Remember the mysterious ballet performed on the set of Destination Moon? Here are eightysome of Allan Grant's 1949 photos, assembled from thumbnails into a crude animation. All images are copyright 1950 by Time, Inc.

As I mentioned Monday, I was searching Google's Life magazine photo archive for photos by Allan Grant taken in 1949 or 1950. I was hoping to find previously-unrevealed photos from the set of Destination Moon, the classic science fiction movie co-written by Robert Heinlein.

Google limits the search result to 200 images from this archive, even if a larger number satisfy the search condition. So I was trying "allan grant 1950" to turn up a somewhat different set of pictures than those revealed by "destination moon."

Jackpot. I found 86 more pictures of the DM set. They are tagged Preparation "Moon Ballet."

Recall that I previously found a couple of strange pictures of ballet dancers cavorting on the set. Turns out Grant shot many more. They are mysterious.

( More photos here )
It is evident that someone staged an elaborate performance, by people wearing dance costume, on the set of Destination Moon. Part of this performance involved suspending the dancers on wires. It incorporated both the full-size version of the rocket ship Luna (one dancer is seen clinging to rungs of the ladder on its hull) and the smaller model seen in the "distance."

We may reasonably infer that this surreal performance was filmed, probably using the same cameras, lighting, and crew. The film may or may not have used the Technicolor process that DM used.

It seems very probable that this shooting would have taken place after DM wrapped, or anyway after it completed shooting on its lunar set. This suggests sometime after the second week of December 1949. According to the shooting schedule I found among Heinlein's papers, the film was scheduled to complete shooting on Friday, 9 December, the 23rd day of filming. This was also the final day using the Moon set.

The Moon Ballet has not been mentioned in anything I have read about Destination Moon. Bill Patterson has reviewed all the drafts of the screenplay, and has discovered no plans to include ballet scenes.

Who are the dancers? Who directed and choreographed this? For what film (short? feature?) was the performance intended? Was the film ever released? Is it available on video now?

How do we find out?

1. Google "lunar ballet" or "moon ballet" or similar keywords. (Hey! Apollo 17 visited a Ballet Crater!)

2. Find someone who knows a lot about dancers working near Los Angeles in 1949. See if they can identify any of the people in the photos.

3. Run down the credits of Destination Moon's production designer, set decorator, camera operators, lighting people, etc. to see if they are credited with any ballet-type films around 1950.

4. Find someone who was involved in shooting DM, and ask.

5. See if Allan Grant's estate, or Life magazine, has any information about this shoot beyond that which made it into Google.

Destination Moon's production company was Eagle Lion Films. According to Wikipedia, their lot was at 7950 Santa Monica Boulevard; according to the George Pal Productions callsheet of 18 November 1949, DM shot on stages #2 and #3.

Are there good online forums that attract people who know a lot about Hollywood dancing?

Do you know anybody who can help learn more about this mystery? Pass this along.

Rummaging again through the Google archive of Life, whl and I have found over two hundred photos depicting the filming of Destination Moon, the 1950 film for which Robert Heinlein collaborated on the screenplay, and served as technical advisor.

You may recall the expository cartoon, explaining the principles of spaceflight, embedded within the film. In it, Woody Woodpecker encounters an issue of Life covering the movie he is in. In reality, the April 24, 1950 issue carried a Destination Moon feature, though the cover showed a girl, not a Moon rocket.




Life sent Allan Grant to shoot the production. A few of the photos have captions (I presume these are the ones which appeared in the magazine story) but most of them do not. Fortunately-- though these were the days before DVD extras and "making-of" documentaries were commonplace-- Heinlein wrote a magazine article about the production, which helps in understanding some of Grant's photos. The full text of "Shooting Destination Moon" is not online, but you can find it in the book Requiem, among other places.

Checking the callsheets in the UC Santa Cruz archive of Heinlein's papers, I believe Grant shot these during the first two weeks of December 1949.

A few gag shots crept in. Some are just bizarre.



I'm afraid I can't tell you who these people are. They don't appear in the movie.

