Showing posts with label SCIENCE FICTION. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SCIENCE FICTION. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Thursday, December 26, 2013
getting the future wrong, #3
[#2 was this post on the 1977 series 1990]
Television scholar Robin Carmody has recently been making available some marvellous archival material from the British 1970s and 1980s.
Including Stargazy on Zummerdown, which I had been searching in vain for on YouTube having come across a clipping about it in an old scrapbook of mine I'd recently got hold of, from when I was fifteen-sixteen and transitioning from old obsessions (Monty Python & diaspora; science fiction; futurology; surrealism) to new ones (music + music journalism).
Originally broadcoast on 15th March 1978 as part of the BBC2 Play of the Week series, it's set in a "23rd century, Britain (now called Albion)" which is "made up of two distinct communities - the Aggros (farm workers) and the Toonies (industrial workers). They meet at Zummerdown for the annual midsummer festival of Stargazy"
Well, I say "getting the future wrong" but I guess we won't know until we get to the 23rd Century, strictly speaking. However like Greatorex's 1990 and like Burgess's 1985, the play is much more a reflection of mid-Seventies preoccupations than actual prognostication.
(C.f. this Guardian articleby Neil Clark on the 1978 Christmas edition of the Radio Times and UK TV "before Thatcherism ruined it")
Here's the play in five parts
Stargazy on Zummerdown 1
Stargazy on Zummerdown 2
Stargazy on Zummerdown 3
Stargazy on Zummerdown 4
Stargazy on Zummerdown 5
Commentary on Stargazy from Horror News
"Billed as a visionary fable of Britain in the 23rd century, this was an optimistic look at the future by a historian specialising in the 17th century. England, or rather Albion, has reverted to a country of peaceful rural communities and small towns in a happy balance of high technology, industry and nature, called the Commonwealth of New Harmony. At the Stargazy, the annual midsummer meeting of the agricultural folk (Aggros) and industrial workers (Toonies), among the megaliths on top of Zummerdown, the two communities come together to settle the terms for the following year’s exchange of products and know-how, and engage in the ritual discharge of mutual aggression. Under the amiable supervision of the Reformed Celtic Church, they enjoy themselves in dancing contests, onion tastings and a swearing contest of Chaucerian earthiness. Stargazy On Zummerdown was science fiction that drew heavily on history. Author John Fletcher called it “The Anglo-Saxon constitution plus industrialisation.” The talented cast included Roy Dotrice, Stephen Murray and John Gillbyrne."
Commentary on Stargazy on Zummerdown from You Can't Do That On TV Anymore blog:
Television scholar Robin Carmody has recently been making available some marvellous archival material from the British 1970s and 1980s.
Originally broadcoast on 15th March 1978 as part of the BBC2 Play of the Week series, it's set in a "23rd century, Britain (now called Albion)" which is "made up of two distinct communities - the Aggros (farm workers) and the Toonies (industrial workers). They meet at Zummerdown for the annual midsummer festival of Stargazy"
Well, I say "getting the future wrong" but I guess we won't know until we get to the 23rd Century, strictly speaking. However like Greatorex's 1990 and like Burgess's 1985, the play is much more a reflection of mid-Seventies preoccupations than actual prognostication.
(C.f. this Guardian articleby Neil Clark on the 1978 Christmas edition of the Radio Times and UK TV "before Thatcherism ruined it")
Stargazy on Zummerdown 1
Stargazy on Zummerdown 2
Stargazy on Zummerdown 3
Stargazy on Zummerdown 4
Stargazy on Zummerdown 5
Commentary on Stargazy from Horror News
"Billed as a visionary fable of Britain in the 23rd century, this was an optimistic look at the future by a historian specialising in the 17th century. England, or rather Albion, has reverted to a country of peaceful rural communities and small towns in a happy balance of high technology, industry and nature, called the Commonwealth of New Harmony. At the Stargazy, the annual midsummer meeting of the agricultural folk (Aggros) and industrial workers (Toonies), among the megaliths on top of Zummerdown, the two communities come together to settle the terms for the following year’s exchange of products and know-how, and engage in the ritual discharge of mutual aggression. Under the amiable supervision of the Reformed Celtic Church, they enjoy themselves in dancing contests, onion tastings and a swearing contest of Chaucerian earthiness. Stargazy On Zummerdown was science fiction that drew heavily on history. Author John Fletcher called it “The Anglo-Saxon constitution plus industrialisation.” The talented cast included Roy Dotrice, Stephen Murray and John Gillbyrne."
