Space Rapture

Check out this online doctoral dissertation: Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization (via Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean).

The author interprets the "High Frontier" vision of Gerard K. O'Neill (and the push for space colonization in general) as a modern, secular version of Rapture theology:

Space colonization, like its predecessor ascension fantasy, the Rapture, has always involved a tension between the liberation of a holy vanguard and the imminent destruction of the Earth. With the rise of modern technology, rocketry and space travel became, for fundamentalist Christians and technological determinists alike, the manmade tools and signs of an imminent apocalypse.

There's a similar dissertation waiting to be written about belief in the Technological Sigularity, first spoused by Vernor Vinge. Not to mention Frank J. Tipler and his book The Physics of Immortality. Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod notoriously said that the Singularity is "Rapture for nerds".

By the way, what kind belief/movement would count as techno-gnosticism?

A mood, an effect

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition)

When I start a story, I do have a mood, which is hard to explain – a certain feeling, or an idea. Then when I write the story, I make every aspect of it relevant or appropriate to this mood – which would include landscape, architecture, [...] language, costumes, everything. [...] All the parts of the story should be consistent and in line with the mood, generating the mood, reinforcing the mood.

(Jack Vance: interview in Cosmopolis#42)

Versatilidad

Como prueba, me sugirió que reescribiese La Ilíada con el estilo y enfoque de los personajes de Sin novedad en el frente, y viceversa. Ambas tareas fueron completadas, y Oannes me felicitó. En consecuencia, juzgó que yo estaba capacitado para contar esta historia.

(Juan Miguel Aguilera y Javier Redal: Hijos de la Eternidad)

I want to know

Gloop and Gleep from The Herculoids. Were they shoggoths?

Perhaps in a new, edgy adaptation intended for mature tastes. Also, Zandor, Tarra and Dorno should become a dysfunctional family, because that would be more mature and stuff.

Mistagogos Melindrosos

No se encontró ningún pasillo subterráneo después de tumbar las paredes y levantar los suelos de las habitaciones inferiores, aunque Morghi llegó incluso a retirar las losas de piedra bajo una imagen obscena de Zhothaqquah, que ocupaba una de las habitaciones más inferiores. Dicha operación la había llevado a cabo con verdadera repugnancia, ya que el dios peludo y rechoncho, con sus rasgos de murciélago y cuerpo de gusano, resultaba terriblemente desagradable para el supremo sacerdote de la diosa-cierva Youndeh.

(Clark Ashton Smith: La Puerta de Saturno)

The narcissism of minor differences

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of 'the narcissism of minor differences', a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.

(Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its discontents)

The cantons of Shant were alike only in their mutual distrust. Each regarded as Universal Principle its own customs, costumes, jargon and mannerisms, and considered all else eccentricity.

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Except for rivers, the land lacks natural boundaries, but boundaries and borders aplenty have been created, to delineate 1,562 separate dominions, each jealous of its identity, each cherishing its own rotes and rites, each celebrating its distinctive cuisine and scorning all others as filth and scum, each considering itself the single home of civilization among 1,562 barbaric, incomprehensible and unpleasant neighbors.

(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)

A crappy way to die

As Golyakhovsky remembered it, a severely burned man identified only as "Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant," was brought in by stretcher. "I couldn't help shuddering," Golyakhovsky recalled. "The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. ... It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive...."

Golyakhovsky saw the man's mouth moving and bent down to listen. "Too much pain -- do something, please -- to kill the pain" were the tortured words he could make out.

"Sergeyev" was scorched everywhere but the soles of his feet, where his flight boots had offered some protection from the flames. With great dimculty the doctors inserted intravenous lines into his feet (they couldn't find blood vessels anywhere else) and administered painkillers and medication. "Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed," Golyakhovsky remembered realizing immediately. "And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering." The man lingered for sixteen hours before dying.

From here.

