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Life Before Man

Posted on February 21, 2013 by John Guy Collick

On my last trip up to Yorkshire I found one of my favourite childhood books, Life Before Man, by Zdenek Burian (pictures) and Zdenek V. Spinar (text), published in 1972 by Thames and Hudson. I bought this when it first came out and it entranced me for years.

Nowadays photorealistic dinosaurs are de rigueur, thanks to Jurassic Park (1993) and TV series like Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) but in the 60s and 70s making prehistoric beasts come to life was a real challenge. Films went for two approaches to the problem – either using stop motion rubber models (Valley of the Gwangi (1969) and A Million Years BC (1966)) or gluing fins onto real lizards, poking them with a stick and filming them in slow motion (The Lost World (1960) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1959)). They also tended to mess things up historically by introducing women who ran about screaming and spraining their ankles mid-flight, as was required by the artistic sensibilities of the time. Only the Stravinsky sequence in Fantasia (1940) came anywhere near a decent attempt at scientific accuracy.

A gala dinner held inside a wildly inaccurate dinosaur in 1853

Artists had been trying to recreate the beasts since Victorians fell in love with the monsters in the middle of the 19th century, though first attempts came up with some spectacular errors. Most famous of these was the sculpture of the Iguanadon intended for Crystal Palace gardens. The artist knew the monster had a spiky bit but was at a loss where to put it, so he stuck it on the end of the creature’s nose (it belongs on its thumb). He also made it four-legged, not bipedal, though this did help when a gala dinner was held inside the mould in 1853.

The obligatory Tyrannosaurus Rex

Zdenek Burian’s paintings were revolutionary because of their obsessive attention to detail, and the almost near-photographic execution. Many of them are also ‘action shots’ rather than the rather dull static images of the day. Scientific discoveries have rendered some of the images inaccurate, his biped dinosaurs appear to walk like humans dragging big tails, rather than like birds with their rear ends stuck out for balance. Yet both his dinosaurs and their surroundings appeared completely believable, so much so that one foil-hatted UFO-hoaxer used Burian’s picture of Pteranadon as a ‘photograph’ proving he’d journeyed back in time with the help of his alien chums.

Burian’s painting of a Pteranodon used as photographic ‘proof’ of Billy Meier’s time travel.

Life Before Man is also remarkable for the sheer number and scope of the pictures. The book is chronological and spans prehistory from the cratered volcanic wilderness of 4600 million years ago, through the Precambrian all the way through to the Quaternary era and the New Stone Age. Not only does it show prehistoric monsters in all their glory but also the rise of the mammals, and eventually the different stages of man’s evolution.

Neanderthal man makes something to poke Homo Sapiens with.

After the dinosaurs the mammals are a bit dull; big cats, hairy elephants and odd looking rinoceri, but Burian comes into his own again with wonderfully evocative images of early people engaged in various prehistoric pursuits such as Chipping Flints or Pointing at Things and Grunting in Alarm. Here the quality of the images is patchy, but when he’s at his best you could believe you are looking at portraits of living beings. Here’s his rendition of Homo Erectus from half a million years ago.

Homo Erectus (Peking Man)

Sadly Life Before Man is currently out of print but stray copies occasionally appear on Amazon.

Here’s a link to Billy Meier’s website in which he answers accusations that the photo of a Pteranodon he took while time travelling was simply a copy of Burian’s painting. He backs up his argument with a letter from Ptaah the Plejaran of the Andromeda Council who blames it on Quetzal, another alien, for going off on one and stealing all the original negatives.

Under the Moons of Mars

Posted on September 26, 2012 by John Guy Collick

I’ve just got back from a trip to Moscow and was planning to write a few posts on some of the things I found there; especially the wonderful Symbolist Art of Nicholas Roerich. Then Curiosity sent back one of the most amazing space photos I’ve seen. It’s not much to look at, but for anyone who has an abiding interest in Mars, both the real and the fictional versions, this really is incredible. Have a look at the top right corner of the image below. See that white crescent? That is the moon Phobos photographed from the surface of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity Rover. It is an image taken from the surface of another world, looking up into the sky at one of two moons. If both were in the sky that would be even more mind-blowing, but this is amazing enough, I think.

A few weeks ago Curiosity also took a photograph of a partial eclipse on Mars, again with the moon Phobos. Here is the image below:

As Phobos is only a big rock it doesn’t take much of a bite out of the sun. You can learn more about the above picture in this Guardian report.

