happens to somebody. I was just testing out how far fetched they were.” The brothers argue and here you get a sense of the dubious morality of Katurian. While stunned that his brother could do such things, he still vigorously defends `The Pillowman` and other stories and at one point suggests that he would die himself if his stories could be saved. He puts such great store in them; it appears they are his way of dealing with his own past and, perhaps, a way he feels he can communicate to others. The stories are pivotal to everyone’s reactions; both detectives are affected by their content not just because of the horror aspect, but also because of incidents from their own pasts. Michal really trusts only Katurian and has absorbed the stories but his logic is affected by his seven years of torture so he can’t see the points Katurian is making; he takes the stories literally because he can actually conceive such horrors happening after his own experiences. Katurian eventually decides on drastic action; he sends Michel to sleep with what seems to be his only relatively normal story and then smothers him with a pillow.

After the interval we start with `The Little Jesus`; a delightfully dark story about a girl whose obsession with being Jesus annoyed her parents so much they end up reproducing the crucifixion in their living room then burying her in the forest. Back in the interrogation room, Katurian is writing out his confession, including the murder of his parents, which the detectives had hitherto been unaware of. The one proviso he insists on is that his stories remain safe. During this sequence the two detectives’ motives are revealed which adds tension and also changes the dynamic. Tuploski has started to realise that Katurian may be lying; he asks detailed questions that only the murderer could answer and finds gaps; here he tells a story of his own the point of which is that Katurian’s confessions about the murdered children are made up. Furthermore, in a moment that adds a dash of pure comedy, a girl covered in green paint is led in; turns out that Michal had enacted the innocent story of `The Little Green Pig` and not `The Little Jesus` after all! Katurian of course is still going to be executed.

He is shot at `four` in a countdown to zero. Ariel: “You said you’d give him ten. That wasn’t very nice.” Tupolski: “Ariel, what exactly is nice about shooting a man on his knees with a bag on his head?” We get to see what Katurian was thinking in his last few seconds before we see Ariel not burn the stories after all.

The Pillowman is a gripping, caustic and funny play with the capacity to unsettle and amuse from one moment to the next. Visually, the stark set offers a fairly neutral canvas but there are some superbly staged tableaux that cause the audience to gasp. These occur during sequences depicting either flashbacks or Katurian’s stories and are presented in a raised second level `square` above the main set and, in contrast to the plain walls of the cells, are vividly coloured, almost as if a child had drawn the background. The torture of Michal is only shown for a couple of seconds, while the Jesus Girl sequence is horrific and funny all at the same time. There’s also one genuine shock that sent the audience into jitters. Moody incidental music helps set the scene as well. One very noticeable thing is that the dialogue runs delightful circles around the participants with sarcasm and wry observation never far from the surface. In that sense, the ghost of Quentin Tarantino hovers but instead of talking about pop culture, our characters here are discussing life and death.

Katurian is a difficult character to read, in that he goes from trembling fear to defiant sarcasm in a moment and it’s a challenge that Lee Ingelby proves the equal of. He brings out Katurian’s vulnerability even when he’s standing up to the detectives while his brotherly affection with Michal is also very well played yet you also see the selfishness that McDonagh has built into the character. Ingleby sparks in the scenes with Tupolski and Ariel and whenever Katurian is reading his own stories you can see the storyteller’s zeal in the actor’s face. As always is the case with Lee Ingelby, you develop a rapport with the character whatever his moral faults; this is a confident performance boosted further by his obvious rapport with Edward Hogg, who plays Michal. They play fraternal familiarity easily and Hogg is careful not to overplay the disability card. Their scenes together are full of the love and hate that brothers always have and when Katurian prepares to smother Michal and says “Sweet dreams, little baby” it’s heartbreaking.

Jim Norton is fantastically dry as Tuploski yet every so often lets the character’s nasty interior surface; in many ways he is far more dangerous than the brutal Ariel. Watching Norton and Ingleby dance the lines around each other is perfect theatre and makes you wonder why stuff like this doesn’t appear more on TV these days. Yes, there is plenty of what sombre continuity announcers like to call “stong language” but there is also “rich, wild language”. Perhaps they feel that is a step too far for tv?. The two detectives spar brilliantly too; a rivalry is established from the start and Ewan Stewart’s burly Ariel surprisingly providing some of the biggest laughs, especially when the play pokes fun at police work and interrogation; in one scene Tuploski is even correcting grammar!

This production of The Pillowman is one of the best things I’ve ever been to the theatre to see; it provokes, amuses and shocks, has a brilliant cast and is staged to stunning effect. And when I’m next writing a story, I’ll be a little more careful…

Story Time!!

If you missed The Pillowman, you also missed Katurian’s strange stories that are at its heart. So, here’s one to whet your appetite. It’s called `The Little Apple Men`….
There’s a little girl and her father treats her badly. One day, the girl gets some apples and carves some little men out of the apples with little fingers, eyes and toes. She gives them to her father but says they are not to be eaten; they’re to be kept as a memento of when his only little daughter was young. Naturally, the father swallows a bunch of the apple men whole just to spite her but they have razor blades in them and he dies in agony.
The girl wakes up that night. A number of the apple men are walking up her chest. They hold her mouth open and say to her; “You killed our little brothers”. They climb down her throat and she chokes to death. The end.

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