Eoghann Irving's Blog, page 3

Douglas Brodie’s “House”

Where: Outside Charles Town, WV

What: Doublewide trailer own by Douglas and used as his home

Description: The trailer sits off the beaten path in a wooded area outside of Charles Town. It is old and rusted but it doesn’t attract attention or visitors (usually). Douglas has a generator which allows him to keep the place warm in the winter and let’s him cook and use a computer.

It wouldn’t be hard to improve the living conditions but it doesn’t seem like Douglas has made any effort. He is clearly hiding out and not looking to put down any roots, but the reasons for that are unknown.

Using AI for Concept Art and Giving Your Creativity a Boost

AI art is all the rage these days and also a source of great controversy. I don’t want to minimize the issues that need to be worked through, for example was permission received before using people’s artwork or photography to train the AI; or what are the ethics of using AI to mimic a current professional artist and potentially taking money from their pocket? but the usage I’m talking about does not in my opinion raise any ethical issues and can offer a huge value creatively to a writer.

I’m not a visual writer. When I picture a scene I don’t actually see it in my head, at most there are vague shadows and outlines of what people look like, where they are standing etc. If asked to describe my characters in any detail, I can’t really do it. I can tell you all about what they are thinking and feeling, but what their face looks like? Nah. I don’t think that’s a terrible thing in and of itself it can be limiting at times because the physical elements of what things look like and where they are placed play into stories. However, until now there hasn’t really been anything I could do about it since I am sadly not independently wealthy and can’t hire and artist to just churn out concept art for me on a whim.

And then AI Art arrived and with it the promise of being able to generate artwork from a short description. I can do short descriptions!

If you’ve ever tried any of the endlessly multiplying AI Art tools you’ll have noticed that they have some severe limitations but when we’re talking about concept art these limitations are much less of an issue. For example you don’t know exactly who it’s going to interpret your description so if you have a really precise scene in mind that’s going to be frustrating. On the other hand, if you are like me and only have a shadowy image, suddenly you’ve got lots of new details to inspire your writing. The other thing that AI art gets wrong a lot is just not understanding physics and the real world. So characters will have 3 eyes when they ought to have 2 or there’ll just be random out of place lines in an image. That would be a show stopper for a published work, but if the purpose of the art is just to inspire the writer it doesn’t matter at all.

Character Art

The first way I am using AI Art in my writing is to generate character art. I feed my tool of choice (Midjourney gives far better results than anything I’ve previously tried) with a basic description and whatever details have surfaced in my mind and then see what it comes up with. The initial response to the prompt gives you four thumbnails and from there you can pick one to upscale, choose to create variations based on one of them or adjust your prompt if you’re not happy with any of them. My initial prompt for this was:

Full body of twenty year old woman, long multi-colored hair, nervous look on her face, fashionable modern clothing, in urban fantasy style, character concept –chaos 0 –ar 2:3

As you can see it’s not quite a normal description. I try to keep it relatively simple because complicated situations confuse the AI and even then while it’s got the general concept it’s not 100% mapping to what I said. For my purposes though it was close enough so I selected option 2 and created some variations.

Of those, the fourth one spoke to me the most so I chose to upscale that one. Now the thing about upscaling is it doesn’t just give you a higher resolution image, it also adds extra details. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. But if you don’t like what it does, you can tweak it again, that’s the fun thing about this process you can spend as much or as little time on it as you want. In the end here is Julia,a character who, until now, all I knew about physically was in that prompt: twenty year old woman, long multi-colored hair, nervous look on her face, fashionable modern clothing.

Now I have a physical reference, something to look at when I’m thinking about how she might act. She looks a little tougher than I had originally seen her in my head and I like that, maybe not such a wallflower after all. That’s going to color how I write about her going forward and having a specific look will help me remember the character better too.

You don’t have to generate full body images of course, you can have Midjourney create headshots instead and here’s where things get really cool. I can take the image I’ve already created and use that a base image to create more, so that way any future images stay at least somewhat similar.

