Arthur’s Travels
My wife and I just finished reading Edgar Allan Poe's one and only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". It's really three short stories stuck together like lumps of Play-doh, and the ending leaves a lot to be desired. So it might not be a successful novel, but Poe on his worst day is better than just about anyone else on their best. There are so many tantalizing, wonderful, mysterious and amazing things Poe never elaborates on, but in a weird way it only adds to the story.
There are a lot – a lot – of dates and coordinates peppered throughout the text. I found it bewildering, so I took it upon myself to mark everything in Google Maps. It ended up a massive undertaking – two or three days of my life I'll never reclaim – but it's done. I daresay the below map is utterly exhaustive. Every single date and place mentioned in the story is included. If you ever read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket – and you should – I hope it will make the story less confusing.
One of the best things I came away with was an understanding of the vastness and remoteness of the South Pacific. Poe mentions and island called Tristan D'Acunha, smack dab in the middle of the ocean, between Brazil and South Africa. British entrepreneurs settled it in the early 19th Century, and it's still inhabited to this day. The main settlement, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, is the most remote outpost of Western civilization on the globe.
Two Cheers for the Space Shuttle
Space Shuttle Discovery, 2006. Thanks to NASA for the photo.
The crew of STS 135 is safely back on Earth. Thankfully. Now we can finally lay the Space Shuttle program to rest, and not a moment too soon. For all the backslapping and congratulating going on at NASA, I firmly believe people will look back on the shuttles as a gigantic leap backwards for space exploration.
The Shuttle program had three primary objectives: to make space travel affordable, safe and commonplace. Sadly, it failed colossally on all three counts.
First of all, it costs about half a billion bucks to lob a shuttle into orbit. A Boeing Delta IV rocket, if Wikipedia is to be believed, can push about the same payload into low Earth orbit for one fourth the cost. One fourth!
As for safety, the shuttles would have been much less risky if they’d been configured like the Apollo missions, with a crew/payload capsule on top. Just take a look at the shuttles’ launch configuration; the idea of strapping a big ol’ rocket-powered glider to the side of what essentially amount to three massive fuel bombs is totally insane.
Why do human beings need to go into space at all? That’s the big question now. The answer “because it’s there” is totally unsatisfactory while 3,000 children die of starvation every day in Africa. They are “there”, too.
The truth is, chemical rockets will never take us into the space age. Learning the equations that determine the amount of fuel needed to escape Earth’s gravitational pull in high school physics was an eye-opener for me. More fuel adds more weight, which means more fuel, which means more weight.
Nuclear rockets aren’t the answer, either. You sure as hell can’t watch a nuclear rocket launch half a mile away in a bikini, like you can for the shuttles, not unless you want a 10,000 year suntan. And the crew for a nuclear rocket would have to be shielded from the radiation, which means a massive amount of additional weight. Which means more radiation.
Maybe some genius living in the slums of Bangalore or São Paulo will think up the magical “warp drive” of Star Trek tomorrow. Maybe he or she already has, I don’t know. But for right now, manned space flight seems like an absurd waste of money.
Arthur C. Clarke, one of my favorite authors, famously said “If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.” How false, Mr. Clarke, how false.
I mean, 2001 was ten years ago. Weren’t we supposed to have moon bases and manned missions to Jupiter by now? That’s why I resent people calling things like Twitter and iPads “revolutionary”. The characters in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 are always holding iPad thingies. iPads should be a given, but no. “Revolutionary” now means organizing your photos online, not manned missions to Alpha Centauri.
Yes, we have iPads, but we're also making sweet, sweet love on inter-dimensional planets in the Gamma Quadrant.
It’s becoming increasingly clear the future people like Clarke and Isaac Asimov imagined is laughably naïve, not “conservative”. Never mind space travel – aeronautics, especially for the military, is becoming increasingly remotely operated and robotic. It will probably be even more true for space. Unmanned is just a hell of a lot cheaper, and safer.
So good bye, Space Shuttle! If you’ve taught us Earthlings anything, it’s that we’re not ready for manned space exploration, and probably won’t be for a very long time.
P.S. – Warlord of Mars #8 came out yesterday – check it out! Next issue is the grand finale of the first story arc.
An Incomplete and Annotated List of Things That Annoy Me
1. Fortune cookies containing not fortunes but aphorisms. I demand to know I will one day crush my enemies.
2. Mass emails irrelevant to me beginning with the disclaimer "Hey everyone! Sorry for the mass email..." If you don't do it, you won't have to feel "sorry".
3. DVDs encoded in such a way that the volume for the title screen is ten times louder than the volume of the actual show/movie.
4. Corn chips too wide for the f______ jar of salsa. Not sure why I'm more upset at the chip than the jar, but I am.
5. Locals who get irked at tourists for not knowing their way around a particular place. I'm patient with tourists in Times Square, I expect the same thing when I go abroad, thank you very much.
6 (new!). "Holodeck malfunction" episodes of Star Trek.
7. Spelling one's name "Thom" instead of "Tom" or "Robb" instead of "Rob". Yes, this includes Thom Yorke.
7a. Extraneous final Es. "Olde", "Shoppe", like that. Last names are exempt, but only because changing is a hassle. In other words, I only condemn Thom Yorke for "Thom", not "Yorke".
8. Those f______ Charmin™ ass-bears.
8a. "Cute" corporate mascots in general. Is it any wonder our society breeds serial killers?
9. The letters "c" and "q", which really have no right or reason to exist.
10. Capitalized prepositions and articles in titles (arrgh!). Also: over-zealous use of commas/apostrophes.
11. Fascism (aside from the uniforms).
Raging Doom
The first issue (of three) of the comic tie-in for Rage, id Software's big new title, hit stores last Wednesday. Guess who wrote it! Can you guess? Saw one positive review, two very negative; thankfully, the Google gods have consigned the bad ones to low rankings. Take that!
Andrea Mutti, the artist, makes the comic worthwhile all by himself, and Dark Horse chipped in for some great cover artists, including Stephan Martiniere, the creative director for Rage. Mon Dieu!
And there's a hilarious (to me) YouTube video out there of "Mahalo Video Games Today" featuring Rage, in which the VJ brutally mispronounces both my name and the name of Rex Mundi. So that's great.
However good or bad our Rage comic may be, it's safe to say it will never attain the glory of the semi-mythical Doom Comic.
Arvid Nelson (me!) is a comic book writer, responsible for Rex Mundi and Zero Killer, among other things. I live in Northampton, Massachusetts with my lovely wife. more...Coming Up
- Feb. 15: Dejah Thoris #10