( Click here for more photos )

If you're wondering about some of the sets, special effects, props, and costumes shown in these photos, William Max Miller has a good discussion on "The Filming of Destination Moon."

A few more behind-the-scenes photos illustrate an article on Moon rockets in Popular Mechanics, May 1950.


Full-page ad in PopMech for the movie, September 1950.

My article "Antimatter's science fiction debut" has appeared in the September 2008 issue of Symmetry magazine, on page 32.

Accompanying it is a "Logbook" feature displaying a carbon copy and Astounding page from Jack Williamson's first "Seetee" story, "Collision Orbit." (Logbook usually features a primary source in the progress of science, such as a page from a lab notebook, a letter, or a computer printout.)

I proposed an article, noting that an Astounding page might be used as an illustration, and Kurt Riesselmann, the managing editor, suggested that it could be the basis for a Logbook item. That's when I realized that the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at Eastern New Mexico University, where Jack taught for decades, has his papers. Sure enough, we were able to obtain a scan of the author's yellowing carbon copy for "Collision Orbit."



Faithful readers of this journal will recall that I began working on this last winter, reconstructing the trail through physics, astronomy, and science fiction that led to the writing of the Seetee series.

"Collision Orbit" wasn't the first SF story to feature antimatter, but it definitely put antimatter on the map. Oh, and by the way, for this story Jack Williamson coined the word "terraforming." The sequels, later collected as books, cemented "seetee" as a prop in the imagination of later SF writers.

I've put together a talk about this, "How Antimatter Became a Plaything of Science Fiction," and I'll be giving it for the first time this coming Sunday at Conclave 33 in Romulus, Michigan. It's scheduled for 11 to noon. I may be repeating the talk at other SF conventions. Catch it if you're interested.

2008: A Pungent Message

I received a very peculiar e-mail today: an offer to sell a sauce factory. In India. It can also bottle pickles, relishes, and chutneys.

Your opportunity to buy a plant making and bottling sauces, pickles, relishes and chutneys.

Now due to the success of the products a full-scale factory has been set up and is in full operation in India.

You can buy this immaculate equipment, which produces 4000 bottles of 250ml (1000kg) per 8-hour shift.

Everything is here for you to start up. The price is ridiculously low, as the plant must be cleared by the last week in July.

Everything for £65000+VAT

FACTORY CONTENTS

Junheinricht 3 wheeled Counter Balance Forklift and Charger (Fully serviced) * Large Stainless Steel Table with lower Shelf * Shrink Wrapper machine + Spare Large & Small Polythene Rolls * Hillsman Bottle Blower * Sessions of York Automatic Labeller with date, batch code and bar code printer * Spare parts for labelling different sized containers (Fully Serviced) * Zebra Thermal Label Printer for outer case bar codes and Food Service Labels + 9 spare rolls of labels *Mettler Multirange Scales ID1 – weighs upto 150Kg * Small Wheeled Stainless Steel Table with lower shelf * Williams Double Door Refrigerator * Williams Walk in Freezer * Data Logger to monitor freezer temperature with up-to-date reports and software * 250Kg Steam/Oil Jacketed Cooking Vessel with Auto-Stirrer and Side Scrapers, High Shear Homogeniser and Insulated Outer Jacket (Fully Serviced) * Tricool Sheik Oil Generator *Universal Semi Automatic Filler Machine * Ferrous, Non-Ferrous and Stainless Steel Metal Detector * Universal Capper with Changeable Parts for different sized caps

