The Fredösphere

How is it I made it to my forty-nth birthday (yesterday) without knowing it (almost) coincides (probably) with the birthday of the guy I was named after?

Bonus material: check out this truly horrifying bit of Prohibition History and the role of musicians in in predicting the future.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Futurism

More on my favorite mashup, vocal-heavy soundtracks of science-fictional stuff:

Via A Cappella News we read of Gaggle, a not-your-mother's-female-chorus from England with a sound described as "sci-fi riot." Fusty reputations, begone. You can here their heavily post-processed sound at their MySpace place but bewarned, perfect intonation is not a priority.

Via SF Signal comes this animation accompanied by the Schubert Ave Maria (of all things) depicting the rings of Earth—or what the rings of Earth would look like if Earth had rings, like Saturn's. Dang, rings would be cool. We gotta get us some of them rings!



Okay, this last one has no vocal music, but it's futuristic, it's (even better) retro futuristic, and terribly arty: it's the art of Retropolis: The Future That Never Was! Do visit the posters page. Heck, do visit this future! Let's please go there, and never come back.

Labels: Choral, Futurism, sci-fi, VideoClip, vocal

Today I address you, gentle reader, in my role as an aspiring but, for now, frustrated science fiction writer.  First, I direct you to this wonderful bit from Nielsen Hayden, a slush pile reader.  You'd think such an avenging angel would derive sufficient spiteful satisfaction from writing all those rejection letters, but no:  upon discovering a website exists for disgruntled and rejected authors, the angel turns demonic:

What I find weirdest about their take on rejection is that it's all completely personal. I don't just mean the rejection itself, which they're bound to take personally, being writers and all. They take things personally which have nothing whatsoever to do with them [. . .]

and then he tears the authors to shreds.  For example, to the person who was insulted because the rejection came typed on a half-sheet of paper:

Right. I can just see the staff at Prominent Science Fiction Magazine doing the slush, with all their different-size rejection notes stacked up in a little row in front of them. If your story really sucks, you get a rejection note that's mimeographed on a sheet of paper the size of a large postage stamp. If you've got strong writing but defective storytelling skills, you get a half sheet. Acceptances come on foolscap. And so on.

Great stuff.  Read and savor the whole thing.  Thanks to the ever-fascinating John C. Wright for the link.  John has his own list of authorial boo-boos, and his commenters (why can't I seem to attract dozens of clever, literate commenters?  No offense, Steve) riff at length on his "empirical storm troopers."  Not to be missed.

By the way, since I know you're dying to ask me, I have sufficient experience as a writer to have attained Nielson Hayden's level 9 (Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book) which is something I'm pretty proud of.  Sadly, the final level (Buy the book) is level 14.  Five more to go, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize each level is 20 times harder to attain than its predecessor.

Other fun links:  a 13-year-old boy tries out a music-playing gadget called a Walkman and finds it inadequate.  Don finds an animation to accompany the Hoedown from Rodeo.  And finally, Jalopnik has fun with a rendering of a gorgeous but hopeless Bugatti concept car:

[. . .] French industrial designer Bruno Delussu's rendering of a modern Bugatti Type 57 is so far removed from reality that the mind is free to conceive of anything. Say, a France removed by tractor beams from the way of an imminent Nazi invasion. Then allowed to grow in isolation for decades, acquiring high technology on the border of magic, to come up with this thing. A modern take on the Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic, powered probably by ion cannons instead of the original's clockwork straight-eight.

Not to mention that this princess has a chassis clearance so minimal, she would crash if she hit a rock the size of a pea.

Labels: Design, Fiction, Futurism, sci-fi, VideoClip

At the official blog of the Tor publishing house, John Ottinger III notes a Parisian statue that honors the man who could walk through walls.

The most ridiculous political video ever?  A candidate, at least, but let's at least give Nixon credit for pulling off a nice one-liner about Truman, that other piano-playing president.



Too bad Nixon didn't enter that piece in a competition; with his political clout, he could have won!  Meanwhile, Don has heard the future, and it sounds like a nasal Japanese pop diva.

Labels: Futurism, sci-fi, VideoClip, vocal

Why, yes of course, this is Atlantis.  It's just as I remember it:  about as big as Wales, and about 600 miles off the coast of Morocco.