Commentary on Stargazy on Zummerdown from You Can't Do That On TV Anymore blog:
"Nuzzling up to Stars of The Roller State Disco (1984) in any self-respecting apocalyptic telly fan's alphabetised collection is Stargazy on Zummerdown
(1978), a slice of town and country ritual rivalry set in the 23rd
century, in a society where urban and rural communities live uneasily
side by side under the benign auspices of a retro-pagan church, and
trade relations between the two are agreed at an annual festival wherein
village fete meets wrestling smackdown. Oh, and an onion eating
contest. If ...Disco was a prime example of hands-on-hips grimness, here's a future full of side-clutching whimsy.
"This is an odd little thing, even in the weirdo annals of 1970s BBC drama. Part of BBC2's prestigious Play of the Week slot usually reserved for the finely wrought likes of Langrishe, Go Down or Stoppard's Professional Foul,
it's the work of John Fletcher, a historian with no previous dramatic
convictions but a healthy interest in pre-industrial revolution England.
As with Hastings's work, characters are schematic. Roy Dotrice plays a
loopy, valve-soldering eccentric, while Peggy Mount gets to shout great
rustic insults as one Opinionated Alice. But the majority of talk, as is
the way with these things, gets put to use explaining and itemising the
meticulously detailed future world and its workings. Delivered in
sing-song west country burrs, this functional chat starts to sound like a
lacklustre episode of The Archers, with the occasional reference to starships being built in Sheffield.
"It's also a fine example of the studio countryside. Everything takes place
indoors, with shrubbery wheeled in from the sides and lit with 5,000
watts in front of a sky blue backcloth. Only modern eyes, raised on
years of hand-held, desaturated Cardiff street footage, have trouble
taking stuff that looks like this seriously, but even at the time the
effect must have smacked a bit of Play School. Not helping
matters is the presence in the cast of Toni Arthur, though to be fair
she does as spirited a saucy “I do declare” turn as the modest headroom
of the script will allow. Perhaps as if to acknowledge this threadbare
failing, director Michael Ferguson (a name to drop amongst psychedelic
Whovians, should you find yourself in their company with no easy escape
route) ends the final shouting scene with a pull-back to reveal the
studio cameras and lighting gantry – a budgetary apology dressed up as
entry-level Brecht. Still, Ferguson was a veteran of Churchill's People, so he knew a thing or two about the “cardboard spear” end of recession drama."
Friday, November 22, 2013
getting the future wrong, #2
#1 was this post on Anthony Burgess's 1985, a clumsy satire of a trade union dominated Britain of the near future
in similar vein, the 1977 series 1990, set in a bureaucratic dystopia (creator Wilfred Greatorex called it "Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six")
The blurb at YouTube: A nightmare vision of the (then) future UK set in 1990. The permanent civil service in Britain has taken political control and the population finds itself living under a totalitarian regime. The Public Control Department (PCD) of the Home Office monitors all activity, and ruthlessly suppresses any act of opposition. The story focuses on two key players -- the supercilious Permanent Secretary at the PCD, Herbert Skardon (Robert Lang) and a journalist on Britain's last independent newspaper, Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward).
(More on it here)
Laughably off-base, did they really not see Thatcher coming?