Buckets for Caps * Hydrovane Air Compressor HV02

Desks x 3 * Filing Cabinet *Large Storage Cabinet *Fire Extinguishers x 2 plus health and safety signs *Storage Heaters x 3 *Dolly Trolley x 3 *Heavy Duty Plastic Crates x 50 *Pallet Racking – holds 18 pallets *Pallet Hand Pump truck (1t) *Trolley Stainless Steel Double Knee Operated Hand Wash Sink *Locker x 1 – containing white coats and disposable hats and coats *Mirror *Paper Towel Dispenser *Fan Heaters *Double Tube Insectocuter *Set of Strip curtains for Shutter doors *Stainless Steel Bin *Storage Heater x 2 *Fire Extinguishers x 2 and Health and Safety signs * Stainless Steel Shelf *ADT Alarm – Connected via redcare to local police * Brute Ingredients Buckets x 18 *Tote Wheeled Ingredients Bins x 4 *Large Utility Sink – connected to water heater *Paper Towel Dispenser *Stainless Steel Bin *Separate Mop Water Sink *Insectocutor *Hose for Wash Down *Extractor Fan *Plastic Coated Fluorescent Lighting *Plastic Clean room * Skirting *Large Stainless Steel Table with Draw and lower shelf *Storage Heater *Fire Extinguishers x 2 plus health and safety signs *Various Temperature Sensors *PH Meter *Various Utensils * Large Wheeled Stainless Steel Table with Lower shelf *Large Stainless Steel Table * White Coats x 6 *Box of Disposable Coats * Industrial Sterilising Fluid x 40 ltrs *Industrial Washing-Up Liquid x 10 ltrs

Photographs available Call or Email

Tel: [DELETED] Mob: [DELETED]

Fax: [DELETED]

Email: [DELETED]

I dismissed a brief daydream in which I move to India and become the Maharajah of Chutney.

1952: Willis and the Sauce-Bottles

Reading about this factory put me in mind of an essay penned by the legendary fanwriter Walter A. Willis, of Belfast, in 1952:

We were all the sort of people who read at meals and if there was nothing else to read we would read the lables on the jars and things on the table. We soon found that we all knew off by heart the lable on a sauce known as "H. P." Not only did this lable carry a much greater wordage than any marmalade jar, it was of immensely higher literary standard. For one thing, part of it was in French, which gave it an immense distinction in the eyes of us Francophiles. The lable had three sides. The middle one had a picture of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, a statement that the sauce was made by Garton and Company, and a description of its constituents-- pure malt vinegar and oriental spices. On the lefthand side was the blurb in French--"Cette Sauce de premier choix...." --which we intoned with the solemnity we gave to Baudelaire and Rimbaud. And on the righthand side was a copy of a certificate by two public analysts that they had " regularly taken samples from stock and found the sauce to be in every way pure and wholesome. --signed A. Bostock Hill and William T. Rigby. " Read More...

(Thanks to Judy Bemis for putting this on-line.)

If only Willis had lived to receive this spam! He might have bought the thing himself. Sixty-five thousand pounds seems cheap, and apparently they throw in a Vat.

Imagine a factory churning out a thousand kilograms of sauce per eight-hour shift, where the copy on all the labels is written by Walt Willis! The mind boggles.

At last Willis, dressed in a white coat, working by the glow of plastic coated fluorescent lighting, could have achieved the perfect fusion of Sauce-Bottle Fandom and Fanzine Publishing. It's the fanzine you can pour on a steak! It would have been great.

1996: On Reading the A1 Label

Back when Willis's article was only a rumor to me, I set down my own thoughts culled from a lifetime of reading sauce-bottles.

( Flashback to 1996: Ruminations on Sauce-Bottle Culture )

I thank Al von Ruff for his efforts to bring me to a more enlightened state. I think I'll go now and eat something I can put sauce on.

NPR's Morning Edition this morning featured a story about growing meat without growing animals. Not only did they refer to Alexis Carrel, but they interviewed Frederik Pohl about The Space Merchants/Gravy Planet.

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay "Fifty Years Hence": "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill's comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist kept his experiment small, but it fed many an imagination, including that of author Frederik Pohl.

Pohl wrote the 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants, in which tissue-cultured meat gets a starring if inglorious role — it's the starter ingredient for an ever-growing lumpen food source known affectionately as Chicken Little.

But Pohl, now almost 90, suspected the novel he wrote with Cyril M. Kornbluth wouldn't stay science fiction for long.

"Actually, when Cyril and I wrote the book, I thought we would see much of it actually happening," he says.

Extra bonus points for quoting Winston Churchill!

(By the way, today is the 81st anniversary of the transatlantic flight of Carrel's pal Charles Lindbergh.)