Ah, Atlantis.  How fondly I remember your palm-shaded avenues, your charming little cafes serving spring waters shipped in daily from Bimini by nuclear-powered zeppelins.  I recall many happy hours riding your cable cars powered by crystal technology, or loitering at the Great Library, browsing its excellent DVD collection.  How sad that your rulers grew fat and careless and failed to monitor their glycemic index, or inspect and maintain the island's dikes, which must be 3.5 miles high to keep the sea out.  Alas!  In one hour, destruction came upon you, fair city, and all your inhabitants.  Luckily for me, I was serving on a trade delegation to Shangri La at the time and escaped death, something that can come to me only through violence since my body contains cells that manufacture a rejuvenating élan vitale within the webbed tissues of my fingers and toes.  And did I mention I resemble Patrick Duffy, only better-looking?

Labels: Airship, Futurism, Spooky

My message to the scientists and engineers of the Polywell Fusion experiment:   Why the heck don't you have the spatial resolution of the density to see if the cusps are quasi-neutral on the WB-7, ya lazy, worthless pack o' pinheads?*

I commend to your attention the blog Holy Heroes, wherein you will find a nice post on the sometimes queasy, always interesting topic of crucifixions in comix.  (Wile E. Coyote makes a very unexpected appearance.)  Another topic begging for expert analysis is the use (and especially misuse) of Christian symbolism in anime, which always gives me, when I see it, the thrill of the white guy enjoying cultural imperialism victimhood.

I've been terribly burdened by work lately and the irresistible Facebook vortex, but I do hope to be back to my usual semi-regular posting soon.


*Classical Values has a more appreciative, not to say coherent, reaction.

Labels: Futurism, GraphicNovel, Religion

I haven't spent the time necessary to determine if this trend map for 2009 should be taken seriously, but on a superficial level, it looks deep.  Note the warning of one potential danger:  "people taking trend maps too seriously."  Also, thanks to its wavy tentacle design, I am on the verge of worshiping it as a god.

Labels: Futurism

Who besides Daniel Wolf is blogging brainily about the process of composing?  If there are others, I want to (I should!) know.  Most recently he's making an analogy about the world-building of speculative fiction and role-playing games.  Yeh got yer composing, yeh got yer SF; perfect.

Next, let's sample some SF video.  First, we return to the most SF country that ever was, the USSR, for an animated interpretation of Ray Bradbury's There Will Fall Soft Rains:


...followed by a Star Trek mashup called A Cavalcade of Redshirt Fatalities:



Finally, we explore two interstitial realms of the almost-real and the almost-fake.  Of the former, Design Observer reverse-engineers the Steampunk movement and finds it wanting, making good points but adopting a regrettable "gatekeeper" tone in the process:  how dare these people design when they're clearly not real designers?!  (I like DO; why do I only link when they annoy me?  Maybe I am the regrettable gatekeeper.) Of the almost-fake, check out these "tilt-shift" photos (more here) that make true cityscapes look like cheesy H0-scale models.  Be-yootiful, and don't miss the skeptics in the comments section.

Labels: Composition, Creativity, fun, Futurism, VideoClip

Previously at the Fredösphere we discussed the discrete charm of French science-fiction.  (La Flamme Cosmique!  Métal de Mort!)  While French is an inappropriate language for le futur, Russian seems perfect, especially when spoken in the impatient growl of a Soviet apologist.  Io9 raises the topic; Dark Roasted Blend remains my go-to guy for images (galleries are here, here and here).  It would seem that, in space, all the stars are red.

While researching this post, a few oddities turned up that I cannot turn down:

Turns out there's a literary award for Russian science fiction which, as far as I can tell, is referred to as "Literary Award 'Russian Science Fiction'" (how ... appropriate!) which is interesting only because the trophy they give the winners looks like Howard Roark built a skyscraper model out of chocolate and then left it sitting too close to the radiator.  (Speaking of ill-placed radiators....)

Here's an alt-history novel that until now has flown beneath my radar:  it posits a world where the United States turned communist in 1917, but Russia remained imperial.  It's called Back in the USSA.  Cute.

An expert in ancient engineering techniques reviews some books in his field.  Any fan of the Age of Empires RTS (real-time strategy) game will fall in love with the catapults.  It seems the Romans (and even the Greeks) had some serious firepower at their disposal, including even hand-held weapons that could kill at one hundred yards.