/imagine https://URL-HERE character concept, headshot,  twenty year old woman, long multi-colored hair, portrait, head, scared –ar 2:3

Scene Concept Art

The other way that I’m using AI art is to help me visualize scenes better. This has a dual purpose for me since I’m posting writing on my blog and I’m not attempting to make any money off it so I can’t afford to purchase art for every blog post. Having the AI create a scene for me gives me a feature image that I can use on the post and also helps to inspire my writing. Again, the goal here is not to create a picture perfect representation of what is in my head but rather to use the limited details in my mind to spin a picture which can in turn stimulate my brain to new ideas.

For example I have a short story about someone who is haunted by shadows. The shadows are very vaguely described so I fed this into Midjourney

Shadows with humanlike shapes looming over person in bed at night, dark room, atmospheric lighting, detailed,  in horror style, concept art –ar 3:2

Which gave me these thumbnails and I like the atmosphere, but you’ll notice that the AI, literal as it is, has the person in the bed, not laying on the bed. So I did a little tweak to the prompt as follows:

Shadows with humanlike shapes looming over person laying in bed at night, dark room, atmospheric lighting, detailed,  in horror style, concept art –ar 3:2

And eventually I landed on this image. Now this isn’t what I originally pictured when I wrote the first draft of the story, but when I got to re-draft I will now be thinking about how this shadow looms over not just the person but the entire room. How it’s almost human but at the same time breaks the rules in disturbing ways and how there doesn’t seem to be any escape from it.

For me this process is something of a revelation. As someone who doesn’t think in those ways normally, just writing the prompts is forcing me to think more visually and then the inspiration I can get from the images that are generated opens up all sorts of new story ideas.

Learning Curve

It’s really ease to produce something with Midjourney but producing something that matches your vision is quite a bit harder. There are a lot of additional descriptors for drawing style, lighting, poses. It’s a lot and it takes trial and error to really master, but there’s no shortage of resources out there to help you with that and to get some basic character portraits doesn’t need much at all, even if you’re understandably concerned about the ethics of making money from AI art it would be a mistake to completely ignore what it can bring to your creative process.

And to give you just a sense of the range of what can be done let’s generate a few more images. First we’ll try this:

dragon breathing fire as it lands, lord of the rings, epic composition, detailed, in origami style, –ar 16:9

Pretty cool, I like the combination of the origami style with the flames even if it did ignore the bit about the dragon landing.

Okay, what about this one:

dwarven citadel amongst the snow covered mountains, lord of the rings, epic composition, detailed, fantasy, –ar 16:9

Sure looks like a dwarven citadel to me, suitable for any fantasy epic I’d say.

Now, what if we were to do some real vodoo and blend the two together. Yes Midjourney has a blend command that lets you combine 2 or more images together into a unique creation. So what do I get when I try that here? Something that clearly has elements of both the previous images but is also it’s own thing. Now tell me you don’t get any story ideas when you look at images like this!

If you’re curious and want to experiment you can join the Midjourney Beta for free and get 25 free image generations to try things out, but you will have to set up a Discord account (also free) if you don’t already have one. After that you’d need to select one of the paid plans, but at a modest $8 a month it’s not much of a burden.

Looking for Food

Last year I started making more of an effort to put out food for the birds in my yard. I may even have got a little carried away what with the now 4 bird feeders, two 2 suet cages and also a birdbath with a bubbler in it, but it is relaxing to watch all those birds stopping by to eat and drink. It also gives me some great opportunities to practice my bird photography.

This shot is from last summer using my telephoto lens cranked almost to maximum and because of that even with the sunlight I had to push the ISO up a bit too. That’s the problem with birds, they don’t like you getting close and they’re so small. I’m hoping that by having the bird feeder around long term they may get a bit braver though.

Part 2: The Missing Girl

My phonecall to the Shepherdstown police was singularly lacking in useful information. They were polite but particularly uninformative about the missing Naomi. Ongoing investigation; pursuing a few leads; no comment.  Someone had just done a refresher course on how to deal with the press. Oh yes, I may have given them the impression that I was a reporter of some sort. It’s not technically true, but I hear everyone is a journalist these days.

