I find that roleplaying games (especially the text-based, online variety) can pique my interest in writing something when I’m otherwise at a bit of a low ebb. At the moment, I’m working on running a game set in the universe of a newly revived obsession of mine: Battlestar Galactica.

That said, heavens forfend that I ever try to do something easy or normal, so this game has got a bit of my own twist on it. It’s set on a Sagittaron mining vessel (the Sagittarons being pretty much the most discriminated-against people in the Twelve Worlds) and is going to spend a lot of its time exploring issues like race, prejudice, oppression and politics.

The last one is especially interesting to me because the Sagittaron representative on the Quorum is Tom Zarek, a political revolutionary and freedom fighter that a lot of people consider a terrorist. Mainly because he once blew up a government building. From what we see, Zarek’s politics have quite a lot in common with some strains of anarchist thought, and appears to be predominantly collectivist. This makes him fascinating to me. I share a lot of the beliefs that he appears to hold, but disagree with others. Either way, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to try and get inside his head and walk around, and for a while now I’ve been doing exactly that.

It would also appear from this impassioned defence that my view of Tom Zarek is pretty consistent with the view held by Richard Hatch (who played him).

Tom Zarek supposedly has a book that has been banned across the Twelve Colonies, and for the introduction to Sagittaron that I’ve been working on for my players, I decided to try and tackle Zarek’s voice and attempted to write an extract from that book.

I’ve included it here in case there is possibly one other person somewhere in the world who shares my love of politics and Battlestar Galactica.

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Facing Sagittaron

Preface to ‘The Revolution Within’

by Tom Zarek

You reap what you sow.

The traditional perception of Sagittaron is that it is the biggest backwater in the twelve worlds. The people who live there are stubborn. They are backwards, or else they are fanatics.

Caprica and her allies are happy to believe that every Sagittaron they could ever meet would be a dirty, stupid, inbred pacifist that rejects modern medicines and denies themselves all intimate relations before marriage. The more open-minded among them may think that we labour under the yolk of colonial rule because we are not interested in doing anything to defend ourselves and our families.

Of course, it is very easy for them to go on believing that for as long as they choose to, because they are unlikely to ever have to speak to someone who actually comes from Sagittaron. The vast majority of us are planet-bound. We spend most of our lives as slaves in the Caprican-owned factories, making goods that are shipped off-world to the other eleven colonies—feeding their prosperity and riches while we remain unable to afford the very commodities that we produce for them.

We pay what few cubits we have into Libran banks.

Our lives as good as owned by the Caprican-run Colonial Labour Ministry.

Those of us who do manage to get off-world are frequently found in the most unpleasant jobs aboard the colonial vessels and battlestars. We are the cleaners, the kitchen hands and the contracted workers of the twelve worlds, and we have learned not to challenge the assumptions that the other colonies make about us and our people. We have also learned to reject our heritage entirely: Turning our backs on it so that we may succeed without it, because the gods only know that we cannot succeed for as long as we embrace it.

The truth is more unpleasant than anything that might be taught to Caprican children on the token ‘Sagittaron History Day’ that is wedged into the curriculum and paraded around with great ceremony the moment anyone dares to raise the idea that our people are treated unfairly.

Sagittaron is an occupied world.

Even our own history is denied to us, and made the property of Caprican scholars and libraries who choose to represent us exactly as they wish. Of course they will allow the idea of the Sagittaron ingrate to perpetuate itself, when the alternative is that their ancestors have oppressed our people for generations and that they themselves continue to grow rich on the legacy of that oppression. The fact that every luxury and commodity enjoyed on Caprica, on Libran, Virgon, and on Picon was made in a Sagittaron factory by men, women and children who are denied even the most basic entitlement to shelter, education, healthcare and fair representation is so much easier when you can believe that those people are not worthy of these things.

Even the most pitiful library on Caprica has more books of Sagittaron history than our finest on-world university. The majority of these books perpetuate the myth that Sagittarons are universally ignorant and fanatical. Some of them do not. Either way, the power of that knowledge is kept out of our hands, where it belongs.

Anyone seeking the reason why Sagittaron exists in a state of perfect oppression (or any evidence of the fact that this may not always have been the case) is immediately left with little choice but to extrapolate what they can from the spaces left in colonial academia. They may consult the diaries and memories passed down through Sagittaron families from generation to generation, or they may even find most rare of all treasures: a Sagittaron book written in the old language.

Over the first twenty years of my life I researched all of these things, and this book represents (among other things) the sum of what I have learned.

To this effect, the first thing that you must accept is that Sagittaron’s position amongst the Twelve Colonies is not the result of any inferiority on the part of its people. Rather, it is an accident of its birth.

Sagittaron has little by way of natural resources, and it is isolated from many of its fellow colonies by virtue of its position at the outer cusp of our system. I do not believe that it is any coincidence that the only planet which is in a more remote orbit than our own—Tauron—enjoys a reputation that is almost as poor as ours. Because of this remoteness, when people first settled here they learned two seemingly contradictory lessons. Firstly, that if they were going to survive then they would have to learn to support themselves, to become independent on what limited natural resources that they had. Secondly, that if they ever wanted to thrive, then they were going to have to rely on the other colonies in order to do so.

In this way, Sagittaron began its work as the factory of the twelve worlds: Making all of the luxuries and commodities that its brothers and sisters required in order to grow stronger. However, to do this we needed money and, of course, the banks of our sister Libran were happy to oblige. As a direct result of this, for the past millennia Sagittaron has been kept impoverished and indebted at the feet of the other worlds. Over the years, the myriad of tiny Sagittaron manufacturing firms were bought by companies from Caprica and Virgon and amalgamated. Eventually, the Colonial Labour Ministry was founded, and the erosion of the rights of the Sagittaron people began.

In the wake of the inevitable labour strikes and riots, any recourse left open to the Sagittaron workers was removed. The unions were gradually eviscerated, then they were eradicated entirely. This state of affairs persisted for many hundreds of years until the Sagittaron Workers Union was founded by my mother forty years ago. Of course, by then such a thing had become so unthinkable that the wrath of the Twelve Colonies was brought down upon our heads. The gods forbid that any Sagittaron should ever dare to stand up for their own rights, or that we should speak out against the fact that our people are denied even the most basic access to healthcare.

The gods forbid that any Sagittaron should seek to represent herself, or that she should not be content to settle for the colonial puppets which we are supposed to accept as our rightful government.

My mother paid the ultimate price for such insubordination, and despite the claims of a full and thorough investigation by Sagittaron’s so-called ruling party, to date no one has been tried or prosecuted for her murder.

But the more the colonial forces attempted to choke us, the stronger we became. After my mother’s death, I took over the day-to-day running of the union and tried to carry on where she had left off. When that became impossible, the Sagittaron Workers Union became the Sagittaron Freedom Movement and we began to speak of other, less palatable ways to get our voices heard.

It was at this point that the foundations for the attack on the Labour Ministry were laid, and the colonial occupation began to bring about its own demise. If the other eleven worlds were determined to silence us, and the peoples of those colonies were deaf to the cries of our children, then we would find new ways to make them hear.

