Spaceship Moon

I have to admit, with a really shameful and apologetic face, that I find UFO culture to be endlessly fascinating. I have a number of books on the subject, some of them of the classic “The Unexplained” magazine reports collected in a single volume, another with some wonderful illustrations of Nordic blonde spacemen apparently dressed as fish. And account of the classic sexual encounter between a Brazilian called Vilas-Boas (not the football manager) and a spacewoman with blood red pubic hair.

Another is a rather more sober volume with a black cover illustrated with the so called Washington Invasion photos of definitely-not flying saucers giving the Capitol a buzz in the 50s. Within it, are some rather strange theories about the moon.

Now let me say straightaway that the UFO stuff is all utter rubbish, and most of the reports a four year old with a reasonable sense of scepticism could see through. I find them interesting as a cultural document of their times, and the deep seated sub and supra conscious fears of folk through the various tumults of the nuclear age. And one idea that a few people had on the go was that the moon was some kind of spaceship, expounded upon in the sober black book.

We don't really know how the moon came about – a fissioning of an original larger body into the Earth and Moon, a capture of a straying Moon, separate accretion from proto-planetary matter, or the most supported new theory, that of a Mars sized object striking the proto Earth and splitting the Moon off from it. So I suppose if your mind is out there enough, why shouldn't the Moon be a spaceship (Populated by who???!!!) that has decided to plonk itself in a pseudo-tidally locked orbit around the Earth (Why???!!!).

The evidence? Well the fact that the craters are all the same depth, supposedly, indicates that Spaceship Moon has an outer “Weather Shield” to protect it from extremes of heat and radiation that is easily penetrated by meteorites before they are stopped by the second Space Shield, a far more substantial barrier. Others claim to have spotted glittering bridges, buildings and even giant lettering. Apparently a couple of Russian scientists put this theory together in 1970 – avoiding deportation to the salt mines – saying the lunar seas were the result of molten slag and lava being created and spewed out by the giant machines that powered Spaceship Moon.

So remember this, the next time you to to bed with the moon shining in through the window. The man in the moon may harbour a terrible secret, and who knows, it could be far deadlier than what HG Wells envisaged dropping in on is from Mars.

And it wouldn't have so far to come, either.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 21.03.14

Sexy Sexy Robots

I suppose when most people are asked to think of sexy sci fi robots, they will come up with something drearily conventional, like the Liz Hurley Austin Powers fembot, or perhaps the deadly perfection of the Terminatrix Kristanna Loken;

Nothing wrong with that I guess, as she is an extremely attractive proposition, but it's a bit dreary isn't it? A bit fanboyish sticky stain on mattress to be awkwardly explained to mother? And she's not really very robotic either.

In the same way that Patti Smith said "If you are male, then choose something other than female" on the Old Grey Whistle test while singing "Land" (it's not called Horses you know, that song), why not perhaps look at something that is a little more mechanical. Like the Robot Maria from "Metropolis".

I realise I'm being a little female-centric at the moment, so for those more into cybernetic men, enjoy the practical, utilitarian sexiness of Donald Moffat as Rem from the TV series of "Logan's Run."

Still, it's all rather obviously human. Doctor Who tale "The Five Doctors" featured the Raston Warrior Robot, asexual yet sleekly elegant, and clearly an inspiration for the weird woman who walks around in modern day crap Krypton Factor "The Cube".

In the same way that there is a fetish for attractive amputee Russian ladies - so I've been led to believe - then some folk will be drawn to the stumpish Disney versions of R2D2 that were seen in "The Black Hole"; VinCENT and Old BOB. Note that Old BOB is a bit beat up, and is thus ideal for those with a "Crash" style orthopedic fetish...callipers and the like.

But to me the sexiest robot of all is found in the strange sci-fi vehicle for Kirk Douglas' saggy old bottom, "Saturn 3". Hector is a God Class robot designed to be trained by direct input from someone else's brain. Unfortunately the person concerned is deranged murderer Benson, played by Harvey Keitel, who rocks a pony tail and a hole in his head, and issues forth sensational dialogue at Farrah Fawcett. Dubbed by Roy Dotrice for some reason.

"You have a wonderful body...may I use it?"

But it's no joy for Harvey or Hector, as the robot develops a parallel obsession for Ms Fawcett, and pursues her up and down accompanied by strange bionic man style sound effects, killing dogs and eventually wearing Harvey Keitel's head on top of his own.

Sexual perversions - which weren't his fault - aside, Hector is a magnificent creation. All shiny chrome fashioned in a futuristic version of Michaelangelo musculature, he is a robot of fearsome power with a four foot long brain kept in a jar in his back. Forget the fact he has an angelpoise lamp for a head and walks like an arthritic miner, this is a polished, sophisticated, and terrifying, machine that deserved to be in a far better film than this one.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.03.14

The Planet of the Artists

I read now that the Mars One colonization project – a one way trip to found a new society on Mars, essentially – has now found a producer for the reality TV programme that is going to be constructed around it.

