The Untold Tales of "The War of the Worlds"

I've been watching Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds - The New Generation" DVD - originally bought as a Christmas present for my folks but still unopened 8 months down the line. The Victorian costumes the musicians are wearing are to die for and the updated music is still amazing, but some of the vocal performances are not as strong as the original DVD production.

Like the fact that the terrible Richard Burton head was ditched, and the noticeable steampunking of the stage show. Some of the extra dialogue is pretty risible, however.

Idle Jeff Wayne chit-chat is not why I'm here however. It struck me while I was watching that all the way down the line, "The War of the Worlds" is a story told through the eyes of a single person, the first-person journalist narrator. Later christened "George Herbert" by Wayne - as in Herbert George Wells - we only see what he sees, only interact with what he interacts with. Obviously there is his brother too (as I've stupidly only just remembered) but that is so essentially the same story that in all later versions it is easily converged with the narrator's.

One of Alvim Correa's beautifully atmospheric illustrations for a French War of the Worlds

I was thinking of all the potentially really interesting tales of the Martian invasion that have been left untold. The extended serialisation Wells wrote, if I remember correctly, features some corking extras, like the scientists who was vivisected by the Martians in a rather twisted piece of satire. But there must be others.

There are obvious ones of course, like that of the narrator's wife in Leatherhead - what traumas did she suffer while waiting to be reunited with her husband? Or that of the Artilleryman, what sense of purpose did he lose after the Martians died when he realised his dream of being a working class Lord of the Underworld was over?

But think too of all the people never mentioned in the book...the nameless dead, the anonymous survivors. Who were the people who discovered the dying Martians before the journalist? Who survived being kept as a living blood donor in the invaders' food baskets, and don't say Tom Cruise with his bloody Hang Grenades.

Who met a Martian close up, and attempted face to face communication, or perhaps hand to tentacle fighting. What happened to those who stayed in an East End of London that still remembered the Whitechapel murders? Who got closest to  a Martian cylinder without being razed out of existence by the Heat Ray?

So many stories.

I wonder how many people have tried to create "spin offs"(ugh I hate that word)  from the original novel; I would imagine it's a tricky thing to do because the rights to the Wells estate are complicated. I shall research this.

Research, then perhaps see if I could produce something of my own.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.14

Poets in Space

Is there a use for poetry in space?

Can the language of apogee, perigee, declination, right ascension, thrust vectors, newtonian mechanics and lagrangian points harbour those for whom words are a means to an artistic end? And not a means of requesting more oxygen be let into somewhere from a valve to ensure the survival of pocket humanity against the vast all but emptiness of space.

Space loves capital punishment, and is the harshest of hanging judges. Who can need beautiful wordsmiths where a single mistake of prosaic human or engineering frailty results in certain death.

Everything is checklist, double checklist, instruction manual and zero gravity suction lavatory. The incredible Commander Hadfield took beautiful photographs and sang a little Bowie, but if he had started declaiming Homer while bowing on a lyre, his fellow astronauts would have bundled him out of the airlock faster than you can say “tin can”.

Yet, when humanity does colonise the stars and planets, the arts will have to play a part. A society will surely go mad without them, without an outlet to perform and express. The all encompassing sterility of space must have an antidote; steel domes and plastic furniture won't be enough.

And so, in addition to the square jawed heroes, science nerds, brilliant women, engineers, doctors and folk who's hair looks good in zero gravity, so there will need to stained trouser artists, dusty sculptors, and lank haired writers in tweed jackets with elbow patches. And the poets, space berets and polo necks, astro beatniks, will have to go to.

It seems strange to think of it, but it is true. Mars needs poets.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.14

The Mars One Project (Murder on a new World)

News report today; a local news report on a very slow local news day. Amid endless film of flooding, and anticipation of a football match I care not a jot about, was a feature about a local fellow who has made it to the last 1000 potential candidates for the Mars One mission.

Mars One Homepage 

Mars One is no ordinary space mission. Unlike the Apollo moonshots, where JFK stressed the importance of the “Bringing them safely back to earth” bit, Mars One isn't selling return tickets.

It is a one way mission.

Now, they aren't planning to crash the astronauts onto the surface of Mars, although I have to say that my first thoughts were of a modern day Golgafrinchan B Ark designed to remove Earth's cretins from the gene pool in an imaginative fashion. They are going to give them everything they need, carrying out initial construction of a habitation using unmanned robot vehicles, before launching a human crew to their new world, with no probability of return.

Two years later, after the initial crew has successfully got the colony up and running, and expanded it sufficiently, a supply rocket arrives with more colonists aboard – think “Shipwrecked – the Rivals” from Channel 4 – and so on.

Eventually a fully fledged colony is up and running, that might perhaps get on with serious work like rare mineral mining, or perhaps terraforming.

The “Shipwrecked” analogy is an apposite one, because Mars One doesn't have any large scale financial backing. The enormous costs for the mission will be met through TV Advertising, because as much as a space mission, Mars One is a reality TV show. The 8 month voyage, the colonisation, the forever of it, is a celestial Trueman Show. And who should be surprised, for Mars One is a Dutch project, the nation that brought you “Big Brother”.

It may sound crazy on the surface of it, but there is an impression out there that sooner or later, the only way we are going to make these great leap forwards into interplanetary or interplanetary space is through one way missions. But surely by highly trained, highly psychologically assessed professional astronauts initially, not tabloid friendly prone to breakdown backstoried cuties – and financial pressures will mean it will end up that way. No-one is going to watch 24 or so REAAALLLLLY BOOORING people sit on their backsides in a space capsule for 8 months, before eternity in a series of what will essentially be Martian space sheds, each one sod all bigger than the Diary Room. Nope, there's got to be hotties, and there's got to be stories.