I did not expect to live long after the explosives were set. I believed that the courts would see that I was tried and convicted of treason. I was prepared. Sagittaron needed a figurehead for her revolution, and perhaps I even believed that the revolution required a martyr. Either way, I was prepared to be that man. I was prepared to pay for the blood of the men and women that died at the Labour Ministry with my own. I did not expect to be here long enough to regret what I had done. Five years into my sentence in a colonial prison camp, and I am still not certain that I will.

I do not mourn the lives of the men and women from Caprica, Picon, Virgon, Libran or even the people from Sagittaron that died that day, but I do bear the burden of their lives, and of their deaths, with me. Such a responsibility of necessity will be mine and mine alone for the rest of whatever existence I am allowed.

I will dedicate what life I have to making sure that others understand exactly why I felt as though I had no other choice but to take those lives to gain the freedom of my people. I will do what I can with the time that I have left to ensure that no citizen of Caprica continues to ignore what has been done (and what continues to be done) in their name in order to assure them wealth and luxury.

Most of our oppressors will question why I have insisted time and again that we Sagittarons have been denied their rightful access to drugs and hospitals to treat diseases that have been all but eradicated on the other eleven worlds. After all, everyone knows that Sagittarons reject modern medicines in favour of herbalism, amulets, and dedications to the gods. I am not about to deny that this stereotype has some foundation in the lives of real Sagittaron men and women, however, as always the situation is not quite as simple as the colonists would have you believe.

It is not difficult to grasp why a people who are denied even the most basic access to medicine may grow to resent and mistrust it, or why they may instead turn to the support and love of the Lords of Kobol. But the truth runs deeper still, because as the poorest people of the twelve worlds, any new drug that was developed on Caprica was tested first and foremost in Sagittaron hospitals. When our people have been treated like animals, worthy of little more than experimentation with untested and potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, is it any wonder that the Sagittaron people began to distrust the very drugs that they were permitted?

It is not difficult, then, to see how the stranglehold of colonial pharmaceutical companies has also informed Sagittaron attitudes to conjugation. After all, it only takes one particularly virulent sexually transmitted disease to be brought across from Scorpia before rejecting any kind of sexual relationship that is not utter exclusive begins to look less like a choice, and more like a matter of survival.

Neither is it difficult to see how a population of working men and women who have lived under the oppression of colonial rule could gain a reputation for being pacifists. After all, when everything that you see and hear from childhood informs you that you exist to work, and that those who do not work (and those who cause unrest) are punished beyond all degree of fairness, you learn from infancy that if you want to survive then you must submit.

How can the people of the other eleven worlds expect a Sagittaron to have any desire to fight when she has had that desire beaten out of her since childhood? How can they stare down their noses at her for submitting to be kicked and taunted, for working in the most menial and undesirable of jobs, or for standing by while those she cares about are threatened? How can they think the less of her for it, when the society that they have imposed on us has taught her that if she does anything to stop it then she risks losing everything she has?

It is easy to believe that Sagittaron’s problems are Sagittaron’s responsibility and ultimately that they are Sagittaron’s fault. In fact, it is too easy. Each and every man and woman of the Twelve Colonies owes it to themselves and to their children not to take the path of least resistance. Each of us, no matter which of the Twelve Worlds we feel that we belong to, is responsible for the oppression of the Sagittaron people. This oppression has occurred across the centuries, it continues to exist today, and we must accept responsibility for that because, until we do, none of this will change.

The Lords of Kobol tell us that we are not free until each and every one of us is free. On Sagittaron, that freedom is still a dream as dim and distant as the sun that rises low and pale each morning on the barren horizon of our world.

These things can change, and we owe it to ourselves and to the Lords of Kobol to change them. No matter what the cost. Because you do reap what you sow.

So say we all.

I’ve just recently finished watching the first nine episodes of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel that aired on the SyFy Channel earlier this year. I firmly believe that Galactica is pretty much the best thing to ever be on a television screen (it is the only series that I have ever seen through from beginning to end, in fact, I’ve just started a second run-through), and so I was prepared to give Caprica more than it’s fair chance to impress me.

Although it’s definitely a slow-burner compared to is parent show (it isn’t easy to hit the ground running with the pace of something like “33”), there are already some very interesting little ideas and themes worming their way in.

Caprica appears to be following on from Battlestar Galactica in being television that invites a degree of critical analysis. On which note…

While poking around trying to find out when the second half of the series is due to air (in the autumn, if you’re wondering the same thing), I happened upon the UK DVD release of the pilot which has this image of Alessandra Torresani (who does an absolutely fantastic job of portraying the brilliant-if-misguided Zoe Graystone) on the front of it.

Further poking around revealed that this isn’t the only promotional image with such smack-you-in-the-face symbolism, either.


And the phrase repeated on both of those posters: “The Future of Humanity Begins with a Choice” only further shouts at you to sit the hell up and start paying frakking attention.

These posters foxed me slightly to begin with: The apple is obviously meant to imply the Garden of Eden—with Zoe Graystone standing in for Eve and her father Daniel (or possibly even Joseph Adama) as our Adam. It didn’t necessarily surprise me that Caprica would draw on such intensely religious imagery to make its point (after all, Galactica did exactly the same thing), but it did leave me a little confused.

In the Bible, the tree that Eve is tempted into eating from is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and concepts like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ don’t really seem to have a place in Caprica.

But then, they don’t really have to, because Caprica’s forbidden fruit doesn’t have anything to do with the knowledge of good and evil: The apple here represents eternal life. Mythologically, that is a far older symbol. In fact, I’d put money on it being drawn from the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides, where the golden apples of immortality are grown. This is kind of a no-brainer, once you consider the relationship between Greek mythology and the religion of the Twelve Colonies in the Galactica/Caprica universe.

Then this got me thinking about the ways in which Caprica treats the idea of immortality.

The most obvious way that it deals with it is (not surprisingly) through Zoe Graystone. Zoe dies in the maglev bombing as a result of her involvement with the Soldiers of the One, but her consciousness lives on in the v-world in the form of her avatar (and then later within the artificially-created body of the U-87, the very first Cylon). Meanwhile, her former friends in the STO are trying to exploit Zoe’s avatar for their own ends, with Sister Clarice attempting to use it for ‘apotheosis’—a (surprise!) Greek word meaning ‘to be made divine’.

Any doubt that may be left in our minds about whether this ‘apotheosis’ has anything to do with achieving immortality are slowly dismissed over the course of the first few episodes, as you can see:

Clarice: “I know that Zoe Graystone was beloved of god, and that she was given the spark of life itself. And that was her gift to all of us, and it will save all of us.”

– The Reins of the Waterfall

Clarice: “It’s not just a living avatar. It’s a continuation of the soul into eternity.”

– Know Thy Enemy

So, the Soldiers of the One believe in a single God, and also believe in obtaining immortality of the soul. Zoe, as one of their agents, develops living avatars for this purpose. Her living avatar becomes the first Cylon, the Cylons go to war with humanity then leave. They began the development of humanoid Cylon models which believe in a single God, and in immortality of their souls through resurrection.

“All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again,” and we began to see how the humanoid Cylons inherited their religious beliefs from the people who created them.