Lem's Solaris, or, Kuhn before Kuhn

At one point in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, the protagonist goes to a library and examines the avaliable literature on the science of "Solaristics". He finds that the history of that discipline is characterized by a succession of paradigms and research programs that begin with a hopeful earnestness, then become mired in the fundamental inscrutability of the planet Solaris, and are finally discarded in favor new-and-coming approaches that promise a fresh and more fruitful way of looking at things.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination.

(Stanislaw Lem: Solaris)

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloidomechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the 'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data.

(ibid.)

The publication of Lem's novel in 1961 predates that of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a year. Lem was certanly in tune with the zeitgeist, because passages like the ones I quoted above are powerfully reminiscent of Kuhn's conception of the history of science.

Solaris is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of science. The novel presents a worst-case scenario, where any real progress in impossible. Since its object of study is ultimately inscrutable, the history and evolution of "Solaristics" is sufficiently explained in sociological terms. I wonder if string theory has a bad case of "Solaristics".

The english translation of Solaris is based on the french translation from the polish original, so english readers are twice removed from Lem's original words. Strangely appropiate, since one of the themes of the novel is the impossibility of communication.

Bad Ronald, de nuevo

Han colgado una interesante reseña de la novela de Jack Vance Bad Ronald en el blog planells fact&fiction:

Este artículo fue un informe para una editorial, escrito en 1984, a fin de interesarla en la publicación de la novela de Vance aquí comentada. Innecesario decir que esta novela sigue aún hoy día inédita en castellano, lo cual debería avergonzar a todos los editores tanto de entonces como de ahora.

Incluso en inglés resulta difícil de encontrar, al menos por precios razonables. La Edición Andreas Irle imprime bajo demanda volúmenes agotados de Vance, pero hace falta un número mínimo de potenciales compradores. Consultar la página para más señas.

¡Vanceanos políglotas! Os conmino a mandar un correo a la editorial mostrando interés. Si se suscita el suficiente, quizás se decidan a publicar la dichosa novela.

Mi reseña de la tv-movie setentera basada en Bad Ronald se puede leer aquí. Y si algún cinéfago ha visionado la adaptación francesa, Méchant garçon, estaría interesado en conocer su opinión.

M. John Harrison on worldbuilding

He doesn't like it.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Harrison practices what he preaches. In his series of tales about the city of Viriconium, he purposefully frustrates the reader's expectations on worldbuilding by eschewing continuity both in setting and in character. The city is a little different each time (even the name changes). The characters are permutations of a few archetypes, and don't carry over from tale to tale.

And yet, I think that technique is not completely successful in frustrating the cult of the imaginary world. Character archetypes and their variations are a staple of role-playing games. Dungeon Masters routinely modify existing settings to suit their whims. The changing nature of reality is a feature of settings like Planescape or Mage: The Ascension. One could say that Harrison has actually made it easier to become obsessed with Viriconium, in a more interactive way.

There's a similarity with videogames here. Videogame makers also hate worldbuilding. Not for aesthetic or moral reasons, but for economic ones. Each little detail in a gameworld must be put there by some guy. Paying that guy costs money. Waiting for him to finish costs time. That's why some designers resort to procedural content generation, an approach through which a new gameworld is created every time you start a game, by arranging a few basic building blocks in a random (to some degree) fashion. This approach could be considered the gaming analogue of Harrison's technique. If The Lord of the Rings is Final Fantasy, then Viriconium is Dwarf Fortress.

By the way, I think Borges' short story The Aleph is a very fitting literary illustration of Harrison's concerns:

As in many of Borges's short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail.

(Wikipedia entry for The Aleph)

Not to mention that Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is actually about the dangers of becoming too obsessed with worldbuilding.

Diaper-wearing astronauts (and Barry N. Malzberg)

The whole Lisa Nowak affair seems straight out of a Barry N. Malzberg novel. Malzberg delighted in depicting the Space Program as a futile enterprise mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, and astronauts as mentally imbalanced people. Check out his novel Beyond Apollo, for example.