Still, great synth-twizzled library-music-esque theme tune, and Edward Woodward is always good value
Episode one
Episode two
Episode three
Episode four
Episode five
Episode six (titled 'whatever happened to Cardinal Wolsey?' !!!!)
Episode seven
Episode eight
Blimey, there appears to have been a second series.
Wilfred Greatorex - what an awesome name!
in similar vein, the 1977 series 1990, set in a bureaucratic dystopia (creator Wilfred Greatorex called it "Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six")
The blurb at YouTube: A nightmare vision of the (then) future UK set in 1990. The permanent civil service in Britain has taken political control and the population finds itself living under a totalitarian regime. The Public Control Department (PCD) of the Home Office monitors all activity, and ruthlessly suppresses any act of opposition. The story focuses on two key players -- the supercilious Permanent Secretary at the PCD, Herbert Skardon (Robert Lang) and a journalist on Britain's last independent newspaper, Jim Kyle (Edward Woodward).
(More on it here)
Laughably off-base, did they really not see Thatcher coming?
Still, great synth-twizzled library-music-esque theme tune, and Edward Woodward is always good value
Episode one
Episode two
Episode three
Episode four
Episode five
Episode six (titled 'whatever happened to Cardinal Wolsey?' !!!!)
Episode seven
Episode eight
Blimey, there appears to have been a second series.
Wilfred Greatorex - what an awesome name!
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
retroARTmania / future = obsolete in reverse
"I'm inclined to think that if this sort of thing signifies anything, it
has more to do with the "cult of the curator" that emerged back in the
early 1990s and has stayed with us ever since. And perhaps the
curatorial class’s hailing or enshrining its own legacy
by commemorating a few grand moments from the past – those occasions
(infrequent as they were) when an ambitious, zeitgeist-defining
exhibition actually succeeded in corralling a corpus of work which would
not only define its moment, but point in the direction that art would
(in one way of another) be taking in the years that followed" -- Our God Is Speed addresses Holland Cotter's contention of a "boom" in remountings of iconic exhibitions and the idea that this is part of a larger malaise of retro art.
Our God adds:
"Perhaps, then, this might considered the manifestation of an underlying anxiety among some curators -- about an inability to undertake any similarly decisive endeavor in the present-day global art field?"
and suggests that "Cotter's diagnosis" points not to a "a pervasive condition" but is rather the braiding of "several diffuse dynamics into a master narrative" of "stasis, nostalgia and ouroboric self-cannibalization"
(Which is kind of what "retromania" is - not a unified condition with a single underlying etiology, but the convergence of a number of discrete conditions into a synchronised peak of exacerbation).
In a follow-up post, Our God / Grayhoos discusses Claire Bishop's "Digital Divide" essay, focusing on the concept of obsolescence, and also suggests some other iconic exhibitions of the past that might merit remounting.
Along the way he mentions Nabokov's famous "The future is but the obsolete in reverse" - an epigram that sometimes seems clear as day to me, but other times I'm like, "you what, guv?". And he points out that it comes from Vlad's 1952 short story “Lance,” which "takes the form of a science-fiction tale concerning interplanetary travel" allowing Nabokov many opportunities to "to vent his own loathing of the science fiction genre".
Two other things that Nabokov loathed were Freud(ianism) and music! Disconcerting to me, because he is probably my favourite novelist, and three things that are absolutely central to my make-up are music, science fiction and psychoanalysis.
Still, who says you have to be in agreement with your favourite writers, artists, musicians etc?