Adding to my antimatter timeline I have extended my research a bit further, with the kind help of other scholars:


I've learned that Physics Today ran an obituary for Prof. Vladimir Rojansky of Union College on page 76 of the August 1981 issue, along with a photo. I believe Rojansky coined the term "contraterrene" in 1935.

I've established that the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't know this. Perhaps I can help.

I've ascertained that Jack Williamson's manuscript carbons are in the collection at Eastern New Mexico University, where he taught for so many years, but that most of his letters from John Campbell are not.

I've found that CERN has an Antimatter FAQ to deal with questions about Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, an antimatter novel I have not read.

Q. Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?

A. No.

I've wondered how antimatter got into Star Trek. This doesn't seem to be documented, but I suspect Harvey P. Lynn, a physicist at the RAND Corporation, is responsible. I've decided it's not connected to the Seetee stories. Antimatter propulsion for spacecraft was a common idea in the early Sixties, as a browse through my personal astronautics library will reveal.

I have now read the book version of Seetee Ship. The seams of the fix-up really show, especially between the second story and the third, where a formerly supporting character suddenly becomes the point-of-view guy, and vice versa.

The ideas are nicely inventive: Rock rats live on "terraformed" asteroids-- Williamson coined this term in these stories. An energy crisis is forseeable, since supplies of easily-mined fissionables are dwindling. Contraterrene asteroids are a terrifying hazard to be avoided, but a few rock rats dream of manipulating CT and building CT tools. The key is a "bedplate," a way of magnetically supporting a CT machine without touching it, and this is difficult to develop. Some characters want CT technology as a boundless source of energy, others are seeking annihilation weapons; the tension between the two anticipates the dilemma of fission that was about to unfold in our own world.

A review by james_nicoll appears here. (I am pleased to see that I am not the only guy who sometimes recycles his Usenet postings for Livejournal.)


(That's the Antiproton Source in the background, just behind the steam coming from the circular Booster Pond. AP Zero, the building over the antiproton target, is in the upper left corner.)

Did you ever wonder how Jack Williamson came to write a series of science fiction stories about antimatter?

1928 Paul Dirac's relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics shows that the positron may exist.

1932 Carl Anderson discovers the positron in cloud-chamber photographs. Physicists speculate about other anti-particles (what we now call antimatter).

1933: Dirac concludes his Nobel Prize lecture by saying: "If we accept the view of complete symmetry between positive and negative electric charge so far as concerns the fundamental laws of Nature, we must regard it rather as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive protons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about, these stars being built up mainly of positrons and negative protons. In fact, there may be half the stars of each kind. The two kinds of stars would both show exactly the same spectra, and there would be no way of distinguishing them by present astronomical methods."

1935: Vladimir Rojansky speculates that negative-energy "hole" counterparts of protons and neutrons may exist, forming "contraterrene matter." (It seems probable that Rojansky coined this term.)

1937: George Gamow speculates further in his book on nuclear structure.

1940: Rojansky speculates that contraterrene bodies may exist elsewhere in space, possibly including some comets and meteors. Later he suggests looking for an increase in cosmic rays when a comet passes near the Earth.

September 1940: Boaters witness a screaming sound and a mysterious explosion in Long Island Sound. No artillery can be found to account for this.

February 1941: Lincoln LaPaz suggests that contraterrene meteors might explain terrestrial craters where no meteoritic debris is found. Samuel Herrick immediately suggests that the September "Phantom Bertha" event may be an instance of CT impact.

3 March 1941: James Stokely writes "Exploding Atoms Dig Craters?" for Science Service and pop-science readers become aware of the controversy.

April 1941: H.H. Nininger doubts LaPaz. They wrestle.

April 1941: "Reason," Isaac Asimov's second robot story, describes robots as having "positronic" brains, because it sounds cool.

8 April 1941: John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, writes a four-page letter to Robert Heinlein. He describes contraterrene physics, then sketches the background to a story about asteroid miners who gather CT material for an energy source.