To be honest, they may not have to try very hard. The pressures on the crew will be immense – the boredom, the lack of privacy, the fact that there will never be a way home or no way to see families again. There will be suicides. There will be a guy who's habit of drumming his fingers on his chair, or farting, or constantly clearing his throat, will cause knuckles to whiten. There will be arguments...fights...

There will be sexual tension too. Imagine being the guy on the mission that no girl – or guy – fancies. The guy – or girl – you hate is the one who is getting the action. Imagine them in bed, having sex in the most filthy, sweaty way, low gravity orgasms, blood swelling engorged organs...and nowhere to go to escape it.

It would be too much to bear.

The certainty is that the first manned reality mission to Mars, would result in the first murder on another planet. Someone would get it, a space shower head cracked over a skull, strangulation with coolant cable. A geological axe through the spinal column, suffocation in a space helmet.

Someone will get it. And if no-one gets it, no-one will watch any more. And when that happens, no more revenue. And all the astronauts die anyway, as they run out of money for supply rockets and communication systems, and Mars' first colony becomes a futuristically materialled tomb.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.01.14

Punching a Martian

I used to have Martian dreams a lot.

I'm always saying this...dreams of trying to keep away from fearsome tripodsof varying colours in a deserted modern London...paralysed as finally one loomed up over Tower Bridge and reached for me with grapple claws sharply open.

Another time I was trying to cross a wood near Horsell Common, in the dead of night, and the Martians had sent out strange bio-machines to patrol the woodland – mechanical metal birds, with big cone shaped heads, lit up in christmas light flashes and hunting me making soft synth owl sounds.

It cornered me behind a fallen, burnt out tree, and I woke up a-shiver.

But for all there technology, as HG Wells kept pointing out, the Martians were feeble and vulnerable under Terran conditions. But no-one ever did the obvious.

No one ever waited until they had all climbed down from their fighting machines for the night, and then treated them to what Wells rather more talented rival Jules Verne would have said was “A fine application of English fists.”

In short, why didn't anyone ever just walk up to one and twat them?

I imagine doing it myself. I leave the artilleryman to his delusions of underground society, seek out the nearest Extra-Terrestrial nest, and evade any patrolling tripods and drop upon the tentacled monsters unaware.

And then I'd just march up, and punch their lipless, slabbering faces smack in their luminous disc – like eyes. I'd punch them over and over again, fist making a sound like someone hitting a bag full of liposuction by-product. Look at its tentacled flabby body trying to get away, when it can barely move in our gravity.

Kick it for good measure. Kick hard and often, leave army boot imprints in its leathery hide, fungal lesions starting too ooze a pus type substance. It can “Ulla” all it wants, it won't do it any good.

Kick it like a deflated football until it bursts. And then start on its friends, until the world is our again. Don't wait for the bateria! Smash their alien faces in!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22/11/2013

Bioshpere 2 and Mars One - the Daydream Lives On

I remember very many years ago, when I was still just about at school, I remember one of the science programmes of the time – Horizon or Tomorrow's World probably – featuring the commencement of the Biosphere 2 first mission. It seemed so attractive, 6 or 7 people sealed into an enormous laboratory with fields for growing crops, various other biomes like rainforest and desert. and most attractively, a big pseudo-ocean filled with fish that you could swim in. The whole thing reminded me of Douglas Trumbull's “Silent Running” movie, one of my favourites.

The whole point was that it was supposed to be a closed circuit environment – nothing in or out, the “bionauts” having to survive with nothing other than what they could grow themselves.

And so initially they starved. And I remember there being stories about the supposedly sealed environment letting in bacteria and air from the outside, and the whole thing wasn't really self sustaining anyway as a lot of the food was planted before the Biosphere was sealed. In the days when to most people the World Wide Web didn't really exist, and for those that did - like me in my first year at university – it was used mainly for playing MUDs based in California. Therefore you couldn't really follow the project like you could do now.

There was a second mission, but apparently this dissolved in acrimony after management takeovers and an attempt by members of the first mission to break in.

Sad. It all seemed so idyllic on Horizon, the image of a guy swimming in “the ocean” has always remained with me. It seemed like such a cool thing to do, the dismal reality of ant takeover and falling oxygen levels never registering on my radar. It seemed like practice for a really long space mission, and indeed since then various other experiments, with greater success, have run along these lines to see if a Martian mission is possible without everyone going mad and stabbing each other.

Of course, if you want, you can try and take part in the Mars One reality show mission, where various lucky folk will be sent to spend the rest of their lives on Mars in capsules about the size of a caravan stood on end, by the looks of things. And all this while having your decaying psychological state being observed by Big Brother type fans 24 hours a day!

On the other hand, this is how our colonisation of the solar system will eventually have to start, it's just not cost or resource effective to send people that far with a plan to bring them back. But imagine having the fact that you are the only person on the mission who is so ugly they can't get a partner.

I think the first space murder investigation will be on the cards.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15/09/2013

The Creeping Terror of Mars...

It's not there to be seen at the moment, it's crimson brilliance hidden away until it next approaches opposition in a year or so's time. Jupiter entertains all night, Venus glitters in the frozen mornings and soon Saturn will be shaking off his duvet just before the dawn.

But not planet Mars, not for now.

And in some ways, this suits me fine.

To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.

You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.

Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.

I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...