He may have despised s.f. but he had a bash at the s.f. side-genre of alternative history / counterfactuals. Albeit more as the whimsical backdrop to the main story, which is an erotically fevered and doomed romance between two young (very young) lovers who discover they are half-siblings. I'm talking about Ada, which takes place in a Russianized North America. How it came about I forget, something to do with the Tartars not stopping but conquering what would have Russia, driving the Russians out? As so often, my memory failing me (even though the book made a huge impression on me as a teenager) I turn to Wikipedia:
"The story takes place in the late nineteenth century on what appears to be an alternative history of Earth, which is there called Demonia or Antiterra. Antiterra has the same geography and a largely similar history to that of Earth; however, it is crucially different at various points. For example, the United States includes all of the Americas (which were discovered by African navigators). But it was also settled extensively by Russians, so that what we know as western Canada is a Russian-speaking province called "Estoty", and eastern Canada a French-speaking province called "Canady." Russian, English, and French are all in use in North America. Russia itself, and much of Asia, is part of an empire called Tartary, while the word "Russia" is simply a "quaint synonym" for Estoty.
The British Empire, which includes most or all of Europe and Africa, is ruled (in the nineteenth century) by a King Victor. Aristocracy is still widespread, but some technology has advanced well into twentieth-century forms. Electricity, however, has been banned since almost the time of its discovery following an event referred to as "the L-disaster". Airplanes and cars exist, but televison and telephones do not, their functions served by similar devices powered by water. The setting is thus a complex mixture of Russia and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The belief in a "twin" world, Terra, is widespread on Antiterra as a sort of fringe religion or mass hallucination. (The name "Antiterra" may be a back-formation from this; the planet is "really" called "Demonia".) One of [protagonist] Van's early specialties as a psychologist is researching and working with people who believe that they are somehow in contact with Terra. Terra's alleged history, so far as he states it, appears to be that of our world: that is, the characters in the novel dream, or hallucinate, about the real world."
The alt-history backdrop in Ada, though, isn't really an exercise in speculative fiction so much as the excuse for Nabokov to lovingly, longingly recreate the lost world of his childhood as a member of the ruling class in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Similar to the consolatory function that Zembla serves for Kinbote in Pale Fire.
Curious to reread Ada as a grown-up (or a grown-er up, the last time was probably 25 years ago) as with critically sharper eyes I suspect I might find it a little over-ripe and mannered, and agree more with the generally mixed reception it got in its own time. But as a 15 year old it hit just the right spot where flushed-with-hormones meets speculative fiction/alternative history.
Our God adds:
"Perhaps, then, this might considered the manifestation of an underlying anxiety among some curators -- about an inability to undertake any similarly decisive endeavor in the present-day global art field?"
and suggests that "Cotter's diagnosis" points not to a "a pervasive condition" but is rather the braiding of "several diffuse dynamics into a master narrative" of "stasis, nostalgia and ouroboric self-cannibalization"
(Which is kind of what "retromania" is - not a unified condition with a single underlying etiology, but the convergence of a number of discrete conditions into a synchronised peak of exacerbation).
In a follow-up post, Our God / Grayhoos discusses Claire Bishop's "Digital Divide" essay, focusing on the concept of obsolescence, and also suggests some other iconic exhibitions of the past that might merit remounting.
Along the way he mentions Nabokov's famous "The future is but the obsolete in reverse" - an epigram that sometimes seems clear as day to me, but other times I'm like, "you what, guv?". And he points out that it comes from Vlad's 1952 short story “Lance,” which "takes the form of a science-fiction tale concerning interplanetary travel" allowing Nabokov many opportunities to "to vent his own loathing of the science fiction genre".
Two other things that Nabokov loathed were Freud(ianism) and music! Disconcerting to me, because he is probably my favourite novelist, and three things that are absolutely central to my make-up are music, science fiction and psychoanalysis.
Still, who says you have to be in agreement with your favourite writers, artists, musicians etc?