10 April 1941: Heinlein interested in writing CT story, but, uncomfortable about his ignorance, requests more physics information.

14 April 1941: Campbell cites references for contraterrene matter, offers further speculation about methods of mining CT.

26 April 1941: Heinlein informs Campbell that he has trouble finding a story to fit the CT background, and may drop the project.

May 1941: Heinlein huddles with his atomic physics guru, Robert Cornog of Berkeley, regarding contraterrene matter.



Mid-1941: R.S. Richardson writes article "Inside Out Matter" for the December issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

August 1941: C.C. Wylie weighs in against the CT hypothesis for "Phantom Bertha."

21 November 1941: Campbell writes Jack Williamson "a long letter about CT physics. He outlines a story idea he had offered Heinlein, who isn't going to use it because he has 'more on hand than he wants to write anyway.'"



July 1942: Williamson, writing as "Will Stewart," publishes "Collision Orbit" in Astounding.



November 1942: Stewart's "Minus Sign" in Astounding.



January 1943: "Opposites--React!" in Astounding.

February 1949: First installment of "Seetee Shock" in Astounding.



1951: Setee stories collected in fixup book, "Seetee Ship" from Gnome Press.

Once Williamson had written stories around the idea, antimatter became firmly established in the prop-box of science fiction.

Couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to get up and do something else.

I've just been watching an interesting talk on TV by David M. Friedman, author of The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever (not to be confused with Prof. David D. Friedman, author of Harald, with whom I occasionally correspond).



The Immortalists is the story of the friendship between Charles A. Lindbergh, first man to fly the Atlantic alone, and Dr. Alexis Carrel, eccentric medical pioneer. Friedman's talk made it sound very much worth reading.

Carrel developed a technique for suturing blood vessels, an important step on the road to transplanting organs. For this he received the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Carrel worked on tissue culture, becoming the first to observe cancer cells growing outside the body.

Working with Lindbergh in the 1930s, Carrel developed a perfusion pump that could circulate blood through a disembodied organ.

Carrel believed that cells could keep dividing indefinitely (this is no longer believed correct). Beginning in 1912, he kept cells from the heart of an embryonic chicken alive and growing for over 20 years in his lab.

I want to jot down something about a topic Friedman may have missed: Carrel's influence on writers of science fiction. This has been bouncing around my head for years, and maybe it's time I told someone.

SF is storytelling about the ideas the Age of Science gives us. So SF authors are always looking for information about science and technology and society, plucking ideas and hoarding them away.

Among other things, scientific notions that get a lot of attention in the popular media tend to show up in SF stories. So fiction can be a funhouse mirror reflecting, in distortion, fashions in the pop science of its era.

Think of the way General Semantics shows up in the SF stories of so many different writers in the 1940s and 1950s, or O'Neill's space colonies in the 1970s and 1980s, or the notion that RNA has something to do with memory, or intelligent dolphins.

It's important that Carrel loved publicity, and was always happy to take phone calls from reporters. His doings were frequently reported in the Sunday supplements. When in 1935 he wrote a book for laymen, Man the Unknown, it became a best-seller. (I gather he was worried about inferior races overwhelming superior races, and therefore big on eugenics, among other things.)

How did Carrel's ideas work their way into science fiction?

To answer this well, I should read Carrel's book, Friedman's book, and some other histories, and comb a mountain of SF looking for clues.

Instead, I will answer quickly, with some examples off the top of my head. Maybe this will help somebody else discuss this in more depth. Maybe somebody already has, but I am ignorant of the work. If you have other examples, or opinions on my remarks, please leave a comment.

1. In L. Sprague de Camp's "The Gnarly Man," about a prehistoric survivor living in New York, there is a celebrated and theatrical surgeon who insists that his assistants wear purple robes in the operating room. Carrel and his assistants wore unusual black robes (everybody else was required to wear hoods, but Carrel got to wear the Special White Surgeon's Hat).

2. Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth included the "Lindbergh-Carrel pump" keeping geezers alive in Search the Sky. I think it shows up in another of Fred's stories as well.