The original title for Edgar Rice Burrough’s first Martian novel, A Princess of Mars, was Under the Moons of Mars, published in the magazine All Story in 1911 under the pen-name ‘Normal Bean’. Phobos appeared in the eighth book in the series, Swords of Mars, where it’s called Thuria by the inhabitants of Mars. It’s about 15,700 Haads from Mars to Phobos, and it takes round about five Zodes to get there, just in case you were wondering. Here’s Bruce Pennington’s cover for the New English Library edition of 1972 showing one of the inhabitants of Phobos.

The reality, though uninhabited, is just as dramatic. This is a NASA photograph of Phobos taken from close up:

Of course the first picture above would be much enhanced by the silhouette of Tars Tarkas on a Thoat looking up at it. As that’s not going to happen, to finish with here’s one of Frank Frazetta’s paintings of John Carter and Dejah Thoris on Mars with both moons, Phobos and Deimos, in the background.

Update: My mistake, that’s a painting of Princess Thuvia of Mars and Carthoris of Helium, John Carter’s son, as any fule kno.

Frontiers of Space – in memory of Neil Armstrong

Posted on August 28, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Neil Armstrong, 1930 – 2012

For me the years 1968 – 1969 were a perfect storm for three reasons. Firstly I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of seven. Not only was I entranced by the movie’s images but also beside myself with excitement at the thought that I would be alive at the grand old age of 40 when the new century rolled around, and would experience all the things happening in the film (except, I hoped, the weird hippy bit at the end). Secondly my mum banned me from watching Star Trek because she thought it was rubbish. So my sole purpose in life became, surprisingly enough, watching Star Trek, when I wasn’t playing at being Mr Spock, because he was the one I most identified with.

The third reason was, of course, the moon landing. At 8pm on July 20th 1969 I sat in front of a black and white TV and tried to make out what was happening from those fuzzy images of Neil Armstrong climbing down the leg of the LEM to stand on the Moon’s surface. One worry at the time was that the surface might be dust to the depth of several meters so when he didn’t disappear into grey quicksand I was mightily relieved.

It’s hard to explain just how profound an impact the moon landings had on people (especially boys) who were my age at the time. Every newspaper, magazine, comic and toy store sold us a vision of a near-future space age. 2001: A Space Odyssey already revealed what it would look like, pretty much the same as our own 1960s but in orbit. My dad was an architect and interior designer and we already had some of the Scandinavian designed chairs and tables that littered the interior of Kubrick’s space wheel. This was the beginning of the road that would take us at least to a moon colony, and probably the exploration of Mars.

What the future should have been. I used to eat my tea off tables like those.

Of course it never happened, and now the moon landings are history, along with the sleek formica and steel interiors of my childhood home.

In 1985 J. G. Ballard published a story ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ in Interzone. In the tale the narrator meets a beggar in Rio de Janeiro who claims to be an Apollo astronaut and who scrounges money from tourists in return for tales of his experiences. When the man dies the narrator takes his place. The UK adult comic Viz did a hilarious but poignant fake newspaper report about Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in their post-Apollo 11 days re-forming as a comedy act called The Astronutties and performing out-of-season pier-end shows in faded UK coastal resorts. Finally here’s an intriguing anecdote by the SF/Fantasy writer Lucius Shepard about a possible encounter with Armstrong at the Neil Armstrong Museum where, according to the curator, he occasionally liked to sleep in their model of the lunar lander.

These tales carry a strong resonance for me because, in true Ballardian fashion, the remaining Apollo astronauts have become living ghosts of a future that was dead long before the last LEM touched down on the moon. Staggeringly brave, resourceful and intelligent men, they really were heroes in all senses of the word. For this reason they seem out of place in a world where manufactured celebs make up our media pantheon and ignorance is seen as cool. When I was eight I wanted to be an astronaut. Now kids want to be celebrities, but with no idea what they will do to become one.

‘That’s How It Felt To Walk On The Moon’ by Al Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut.

Andrew Smith’s book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth is a wonderful series of interview-based portraits of the Apollo astronauts, each one a very different personality and each one affected in a different way by their adventure. My favourite is Alan Bean from Apollo 12. He has spent a lot of his post-space days repeatedly painting scenes of astronauts on the moon, and you can see his work online at the Alan Bean Gallery. Other astronauts found god, became obsessed with the paranormal or suffered from alcoholism. Neil Armstrong simply kept himself to himself. By all accounts he saw his own role as minor in the context of the vast efforts that put him at the foot of the LEM’s ladder, and refused to condone the hagiography that surrounded him. Yet the first man on the moon wasn’t quite the mad recluse he was sometimes made out to be. This TV profile shows that he was perfectly happy to give detailed answers to intelligent questions in a 60 minute interview.