Perhaps the total lack of information I received was nature’s way of paying me back for my white lie. Karmic retribution or not what was clear was that the only thing that was going to get me a solid lead to follow was going to Shepherdstown myself. Something I wasn’t very keen on doing until I had a better grasp on the whole werewolf thing.

Fortunately Mercedes was online and already working on my request.

Mercedes: Werewolves in Shepherdstown… lots of references. Silver bullets don’t work!

A bit vague, but certainly good to know. Not that I was likely to be shooting them with silver bullets anyway. I don’t own a gun and I’d probably just shoot myself in the foot if I did. Also, silver is kind of expensive. Anyway I was more interested in keeping them away than fighting them. Which is when I remembered something useful.

I hurried over to my spice rack and started hunting through it. Aconite, often used in homeopathic remedies and more commonly known as… Wolfsbane. Granted I wasn’t quite sure how I would apply it in this tiny pill form, but something was better than nothing.

And yes I keep pills in my spice rack. It’s hard to maintain fresh herbs all the time and while dried or processed may not be as powerful a suitably skilled wizard can always do something with it.

Pills in pocket, I started gathering the rest of my essentials kit. Flashlight, phone (mainly for the GPS, I get lost a lot) and jacket. Yeah it’s not much of an emergency kit I know. I must admit that I have a tendency to trust to luck and wing it rather more than is good for me. While I was getting myself ready Mercedes sent me another of her pearls of wisdom.

Mercedes: Notoriously short tempered. Do not provoke.

Now do I strike you as the sort of person who provokes people (or wolves)? Don’t answer that.

The drive to Shepherdstown takes a little less than thirty minutes from my house.  It follows the sort of road that can only exist if you just stick asphalt on top of cart tracks. Seriously there are less twists and turns in some rollercoasters than there are in that particular road. If you could drive straight, it would probably only take fifteen minutes.

The town itself is probably best described as picturesque. Apart from students, tourism is the next biggest activity. Amongst other things Shepherdstown claims to be the oldest town in the state of West Virginia. I ought to take enough interest in my surroundings some time to find out if that’s true. Sounds credible though. The point I’m trying to make is that the center of Shepherdstown is full of narrow streets, generally packed with pedestrians and featuring some attractive buildings. It’s quite pleasant if you don’t have to live there.

Fortunately a little further out you have the standard elements of American life. I’m talking about chain stores with large parking lots of course and even better strip malls with empty buildings. And that’s where I carefully parked my, well used, car before going to investigate Naomi’s living quarters. I’m not a complete idiot. You don’t park your car in front of the place you’re about to try and break into. Well… not if it’s a car you own anyway.

West Virginia in summer is hot. Sticky, humid, hot. So by the time I had walked to Naomi’s apartment I was distinctly sweaty and short tempered. I still didn’t know exactly what Steven had got me into and I was already coming up with dozens of reasons why I should just go home and not worry about it anymore.

Starting with the fact that her door was locked. But that’s a particularly feeble excuse when you’re a wizard. I didn’t waste time trying the buzzer. Mechanical things like locks are… suggestible. They are designed to do something and with a little encouragement, they can be made to do it. Placing my hand against the lock I concentrated for a moment and felt the mechanism through the metal. It opened with a click and I smiled with undeserved self-satisfaction. A child’s trick, but a very useful one.

I repeated the trick on the inner door and was in Naomi’s apartment in a matter of minutes. Honestly I’m surprised there aren’t more magically assisted burglaries.

I could tell immediately that she hadn’t been here for some time. There’s a stale smell that homes get when they aren’t being lived in or aired out on a regular basis. A thin layer of dust coated most of the surfaces, but that didn’t tell me much. In my experience students aren’t exactly renowned for their cleaning skills.