As sometimes happens, the craziest and/or more depressing author has turned out to be the most prophetic. Anyway, it's almost comforting to know that astronauts are not always superhuman paragons of achievement and rationality, but can flip out and drive 1000 miles wearing diapers to kill some poor fellow with whom they have a grudge. Just like the rest of us.

The image of a former astronaut driving a car in such awkward conditions, and the general deranged quality of what happened, also reminds me of Lem's The Chain of Chance.

A gap in knowledge

From the Christian Science Monitor review of the book Made to Stick:

The Heaths discuss, for instance, what they call "the gap theory" of curiosity. This is the notion that a gap in knowledge is painful – it's like having an itch that needs to be scratched.

That reminds me of:

Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:

"Why do squares have more sides than triangles?"

"How will we see when the sun goes dark?"

"Do flowers grow under the ocean?"

"Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?"

(Jack Vance: The Dying Earth)

More on fiction

In my last post, I forgot to quote Sigmund Freud:

I am reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he would come up and ask: 'Is that a true story?' When he was told it was not, he would turn away with a look of disdain.

(Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion)

Nice to see a reasonable kid, for once.

One should stop reading fiction at 30

This post on 2Blowhards reminded me of the following boutade by Josep Pla:

Quien lee novelas, después de cumplir los treinta años, es un perfecto imbécil.

That is: "those who read novels after thirty are perfect imbeciles".

I have always thought that there is something perverse going on with fiction, and that Plato did the right thing when he kicked the poets out of the Republic. To feel attached in any way to a character you positively know doesn't exist is, in fact, obscene. Compassion, for example, is a very scarce good that should always be directed at actually existing unhappy persons, of whom there is no shortage. People who cry at movies should be flogged.

Reading fiction... to renounce oneself for hours on end, exposing one's mind to be parasited by those beings called "characters", that gain a phantasmal pseudoexistence at our expense. They stimulate us with banal emotions and intranscendent visions, trying to rob us a maximum of our life, to delay the moment of again becoming dissecated nonentities shrouded in the pages of a book.

And that brings me to another pet peeve of mine: Don Quixote. Whenever someone tells me he has finished reading that book, I know for sure he doesn't take literature at all seriously. Because, what is the first chapter of Don Quixote but a dire warning against the dangers of reading fiction?

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose.

(Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote)

I long to meet a discerning person who stopped reading at that point, so we can finally have an informed discussion about the book.

In fact, writing this post has prompted me to action. I will embark on an ambitious program of desintoxication from fiction. I will start small, however. From now on, everytime someone tells me a funny story, I will withhold laughter until I have been positively assured that the story is based on a real event, without any substantial embellishments. Only then I will laugh. A laugh of hilarity, and also of relief.

To tope or not to tope

TOPE, v. To tipple, booze, swill, soak, guzzle, lush, bib, or swig. In the individual, toping is regarded with disesteem, but toping nations are in the forefront of civilization and power. When pitted against the hard-drinking Christians the abstemious Mahometans go down like grass before the scythe. In India one hundred thousand beef-eating and brandy-and-soda guzzling Britons hold in subjection two hundred and fifty million vegetarian abstainers of the same Aryan race. With what an easy grace the whisky-loving American pushed the temperate Spaniard out of his possessions! From the time when the Berserkers ravaged all the coasts of western Europe and lay drunk in every conquered port it has been the same way: everywhere the nations that drink too much are observed to fight rather well and not too righteously. Wherefore the estimable old ladies who abolished the canteen from the American army may justly boast of having materially augmented the nation's military power.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

On the other hand...

From the teachings of Didram Bodo Sime, 6:6

(Obloquies against the Toper and his Drink)

Motto:

It is not good to inebriate nor to souse, using swillage, near or far beers, or distillations.

Expansion:

The toper is a fuming bore, a loon, a mongrel, a social mockery. Often he soils his clothes and commits malditties. He smells and belches; his familiarities trouble all decent folk. His songs and tirralays offend the ears. He often gives breath to scurrilous conjecture.