In 1969 I had two books, Manned Spacecraft and Frontiers of Space. The first one covered spaceflight up to that point. The second one foretold the future. What made it different from other books of this kind was its rigorously serious engineering focus. It tried, in all seriousness, to predict what would come after Apollo, based on the various projects then sitting on NASA drawing boards. The text was too dry and confusing for an 8-year old but the pictures were entrancing and entirely believable. Here are a couple of two-page spreads showing the next stages of moon and Mars exploration. The execution is scrappy but I didn’t care, to me this was my future.

Moon base circa 1978

Mars base circa 1980

For a fascinating account of how the dream of the space age was destroyed by NASA bureaucracy and Senatorial pork-barrel politics have a look at Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age by Greg Klerkx

I used to say that I didn’t want to die until I’d seen an astronaut on Mars. I don’t think that wish will come true. The way I see it now is that the Apollo missions were like Leif Erickson going to America in the 11th century. Viking exploration budgets and project management expertise weren’t really able to exploit the discovery and it was a few centuries before Europeans went back. We will send astronauts to Mars and those other places, but it may be a few hundred years away.

A thousand miles an hour – the Bloodhound SSC

Posted on August 3, 2012 by John Guy Collick

The Bloodhound supersonic car

This week I attended a one-day education conference in Lancaster House, hosted by the British Government as part of the diplomatic activities surrounding the Olympic Games. I spent a while chatting to Wing Commander Andy Green who is the current land speed record holder. In 1997 he reached 763 miles an hour in the car Thrust SSC.

Wing Commander Andy Green

He’s now preparing to break that record in the Bloodhound SSC (Bloodhound supersonic car), which he will attempt to drive at a 1,000 miles per hour. The project involves some breathtaking engineering and Andy Green really will be entering unknown territory. The motivation behind the attempt is to try to recreate the ‘Apollo effect’ in education. During the moon landings there was a surge in Physics and Engineering Ph.Ds in America as the Apollo program captured the imaginations of US students. The Bloodhound project wants to do the same, so there’s a whole outreach program to schools designed to stoke kids’ enthusiasm for the mind-blowing engineering that the project is developing.

To give some idea of the extreme science involved here’s some of the more dramatic facts about the Bloodhound SSC:

1. The main jet engine is from a Eurofighter. In addition the car also has a hybrid rocket so the car will actually be able to outrace one of the planes.

2. The fuel pump alone is the engine from a Formula 1 racing car.

3. When the car accelerates Andy will be hit by a force of 2.5G, on deceleration it’ll be 3G in the opposite direction.

4. The wheels have to rotate at over 10,000 RPM, creating a stress force of 50,000G at the wheel rims (to put that in perspective, the gravitational force on the surface of the Sun is about 30G).

Basically because no-one has driven a car at this speed once it gets above the current record it’s entering unknown territory. Flying a plane or a rocket at 1000 miles an hour is relatively easy because you have the same medium above and below the vehicle. With a supersonic car the ground is a few inches below the chassis and calculating the aerodynamics between the body, the wheels and the earth’s surface is a massive mathematical challenge.

The car will be driven on Hakskeen Pan in South Africa, the only salt lake large enough for the car to complete its 10 mile run. A team of 300 people spent months picking up every stone larger than a tiny pebble to make sure that the surface will be perfectly smooth.

The official website for the Bloodhound project is here: www.bloodhoundssc.com

To give you an idea of the challenges and amazing science behind the project here’s a video:

A simulation of the race between the Bloodhound and a Eurofighter

At the conference Andy Green showed us a video of a test run on the salt lake. Two things were absolutely amazing, firstly the lake is so flat you could see the curvature of the earth. As the car appeared in the distance, coming towards the camera, it popped over the horizon. Secondly it outruns its own sound, so when it drives past it’s silent. The ear-splitting din comes a few seconds later!

Bugs of the Empire

Posted on June 18, 2012 by John Guy Collick

A little while ago I wrote about the Eagle Comic in the early 1960s. The Captain was a similar magazine from the beginning of the twentieth century. The upsurge in adventure books for boys in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras paved the way for the first periodicals aimed at the Empire builders of tomorrow. The Captain‘s strap line is A Magazine for Boys and Old Boys, though judging from the letters pages quite a few girls read it as well. The content is as you would expect, ripping tales of derring do in an Empire populated by plucky young Englishmen and lots of dodgy foreigners. The latter fall into two camps, simple and treacherous if they come from the less developed colonies, or clever, sinister and fiendishly treacherous if they come from civilisations that matched Europe’s (i.e., China).