But this isn’t just about Caprica being turned into something cute and clever that echoes the themes of cyclical time present throughout Galactica, it is about exploring one of the deepest longings of the human soul: The desire for immortality.

Hell, the very word ‘Zoe’ is Greek (again) for ‘life’. Her position within the show as the potential (as well as the potential dangers) of life everlasting is unquestionable. That is the apple that she is eating, and the choice that Joseph and Daniel need to make: They need to decide whether to chase immortality as a way of holding onto their dead daughters, or whether to let them go.

In addition to the STO and Zoe and Tamara (the two dead girls who exist solely as avatars in the v-world), there are further parallels between the v-world and the afterlife. These come in the form of the dispossessed who do not have much of a life in the ‘real’ world, and the bereaved who are seeking their loved ones in the virtual world. Both of these groups have something in common: They do not feel as though they have much left to live for.

People who believe that they can make a better life for themselves in the v-world are characters like Tad Thorean, otherwise known as Heracles. In the ‘real’ world, Heracles is a student who works a dead-end job in a restaurant. Essentially, he is a nobody who has turned to the virtual world to make some kind of life for himself.

Heracles: “This game, it really does mean something to me. It actually allows me to be something.”
Tamara: “Maybe if you weren’t in here playing this game you could be something out there too.”

– There is Another Sky

Ultimately, Heracles has no choice but to find out if Tamara is right. In trying to help her, his avatar is killed. He will never be able to return.

Obviously Heracles is supposed to be analogous to the modern-day gamer who loses himself in a virtual life at the expense of his physical one. This is further enforced by the graffiti that Joseph Adama sees in the v-world during “The Imperfections of Memory”:

However I’m not convinced that’s all that Tamara’s warning means. To me, it’s not so much a warning against using technology and games, as it is a warning against losing the real world. When she says “If you weren’t in here playing this game you could be something out there too,” she isn’t just talking to Heracles—she’s talking to her father. And, in a way, she’s talking to Daniel Graystone.

Both of these men have agendas that have a lot in common with the STO, and with the gamers in the v-world. Both of them want to use the virtual world to achieve life and immortality—not for themselves, but for their daughters.

In the last episode to be aired, “End of the Line”, there is this conversation between Tamara and Emmanuelle:

Emmanuelle: “I’m a friend of your father’s. He’s been in here looking for you. Did you know that?”
Tamara: “What do you care?”
Emmanuelle: “I need you to help me with him. At first I thought it might be better to let him find you, but this is not better.”
Tamara: “I don’t believe you”
Emmanuelle: “It’s true. He missed his own son’s ink day. He’s using amp. He’s lost. Tamara, he needs your help.”
Tamara: “Willie’s real. I’m a ghost.”
Emmanuelle: “So, what do you think we can do to help him?”

– End of the Line

This leads to Joseph Adama suffering the same fate as Heracles: Tamara kills his avatar and forcibly separates the two of them forever in order to stop him from chasing after her.

Meanwhile, Zoe’s mother Amanda keeps seeing visions of her dead brother—in fact, in these visions she is physically chasing him down a corridor. These repeating images of chasing after the dead drive her slowly into madness, until finally she throws herself off of a bridge.

Joseph is so caught up in chasing after Tamara that he alienates his own family, and the only way it stops is when Tamara kills his virtual body and destroys his chances of reaching her. Daniel is so obsessed with recapturing Zoe that he peruses the U-87 project at all costs. He turns to murder, and as a result of that begins to lose everything he has. Who knows how the story is going to end for him, but it probably isn’t going to end well.

By now, we’re starting to see some of the questions that Caprica makes us ask ourselves about the price of holding onto those who have passed away—and about the price of seeking immortality.

Can we grieve so deeply that we actually seek to preserve the minds and souls of the dead somehow? And, if we do that, do we somehow lose ourselves?

There is the ever-present question of identity, mirroring the questioning about humanity (and what makes us human, or not) that ran right the way through Galactica.

To what extent is the Zoe Graystone avatar really Zoe Graystone? The same goes for Tamara. Both of these avatars are constructed from a database of the young women’s memories and personalties. To what extent are the things we do, and the things we’ve done, everything that we are? Are we our bodies, or are we something more than that? And, if we are, what is it? In achieving immortality, have Zoe and Tamara sacrificed their identity? When a real human being can enter the v-world and actually become another person and live another life, is there even really any such thing?

Tamara Adama certainly believes that she has lost her own identity when she says that she’s a ghost. Zoe Graystone isn’t certain who or what she is—whether she’s actually Zoe or a virtual representation of her, or whether she’s something more than the sum of her parts.

Zoe: “I mean… I’m Zoe, and the avatar, and the robot…”
Lacy: “A trinity. That’s what you are.”

– Rebirth

And then there’s the question of exploitation: Because the only two characters who have actually tasted the forbidden fruit of immortality—Tamara and Zoe—are in the process of being actively exploited for the benefit of others. The STO seek to exploit Zoe as their way of achieving immortality, while her own father uses her as the soul that powers the top-secret military project that will save his career. Meanwhile, anyone who hears about how Tamara cannot be killed in the v-world is seeking to use her for their own ends.

All of a sudden, that golden apple of immortality is beginning not to look so sweet after all. And yet, nine episodes in, everyone is still chasing after the elusive hope that we are all more than what we are.

That we are, somehow, more than just our body vehicles.

1816 is popularly known as the Year Without a Summer.

The year in which the rain did not stop falling. There was widespread flooding across the northern hemisphere. Crops failed. Animals starved or were drowned. The rivers were polluted with the bodies of the dead. People fell ill, or else succumbed to famine. In Paris (still reeling in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars) people started printing pamphlets declaring that the end of the world had come.

And, against this backdrop of flooding and famine, of cold and endless, endless rain, some of the most important works of early gothic literature were written by a group of five people, sheltering from the rain in the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva.

Those five people were George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), Mary’s half-sister Jane ‘Claire’ Clairemont, and Byron’s physician Doctor John William Polidori.

Over this summer-that-wasn’t, Mary began work on Frankenstein which (rightly or wrongly) is commonly held to be the first ever science fiction novel. However, Mary’s story of man daring to usurp the power to create life from God and womankind was not the only thing to come out of that summer. At the same time, Lord Byron (whom was renting the Villa Diodati at which the party met) was writing Darkness—a blisteringly vivid piece of opium-inspired, post-apocalyptic poetry depicting the downfall of the modern world—and his physician, Doctor Polidori, was drawing on Byron’s eccentric personality to write The Vampyre: the first truly modern piece of vampire fiction, which would lay the groundwork for Bram Stoker’s Dracula some eighty years later.

In fact, this summer on the shores of Lake Leman has itself become a part of popular culture and is the subject of no less than three feature films (Ken Russell’s appalling Gothic [1986], the utterly fantastic Rowing With the Wind [1988], and the very-pretty-but-plot-limited Haunted Summer [1988]—which is based on a book of the same name in which something actually happens). Sheltering from the weather at what must have felt like the end of the world, with little but a collection of German horror stories (the Phantasmagoriana, which recently made available to English readers for the first time) it is easy to see how the group fell into reading ghost stories to one another, and then went on to write some of the earliest stories of gothic horror and madness.