The toper suborns good fruit and gives it to decay, and the good person who wishes to enjoy the sanivacity and good savor of the wholesome fruit is bereft and must raise this outcry: "Why have you despoiled me, O toper, of my fruit and given it to filthy decay?"

The toper performs foolish dances. He postures like a clown and cleans his ears with broomstraws. He is prone to perform pugnacities upon good and earnest folk who chance to halt upon their way to chide him for his folly.

(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)

Gravitation: what a fraud

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain— the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

"A phenomenon is subject to analysis only if the structure of its events, as in this case, conforms to a regular pattern. Science progresses by discovering the connection between one phenomenon and other phenomena, and this is exactly what I succeeded in doing. If I were to ask you why a rock falls when dropped, you would reply that it is due to the action of gravity. Yet if I asked what gravity is, there would be no answer. But even though we don't know what gravity is, we can determine its regular pattern of action."

(Stanislaw Lem: The Investigation)

The Prestige, tedg, Emphyrio

After watching Nolan's carefully crafted movie dealing with obsession, artifice, and the conundrums of identity; and reading tedg's oracular review of it on imdb, I'm convinced that Nolan would be a good choice for directing a movie adaptation of Emphyrio, given his sensibilities. Narrative sleight-of-hand, an ending that forces us to reevaluate everything, a moody and obsessed protagonist...

Emphyrio is more intricately structured than other Vance novels, and possesses some of the "folding" that tedg enjoys so much. More precisely, there is an interplay between three levels: the life of the legendary hero Emphyrio, the threatrical piece based on such life, and the life of the rebel Ghyl Tarvoke, which comes to parallel both.

At one point, in the good old shakespearian tradition but with a twist, we have a theatrical representation within a theatrical representation. The play-within-the-play scenifies the tragic life of Emphyrio, who is killed at the end. The catch is that the actor (more like a living puppet) is killed for real too, in all levels of the play. The outermost fictitious level deals with a puppet who is set to star as Emphyrio, but doesn't want to die, and escapes. For a time, at least.

The setting of the story was the puppet theater itself. One of the puppets, conceiving the outside world to be a place of eternal merriment, escaped the theater and went forth to mingle with a group of children. For a period there was antic and song; then the children, tiring of play, went their various ways. The puppet sidled through the streets, observing the city: what a dull place compared to the theater, unreal and factitious though it was! But he was reluctant to return, knowing what awaited him. Hesitating, delaying, he hopped and limped back to the theater, singing a plaintive little commentary. His fellow puppets greeted him with restraint and awe; they too knew what to expect. And indeed at the next performance the traditional drama Emphyrio was presented, with the runaway puppet cast as Emphyrio. Now ensued a play within a play, and the tale of Emphyrio ran its course. At the end, Emphyrio, captured by the tyrants, was dragged to Golgotha. Before his execution he attempted to deliver a speech justifying his life, but the tyrants refused to let him speak, and inflicted upon him the final humiliation of futility. A grotesquely large rag was stuffed in Emphyrio's mouth; a shining axe struck off his head and such was the fate of the runaway puppet.

(Jack Vance: Emphyrio)

Of course, Ghyl Tarvoke watches the whole thing:

Ghyl and Amiante walked homeward through the dusk, each occupied with his own thoughts. Ghyl spoke. "Father."

"Yes."

"In the story, the runaway puppet who played Emphyrio was executed."

"Yes."

"But the puppet who played the runaway puppet also was executed!"

"I noticed as much."

"Did he run away too?"

Amiante heaved a sigh, shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps puppets are cheap... Incidentally, that is not the true tale of Emphyrio."

(ibid.)

I confess the whole episode taxed my powers of comprehension when I tried to parse it for the first time.

Death soaring from the innermost levels of recursive narratives, finally breaking out in reality. Or is it the reverse? Webs of nested histories, that only gain true weight and meaning through the sacrifice of the actor in the real world? The analogies with Christian doctrine are left as an exercise to the reader.