BLDGBLOG has a wonderful collection of fanciful ruins, all from the game Guild Wars.  Don't you just want to eat these up?  I'm tempted to find a city and blow it up, just for the chance to indulge in some spooky/artsy melancholy.  (Memo to the good folks at the Counter-Terrorism Unit:  Just!  Kidding!  Anyway, why would I need a blown-up city when I have one so conveniently located just 45 minutes east of here?)

UPDATE:  Links are fixed now.

Labels: Architecture, Futurism, sci-fi

Science Fiction gets all the cool designed environments; see the 15 best locations from futuristic movies at Oobject (my favs being the Marin County Civic Center and Seaside, Florida), then visit the City of Ember (but only visit; it looks like you wouldn't want to live there; and what's with Bill Murray as Big Brother???  And why does Ember remind me of Ambergris so much?)

Labels: Design, Futurism

The title says it all:  The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized.  (Hat tip 2Blowhards.)

Meanwhile...

Rene's Apple will have what Ann Althouse is having:

I'd rather see a show where philosophers descend on a woman with a perfect exterior and rip into her for her intellectual and spiritual failings, put her on some kind of internally transformative regime, and turn her into a human being of substance. Can we get that?

...and furthermore...

Man Babies.  Plus, have a look at Nazis on the Moon.

Labels: Culture, fun, Futurism, movie, VideoClip

In an earlier post I commented with pleasant surprise on a Swedish composer's attempt to create an opera on a science fiction theme.  Commenters assured me this was hardly the first composer to attempt such a feat.  Daniel Wolf cited as ancient an example as Haydn, which impressed me to no end.  Those of you familiar with my Haydn animus won't be surprised my mental picture of Haydn as a space opera-tor is that of the salt vampire of Planet M-113.

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to add another work to this growing list:  Jacques Offenbach's adaptation of Jules Verne's Le Voyage dans la Lune.  Wikipedia has the details, including a wonderful photo showing costumes and a set from the original lush (but to the modern eye, goofy) production.  Kudos is due (hey!  I conjugates that verb real good!) to io9 for dredging up this information (especially considering that deep historical perspective is not what you expect from a Gawker-related site) in a terribly interesting roundup of info on Georges Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 SF film A Trip to the Moon, which itself was recycled in a trippy music video by The Smashing Pumpkins called Tonight, Tonight:



And I suppose I'll have to comment on The Man that Fell to Earth if I ever get up the courage to watch it.

Space.  And opera.  What else have I overlooked?

Labels: Composition, Culture, Futurism, movie, Opera, sci-fi, VideoClip

Ian Moss has a new blog, with an emphasis on arts management to go along with the composing.

Dark Roasted Blend has one of its gallaries of gorgeous retro-future art.  This time the subject is cities.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

I've been looking for a good video of the Four Bettys for a while now.  I found one with them singing "So Happy Together," but they really deserve something with better sound quality.  Meanwhile, enjoy.  Female barbershop quartets use a two-staff system with treble clef on the top for the tenor and lead and bass clef (transposed up an octave) for the baritone and bass.  This way, arrangements for men's groups can be adopted effortlessly by women's groups, and vice versa.  One more factoid:  as best I can tell, the term "beauty shop quartet" has become moribund; perhaps stillborn is the better metaphor.  One is inclined to be impressed by the female bass (really, a female with something like the range of a male tenor) but don't overlook the difficulty of singing the soprano part, which can get very high, but must always stay under the lead in terms of volume.  Unlike with men's groups, there's no falsetto to solve that problem.

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, Composer, Futurism

William Gibson knocked the sci-fi world on its asteroid years ago with Neuromancer, the seminal cyberpunk novel.  Now he's back with another futuristic story Spook Country.  The futurist has an understanding of the Google "aura" (the googleverse?) that nowadays gathers around a novel (or anything, really), and what is especially interesting is the way he self-consciously manipulates it to his benefit.  Read about it in the Guardian (via ArtsJournal).