In this case, however, the apartment was in fact quite orderly. There were no dirty dishes in the sink. No clothes on the floor. Of course it was a girl’s apartment. That probably made a difference. There was nothing to suggest that Naomi had left in a hurry. The place looked as though she could be back at any moment. So just how long exactly had she been gone.

A quick check of the fridge and its contents confirmed that it had been some time since anyone was staying here regularly. Her closet was full of clothes though. The picture I was building in my head was a grim one. If this was not a planned absence or an unexpected trip that required a frantic departure, then what was it? Did she have an accident somewhere perhaps? Certainly there was plenty of countryside to get lost in round here. Quite a few spots without any cellphone signals even. Or did werewolves have her.

There wasn’t any evidence of werewolves. Any more than there was evidence of anything. Steven had been annoyingly vague about the werewolves. He just muttered something about emails and some book she had been reading. A book he wasn’t able to name. Perhaps it was still around here somewhere?

I spun round scanning the apartment for likely drawers to investigate. It was a two room affair kitchen/livingroom plus bedroom. If the book was that interesting to her she’d probably have kept it out here somewhere. Pulling open a drawer I started to rummage through it.

It was at this moment that the apartment door swung open. I should probably have locked it again, but I’m not much of a detective. I turned to face the new arrival, a blonde haired girl, maybe twenty at most and clearly a student from the way she dressed.

“Ah… hi!” I said. I’m known for my snappy dialogue.

“Who are you?” She demanded, clearly suspicious. I tried to casually stuff the contents of the drawer back in a non-suspicious way. I’m not sure I pulled it off.

“Douglas Brodie.” I offered up a smile as I walked towards her, hand extended. She backed away slightly and I hastily stopped realizing that this friendly gesture might come across rather differently if I was a lone woman facing off against an unknown intruder.

“I’m a friend of Steven’s…” I tried hoping that a familiar name would set her at ease. To my relief she seemed to relax at least slightly. “He’s very worried about Naomi.” I pressed on. “I’m trying to find out what happened to her. Are you a friend of hers?”

She shook her head. “Not really. I live across the hall. We talked… sometimes. I’m Julia.”

I nodded in what I hoped was an understanding fashion. “When did you last see her?”

“Maybe a couple of weeks ago now.” She pushed her hair back off her face with a nervous gesture “I thought she’d just gone home until the cops showed up.”

“Was she talking about going home?

“Well… no. But she had stopped going to class. I figured she was… homesick or something. You know?”

“Thanks.” I smiled as I offered her one of my business cards. “If you happen to see or remember something. Would you let me know?”

“Sure.” She nodded, taking the card in that half-hearted fashion of a person who has no intention whatsoever of even reading it but doesn’t want to be so rude as to refuse it.

I glanced around the apartment again wondering if there was anything else to be found here. But now didn’t seem like the time. Stepping past Julia I stood in the hallway and waited determinedly until she also left Naomi’s apartment. At which point I grasped the door handle and pulled it closed. The lock clicked audibly.

Giving Julia a last smile I headed back out onto the street.

Back at my car, and even more sweaty than before, I let out a curse. Julia had interrupted me before I could properly search the apartment to find that book. Or, indeed, apply some of my other talents to the situation. Sure I could go back, but no doubt she would be keeping an eye or an ear open for me now. Maybe she believed me, but probably not. I wouldn’t have.

But there was still the whole business about werewolves. A quick check on my phone confirmed that no, tonight was not a full moon. Tomorrow would be though. Which meant I should get back into that apartment tonight.

I drove home with the casual recklessness of someone who has made this particular drive a few times too often and wants to get back to his house. There was time for food and maybe a nap before I had to play burglar. Hunger won out over taste and I stopped at McDonalds on the way home to stuff some reprocessed meat and freeze dried potatoes into my stomach. Nutritious no, but it kept me going.

Mercedes was online when I got home, and she’d been doing her research.

Mercedes: There have been 237 reported werewolf sightings in Jefferson County within the last 10 years!

DBrodie: That seems… high.

