Science Fiction’s two dads, H.G. Wells’ two children

There are probably two men who can claim the title ‘father of science fiction’ (gay dads!): Jules Verne, author of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and H.G. Wells.

I didn’t realise that as well as writing genre-defining classics like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Wells has also been called the father of miniature war gaming.

He wrote two books, Floor Games and Little Wars (what a title), of rules and theory for playing games with children’s toys and toy soldiers. Little Wars includes a description of a game from the point of view of a caracitural general relating it as a battle from his storied past, beginning:

… suddenly your author changes. He changes into what perhaps he might have been—under different circumstances. His inky fingers become large, manly hands, his drooping scholastic back stiffens, his elbows go out, his etiolated complexion corrugates and darkens, his moustaches increase and grow and spread, and curl up horribly; a large, red scar, a sabre cut, grows lurid over one eye. He expands—all over he expands. He clears his throat startlingly, lugs at the still growing ends of his moustache, and says, with just a faint and fading doubt in his voice as to whether he can do it, “Yas, Sir!”

I don’t know anything about war games. (I am a nerd, but not that kind of nerd.) But I like the fact that Wells’ game makes use of spring-loaded cannons firing wooden cylinders. In Little Wars he says, ‘Whenever possible, death should be by actual gun- and rifle-fire and not by computation. Things should happen, and not be decided.’

If you’ve read Infinte Jest, that might make you think of nuclear-annihilation-and-tennis game Eschaton (or it did me, anyway), which similarly operates with real-world actions (tennis ball lobs) impacting on the accepted pretense of a game world (nuclear explosions). Or at least it operates until debate (does real world snow dictate game-world snow?) becomes violence and the end of play.

at 13.20 on
1 December 2009

H. G. Wells
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books
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games
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science fiction

Sending you a Penguin in a letter

While the other cover for Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder discussed in this post at Zoo in the head is probably superior, I do like the Penguin placement here:

I think they did the same with other Orwells at the same time. For a more contemporary example, currently Penguin have an imprint just for James Bond titles, the logo for which is:

Penguin 007 logo. Pictured on the Pentagram-designed Quantum of Solace hardback.

But there must be other examples like this?

at 14.38 on
30 November 2009

Orwell
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Penguin
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books
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cover design
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logos

There goes the empire

A fun piece of information visualization: four great empires of the 19th and 20th centuries (British, Spanish, Portugese and French) are represented by coloured dots, the size of the dots representing that empire’s territorial extent. As the empires grow the dots bulge, but as we approach modernity there’s not nearly as much growth as there is dissolution, and the dots blister and then burst as territories achieve independence.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

It’s attractive and strangely dramatic, if not particularly informative, and I don’t meant that as a terrible criticism. In fact, Pedro M. Cruz, the creator doesn’t consider it either a piece of information visualization or “information art. Either way sounds too pretentious — as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge.” And I’m sure he’d know better than me.

Still kind of fun though!

(via kottke)

at 09.37 on
27 November 2009

info visualization

Detainee 063

On Monday, Greater Than Or Equal To is starting a new project, called Detainee 063. It is going to republish the interrogation log of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, in real time.

The log covers a fifty-day stretch of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay (where he was, and still is, being held on suspicion of terrorism) from 23 November 2002 to 11 January 2003. Each entry will appear on the website exactly seven years after it was first recorded.

For the fifty days of the log, Detainee 063 is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. Often the log is brutal and unpleasant to read. Often it is almost banal – detailing the quotidian, humdrum schedule by which the interrogators mean to apply unbearable pressure to a person’s will.

Within the first hour on Monday, Detainee 063 will refuse water, a tactic that he will come to repeat often. As the days and weeks go on, sometimes an IV drip will be forcibly administered to ensure that he remains well enough to continue. On one occasion, when he has been handcuffed to his seat to prevent him interfering with the IV, he will bite through the tube running into his body. He will be put in a booth covered with images of 9/11 victims. Images of victims will be taped to his clothes. His head and beard will be shaved and female interrogators will be used to cause him discomfort. He will be made to act as a dog, being taught to stay, come and bark. His hands and feet will swell. His heart rate will slow to 35 bpm.

Detainee 063 is meant as a kind of re-enactment. It will use the internet (as well as the site itself, an RSS feed and a Twitter account will be updated) as a means to dramatize torture as it is practiced but not often talked about: not with techniques used in isolation, but the cumulative effect of mistreatment over a prolonged period. I don’t expect many to read it in its entirety but I hope that following it, even for a few days, that being made aware of the passing of time between entries in the log, will make any visitors to the site more aware of the relentlessness of this interrogation, and of relentlessness as an aspect of torture.

On January 22, 2009, two days after assuming office, Barack Obama issued an executive order that the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay be shut down within a year. By the time the last entry of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log is published at Detainee 063, that deadline will almost have arrived.

Update, 23 November: Detainee 063 is up and running. I posted an explanation of the project (similar to this post) at the Detainee 063 blog.

at 16.25 on
20 November 2009

Detainee 063
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the site

With nothing but a bed and a clear cut goal

Too Loud a Solitude is a novella by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal about Haňťa, a compactor of waste paper. Haňťa has for 35 years been making bales of paper, crushing everything from bloody, sickly sweet butcher paper to rare and valuable books. The books he reads reverentially; he takes them home and adds them to the two ton stack perilously held over his head as he sleeps; and he uses them to stud his bales of compacted paper, turning the bales into his own works of art.

This section comes as Haňťa visits an old sweetheart:

… Manča showed me around the cottage, from basement to attic, explaining in hushed tones how an angel had come to her and she had obeyed him and taken up with a ditchdigger and spent all her savings on a plot of land in the woods, and the ditchdigger dug the foundation and slept in a tent with her, but then she threw him over for a bricklayer, and the bricklayer made love to her in the tent and put up all the walls, and then Manča took up with a carpenter and he did all the carpentry work and shared her bed, but then she threw threw him over for a plumber, who slept in the same bed as the carpenter but did all the plumbing, only to be replaced by a roofer, who made love to her and laid her roof with concrete tile but was eventually replaced by a mason, who roughcast all her walls and ceilings by day and slept in her bed by night, until she took up with a cabinetmaker, who made all new furniture in return for her bed, and so it was that Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear cut goal, built herself a house.

at 10.39 on
13 November 2009

books
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reading

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