3. In The Space Merchants or Gravy Planet, again by Pohl and Kornbluth, a major food source is "Chicken Little," a giant blob of immortal chicken-heart tissue connected to a nutrient supply. Workers slice meat off the outside of Chicken Little, and it keeps growing more.

4.I believe there is Carrel-influenced stuff in Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, but you know, I've forgotten what it is. (The inventive novel is also saturated with pop-science ideas from the works of Korzybski, Wiener, and others.)

5. Arch Oboler, the master of radio horror, wrote a memorable 1938 episode of Lights Out, "Chicken Heart," in which a tissue-culture experiment escapes from the laboratory and grows to monstrous size, engulfing an entire city. (Realaudio here courtesy of David Szondy, starring the great Hans Conried.) This may sound stupid as I describe it, but it's actually scary. I told you he was a master.

6. Holding up a second mirror to distort Oboler's already distorted image of Carrel's work, comedian Bill Cosby recounted hearing the forbidden Lights Out as a terrified kid, The plot points of Oboler's story are present, but in Cosby's telling it becomes one of the most hilarious comedy routines I've ever heard. It's recorded on the 1966 album "Wonderfulness," in a track also entitled "Chicken Heart."

So. Anybody up for further Carrel-spotting?

It has become interesting to ask the age of Professional Guests of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention. And how long they were working in the field before the Worldcon honored them.


Birth year vs. year of Worldcon for Professional Guests of Honor

Sources:

Wikipedia entries on individual World Science Fiction Conventions (Worldcons) and Guests of Honor and Internet Science Fiction Database (ISFDB) bibliographies of authors and editors.

Rules:

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror count.

From my graphs, I eliminated Pro GoHs not known as authors or editors (e.g. artists, an essayist (Ley), GoHs from TV and motion pictures). In the case of some artists, it was difficult to learn the date of their first work in the field.

I eliminated the Ballantines because I'm not sure of the date of their first SF or fantasy work.

Most GoHs primarily known as editors have also written stories; I used date of first sale to mark their entry into the field.

I'm not sure I have accurate figures on the first sales of Wolfgang Jeschke, Josef Nesvadaba, or Sakyo Komatsu. I did the best I could.

Ages are calculated hastily as the difference between birth year and Worldcon year, rather than scrupulously by looking at the calendar date of each. Think of them as estimates.

Goofs:

I left Elisabeth Vonarburg out when I made the graphs. Born 1947, GoH in 2009, first sale 1979. Sorry.


Years Since First Contribution to SF vs. Worldcon Year


Birth Year minus Year of First Contribution to SF vs. Worldcon Year
( Ugly text lists behind cut )

Stan Freberg once made a commercial for Sunsweet Prunes starring visionary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury.

I was recently watching an episode of Genndy Tartakovsky's excellent cartoon Samurai Jack and had the following thought:

I wish Roger Zelazny had lived to see this. I think he would have enjoyed it.

shsilver pointed out a review by Paul Di Filippo of Jeff Duntemann's novel The Cunning Blood:

Let me just say at the outset that if I could be sure a 25-year moratorium on his or her SF writing would allow any individual writer to produce such a great book, I'd insist on making it part of SFWA's bylaws.

Duntemann has obviously not been ignorant of the developments in the SF field since 1980. This book is absolutely au courant, and actually extends the Great Work of SF in several unexpected directions.

Wow.

Here is my review of The Cunning Blood. Unlike Mr. Di Filippo's review, it is not based upon reading Mr. Duntemann's novel. My experience with the novel is confined to carrying many boxes full of it upstairs to shsilver's attic from pallets delivered to his garage by the bookbinder.

The Cunning Blood is a heavy book. It comes in boxes weighing about thirty-four pounds. To the prospective reader, I would recommend shifting the box to one's shoulder, as it becomes somewhat easier to bear the burden that way. Truly devoted lovers of hard SF may find that five or six of these boxes will stack neatly on a hand truck; however, this is useful only for negotiating the level parts of Domus Argentus.