But, if the weather hadn’t been so apocalyptic, would these stories have been written at all?

Of course, we’ll never know the answer to that one. That said, the reason that The Year Without a Summer happened does begin to make the gathering at the Villa Diodati look as though it was fated.

It all started the year before on the other side of the world (and here is where you will begin to see my reasons for ranting about it here and now), at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, and the site of the largest volcanic eruption in all of recorded human history. In fact, the eruption was so huge that it was heard over a thousand miles away, and killed 10,000 people in the immediate aftermath.

But that was far from the end of it.

The eruption of Mount Tambora threw so much volcanic gas and ash up into the atmosphere, that it plunged the world into volcanic winter. The Year Without a Summer that followed is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 70,000 people across the northern hemisphere, so, a little bit worse than the grounding of European flights that we have seen as a result of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

However, there is an amusing end to this story of the volcanic nature of the meeting at the Villa Diodati in 1816 (which, despite what it looks like, isn’t just an excuse for me to rant about my favourite moment in history). Because, the name ‘Villa Diodati’ is now used for a science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction workshop that happens annually across Europe. Or rather it did, because this year it has had to be called off because of (you guessed it) the volcanic eruption that has grounded flights across Europe.

Although those who were planning to attend are doubtless going to be disappointed, hopefully they will at least be able to appreciate the irony of the situation.

It is just over two weeks until Beltane (which, here in Wales, is called Calan Mai or Calan Haf) and finally, finally there is: The first breath of the summer. This weekend, I went to a druid friend’s house to plan the Beltane rite. The weekend before, I spent two full days with my best friend: Climbing over mountains and through woods, laughing and picking wild garlic in the freezing cold and pouring rain.

Today, the sky is high and bright, and the mountains are crisp and cool and clear. My satchel still smells like wild garlic, but now it is mixed with the last coal smoke of the year—coal smoke that melts into the smell of burning gorse, as the farmers set the mountain on fire to encourage new growth for the new year.

Up above those mountains, a mated pair of buzzards are circling: Slowly carving up the sky, slicing the air with their great, brown wings. In the fields, the jackdaws are gathering straw and stray fleece to line their nests.

The last of the snow is melting, and the sunlight is like a physical pressure—like a hand pressing down from the sky. The wind that’s blowing in from the west is still brisk and whispering of winter, but those whispers grow quieter and quieter by the day. Soon, Dylan and I will be washing our faces in the first dewfall of the summer and gathering wild flowers for the ritual.

For now: We go outside.

Close your eyes. Feel that sunshine like a hand against your skin.

Summer isn’t far away.

Combining Doctor Who and socio-literary criticism is probably not the best idea I’ve ever had, but I’m going to do it anyway. Please be aware that if you haven’t yet seen last night’s episode of Doctor Who, ‘The Beast Below’, then there are many spoilers below and you may not want to read on.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to, the plot went a little something like this:

The Doctor and Amy arrive on ‘Starship UK‘, a giant flying city/country of a spaceship that was built after the Earth was destroyed, and which combines all of the cities and counties of the United Kingdom (except Scotland). But, there is something amiss: People are going missing, and everyone else is living in a sort of state of fear. Eventually, it turns out that the entirety of Starship UK has been built around the last of the star whales—a sort of gigantic, friendly whale-like species that swims around in space. In order to escape their burning planet, the humans of Starship UK captured the whale, cracked open its brain, and are torturing its pain centres in order to force it into moving the ship. When the people on board the ship are over sixteen (and every five years from then on in) they are told about the existence of the star whale, and given the choice to either forget about what they have seen, or to protest—with the waiver that if 1% of the ship’s population vote likewise, then the whale will be released, the ship will come apart and they will all die. In fact, it turns out that this last bit is a smokescreen for the fact that anyone who protests is surgically fed to the star whale in order to keep it alive. The episode ends with Amy realising that the whale only came to Earth in the first place to help people, and indeed will continue to move the ship even if it isn’t tortured into doing so.

On seeing it, my first thought was: “That’s the story to ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’”. If you haven’t heard of ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas‘, it’s a story by Ursula K LeGuin which you should probably go and read right now (if only because it’s absolutely brilliant).

Failing that, a quick summary is as follows:

In Omelas, everything is beautiful and wonderful and everyone is happy: All except for one small child, locked in a cellar, who can never be shown the smallest shred of love or compassion. These are the terms on which the people of Omelas are happy, and they are non-negotiable. In order for their state of grace to continue, the child must continue to suffer. In return, once in their lifetimes, the people of Omelas must go down into the cellar and see the child that is suffering so that they can be happy. Most of them enjoy the lives they lead all the more as a result of it, because they understand the sacrifice that has been made so that they can do so. Occasionally, however, someone comes out of that cellar leaves Omelas forever.

Comparing that story to the episode summary given above, it’s pretty obvious (to me at least) that Steven Moffat is aware of ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, and that the similarities are intentional. I suppose it’s possible that he’s never heard of Ursula K LeGuin’s story and wrote ‘The Beast Below’ entirely in isolation from it, but that doesn’t seem as likely.

Assuming that Moffat has read LeGuin’s story, this raises one or two unfortunate issues about his episode.

The main problem is that ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ was not written in a vacuum. It is a story about privilege, and it is a mirror that is held up to the world that we all live in. The world of Omelas is not intended to be a fantasy: It is our world, and the people who live there are recognisable to the people who live within the rich countries of the West, because they are us.

In the West, we live in a world were almost every luxury that we are afforded is dependant upon the suffering of others—both historically by way of the countries that have been exploited and oppressed so that we may grow rich from them, and from the people who are being exploited and oppressed even now so that we can continue to do the same.

We need only take a look around at the origins of our televisions, our kettles and microwave ovens, and even our clothes to see evidence of the fact that our comfort is dependant upon the exploitation, poverty and suffering of other people—sometimes there are other people that live within our own countries, but more often they exist within massive factories in other, less well-off parts of the world.

In a very tangible way, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ is in itself the very act of going down into that cellar to see that child. It brings us face-to-face with the realities of all the comforts and privileges that we enjoy, and it asks us what we are going to do about it. Perhaps most importantly, it tells us that there is no magic button. There is no easy way out.

And this is where I start to have a problem with ‘The Beast Below’, because that is exactly the way that the episode ends: By providing us with an easy answer to a story that by definition can have no easy answer.

More than that, if we consider the people of Starship UK to be analogous with the people of Omelas, and the star whale to be standing in for the child in the basement, then our understanding of the episode becomes even more problematic. If we accept that to be true, then suddenly ‘The Beast Below’ carries with it the unfortunate message that it doesn’t matter if people torture, oppress and inflict poverty and suffering other person or persons in order to maintain their own state of privilege, because the person or persons we were oppressing and torturing loved us really, only ever wanted to help us, and will continue to do so even though we have spent the last three hundred years causing them nothing but pain. It is assuaging some of that realisation of culpability and pain that we feel when we read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by waving its hands and saying “But anyway, it’s all ok, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

Only, it isn’t ok, is it?