Google-driven traffic is a funny thing.  For a long time, about 10% of my traffic was coming from people searching for pictures of Hitler.  I once linked to a painting of Hitler in an over-the-top heroic pose.  It's a classic of totalitarian kitsch.  You can see it here.  (Hey!  I can feel my hits rising as I type!)  Note well, I'm talking about a link to the image; I've never displayed it anywhere on my website, yet for some reason Google sent crowds of people to me.  (Large crowds ... large crowds, chanting in German ... large crowds, wearing swastikas and screaming for blood ... Aaaah!!!)  Such is the power of the Nazi meme.  Hitler is big.  Hitler is hot.

Most recently, the Guernica Philharmonic has been popular with Dutch seekers of googly goodness.  I really don't want to know why.

In the last couple weeks, I've noticed another fascinating phenomenon.  Political blogs that support Fred Thompson for president have begun to refer to themselves as the "Fredosphere."  Oh joy!  Visions of millions of accidental visitors dance in my head!  Maybe I could even sell out to the Thompson campaign, and make my site a portal of some kind.  Money, money, and furthermore, money!

Labels: Culture, Futurism

Via Futurismic, a question:  When Will Science Fiction End?  It's a relative of the question:  will we ever know everything?  Specifically, everything related to science.  As a youth, I held a belief so essential, it was a long time before I realized anyone could hold the opposite point of view, namely, that there will always be more in physics to learn.  (I say physics because it is fundamental; all science is ultimately about the particles.)  In fact, I believed physics was inherently unknowable in its fullness; that any system cannot be fully grokked from the inside (although I would not have been able to put it into those words when I was young).  I still tend toward that belief, but I'm more open to the other point of view, and the possibilities for human mind augmentation (for now, still science fiction) make me wonder how far we can go.

More futurism:  Terry Teachout foretells the death of the last regional critic.

Labels: Culture, Futurism

Ten years after making Metropolis, near the end of the silent era, Fritz Lang directed a sci-fi film called Frau im Mond.  To the modern eye, its a salad of astonishing prescience, laughable retro-futuristic anacronisms, compelling achievements in special effects, compelling (because amusing) crudities in special effects, some great action sequences, and long stretches of boooooring dramatic developement -- just as you would expect.

The first plot points Lang wants to establish is that a certain Professor Manfeldt has determined the mountains of the moon are loaded with gold; he now lives alone, impovershed and bitter because his ideas were mocked by his peers.  That's it.  It takes Lang eleven minutes to lay that out.  Shoot, in a modern sci-fi action movie, we would have seen all that in the first eleven minuts plus seen the professor build a rocket, fly it to the moon and back, invent a new weapon system, use it to blow up some aliens, travel back in time so he could become his own father and mother, then have the only-mostly-dead alien come back to get its butt kicked one more time.

This film is nearly three hours long, so it is not like the thing needed padding.  Honestly, I almost gave up on it about three different times.  For the first two whole hours Lang laboriously introduces Manfeldt's disciple, Wolf Helius, who decides to vindicate the professor by attempting a moon landing.  Eventually it becomes clear the movie is all about Helius and the love triangle he shares with his assistant, Hans Windegger, and Windegger's fiancée; why the irrelevant Manfeldt wasn't cut from the story, I'll never understand.  We also meet the evil Mr. Turner, who works for five of the richest industrialists in the world.  They use threats of violence to take over the project, in order to maintain their control of the world gold market.

Note the extrordinarily repulsive Mr. Turner's English name.  Could that be a bit of continental hostility to Anglo-Saxon capitalist savvy?  It turns out, however, membership in the club of five big shots shows almost James Wattian-levels of sensitivity to diversity:  the group includes one Asian, and one of the white guys is in a wheel chair.  There's one important demographic group that remains shut out, however.

Non-smokers not welcome.

New music was composed for this DVD release of Woman in the Moon.  It's a disappointment -- it's just some guy and a synthesizer.  During the stirring scenes, the music seems to rise to the occasion, but during the dull parts, the music becomes unfocused and only serves to make things duller.  Honestly, I've been to silent film screenings with music improvised live by organists that demonstrated more immagination and sympathy for the flow of the action.

Lang seems to have an aspergery love of diagrams.  I didn't expect a movie from 1929 to have such a geeky engineering thing going.

An animated diagram of planetary gravity fields.

This flawless beauty mesmerizes me -- and that broad on the right ain't half bad either.

