Tag: Astronomy
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Space Games
I guess, like many, I fell in love with the visual style of No Man’s Sky. The screenshots posted in the build up to its release looked like the covers of 1960s science fiction magazines – Galaxy, If and Worlds of Tomorrow. That, plus the promise of a vast galaxy of procedurally-generated unique planets, many…
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Cosmonauts at the British Science Museum
The only mildly interesting scene in that otherwise steaming heap of found-footage nonsense Apollo 18 is when the US astronauts stumble across the Soviet LK Lunar lander sitting in a crater. The real thing was flown unmanned in orbit but never made it to its final destination. Lack of co-ordination and investment in a launch…
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Life on Uranus – Frank R. Paul, Fantastic Adventures April 1940
I came back from Eastercon 2015 with several pulp magazines, including a couple of copies of Fantastic Adventures carrying Frank R. Paul’s ‘Life on..’ series. This was a wildly optimistic attempt to extrapolate alien life on the planets of our solar system, based on the knowledge of the day. I thought I’d share my particular…
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Giordano Bruno and Alessandro Gallenzi’s The Tower
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) didn’t do himself any favours. Not only did he adhere to a set of particularly extraordinary heresies but he also didn’t know when to shut up. Unlike his predecessor Copernicus who was happy to claim that his model of the universe was a mere mathematical convenience, rather than a description…
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Interstellar (2014)
**WARNING – Major Spoiler Alerts** I’ve been face down writing AntiHelix for the last month so I’ve neglected this blog a little, but having seen Interstellar on its opening night yesterday I thought I’d jot down my thoughts. It’s a curate’s egg – some parts are very good, other parts are disappointing and I came…
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Soviet Space Art
Last week I was working in Russia. I attended a conference in Tver, halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg where I was set on fire. I was also asked to be one of the judges for a final graduation film for one of the students at the All Russian Cinematography University (VGIK for short). As a…
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Europa Report (2013)
Spoiler Alert News from Space last week confirmed the existence of an ocean underneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Furthermore it seems that this immense body of water is in contact with the moon’s rocky core, allowing minerals to leach into the sea. Chemicals, water and tidal heating caused by Saturn’s gravity point to the…
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Flatland 2: Sphereland
Flatland 2: Sphereland is the sequel to the movie Flatland which I mentioned in a blog post last year. It’s a charming 36 minute animated short based on the original novel by Edwin Abbott, and one of the book’s own sequels Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, written in 1965 by the…
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Under the Moons of Mars
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…
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Frontiers of Space – in memory of Neil Armstrong
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…