Finally, if you consider ‘The Beast Below’ to be drawn in some way from Ursula K LeGuin’s story, then you see that while LeGuin chose a child as the one who is oppressed in order that we may benefit, Moffat has turned that child into an animal. A ‘Beast Below’. He has taken all of the humanity out of the one that is suffering, and turned it into the bestial equivalent of a saint or a martyr that is so full of love that it only ever wanted to help us. For my part, I can’t agree that that’s a good thing, either.

I’m not questioning how Moffat chose to write ‘The Beast Below’. In all honesty I think the story was told about as well as it could be told, and I think that Moffat deserves at least some credit for writing something that is thought-provoking and profound rather than something that is all flash and no substance. However I do question how suitable the vehicle of a (supposedly) children’s Saturday night sci fi show is for a story that requires the impact and gravity of ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, even if Steven Moffat has never read the story on which his episode appears to be based.

All right, I’ll admit it: I wasn’t actually planning on writing anything for Ada Lovelace Day, but now I’m going to anyway. It’s all because of this post over at 2D Goggles, wherein is quoted an essay from the 1869 volume of the Contemporary Review titled ‘On the Study of Science by Women’. One of the post’s commenters made a reference to Caroline Herschel that I couldn’t quite resist following up, and lo’ and behold, the article does go on to mention her:

I have no idea who Lydia Ernesine Becker’s sources were here, because what she says about Caroline Herschel here is incorrect, but it was enough to get me thinking – because Caroline features quite strongly in the background of the story that I’ve spent the past few months working on (I won’t go on about it again just yet, I promise), and you know what? She doesn’t get the reputation that she deserves.

So here we go, Caroline Herschel, this one’s for you.

A lot of people will know something about Caroline’s brother William. He did lots of very clever things such as being the first person to spot Uranus, composing lots of music, build frankly awesome telescopes, and discovering infra-red radiation. Herschel was fucking brilliant. I love him to bits, and I had a decidedly fangirlish moment when I found some of his scientific equipment on display at the Royal Observatory, however the fact of the matter is that his sister Caroline was every bit as brilliant as he was. All the more so, in fact, because she gave her life to a man, and to a man’s science, that never really gave her the credit that they should have.

Right from the outset, Caroline’s life was a tough one. Twelve years younger than her brother William, Caroline was born in Hanover and spent her childhood being mostly neglected by her parents. At the age of five she caught smallpox, and at the age of eleven she got with typhus. The two sustained periods of illness took their toll on her, and Caroline never grew much more than five feet tall.

In 1772, her beloved older brother brought her back across to England with him, where he had found employment in Bath as the musical director at the Pump Room. On her arrival, Caroline spoke virtually no English, and had very little way of supporting herself aside from the fetching and carrying, cooking and cleaning that she had done at home. Almost immediately, William put her into a punishing schedule of lessons in English and singing, and began to rely on her assistance while making his nightly astronomical observations.

As far as English goes, Caroline never lost her tell-tale German accent, but as for music: She became so good a singer that in 1778 she was offered a solo performance at the Birmingham Festival.

It was her first real chance in life of gaining financial independence – She turned the offer down, and went back to keeping astronomical observations for her brother and attending to him during the sixteen-hour stretches that he spent grinding and polishing telescopic mirrors.

This is completely characteristic of Caroline’s lifetime dedication both to her brother, and to the science of astronomy. A few years later, while William was rushing to make his observations, she tripped and impaled herself onto one of the iron-hooked stakes that pegged the telescope to the ground, crying ‘I am hooked!’ up to her brother as he urged her to hurry up. Although the wound never fully healed, a few weeks later, Caroline was back at work.

However, her relationship with her brother wasn’t all quiet acquiescence and subservience. Far from it, in fact. As time passed she became a valued and talented scientist in her own right, and began to have her papers published at the Royal Society. Hell, she even managed to get herself a salary of £50 a year from the King, paid for life for her services to science.

At the same time, however, she and William were on rocky ground. His decision to marry local widow Mary Pitt drove a wedge between them. We will never know exactly how Caroline felt about being forced into giving up her place as the head of her brother’s household, but we can find some indication of it in the reason why we will never know: Caroline burned the next ten years worth of her journals, so that none of them were left behind for anyone to read.

However, throughout this time she continued to make a name for herself in the scientific community. In 1783, William had designed Caroline a telescope of her own: Two-feet in length with an intentionally wide field of vision. The telescope did not have a large degree of magnification, and was not suitable for viewing deep space, but then, that was never William’s intention. Instead, in building this ’small sweeper’ for his sister, William had given Caroline a comet-hunter’s telescope, and for the rest of her life, this is exactly what she did.

Comets had only been proven to be extra-terrestrial objects (and not simply atmospheric phenomena) in 1759. The name ‘comet’ means ‘hairy star’, and at the end of the 18th century they were still thought of as messengers from beyond the solar system which refreshed the planets with water, and the sun with new fire.

In all, Caroline discovered eight comets, catalogued nebula, and during her work updating and cross-referencing John Flamsteed’s Star Catalogue, added a further 560 stars.

When Ms. Becker was writing ‘On the Study of Science by Women’ (barely twenty years after Caroline Herschel’s death), the sciences were still mostly barred to women, and any female scientists tended to be woefully under-appreciated and poorly remembered. Perhaps this is why Becker was led to believe that Caroline was never awarded the Gold Medal for her work discovering comets, but on this particular matter I’m very happy to be able to set her straight.

In fact, Caroline Herschel did win a Gold Medal from the hands of Astronomical Society in 1828. If nothing else, her nephew John Herschel (William’s son, and one of the founders of said Astronomical Society along with none other than Charles Babbage) made damned sure of it. In fact, Caroline was awarded the Gold Medal less than a decade after the Astronomical Society was founded. It was a feat that no woman would repeat until 1996. The Society went on to make her an honorary member, she was elected to the Royal Irish Academy, and was awarded the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia at the age of ninety-six. She even got a crater on the moon, C. Herschel, named after her.

This doesn’t mean that Caroline wasn’t eclipsed throughout her whole life (and indeed, throughout the whole of history) by her big brother William, or that she didn’t have to fight tooth-and-nail for every achievement that was ever put against her name. It just means that, as we can see from looking at the rest of Lydia Ernesine Becker’s article, Caroline’s was one of the relative success stories that were (and still are) few and far between for women working in the sciences. As such, we can take a little comfort, at least, from hearing it.

However, the fact that Caroline achieved any kind of critical success at all has an awful lot to do with the way the sciences were changing at the end of the Romantic era and the beginning of the Victorian age. For centuries, the Royal Society had dominated the academic landscape of Great Britain, but by the time Caroline Herschel began to be rewarded with critical acclaim, that was changing. New societies such as the Astronomical Society and the Geological Society were forming – a change indicative of the shifting attitudes in the scientific community, where increasingly people were beginning to dedicate themselves to a specific disciple rather than studying science as a whole.

This is one of the biggest changes that happened in the first half of the 19th century, and it really does separate Romantic sciences from Victorian ones. Obviously, then, it’s of huge interest to me in developing a pre-Victorian steampunk setting.

So, what about the questions, right? I always end on a question, don’t I?

Well, I’d hate to disappoint you.