Mercedes: Very. I’m plotting them all on Google Maps and guess where the center is?

DBrodie: Shepherdstown?

Mercedes:   Man you really live out in the sticks don’t you?

DBrodie: I’ve never seen any werewolf reports in the local papers.

Mercedes: There aren’t any. I’m pulling police reports.

DBrodie: That’s a little… suspicious.

Mercedes: Very. Be careful.

The careful thing to do would clearly have been to stay at home. And believe me I did consider it. But I couldn’t do it. That damn geas. It’s like a compulsion. And besides with all this talk of werewolves, now I was curious to find out exactly what was going on in Shepherdstown and who was going to so much trouble to cover it all up.

But if I couldn’t do the careful thing, I could at least do the smart thing and go prepared. I’m not what you’d call a powerful wizard. I haven’t been doing this for very long and it’s quite difficult. But I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. And one of the first things I learned was to prep some spells. Because it’s hard to do complex magic under pressure. The trick is to set it all up and key it to a simple word or gesture.

In this particular situation, the camouflage spell seemed ideal. You can’t make yourself invisible. The laws of physics apply to magic. Well, sort of. But you can discourage people from looking at you. In effect you just become part of the scenery. It’s a fairly simple spell that relies mainly on not attracting people’s attention. Basically if you start shouting someone will notice.

There are more sophisticated variations, but they’re also more difficult to pull off. Plus I had all the components for the basic spell and it only took half an hour to prepare.

I followed the steps meticulously, refusing to let myself get distracted or weaken the spell in any way. All I needed was an anchor object. Something to tie the spell to me for as long as I needed. Glancing around my eyes landed on a 20-sided die left over from one game or another. A perfectly innocuous looking object. I bound the spell and slipped the die into my pocket.

Just enough time for that nap before I set off on the night’s adventures.

The Sentry

Despite the beautiful views, the beach can be a challenge place to find good compositions. Often there’s just too much sea and sand without any detail to focus on, which is why a telephoto lens can come in really handy. This is a very simple shot, just a gull perched on a post looking towards the sun.

The telephoto let me cut out all the extraneous detail and let the sentry on his post dominate the image. A little tweaking in Lightroom brought out the pinks in the sky and the blue in the water, and bingo!

Logopolis Review – Was the Moment Prepared For?

I have an inescapable fondness for Logopolis that I’m sure clouds my judgment of the story. I would have been 8 (coming up for 9) years old when the story first aired and while I’d been watching Doctor Who my entire life Tom Baker was the only Doctor I had any memories of.  His departure, which I knew was coming although I no longer remember how I knew this, was a seismic event and this story felt different from the opening moments.

Christopher Bidmead, in his role as script editor was keen to steer the show towards more scientific stories and you can see what the concept looks like here with references to entropy and the “science” of block transfer computation, plus the excellent demonstration of what recursion is (Seeing the TARDIS somehow appearing inside the TARDIS blew my tiny mind on first viewing. The whimsy and fantasy is still present in many aspects but things aren’t played for laughs any more. Even at my young age when first watching this, I was aware of the gloomier tone of the whole series, and this story in particular had a sense of change and impending doom to it that I wasn’t used to.

The opening sequence where we get the laughter of the Master as he needlessly murders the policeman tells us that bad things are coming. The Doctor and Adric’s talk in the cloisters serves not only to introduce the Cloister Bell (conveniently as it immediately becomes important!) but furthers that sense of gloom and imminent endings.  It’s interesting that Adric’s interactions with Baker here are relatively free of the annoying elements that I and others associate with the character. It’s not that Bidmead handles the character noticeably better, it’s just that the relationship between 4 and Adric seems to be more Teacher/student than the weird snarky interactions between 5 and Adric.

This serial is also our first introduction to the character of Tegan and it seems to me that while still a “mouth on legs” the character is less abrasive than she would become in later seasons. From the outset she is stridently independent but not aggressively so and her character displays a basic level of competence when faced with the incomprehensible.