He may have despised s.f. but he had a bash at the s.f. side-genre of alternative history / counterfactuals. Albeit more as the whimsical backdrop to the main story, which is an erotically fevered and doomed romance between two young (very young) lovers who discover they are half-siblings. I'm talking about Ada, which takes place in a Russianized North America. How it came about I forget, something to do with the Tartars not stopping but conquering what would have Russia, driving the Russians out? As so often, my memory failing me (even though the book made a huge impression on me as a teenager) I turn to Wikipedia:
"The story takes place in the late nineteenth century on what appears to be an alternative history of Earth, which is there called Demonia or Antiterra. Antiterra has the same geography and a largely similar history to that of Earth; however, it is crucially different at various points. For example, the United States includes all of the Americas (which were discovered by African navigators). But it was also settled extensively by Russians, so that what we know as western Canada is a Russian-speaking province called "Estoty", and eastern Canada a French-speaking province called "Canady." Russian, English, and French are all in use in North America. Russia itself, and much of Asia, is part of an empire called Tartary, while the word "Russia" is simply a "quaint synonym" for Estoty.
The British Empire, which includes most or all of Europe and Africa, is ruled (in the nineteenth century) by a King Victor. Aristocracy is still widespread, but some technology has advanced well into twentieth-century forms. Electricity, however, has been banned since almost the time of its discovery following an event referred to as "the L-disaster". Airplanes and cars exist, but televison and telephones do not, their functions served by similar devices powered by water. The setting is thus a complex mixture of Russia and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The belief in a "twin" world, Terra, is widespread on Antiterra as a sort of fringe religion or mass hallucination. (The name "Antiterra" may be a back-formation from this; the planet is "really" called "Demonia".) One of [protagonist] Van's early specialties as a psychologist is researching and working with people who believe that they are somehow in contact with Terra. Terra's alleged history, so far as he states it, appears to be that of our world: that is, the characters in the novel dream, or hallucinate, about the real world."
The alt-history backdrop in Ada, though, isn't really an exercise in speculative fiction so much as the excuse for Nabokov to lovingly, longingly recreate the lost world of his childhood as a member of the ruling class in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Similar to the consolatory function that Zembla serves for Kinbote in Pale Fire.
Curious to reread Ada as a grown-up (or a grown-er up, the last time was probably 25 years ago) as with critically sharper eyes I suspect I might find it a little over-ripe and mannered, and agree more with the generally mixed reception it got in its own time. But as a 15 year old it hit just the right spot where flushed-with-hormones meets speculative fiction/alternative history.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
“I think the next few decades we might see some of the science fiction dreams we’ve had actually come true”
so says astronomy journalist Stuart Clark, in reference to the SABRE engine / Skylon aircraft being developed in the U.K. It doubles as both a super-Concorde that would enable flights between the UK and Australia lasting just four hours, and as a new, improved version of the Space Shuttle:
"This supersonic aircraft... would be able to take off from any runway in the world, accelerate to five times the speed of sound using a hybrid jet-rocket engine, then transition to rocket mode to break through the Earth’s orbit and reach outer space. After dropping off a payload of satellites, astronauts... the Skylon could return to land on the same runway less than 48 hours later. Used as a traditional aircraft, the Skylon could take 300 passengers from London to Sydney in four hours."
That's from Slate's Jeremy Stahl, who rounds up a bunch of sceptical reactions:
Once again, the future as simply too expensive for us to afford. Too risky an investment.
Interesting, in re. the Entrepreneurial State / David Graeber arguments about the role of public investment and long-term mindset in innovation, that SABRE/Skylon is a collaboration between the public sector and private investors. In other words, capitalism on its own would never develop such a spectacular, reality-rearranging technology.
The Slate piece is also interesting on the history of Concorde (a spectacular achievement, financially a huge flop) and on similar rival supersonic aircraft and son-of-Concorde schemes...
"This supersonic aircraft... would be able to take off from any runway in the world, accelerate to five times the speed of sound using a hybrid jet-rocket engine, then transition to rocket mode to break through the Earth’s orbit and reach outer space. After dropping off a payload of satellites, astronauts... the Skylon could return to land on the same runway less than 48 hours later. Used as a traditional aircraft, the Skylon could take 300 passengers from London to Sydney in four hours."