How about this: Although Caroline Herschel had papers published by the Royal Society, and was good friends with a number of its members, unlike the Astronomical Society it never awarded her with any form of recognition for her work, and she was never elected as a fellow – honorary or otherwise.

In trying to figure out why, we can turn our attention first and foremost to Joseph Banks in his role as president of the Royal Society. Of the new, Victorian-style, discipline-specific societies that were springing up across Great Britain, Banks is quoted as saying that they would “finally dismantle the Royal Society, and not leave the Old Lady a rag to cover her”.

Unfortunately, the ‘old lady’ adage rings a little bit too true. By the early 1800s the Royal Society had grown staid and stagnant. She was old-fashioned, conservative and backwards, and the longer Banks stayed in office as her president, the more like her he became.

Ultimately, then, the Royal Society was its own downfall, but it would have only taken someone a hair’s breadth more progressive at the helm (or Banks being breath more committed to his libertarian ideals) for things to have been very different. Caroline could very easily have been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society, god only knows that women like her and Mary Somerville got damned close. One more small step in that direction and the future of science could have been changed forever. Perhaps the Royal Society could even have saved itself from the death of a thousand cuts that it went on to endure.

And, if it did: What do you think the world would be like then?

Caroline Herschel's place setting as part of Judy Chicago's work: The Dinner Party (1974-79) at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Carrying on from my last post on steampunk and the Romantic Age, I’m going to be writing a few more posts about the ‘dreampunk’ world that I’ve been working on. These are most likely going to be from more-or-less a straight historical perspective to begin with, but once I have the history all laid out, I will write more about the ways in which I’ve developed and expanded it into something a little bit more steampunky. I’ll also provide some background rambling on the first dreampunk story, ‘Liberty’, which is going to be in the next issue of SteamPunk Magazine.

‘Liberty’ is my first attempt at developing a steampunk world outside of Victoriana. The issues that lie at the very heart of the story are the concepts of exploration and colonisation as they were in the Romantic Age. In particular, starting point for the story was the first voyage of James Cook, in 1768.

As I’ve mentioned previously, in trying to steampunk a particular period in history, I figured that the first thing to do was look at the technology and science of the place and time I’m working with. I’ve already talked a little bit about Romantic technology by way of the history of hot air ballooning, however when you begin to look at ’science’ in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you inevitably find yourself coming face-to-face with one man: Joseph Banks. Banks was president of the Royal Society from 1778, until his death some forty-one years later, which is to say: He was at the helm of one of the most important scientific institutions in the Western world for pretty much the whole of the Romantic period. When you consider that, it’s not hard to see why his influence over Romantic science was so pervasive.

However, before Banks became president of the Royal Society, he also happened to have been the botanist on HM Bark Endeavour.

The Endeavour left England in 1768, and did not return again until 1771. Over the three years that she was gone, the she ranged across the southern hemisphere in search of the massive, mythical southern continent of Terra Australis Incognita (a legend that was only resolved with the discovery of Antarctica in 1820, the same year that Banks died). However, the secondary aim of the voyage was to document the Transit of Venus across the sun in 1769, which (it was hoped) would help to determine the distance between all the planets in the solar system.

Banks joined the Endeavour voyage as a botanist, but by the time he left it he was almost an early anthropologist: Fascinated not only by Nature, but by the study of humanity and human society. This was due, in no small part, to the three months spent that he preparing for the Transit of Venus on what is now Tahiti. To Banks, however, it was the island of Otaheite, where James Cook established a defensible position and trading outpost at Fort Venus, which served as the crew’s base of operations.

The first Europeans hadn’t landed on Otaheite until 1767, and so when the Endeavour arrived two years later, it was still a mysterious and undiscovered wonder. So much of a wonder, in fact, that over the coming years, Europe fell in love with Tahiti: Imagining it as a kind of earthly paradise where the people lived in a state of innocence – untainted by the horrors of the world, and living in harmony with Nature.

In truth, there was just as much exoticising and fetishising of Tahitian culture at work here as would later exist between the Victorians and the ‘Orient’ of the Middle East and Asia. That said, the ways in which the exotification of Tahiti expressed itself very much encapsulated the spirit of the age: The desire to live in a state of physical, sexual, mental and spiritual innocence that brought humanity into a more profound relationship each other and with Nature.

If there was anyone in Europe who understood the peoples and society of Otaheite to be far more nuanced and complex than the masses perceived them to be, then it was Joseph Banks. Banks fell in love with Otaheite in a way that many of those that were travelling with him struggled to understand. He threw himself into this strange and wonderful society that seemed to opened its arms to welcome him, and even took part in Tahitian rituals and customs such as the funeral rites documented in his Endeavour Journal:

“This evening according to my yesterdays engagement I went to the place where the medua lay, where I found Tubourai, Tamio, Hoona the Meduas daughter and a young Indian prepard to receive me. Tubourai was the Heiva, the three others and myself were to Nineveh. He put on his dress, most Fantastical tho not unbecoming, the figure annexd will explain it far better than words can. I was next prepard by stripping off my European cloths and putting me on a small strip of cloth round my waist, the only garment I was allowd to have, but I had no pretensions to be ashamd of my nakedness for neither of the women were a bit more coverd than myself. They then began to smut me and themselves with charcoal and water, the Indian boy was compleatly black, the women and myself as low as our shoulders. We then set out. Tubourai began by praying twice, one near the Corps again near his own house. We then proceeded towards the fort: it was nesscessary it seems that the procession should visit that place but they dare not to do it without the sanction of some of us, indeed it was not till many assurances of our consent that they venturd to perform any part of their ceremonies. To the fort then we went to the surprize of our freinds and affright of the Indians who were there, for they every where fly before the Heiva like sheep before a wolf. We soon left it and proceeded along shore towards a place where above 100 Indians were collected together. We the Ninevehs had orders from the Heiva to disperse them, we ran towards them but before we cam[e] within 100 yards of them they dispers’d every way, running to the first shelter, hiding themselves under grass or whatever else would conceal them. We now crossd the river into the woods and passd several houses, all were deserted, not another Indian did we see for about ½ an hour that we sepnt in walking about. We the Ninevehs then came to the Heiva and said imatata, there are no people; after which we repaird home, the Heiva undressd and we went into the river and scrubbd one another till it was dark before the blacking would come off.”

The concept of a Westerner becoming absorbed in a foreign and alien culture and ‘going native’ was still broadly unfamiliar to the people of Europe, who found the idea of a British explorer stripping himself naked, painting himself with charcoal and charging out of the jungle scaring people, every bit as strange as the crew of the Endeavour must have found him as they watched from the safety of Fort Venus.

The relaxed sexual attitude of the Tahitian peoples also caused the expected shock and scandal amongst the gossipers of London, who hounded Banks on his return with rumours about his relationships with the Tahitian women who danced the timorodee – a courtship dance that was supposed to be of untold indecency. In fact, these Tahitian dances became so notorious that the well-known London brothel Madame, Charlotte Hayes, put on a performance titled the ‘Tahitian Review’ where London girls played the part of the nymphs of Otaheite and performed scandalous dances for the enjoyment of the paying gentlemen. The irony of the astrological event that Banks had gone to Otaheite to witness was not lost on Ms. Hayes either, who touted her girls as ‘performing the celebrated rites of Venus, as practised at Tahiti’.