Compared to modern doctor who this is downright sluggish and even for Classic Who it’s quite sedate in its pacing. Did we really need so many shots of the Master’s TARDIS changing shapes and moving location? Not really once or at most twice would have done, so there’s definitely some filler here. But, the story emphasizes atmosphere and that slow build, carefully laying out all the elements of the noose that will eventually tighten around the Doctor’s neck. In that regard I think it’s a well structured story.

While I applaud Bidmead’s efforts to reintroduce some science into what had become a full on fantasy series let us be very clear about one thing, Block Transfer Computation is magic disguised as science. It’s quite a good disguise admittedly, but just because they print some stuff out on a dot-matrix printer and it looks like a programming language, that doesn’t make it science. I really like the visualization of Logopolis though, it looks and feels like an alien culture, one with an ascetic bent which fits once we find out what the Logopolitan’s real purpose is.

Speaking of spartan we should probably address how death is handled in this story. First there is Tegan finding out that her Aunt is dead and the Doctor’s rather cursory acknowledgment of the situation. Admittedly he is a little distracted by his own impending death, and was never the most empathic of Doctors, but still that’s a bit brusque. There’s also Nyssa first discovering that her father has been killed and his body stolen by the Master, which is then topped by the destruction of her entire planet and everyone she knows. Each of these moments gets only seconds of attention before we move on with the plot. I’m not much of a fan of the way modern Who often excessively milks the emotional moments but this story can come off as clinical at times to say the least.

Watching this story again I’m left wishing that Baker and Ainley got more opportunities to play against each other as the two bounce off one and other in such an entertaining manner. It has a lot of the feel of Delgado and Pertwee, though this Master is clearly several degrees more insane. It does seem very appropriate that not only does the Master finally manages to kill the Doctor, something he’s been trying to do since he was first introduced, but also that it happens at a radio telescope which is something that features in the Master’s first story too.

The Doctors death here is strangely anti-climactic after all the portents of doom, not to mention the mysterious Watcher (“it was the doctor all along”). In the end he simply falls to his death, it’s a big fall certainly but then he just lays there and dies. This is not the death of a superhero and it’s a very lowkey way for the longest lasting and arguably most popular Doctor to date to go out. As an ending to Series 18 I think it’s perfect as it embodies many of the themes and much of the style of that season, as an ending to the Fourth Doctor’s era as a whole, I suspect it’s not how a lot of people wanted him to go out. Overall I think I like it for its ordinariness, though clearly the whole idea behind the Watcher failed to come across properly which is why we get the bad voiceover.

Douglas Brodie Character Info

Born: Edinburgh, Scotland

Gender: Male

Age: Mid-thirties

Stories: Wolves of West Virginia; ZombieMart; Dragon Greed;

Description: Slim build, shaved head, beard (brown with some gray), blue eyes

Background: Wizard, born in Scotland but moved to the US for as yet unspecified reasons. Currently works at the SuperMart and keeps a low profile. There is a geas on Douglas that means people are drawn to him for assistance and he is obligated to help them.

Things that still need figuring out: Two watches?? Tattoos?

Steven ??? Character Info

Born: ???, West Virginia

Gender: Male

Age: Nineteen

Stories: Wolves of West Virginia

Description: long hair, nerdy looking and wearing a collared shirt

Background: College student and boyfriend of Naomi

Things that still need figuring out: Last name.

The History of Science Fiction Part 3: 1900 — 1909

The first decade of the 20th century continued the remarkable scientific progress of the previous century. Two events in particular informed the “scientifiction” writing of this period. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built and flew the first airplane, something that would inspire a lot of stories.

But probably even more significant was Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity  which he published in 1905. As well as giving us the only equation most people know (E=mc2), Special Relativity gave us the concepts of Time dilation, Length contraction and relativity of simultaneity. These are things that science fiction writers still use in stories today.