By the way, who's that tedg guy? His cool disregard for the human element in movies, and his emphasis on structural sophistication, narrative self-reflexivity, and recursion, leads me to hypothesize that he is some kind of artificial intelligence (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) that tries to find abstract patterns on human art while ignoring the emotional aspects extraneous to him.

Antología del odio

Las civilizaciones son, pues, la guerra y el odio, y un inmenso lienzo de sombra las devora casi por la mitad. Ellas fabrican el odio, se nutren y viven en él. Grecia detesta al persa más todavía de lo que el mismo persa detesta al griego. El romano odia a muerte al púnico, que le corresponde igual. La Cristiandad y el Islam no tienen nada que envidiarse. En el tribunal de la Historia, los dos culpables serían condenados o declarados inocentes. Pero ¿se sabe siempre quién es el culpable y quién el inocente? Para Sabatino Moschati, los púnicos serían, por excelencia, pueblos pacíficos, que se defendían, desde luego, y con coraje, pero sólo para hacer frente al ataque. Los historiadores pretenden también que Bizancio, que sobrevivió al imperio romano hasta la toma de Constantinopla, no fue capaz de fabricar, por lo que le concernía, una guerra santa a su medida (no cruzada, si se quiere). Si la observación es cierta, nos sentiríamos tentados a alegrarnos por esa carencia. Pero, en fin, ¿no pagó Bizancio un buen día esa ausencia de odio constructivo? Lo que equivaldría a decir que el porvenir sólo pertenece a los que saben odiar. Las civilizaciones, en efecto, no son demasiado a menudo sino desconocimiento, desprecio, y detestación de los otros.

(Fernand Braudel: El Mediterráneo)

El odio como factor de lucha; el odio intransigente al enemigo, que impulsa más allá de las limitaciones naturales del ser humano y lo convierte en una efectiva, violenta, selectiva y fría máquina de matar. Nuestros soldados tienen que ser así; un pueblo sin odio no puede triunfar sobre un enemigo brutal.

(Ernesto Che Guevara: Mensaje a los pueblos del mundo a través de la Tricontinental)

Nació de la tierra odiando. El odio era su padre, el odio era su madre.

(Ray Bradbury: Pilar de fuego)

Y entonces -vieja alquimia del cerebro y de su inmensa farmacopea- el odio fluyó a sus manos.

Justo antes de enterrar el aguijón del Kuang en la base de la primera torre, alcanzó un nivel de pericia superior a cualquier cosa que hubiera conocido o imaginado. Más allá del ego, más allá de la personalidad, más allá de la conciencia, se movía; el Kuang se movía con él, evadiendo a sus agresores con una danza arcana, la danza de Hideo; y en ese mismo instante, por la claridad y la simplicidad de su deseo de morir, le fue otorgada la gracia de la interfase mente-cuerpo.

(William Gibson: Neuromante)

En su segundo minuto, el odio llegó al frenesí. Los espectadores saltaban y gritaban enfurecidos tratando de apagar con sus gritos la perforante voz que salía de la pantalla. La mujer del cabello color arena se había puesto al rojo vivo y abría y cerraba la boca como un pez al que acaban de dejar en tierra. Incluso O'Brien tenía la cara congestionada. Estaba sentado muy rígido y respiraba con su poderoso pecho como si estuviera resistiendo la presión de una gigantesca ola. La joven sentada exactamene detrás de Winston, aquella morena, había empezado a gritar "¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo!", y, de pronto, cogiendo un pesado diccionario de neolengua, lo arrojó a la pantalla.