However, as more and more ships filled with European sailors descended upon Otaheite, the relaxed attitude that the Tahitians had towards their own sexuality (whether celebrated or spurned by Western poets and moralists) was to have tragic consequences beyond anything Banks could have foreseen. Between Banks’ first landing on Otaheite in 1769 and his death in 1820, the population of Tahiti plummeted from around 50,000 to barely 6,000. This was due almost entirely to the things that Banks and his fellow Europeans had brought with them to the islands: Alcohol, smallpox, typhus, prostitution, and (most devastating of all) venereal disease.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that even as Banks was renting apartments to display his collection of artefacts and drawings from Otaheite, as the wealth of plants that he had collected there were growing in Kew Gardens, as Madame Hayes’ girls were dancing ‘the celebrated rites of Venus’ and the rumour-mill was digesting a good portion of Banks’ reputation, Tahiti itself was being destroyed and divested of the very innocence that had endeared so many Europeans to the dream of it.

The greatest tragedy is that Europe created a paradise of its own from Tahiti: taking its customs, its dances, and its wild plants back to London, while at the same time destroying the reality of the place that had brought them all their utopian dreams in the first place. For Banks, this tragedy could only have been accentuated by the fact that he himself had no small part to play in destroying the very place that he had fallen so in love with.

I have no idea how Joseph Banks felt about any of this. The truth of the matter is that we will never know, but that’s part of what makes him so interesting: The question that, if Banks had known what was going to happen to his Otaheite as a result of the Endeavour landing there in April of 1769, what would he have done? Would he have acted differently? If he had, would it matter? Would it make any difference to what happened there?

And, if Joseph Banks had lived to see the same thing happen again as a direct result of British scientific and colonial efforts: What would he do then?

Anyone who’s spoken to me for any length of time will know that, as far as steampunks go, I’m very odd (I’m odd in other ways too, but that’s for another day). The main reason I’m so odd is that I can’t actually manage vast amounts of enthusiasm for the Victorian era. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it was great, and I’ve dabbled with it as much as the next girl, but it’s not really where my heart is.

No, that space belongs to the Romantic Age.

This is the period around the Regency (a word that I’ve stopped using lately to avoid Jane Austen connotations) which was between 1811 and 1820. But the Romantic Age can be said to extend beyond this narrow space into a woolly area somewhere between the 1760s and the beginnings of the Victorian era. The period that is of particular interest to me between 1780 and 1820.

For about the last year, I’ve been working on steadily developing my own form of Romantic Age steampunk which along the way has picked up the cute little monkier of ‘dreampunk’. If you don’t understand why, then you soon will.

In starting to develop a steampunk setting in any time and place, the first thing to do is look at the technology, right? And when you start doing that with the Romantic Age, what jumps out at you as really encompassing the sheer spirit and wonder of the age boils down to one thing: the hot air balloon.

So, let’s start with them, shall we?

The first real, genuine, documented and manned hot air balloon flight happened in France in 1783. The balloon was built by the Montgolfier brothers, two paper merchants from Ardèche who had supposedly discovered the massive potential of flight while watching laundry drying. As the story goes, Joseph Montgolfier watched a woman’s slip billowing over the fire where it had been hung to dry, and suddenly conceived of the possibilities of hot air rising.

This sort of ‘eureka moment’ is not unusual in Romantic science. You find it everywhere. In fact, you even find it in places where it never actually happened, such as with Herschel’s discovery of the Georgius Sidius (later to be called Uranus). But that’s a story for another time.

The Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon (later known as the montgolfière after its creators) was constructed almost entirely from paper and paste. The gallery for its passengers was ring-shaped to accommodate the brazier in the centre. This brazier was fed by a mixture of damp straw and wool, and could be raised or lowered to adjust the amount of lift fed up into the ballonet.

The pilot of this inaugural flight was one Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a physician and chemist living in Paris. You will be hearing much more about him a little later on, believe me. Pilâtre de Rozier was an aviator cast straight from the Romantic mould: Small, slight and energetic with an almost crackling enthusiasm and a rebellious temperament, he was the ideal man for the job. However, the ring-shaped structure of the gallery necessitated a counterweight, and for this purpose François Laurent d’Arlandes was chosen.

Supposedly fearless and audacious, d’Arlandes quickly proved that he wasn’t best-suited to air travel. Contemporary reports have him shouting “We must land! We must land now!” across at Pilâtre de Rozier as the balloon drifted over Paris, occasionally interspersed with “What are you doing? Stop dancing! ”

Pilâtre de Rozier, on the other hand, was overcome with a kind of ecstasy, retorting: “Look, d’Arlandes. Here we are above Paris. There’s no possible danger for you. Are you taking this all in?”

This flight was the starting point of a ballooning craze that would sweep across the whole of Europe, catching everyone up in its dreams of flight. The next major breakthrough came only ten days later, with the invention of an entirely different sort of flying balloon.

So far, we have focused purely on the hot-air-style montgolfière ballonet that was so famously described as “putting a cloud into a paper bag,” however the balloon that launched from the Tuileries Gardens just over a week later was of a completely different nature.

Named the charlière (again after its creator, Jacques Alexandre Charles), this balloon was powered not by hot air, but by hydrogen.

The charlière was striped pink and yellow, and the gallery beneath it was not the ring-shape of the montgolfière, but was shaped like a small wicker boat festooned with flags and ribbons and hung beneath the massive envelope of the balloon.

The charlière flew for twenty-seven miles with Jacques Charles and his scientific assistant, M. Robert, who again experienced the sense of awe and wonder documented by d’Arlandes and Pilâtre de Rozier. Later, Charles wrote:

“Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles forever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical ecstasy. My companion Monsieur Robert murmured to me – I’m finished with the Earth. From now on it’s the sky for me! Such utter calm. Such immensity! ”

This the sort of wonder in the face of Nature and humanity’s achievements that the Romantic poets would later call the Sublime: the mixture of ecstasy and terror a person feels when faced with the immensity of the Nature and the unbridled sky.

A year later, the ballooning craze finally made it across the Channel to England. It did it in the form of twenty-five year old Italian aethernaut, Vincenzo ‘Vincent’ Lunardi. Lacking official sponsorship from either the Crown or the Royal Society (who still generally believed ballooning to be a fad without any real, practical applications), Lunardi funded his venture by turning it into a spectacle.

For several weeks before the flight of Lunardi’s balloon (which was hydrogen-powered in the charlière style), the red-and-white-striped envelope was on display at the Lyceum Theatre on the Strand. He sold front-row tickets for the launch, took his cat and dog up with him, sold his story to the Morning Post, and arrived to see the Duchess of Devonshire dressed in her jockey colours of blue and chocolate. Lunardi was a natural showman, and very much a man after Pilâtre de Rozier: small, handsome, and with an indomitable enthusiasm. But, more than this, he had a real flare for the spectacle of it all. Lunardi also believed firmly that balloons could be guided and steered by the use of ‘airial oars’, which would allow the pilot to row through the skies as if through deep water.