Wells and Verne

The established masters of the genre both continued to write and publish in this decade. In 1904 Jules Verne published Master of the World which featured a ten meter long vehicle that could be a speedboat, submarine, car or airplane. The vehicle was able to travel at 150 mph on land and 200 mph in the air. Verne went so far as to have the vehicle be invisible at the speed of 150 mph which at that time was an unheard of speed.

HG Wells published a series of stories during the decade including The First Men in the Moon which tells the story of a trip to the moon by the two protagonists and their encounters with the Selenites there. This story was an influence on the writings of C.S Lewis which we’ll reach later in this series.

1908’s The War in the Air was remarkably prophetic in anticipating World War I and the use of airplanes in warfare.

Enter Cinema

Georges Melies was an early pioneer of science fiction cinema. Inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells he released Le Voyage dans la Lune (The Voyage to the Moon) in 1902 which showed a spacecraft launched by a powerful gun traveling to the Moon.

In 1904 Melies produced Voyage a Travers L’impossible (An Impossible Voyage) a half hour picture that included a train which morphed into a spaceship.

Both of these are milestones in the cinematic medium and are still available on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

Magazines

It would be some years before magazines became the driving force of science fiction writing, but much of the fiction of the era was serialized. In 1902 Park Winthrop wrote The Land of the Central Sun about people inside the earth. While in 1903 William Cook wrote about robots in A Round Trip To The Year 2000. Both stories were serialized in Argosy Magazine which is considered the first “pulp” magazine.

In 1904 Hugo Gernsback arrived in the United States. Gernsback would play a pivotal role in the development of science fiction. Four years later Gernsback would launch his first magazine “Modern Electrics”.

In 1905 Rudyard Kipling published With the Night Mail in McClure’s Magazine. Kipling is not generally regarded as a fantasy or SF writer since the clear divisions simply did not exist back then. His story envisages a future where airships or “dirigibles” rule the skies.

Astronomer Garrett P. Serviss’ story A Columbus of Space was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1909. The story is about an atomic rocket travelling to Venus.

New Blood

Many other authors began to essay this new genre of fiction. George Griffith’s A Honeymoon in Space from 1900 takes a newly married couple on a whirlwind tour of the solar system. And is in many ways typical of the stories of the time, featuring an English explorer who marries and American girl, goes into space and fights Nazi style Martians.

In 1901 M. P. Shiel published two books which form what is perhaps the first future history series in science fiction. The Lord of the Sea features the founding of an Israel like Jewish homeland.  While The Purple Cloud is about the last man on earth desperately looking for the last woman on earth.

G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill is an interesting entry in the genre. Set in late 20th century London, it depicts a Government where quite simply no one cares what happens and technology halted back in 1904.

In 1905 Edwin Lester Arnold published Lt. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (re-released many years later as Gulliver of Mars). The book was actually very poorly received and Arnold stopped writing fiction as a result. However it is thought that this book may have partially inspired Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series which was also set on Mars.

A particularly  important non-fiction publication was Mars and its Canals by Professor Percival Lowell in 1906 which contained his theories about the Martian civilization that must have built the “canals”. This heavily influenced science fiction authors for a long time afterwards.

The Iron Heel by Jack London (1907) has been described by some as a forerunner to the “soft” science fiction of the 1960s and 70s. This negative utopia looks at the rise of an oligarchy in the United States and its emphasis is on social changes and politics rather than technology.

In The Smoky God; or, A Voyage to the Inner World (1908) Willis George Emerson’s treads a similar path to Jules Verne with a sailor sailing through an entrance to the earth’s interior at the North Pole.

1909’s The Machine Stops is an unusual story from E. M Forster (much better known for works like A Passage to India, Room With A View and Howard’s End) tells of a future humanity who isolate their entire lives living one person per apartment and communicating with video screens.

It’s interesting to note that at this point Science Fiction was not nearly as ghettoized as it has been for much of it’s history. Perhaps because it wasn’t even called science fiction it was simply seen as another avenue for writers to explore subjects.

Watching the Dawn

Similar to a photo I previously posted but from a slightly different angle and with a different crop