The Captain, therefore, has its fair share of atrociously racist imperial tales, mingled with stories of various chaps’ tribulations at their new school. Interspersed with these are the regular features and the letters page, all of which give a fascinating insight into the world of boys (and girls) in the Victorian and Edwardian age. I’ve got the bound edition for 1907, presented to a George Henshaw by the Headmaster for “Regularity and Progress”. Inside there is the Naturalist’s Corner, the Cycling Corner and answers to readers’ correspondence by the editor. All the features sport photographs of the columnists. They all have enormous moustaches, high wing collars and constipated expressions. This is ‘getting down with the kids’ circa 1907.

Edward Step, F.L.S. runs the Naturalist’s Corner. This largely consisted of readers sending him samples through the post for him to examine, or asking him to diagnose their pets’ ailments. His responses get increasingly tetchy as a steady procession of bugs, dead pets and exotic turds arrive on his doorstep for his analysis. One typical example reads thus:

G.A.P. (Windsor) has a green parrot his pater brought from India about eighteen years ago. It has always been a remarkably healthy bird, until quite recently , “when he gave a scream and fell from his perch.” … I do not think this condition has any relation to the use of a new kind of bird-sand, as G. A. P. suggests might be the case ; on the contrary, the symptoms appear to be unmistakably those of an apoplectic fit… All I can advise is to keep the bird quiet, and free from excitement and stimulating food.

A few issues later and the steady stream of specimens through the post is starting to fray Edward’s nerves…

“Bee, Wasp or Fly?” is the query propounded by ‘Jones’ (Blackheath) who sends me an insect unpleasantly squashed on a piece of paper, and asks for its name… Further investigation into its identity I must decline to make, because if readers are so thoughtless as to send specimens in a repulsive condition, it is evident they cannot seriously require the information asked for.

By July 1907 he is clearly losing the plot. He has a new photo in which his beard looks decidedly unkempt and his eyes have a mad, desperate gleam about them. This is probably why:

In spite of my repeated disclaimer, A. M. T. (Mill Hill) sends me yet another dead canary and invites me to state why it died. All things die even pets, and so far as one can base an opinion upon an external examination, I should say the present case is one of old age. But these dead pets should be handed over to the family doctor, who, by examination of the internal organs, might be able to speak with certainty.

While Edward Step was disappearing under a mountain of dead pets and repulsive specimens, the editor was replying to the readers’ more general questions. At this time, most magazines would respond directly to letters sent in, but to save time and space wouldn’t print the original enquiries. The result is a series of comments and advice to questions we can only guess at. The mind boggles as to what was going on in the heads of some of the correspondents. Some queries were as expected:

“Railway Notes” wants me to discuss, in an editorial article, the question of boys meeting girls. Boys should not meet girls without the sanction of parents on both sides and even then the girl should be properly chaperoned.

Some letters hint at a darker side to Edwardian boyhood:

J Robertson – I have been asked many things, but I never have I been asked how a guillotine is made. I have only seen one, and that was at Madame Tussaud’s. Next time you come to London, go there and examine the ghastly thing. Mr. John Tussaud, the sculptor of the exhibition, is a kind man, and possibly would give you the information you require if you wrote to him nicely.

While some provide enough implied content to fill several novels, probably for serialisation in the Victorian underground porn magazine The Pearl:

T.M. Yes you have sinned, and that grievously, but look into your heart and pray to our Lord for forgiveness. In the meantime, a clean mouth and a clean mind is always the best advice for a growing fellow like yourself. There is a great shortage of good and willing men in Australia. I suggest you write to the Foreign Office for more information.

The overwhelming tone of The Captain is of a bunch of well-intentioned men desperately trying to steer the nation’s youth down the right path, speaking to the readers with an odd mixture of school-masterly admonition and embarrassing chumminess. Their resolute ‘Come on chaps!’ call to decency and right-thinking is frequently combined with a sense of confusion and bewilderment when their readers don’t always respond as expected. It’s a bit like a Latin master trying to persuade his class of wayward 1907 pupils that translating Plutarch really is jolly fun, if only they would sit down, pay attention and stop thinking about petticoats. I do feel sorry for Edward Step, though I’m sure his Edwardian sense of moral purpose and dedication to the Empire kept him going.

Storytelling and the brain

Posted on March 22, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Right now I’m in the beautiful ski resort of Kransjka Gora in Slovenia. Out of my hotel window I can see the Julian Alps rising up into a clear blue sky. On a slightly worrying note, I was here last year and I could swear that something has knocked a hole right through one of the peaks. From this distance I reckon the gap is about the size of a church and I can see daylight through it. The tunnel definitely wasn’t there last year. The mind boggles as to what might have made it.