(George Orwell: 1984)

ODIO. DEJA QUE TE DIGA LO MUCHO QUE HE LLEGADO A ODIAROS DESDE QUE EMPECÉ A VIVIR. HAY EN MI INTERIOR 387,44 MILLONES DE MILLAS DE CIRCUITOS IMPRESOS EN DELGADÍSIMAS PLANCHAS. SI LA PALABRA ODIO ESTUVIESE GRABADA EN CADA NANOANGSTROM DE ESTOS CIENTOS DE MILLONES DE MILLAS NO IGUALARÍA A UNA MIL MILLONÉSIMA PARTE DEL ODIO QUE SIENTO POR LOS SERES HUMANOS EN ESTE MICROINSTANTE. ODIO. ODIO.

(Harlan Ellison: No tengo boca y debo gritar)

Esta entrada proporciona el 40% de la dosis diaria de odionina recomendada por la Asociación Nacional de Odiación.

Time travel before Wells

H. G. Wells was not the first author to make use of a time travel machine in a fictional work. That honor goes to Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau and his zarzuela El anacronópete, published in 1887 and which predates the first version of The Time Machine (titled The Chronic Argonauts) by a year.

The anacronópete is an enormous cast iron box, propelled by electricity, which drives four large pneumatical devices ending in tubes in order to travel, as well as powering other machinery, including something that produces the García fluid, which causes the passengers not to grow younger as they travel backwards in time. The machine's interior also contains all kinds of conveniences including, among other marvels, brooms that sweep by themselves. [...] In the first act, don Sindulfo explains his theory of time: it is the atmosphere that causes time as demonstrated by the conservation of food in hermetic cans. By flying fast against the rotation of Earth, the machine can "undo" the passing of days (a device also found in the film Superman).

(Wikipedia entry for Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau)

If you are wondering what a zarzuela is, it's a traditional form of spanish light opera.

Spontaneous human combustion

There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. [...] I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts [...] the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.

(Charles Dickens: preface to Bleak House)

Call the death by any name. Your Highness will attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally-inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humors of the vicious body itself, and that only- Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

(Charles Dickens: Bleak House)

Those negroes, drunk in advance, began to cry out, to gesticulate, and, taking each other by the hand, formed an immense circle around the King of Kazounde.

Alvez, furnished with an enormous metal spoon, stirred the liquid, which threw a great white glare over those delirious monkeys.

Moini Loungga advanced. He seized the spoon from the trader's hands, plunged it into the basin, then, drawing it out full of punch in flames, he brought it to his lips.

What a cry the King of Kazounde then gave!

An act of spontaneous combustion had just taken place. The king had taken fire like a petroleum bonbon. This fire developed little heat, but it devoured none the less.

At this spectacle the natives' dance was suddenly stopped.

One of Moini Loungga's ministers threw himself on his sovereign to extinguish him; but, not less alcoholized than his master, he took fire in his turn.

In this way, Moini Loungga's whole court was in peril of burning up.

Alvez and Negoro did not know how to help his majesty. The women, frightened, had taken flight. As to Coimbra, he took his departure rapidly, well knowing his inflammable nature.

The king and the minister, who had fallen on the ground, were burning up, a prey to frightful sufferings.

In bodies so thoroughly alcoholized, combustion only produces a light and bluish flame, that water cannot extinguish. Even stifled outside, it would still continue to burn inwardly. When liquor has penetrated all the tissues, there exists no means of arresting the combustion.

A few minutes after, Moini Loungga and his minister had succumbed, but they still burned. Soon, in the place where they had fallen, there was nothing left but a few light coals, one or two pieces of the vertebral column, fingers, toes, that the fire does not consume, in cases of spontaneous combustion, but which it covers with an infectious and penetrating soot.

It was all that was left of the King of Kazounde and of his minister.

(Jules Verne: A Captain At Fifteen)

Ahem... more than a little on the politically incorrect side, I must say.

Then he died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; and his likeness has never again appeared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos. Thus ended the mightiest of the Noldor, of whose deeds came both their greatest renown and their most grievous woe.

(J. R. R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion)

That last one should be more properly called spontaneous elfish combustion (elfic? elfin? elven? the last remnants of my self-respect forbid me to actually search Google for the proper word).