That's from Slate's Jeremy Stahl, who rounds up a bunch of sceptical reactions:
"If the Skylon sounds like an impossible dream... that’s because it probably is. “It looks great from a
science fiction standpoint, but it’s really, really tough to do,” says
John Hansman, the head of MIT’s International Center for Air
Transportation. “Even if you can get the engine to work, it’s extremely
challenging to get the entire airplane design to work.”
"The costs are astronomical, too.... “Just to do a run-of-the-mill, state-of-the-art
subsonic aircraft engine, you’re talking a $1 billion bill,” says
Stephen Trimble, an editor at the industry publishing site Flightglobal. “It’s really hard to see that unfolding in the next seven or eight years.”
Once again, the future as simply too expensive for us to afford. Too risky an investment.
Interesting, in re. the Entrepreneurial State / David Graeber arguments about the role of public investment and long-term mindset in innovation, that SABRE/Skylon is a collaboration between the public sector and private investors. In other words, capitalism on its own would never develop such a spectacular, reality-rearranging technology.
The Slate piece is also interesting on the history of Concorde (a spectacular achievement, financially a huge flop) and on similar rival supersonic aircraft and son-of-Concorde schemes...
Thursday, August 8, 2013
use your illusion
When a few years ago I first read these passages from George Melly's Revolt Into Style -- specifically the lines about pop culture being "the country of 'Now'" and the insistence that youth “denies having any history. The words 'Do you remember' are the filthiest in its language" , but the other stuff too, pages of it -- I thought, "yes, yes, this is me, this is where I'm coming from".
The book was written in the late Sixties (seemingly between the end of 1966 and early 1968) * so it's about the Sixties, with a little bit on the Fifties-as-Sixties-prequel, the lead up to the Sixties. And really it's about the early-to-mid Sixties: that neophiliac surge, 1963-1967, the youth-affluence-confidence drive to jettison-the-imperial-British-past (the Victoriana and Edwardiana of psychedelia is not nostalgic, Melly argues convincingly but blithely iconolastic, making a merry nonsense of jingoism and propriety and stiff 'n' starched formality - that's the meaning of the Lord Kitchener poster, the brass bed-frame wheeled around London in The Knack, shops like Granny Takes A Trip and I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet).
Born in 1963, I assimilated all this through my pores as a small kid, as sense-impressions, absorbing by osmosis the cultural-myth-in-process -- Beatles movies on TV , "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "All You Need Is Love" and "I Am the Walrus" heard on the radio, mini-skirts and hot pants and hippie hair in the streets, Dee Time on teevee. And then in the Seventies I solidified and fortified this ideology through my pre-teen and early teen cultural choices: Monty Python and satire of various kinds; science fiction of the New Worlds / inner space kind. Comedy (the post-Goons, absurdist-surrealist-taboo-busting kind I gravitated towards) and the mind-expanding and consciousness-raising sort of s.f. (i.e. anti-fantasy, the absolute opposite of sword'n'sorcery Tolkien-in-space) were both part of the same Liberation current in which music played such a huge and central role during the Sixties.
And then when I got into music, it was the renovated version of that ideology (postpunk ) that I embraced, while equally discovering and exploring the Sixties as very recent and still to some extent unfolding history (I devoured Playpower, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, The Dialectic of Sex, Life Against Death and Love's Body, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, The Female Eunuch, Bomb Culture, etc etc... watched If... etc etc... listened to The Doors, the Stones, and now with conscious ears, The Beatles).
A child, a creature, of the Sixties -- that's me.
There are those now who would say the ideas and the ideals, the epistemic horizon of thought and sensibility, represented by that vague term "the Sixties" (really a blurry longer period from the mid- Fifties through to the mid Seventies, with its after-echoes and resurgences that include postpunk, bliss-rock, and rave), they would say it was all illusion, all delusion. Unrealistic. The cultural superstructure to an unsustainable substructure of prosperity and growth fueled by cheap energy and big-spending governments dedicated to long term exploratory projects. A bubble.