In addition, many readers may, I have a hunch, wish to bend over, not only while passing through the rather short door to the attic, but also while evading the rafters therein. This space is easily high enough to accommodate a substantial print run of hardcover novels, but is a bit inadequate for the typical adult reader.

I was able to see that The Cunning Blood features a handsome and vivid, if weird, cover by the talented Todd Cameron Hamilton. Had he been present, I would have complimented him on another in a long series of excellent cover paintings, and then wheedled him into carrying some more boxes of books upstairs.

It is exciting to have friends who are starting up a small-press publishing operation, but I caution you that it may also prove to be exhausting at times.

To summarize my encounter with this new novel, I can definitely say that Jeff Duntemann impressed me as an author on his way up; though if sales are brisk, as I expect they will be, his stock will no doubt drop lower.

As an indirect result of the Nebula Awards festivities hosted in Chicago by shsilver, daddy_guido, and other friends, I got my picture in Fermilab Today again.

Google News says that the news of Secretary Ridge's departure is only four hours old, but I see it's already airing on C-SPAN 1 tonight in a few minutes:

06:26 pm News Conference: Secretary of Homeland Security Resignation
Department of Homeland Security
Thomas Ridge , Department of Homeland Security

Now I'm imagining a story whose protagonist hacks into the C-SPAN site and discovers that, by altering the scheduled events listed there, he has the power to change the real world.

07:00 pm News Conference: Osama Bin Ladin Capture
Pentagon
Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense

08:30 News Conference: Mars Base One Dedication
Mars Base One
Lance Bass, NASA

Alas, it would probably devolve into a heap of cliches. The Twilight Zone is dead. And they've already made The Lathe of Heaven into a TV movie. Twice!

(Favorite joke from The Daily Show, speculating months ago about Ridge's eventual resignation: "Sources close to the Secretary say he wants to spend more time at home, scaring his family.")

Spotted (via Talking Points Memo) an example of science fiction being used in the presidential campaign: a flyer showing... actually, it's a little hard to make out what it's showing, but gasmasks appear to be involved. Anyway, the text is self-explanatory.

(AP) Florida Red Zone -- August 14th, 2007 -- President Kerry warned parents and children in South Florida that mandatory radiation and chemical gear would be required to be worn "for the forseeable future" since the Suitcase Dirty Bomb terrorist attack on South Florida in the spring. The first day of school was chaotic, as teachers and school officials attempted to bring some ...

Oooh, I'm so scared.

(Radiation and chemical gear?)

Vote for Kerry, and dirty bombs will contaminate your schoolchildren.

Vote for Bush and, for some reason, they won't.

This ought to sway those undecided voters.

I should say, lest I go too long without an entry here, that we are back from our triple voyage to Boston, to Woods Hole, and to Detroit.

Worldcon was, as usual, sprawling, riotous, and busy. I saw many friends and rushed by too many others. Made a few new ones.

Woods Hole was a contrast. Hanging out in a beautiful house for days, playing tourist around the seashore, riding bikes, meeting robot submersibles. This was just what K. needed. Our hosts treated us royally; it was very relaxing--

Except for the steady counterpoint of phone calls to Florida. I'm responsible for my mom's house. We'd hoped to put it on the market soon... but then Hurricane Frances came along. Friends and family down there helped, but they had their own problems with evacuation, storm damage, living without electricity and water, and so forth. The house lost a lot of shingles from its roof. Getting a roofer to help was a stroke of luck; we'd been on his schedule to get an estimate from him before the storm hit, so he put us at the head of the line. Now he's put down a layer of stuff which should keep further rain out until he can get the new roof on. Ivan had me biting fingernails for a while there.

Anyway, I think we're okay for now, and we'll go down and work on the house very soon, modulo subsequent hurricanes.

--In Detroit we attended a marvelous party where people swirled around for hours, changing seats and doing nothing but converse with each other. I was really digging it, as you might imagine.

Time to do laundry, and pick up the loose ends of housework we abandoned in the rush to pack.

I've been given a tentative schedule for my program items at Noreascon 4, the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention. It's happening from Thursday, 2 September through Monday, 6 September.