The following year, in 1785, Lunardi further capitalised on this ability to cause shock and spectacle by taking a woman up on a flight. The woman in question was Mrs Sage. An actress renowned for her voluptuous figure, she arrived for the launch in a low-cut silk dress, and made history as the ‘First Aerial female’.

Mrs Sage was far from the last. Years later, Sophie Blanchard (wife of the late balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard) was another female aethernaut, and famed throughout France for much of Napoleon’s rule. Sophie continued on in the showy style that was started by Lundardi, using her balloon for performances that included flags, parachutes, fireworks and acrobatics.

However, before we move on, there is one final kind of balloon that we should look at alongside the charlière and montgolfière – and that is the ill-fated rozière.

Remember how I mentioned that you’d be hearing more about Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier? Yep, well here’s why:

In the same year that Lunardi was taking Mrs Sage up with him in his charlière (and causing all the expected scandal and rumours to boot), Pilâtre de Rozier was dreaming up a balloon of his own.

As far as he could see it, both kinds of balloon that had been invented and used so far had their own merits, and their own drawbacks: The hydrogen of the charlière provided a lifting power far superior to any hot air balloon, while the adjustable brazier of the montgolfière allowed for a greater degree of manoeuvrability. What was really needed was a kind of balloon that had both the power to lift, and the ability to be adjusted…

As you are probably beginning to guess, Pilâtre de Rozier made a decision that was perhaps not the wisest that he could have made: he decided to combine the two.

The rozière balloon was beyond ahead of its time – most people today would say that it was madness. In the arms race between the British and French to be the first to cross the Channel, Pilâtre de Rozier designed a balloon that looked like a flying sceptre. Made of paste and silk and rubber layered over one another, the rozière was composed of a large, spherical envelope filled with hydrogen at the top, beneath which was a longer, column-shaped section that would be filled with hot air from the brazier.

As you are all no doubt imagining by now, this did not end well.

Shortly after take-off, sparks were seen dancing in the air around the brazier, and Pilâtre de Rozier was witnessed tugging frantically at the cord attached to the release valve at the top of the hydrogen balloon. Not long after that, the entire envelope of the balloon disintegrated into flames. The rozière went into freefall, and by the time they found the bodies of Pilâtre de Rozier and his companion Pierre Romain, they were so badly broken and ruptured that they were buried almost immediately.

It was a tragedy only deepened by the fact that a few days later, Pilâtre de Rozier’s mistress took her own life.

The funny thing about it, though, is that modern research has suggested that actually Pilâtre de Rozier wasn’t so stupid after all. The possibility has been raised that his design was sound, and that it was only a freak accident that caused his death. Certainly, the fact that the first balloon to complete a flight around the world was a rozière (although it was filled with helium instead of hydrogen) would seem to support this. As far as we can understand it today, something went wrong with the release-valve in the top section of the balloon, and the friction that Pilâtre de Rozier created by continually trying to release it ignited the hydrogen inside. And that sort of tiny, stupid detail resulted in the deaths of two men, and a darkening in the balloon craze that was sweeping across Europe. If nothing else, the use of the rozière-style balloon was almost completely abandoned after the crash.

The steampunk in me can’t quite help but respond to that. It’s that little voice that whispers away at the back of my head, saying over and over again: “what if? ”.

What if Pilâtre de Rozier had lived? What if he had successfully crossed the Channel? What if his dream of combining hot air and hydrogen had come to fruition? What would have happened next?

And speaking of that little, niggling, ‘what if?’ question, before we leave off ballooning in the Age of Wonder, there’s one more person that we need to look at, and that’s Jean Baptiste Meusnier.

Most people think of dirigibles, zeppelins and airships as a uniquely Victorian or Edwardian invention, but the fact of the matter is that the Romantics have them beat. In this same incredible few years between the Montgolfier brothers’ first flight in 1783 and the death of Pilâtre de Rozier in 1785, a man with a whole sentence of a name – Jean Baptiste Marie Charles Meusnier de la Place –invented the world’s first airship.

The meusnier took the form of a boat-shaped basket suspended beneath an elliptical ballonet and driven by hand-cranked propellers. Meusnier’s designs were presented to the Académie des Sciences, but ultimately came to nothing: The French Revolution brought Meusnier into a war, and he died after being injured at the Siege of Mainz. Yet another tiny, random coincidence that changed the whole future of Romantic technology irrevocably, it again leaves us with that little, nagging question bubbling away at the back of our minds…

What if…

What if…

What if?

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the ‘dreampunk’ (1790’s steampunk world that I’ve been building over the last few months) and ‘Liberty’ the first story set in that world that will be in the upcoming issue of SteamPunk Magazine.

Unfortunately the layout for #7 and numerous other busy-things have kept me from it, and so until I get the chance to write it I figured I’d put another instalment in my ‘Poems from a Year Ago’ thing. This one is a little belated, but here it is nonetheless.

This is actually based on a short ballet (of the same name) choreographed by Garry Stewart that I saw performed by the Rambert Dance Company last Valentine’s Day. That said, it is also influenced by the stroke suffered by my mother almost exactly eight years ago now, and my unconscious fears of being trapped in a body that no longer feels like my own, or even feels natural any more.

* * * * * * * * * *

Infinity

If hospitals had nightmares,
Then they would feel like this.

Pinned down by antiseptic light,
We squirm –
Insectile,
Something less than human,
Made monsters by
Misfiring neurons.

The petals fall,

A spray of red on migraine white.
A few short, frantic breaths,
And then…

The petals keep on falling.

Hearts stutter for rhythm,
Skin dries into beetles’ wings
As blood rusts into
Ash-black
Veined transparency.

Everything unravels.
We stammer in this space
Between the words,
Between white walls,
Between ourselves and not ourselves
And then…

The petals fall.

This isn’t what we wanted,
This nightmare of anaemic light.

We sit,
And sit,
And stare,
And then…

…And then we only hope,
Because the only thing we have is hope.

Hope, and the hands
That hold so tightly onto ours,
As we clutch at the air.

15th February 2009

Tomorrow, I’m off into the deepest, darkest Welsh lakes and mountains to spend Imbolc with a group of druids that I’ve gotten to know over the last few years.

This was written at this time last year.

* * * * * * * * * *
Journey on Candlemass

Birth of the slow-turning year:
Great gush of frozen water;
The snap of candle flames upon that water;
Snarl of the East Wind
Between those flames;
And the beating of the drum,
The quickened heartbeat of our birthing world.

There is a moaning space between the rhythm
Where the ancient voices sing.

Whip-crack of the mare’s tail
On the East Wind’s spiral path
Around the tumulus.

Metal strikes the anvil.
Candles struggle-splutter in the pool.
East Wind keens over the snow.

I hear Ffraid’s whistle in this night.
It is the sound of hearth fire,
Furnace fire,
It is the song of dragons.
It is that brittle wind,
The water in the pool.
It is the requiem between the stars.

And it is all these things,
Because all these things are one.

Ffraid,
Ffraid,
I am breathless.
Run into exhaustion
And I am stretched too thin.

I have become this drum,
And now my heartbeat is the rhythm
Through which this turning world is born.

1st February 2009