But for better or worse, it's been the wind beneath my wings, the energy that has propelled me through all I've done. It's my make-up, my make-believe. Too late to get off that bus now. The process of identity-formation is complete!
I do wonder what generative power the current "everything is a remix"/"nothing new under the sun" episteme will prove to have over the long term - rooted as it is in an insidious downscaling-of-expectations, an implicit defeatism. Recycling might be sound and sensible, but it doesn't promise to be spectacular.
* Of course Melly is "wrong", in the sense that his insistence that pop is inherently anti-nostalgic and intrinsically forward-looking / present-focused would be disproved very soon indeed. His "country of Now" claim in Revolt Into Style is deployed again the section on trad jazz, which he argues was never a true pop phenomenon, despite its exuberant energy and informality, because a/ it wasn't the exclusive property of youth and b/ it was a a revival. But by the time Revolt gets into the bookshops, pop is deep into its own revival - the Fifties rock'n'roll revival -- proving that pop has an inherent capacity to fold back on itself, succumb to nostalgia for its own youth, the era of its emergence. Melly didn't see that coming. (Nor did he envsion the "historical turn" represented by The Band, Fairport Convention, et al - where the past is not turned into a plaything, but is taken seriously). Nonetheless I think Melly is right to identify the Now!ist, neophiliac, generative-not-reiterative side of pop's soul as its primary motor. Certainly the righteous side of its soul, the side worth siding with.
Friday, July 19, 2013
the outward urge
Thought I had read everything by John Wyndham, but I have no recollection of this one at all: The Outward Urge, published in 1959.
[from wiki] It is a future history, set from 1994 to 2194. It tells the story, with chapters at 50-year intervals, of the exploration of the solar system, with space stations in Earth orbit, then moon bases, and landings on Mars in 2094, Venus in 2144, and the asteroids. This is told through the Troon family, several members of which play an important part in the exploration of space, since they all feel "the outward urge", the desire to travel further into space. They all "hear the thin gnat-voices cry, star to faint star across the sky", a quote from The Jolly Company by Rupert Brooke.[2]
In 1994 "Ticker" Troon is killed foiling a Soviet missile attack on a British space station, and is later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
In 2044 a major nuclear war between the USSR and the West wipes out most of the Northern Hemisphere. Inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere — virtually the only survivors of humanity — call it "The Great Northern War", the far earlier war of the same name seeming very minor in comparison. Only after hundreds of years, with radioactivity going down, do expeditions from the south start carefully exploring and preparing to re-colonise the ravaged northern hemisphere.
Brazil is left as the main world power, which then claims that "Space is a province of Brazil". However Australia eventually emerges as a serious rival. Consequently, English and Portuguese become contenders for the position of the major world-wide (eventually, Solar System wide) language.
Eventually, space explorers break away from the tutelage of both earthbound powers and establish themselves as a major third power, called simply "Space"; the Troon Family plays a major role in this as in many other events."
Swiftly overtaken by events, of course... and interesting how one of the later Penguin covers depicts a naturalistic rendering (or is it actually a photograph?) of a rocket taking off from Cape Canavarel, unlike the more abstract or future-fantastic earlier covers.
Fun fact -- "Lucas Parkes" was one of Wyndham's alter-egos, so this is a collaboration with himself.
Hugely popular and widely read in his day, with Day of the Triffids and Midwich Cuckoos both made into successful movies (the latter as Village of the Damned), John Wyndham is a bit forgotten now - he never had the cool or cachet of your Ballards or P K Dicks or Moorcocks, being an older era figure with no bohemian or countercultural affiliations, a sort of bridge perhaps between H.G. Wells and the New Worlds lot. (Never realised that he died in 1969, i.e. several years before I picked up Triffids and The Kraken Wakes.). But under-rated, I think. I really like the cold, dour Britishness of his novels and short stories and recall Midwich Cuckoos and, especially, The Chrysalids as particularly powerful and chilling. The latter would make for a good movie, I reckon.
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