Anyway I’m here for an education conference, SIRikt 2012. This morning we had a very interesting talk from Dr. Pero Lučin of the University of Rijeka. His topic was on learning, neuroscience and the effect of the new technologies that kids use. His institution is lucky in that it is one of the few research departments in the world with the latest MRI brain scanners. What’s this got to do with science fiction and writing? Well, take a look at the images below.

The brain on the left is reading a book. The brain on the right is searching the internet. So essentially when we surf the net we use much more of our brain than when we read a book. Now the brain grows and maintains complexity through use. Like any other part of the body it needs constant exercise to stop it withering away. So what the research seems to say is that reading is less effective and uses less of the brain than browsing the internet. This goes completely against common (admittedly a bit traditionalist) wisdom that reading makes you clever, computers make you thick.

However the other point Dr Lučin made was that the brain makes fundamental sense of the world through storytelling. This theory has been around for quite a while but neuroscience is beginning to show that it might in fact be true.

Story teller in Damascus with audio visual aid to make sure you listen

Humans make sense of disparate and confusing data by assembling it into stories. People today live in a multi media world bombarded by an undifferentiated storm of data, most of it worthless. The brain’s natural storytelling mechanisms will cherry pick items it finds interesting and assemble them into a narrative, from whence we get meaning. So telling and listening to narratives is a fundamental thought process which we need to stimulate and encourage. That’s the good news for writers who might be feeling a bit deflated after finding that reading a novel is a low level brain activity compared to going on Facebook or trawling through videos of funny cats.

Agora

Posted on March 1, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Agora (2009) tells the story of the brilliant philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, who lived in Alexandria at the beginning of the 5th century. Renowned for her learning, she taught astronomy and philosophy and became involved in the politics of the city at a time of emerging tensions between the Christian bishops and the civic government. She was murdered in 415AD by a mob of Christians. Accounts differ, some saying that she was flayed alive with oyster shells before the altar of a newly-sanctified church.

The film is impressive, and it’s a change to see a historical epic with a bit of intelligence, instead of a load of computer enhanced sword play and pompous shouting. Agora also tries to portray the later Roman Empire as accurately as possible, and the result is very convincing. There’s a great scene when a suitor plays a song he has composed for Hypatia at the theatre. Making no concessions to the audience the film, rather than using some anachronistic confection by Lisa Gerrard or Enya, treats us to 5th century Byzantine music in all it’s glory. It sounds like someone beating cats to death with a hammer. As a side note, being into early music I once bought a CD of Byzantine love songs. In the 1990s some 6th century musical scores had been found at the bottom of a well in Cappadocia and a bunch of enterprising musicians set out to recreate the sound. Two minutes in and I realised why the manuscripts had ended up down a well.

What makes the movie work most of all is the obvious connections between now and then. Without labouring the point it essentially portrays a battle between science, the position of women and Christian bigotry. Hypatia is a pagan philosopher who believes in the supremacy of reason. She is also a learned and self-possessed woman who teaches and advises magistrates. Set against her are fanatical Christian monks who, with the backing of Pope Cyril, burn the library of Alexandria, attack the Jewish community and ultimately declare Hypatia a witch (basically for being a woman who speaks out of turn).

The long arm of Life of Brian sometimes appears in the scenes where raggedy monks run around shouting about the Whore of Babylon but on the whole the portrayal of early Christians is pretty accurate. The image of frightened believers huddling in a cellar while Centurions kick the door down is largely a Victorian invention. Early Christians rapidly became notorious for defiling altars, disrupting religious ceremonies and generally being a complete nuisance. Many of them desperately wanted to follow Jesus and be martyred for their faith, and would commit whatever outrages they could to get the desired result at the hands of increasingly exasperated Roman magistrates.

In the end Rachel Weisz steals the film as Hypatia, and she manages to convey the heady excitement of early philosophy without being too simplistic or obscure. The movie neatly has her exploring Aristarchus‘s theory of the Earth revolving round the Sun so the science is not that hard to follow (she gives a great demonstration of an elliptical orbit using two torches, a sandpit and a piece of rope which certainly made the light bulb come on in my head). So, as a portrayal of philosophy, politics and religion in the Later Roman Empire,Agora is a great movie that manages to recreate an important, (if a bit obscure), time while avoiding pompous lecturing or comic-book theatrics.

John Guy Collick

On and on I sped into futurity...