Thought I might share, though all times, topics, and participants are SUBJECT TO CHANGE AT THE WHIM OF THE NOREASCON COMMITTEE-- so don't rely on my word alone. In fact, it's fairly likely that there will be further changes to my schedule. But this will give you some idea what I'll be doing.

Thursday 5:00pm Rocketship Talk (with the Reactor Brothers!)

Bill Higgins, Jordin T. Kare

Got a problem with your family spacecraft? The Reactor Brothers, Fiss'n'Fuse, will troubleshoot your "ride" and get you back on the spaceways. Unless they don't.

Friday 1:00pm The Cassini Mission

Jeff Hecht, Bill Higgins (moderator), Geoffrey A. Landis, Larry A. Lebofsky

Barring catastrophe, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which entered orbit around Saturn on July 1, will be exploring the Saturn system during Noreascon. This is the first spacecraft to visit the ringed planet since Voyager 2 passed through in 1981. What has it already learned? What more will it learn during its four-year mission to Saturn and Titan? What more do we want to know? What's next? It's another neat space stuff panel.

This should be good. Hecht is a science writer, Landis is a physicist, NASA experimenter, and SF author; Lebofsky is a planetary astronomer studying (among other things) ring systems.

Friday 2:00pm The MIT Media Lab: A Visit From the Future

Sandy Pentland, Bill Higgins (moderator), Marvin Minsky

What's cookin' at the Media Lab? MIT's well known research organization has garnered a reputation as a leading-edge center for developments in machine understanding, affective computing, advanced interface design, nanomedia, silicon biology and digital expression, among other fields, that may influence how we use technology in the years ahead - not to mention provide fertile ideas for science fiction stories. This panel features presentations from Lab researchers on a sample of current activities.

(I volunteered instantly to moderate this one. I don't have any connection to the Media Lab, but I hope I can ask intelligent questions.)

Friday 3:00pm Teaching Science With Science Fiction

Guy Consolmagno, Bill Higgins, Larry A. Lebofsky

Many of today's scientists were inspired to their careers by science fiction, but how effective is SF in introducing science to a non-science oriented student? How effective are SF conventions as venues for presenting science to the public? Which books work best in conveying not only the facts of science, but how science is done? What strategies work best in a typical college classroom? Which authors are most popular with the students? What books just "don't work?"

(It's highly likely this one will move to a different timeslot.)

Friday 6:30-7:00 pm Technobabble Quiz

Howard Davidson, Bill Higgins (moderator), Jordin T. Kare

We're going to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow of our panelists as they compete to (a) explain in their best technobabble just how to do some SF cliche, (b) catch science errors in published SF technobabble, and (c) determine whether a particular selection of technobabble is real science, published SF, or something made up just for the quiz!

Sunday 12:00 noon The Kids Next Door...in Space!

Bill Higgins, Jordin T. Kare

Building a Space Station!

This is a kids' track item, but I'm not sure what it entails. I imagine it will get a more detailed description soon.

Sunday 1:00pm Risky Business

Bill Higgins, Geoffrey A. Landis, Mark L.Olson

Risk acceptance vs. risk aversion in humans, and how it might affect things like evolution, scientific investigation, and (especially) exploration/manned space flight.

Monday 11:00am Obsolete High Technology

Bill Higgins, Jordin T. Kare (moderator), Robert A. Metzger, Charles Stross

What was the highest of tech in 1910? Radio and the Titanic. 1940s: Enigma, bombsights and fission. 1960s: IBMs S360 (and the Pill?), and a man on the Moon. Cutting-edge SF ideas quickly become relegated to background items in the next generation of SF (such as nanotechnology). What do you think will most quickly become quaint tomorrow?

Others who have posted their tentative schedules:

Mary Kay Kare and Jordin Kare

Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Cory Doctorow

I've always been impressed with Michael Wilmington, the Chicago Tribune's film critic, for the familiarity with, and respect for, the body of printed science fiction he exhibits in his reviews of SF movies.

In today's Trib, with I, Robot as his springboard, Wilmington ruminates on the place of SF in culture, and on his own fascination with it.

( Excerpts here: )