Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Science for the People: Private Sector Space

sftp-square-fistonly-whitebgThis week, Science for the People is learning how private enterprise has jumped in to fill the gap left by shrinking government budgets for space exploration. They’re joined by journalist Elmo Keep, to talk about her article on Mars One, a nonprofit planning to make a reality show out of a one-way trip to colonize the red planet.  And they’ll get an update on the state of the for-profit space industry with Space News Senior Editor Jeff Foust.

*Josh provides research help to Science for the People and is, therefore, completely biased.

LEGO Scientists in “New Students In The Lab”

Apocalypse 1912: Nightmare Journey to the Center of the Earth

William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912)

NightLandHiLoBack in 1805, the French priest de Grainville wrote what could be considered the first Dying Earth novel. Despite many obvious science fictional elements, Le Dernier Homme was a religious fantasy, inspired by the pseudo-biblical style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Scientist-prophets fulfilled God’s will by conquering nature with science, but in the background was an invisible world of mystical spirits who were part of God’s master plan.

A century later, a quirky British poet produced another major dying earth vision by flipping this formula: he brought the mysticism to the foreground, and put the science in the background, creating a completely secular and much darker vision of earth’s final era. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, a flawed beast of a book, is a milestone in the genre — a forerunner not only of now-classic Dying Earth fantasies by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, but also of psychologically refracted post-apocalyptic visions like Galouye’s Dark Universe and Dick and Zelazny’s Deus Irae. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1912: Nightmare Journey to the Center of the Earth”

Free Online Marketing Advice

It is the Internet. Everyone arrives bored and annoyed.

Apocalypse 1912: Salvation Through Faith in Science

Garrett P. Serviss’ The Second Deluge (1912)

Servissamazingstories21912 was a good year for science fiction — according to some, it was the best year. Certainly for pulp science fiction, it was a landmark year. Although the first dedicated pulp SF magazine, Amazing Stories, wouldn’t appear for more than a decade, two of the foundational texts of pulp SF were published in 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, which began as the serial “Under the Moons of Mars” in February, and Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, whose last installment was published in March.

Another contributor to this early pulp ferment, less memorable than Burroughs or Gernsback, was the American journalist Garrett Serviss. Serviss was a popular science writer who had also written an 1898 sequel to Wells’ War of the Worlds, featuring an invasion of Mars led by none other than Thomas Alva Edison. The Second Deluge, serialized in 1911-12, is a pulpy, early instance of a classic storyline that crops up over and over again post-apocalyptic fiction: Noah’s Ark. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1912: Salvation Through Faith in Science”