If you watch this movie, consider skipping to the last hour.  Once they start rolling out the rocket, things become, dare I say it, exciting.  Lang loves his toy models.  They don't fool the modern eye, but generally they don't embarass, and they're fun to watch.

A fly-over of the outdoor model.

A peek inside a demonstration model of the rocket.

The least convincing model:  cheesy bread, anyone?

Lang makes a stab at hard sci-fi, and the result is only sometimes wildly wrong:  that's quite an achievement for a 1929 film.  For example:  the rocket is emmersed in water just before takeoff, because it is so lightweight, it can't support its own weight otherwise.  Compare this genuinely inspiring scene with a real-live NASA rollout:  not bad!

Just before takeoff, all the men in the audience doff their hats.  It's quite moving, and it seems like a million years removed from today's sensibilities.


Half way to the moon, they find a boy stowed away.  Of course.  To our eyes, the boy's outfit seems vaguely military, and his hair is flipped to the side in a way that stirs some uneasy associations.  Our mind wanders a bit, and we start to think ... no, no, this was 1929.  Those people came along a few years later.  There couldn't possibly be any connection to ... uh oh.

Hail ladder!  I mean, leader!

The boy insists he knows all about rockets.  To prove it, he pulls out a sci-fi pulp magazine from his napsack.

A woman at the mercy of an alien insect.	30 years later:  some things never change.

Labels: Futurism, movie, sci-fi

Jeffrey Hart records in the January 2005 New Criterion his fond memories of the 1939 World's Fair in New York.  (I got my copy only a few days ago.  I don't know who screwed up, the publisher or the post office, but getting a magazine mid-month is pretty pathetic.  Come on, guys, I have needs.)  Hart  was a nine year-old with a season ticket and he visited the Fair repeatedly.  Clearly, it made a lasting impression, particularly the centerpiece:

In the sunshine, the first thing you saw as you came down the boardwalk and into the Fair was its dominating symbols, the Trylon and Perisphere [sic; why not Perösphere?  Looks like someone dropped the ball, har-har] the former a triangular spire fifteen stories high, the latter a gigantic globe a city block across....The Trylon and Perisphere remian in our minds today.  They have become something like the archetypes Jung imagined as central to the mind.  We have them in salt-and-pepper shakers, plates, scarves, pencil sharpeners, glasses, rings, ash-trays.  I have a copper penny rolled oblong with the image of the Trylon and Perisphere stamped on it, a souvenir of the Fair.  I wear it on a silver chain as a necklace along with a silver cross....The two gleaming structures were of course male and female symbols.  Inside the female globe, the designers had gestated their vision of the World of Tomorrow.  The called it Democracity, and it was the most popular exhibit at the Fair.

Let's look carefully at this bun in the Perisphere's oven.  Hart describes it as a model of a Corbu-inspired city planned according to rationalist principles, zoned into massive tracks devoted to worker's housing, industry, agriculture, recreation, and commerce, each linked to the others via superhighways.  Much effort was put into designing the Perisphere total spectator experience, with visitors riding revolving balconies while watching a multi-media presentation:

As the crowd watched from the two circular and suspended balconies, the familiar voice of radio announcer H. V. Kaltenborn exmplained how Democracity functioned.  After two minutes, daylight faded under the great dome of the Perisphere, and as dusk slowly deepened toward dark the dome twinkled with stars.  To a musical accompaniment a thousand-voice chorus sounded from the glittering heavens, while at ten locations on the dome you same images of marching men -- farmers in their work clothes, mechanics carrying tools -- and as they came closer you saw that they represented the various ethnic groups that make up the American metropolis, her presented as an image of national unity.

"Ah-ha!"  you cry; you see why the heck this article is quoted at length here at the Fredösphere -- its the juxtaposition of choral music and sci-fi!  Or at least sci-fi's twin, futurology.

What's with the "thousand-voice" chorus?  Clearly its purpose is to signal that the visit to the Perisphere is a religious event.

That's it.  I don't have any more points to make, really.  I saw it, I thought it was cool, I blogged it.  That's the formula.  I could express my horror one more time at the social engineers, but that's getting old.  I'm even getting tired of laughing at these outdated visions of the future, even though their predictions were so bad they failed to predict obvious stuff like this just six years away.

Labels: Architecture, Culture, Futurism