While the whole thing smacks of an eccentric rich Dutchman's idea of highly publicised group suicide to some, there is no doubt that sooner or later someone is going to have to try and colonise another world in that very fashion...what kind of people will they be? Will they be scientists, dry, practical yet crackling with mechanical invention? Or oridinary people, drawn by inducements to leave an overcrowded Earth for our real life future “Off-World Colonies” on plasma rockets of shining silver?

Or perhaps, the technology to send people extraterrestrial will become available to artists.

What could a planet settled by artists, and a society begotten by artists be like? Peaceful with an intense co-operation and indeed socialism in the Martian wind? Or competitive, talents of all kinds striving to out-do each other in the new world they created?

Movements will divide up the five continents after the devastating war between the conceptualists and the realists. Sculptures cast their new style idols high above the inconceivable red landscape, organic forms in brass and bronze glinting in the reduced sunlight, so high that across the Straits of Da Da the Island of the Photographers can see them plain. The photographers document themsevles, document themsevles taking pictures of each other, feedback in the lenses choing to eternity.

The photographers forget to feed themsevles, so intent with their documentation and display thereof are they. They rely on food-drops from the poets, who make edible books out of their poetry because on mars paper is not only edible but a delicacy...the future poet of Mars thinks that his words are literally and doubly so food for the soul and so should be distributed free from sub orbital space capsules.

How does a poet know how to build a space capsule? They have made lyrical the instruction manuals and their iambic factory workers can cope with this form of industrialisation.

The land of the architects, which on the southern shore of one of Lowell and Schiaparelli's canals, which are really real but highly misunderstood, is one of holes. For reasons of contrariness, all land above 5 metres in height is levelled with powerful instruments, and vast holes are dug, holes that are in the shape of buildings that aren't there...a Chrysler building made of nothing, a Palace of Knossos in insolid air, Eiffel Tower up not down, girder shapes etched in the rock, into the depths.

Of course, these architectural spaces being sacred, their creators don't dwell in them and live in crude tents in the super-dry terraformed atmosphere, throats coated in sand so they can't speak.

Finally there is the Continent of the Painters, a community engaged in an endless project – to reproduce in entirety the night sky on the ground in utter exactitude. It is a beautiful wonder, and to avoid spoiling it, they live underground, deep enough so their rabbit digging does not fracture the art. They painted the land black, and picked out stars in titanium oxide white, Tio2, tinting them occasionally yellow or red to match in utter exactitude the tints of Capella, Betelgeuse and the rest. The poets don't feed them because they don't like their slavish copying of nature; they have learned and evolved to subsist off their own paint.

The project never finishes, because every new comet, meteor and nova has to be added in, streaking the blackscape in more white and making the painters scream “THIS MASTERPIECE OF CREATION SHALL NEVER BE FINISHED”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.03.04

"Between Thought and Expression..."

"...there lies a lifetime."

Lou Reed wrote these words in 1968-69, and he was clearly a far more considered man than I am. For his statement is sometimes true, a thought can sometimes gently stimulate the synapses for what seems like an age, before impulse finally makes its way to sensuous, charming mouth or expressive hands, like the spark expanding along the metal loops of a Tesla coil before it crackles into reality, a flash of inspiration in a bar; a bedroom; or even on rainy streets where puddles are irridescent with oil dropped from ill maintained cars.

The person brings forth elegance and flourish like a skater posing at the end of a spin. The effect is deadly.

How wonderful it must be to be able to allow your brain to effortlessly pick the right thing to say or do, for it to act with studied contemplation before it lands the bowler on the hat-stand without even looking.

Me, I operate at the two other extremes. One is where the lifetime's contemplation becomes eternal, a never ending lightning streaked fog of indecision and panicked pondering, agonising over whether something is the right thing to do. By the time the decision is made, the moment is gone and the action is trapped within a pile of dust long after you've died.

The other extreme is where expression is so fast, it actually proceeds thought and almost rips it' way backwards up your spine to explode a “Oh my god, how could I have said that?” bomb in your mind. Sometimes its the only way to try and break the cycle of obsession described above, but the dangers are countless.

Most of the time you just end up mentally slapping yourself in the face, or scrubbing your knees with a brillo pad.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.03.14

Me and My Mental Hospitals

The town's old mental hospital...marked by a red brick tower, a landmark still standing today even as the rest of it was ploughed under salted earth to make way for a supposedly luxurious housing estate which like every other such development in this town has ended up nothing such.

I was taken there by a next door neighbour for reasons I can't remember. “Would you like to come to the mental hospital with me?” - I can't imagine me saying yes to that as a 6 year old, nor my family agreeing to this. I wonder what the circumstances were? Perhaps they had a lasting effect, although I wasn't given ECT, I just sat in a brown and cream canteen drinking orange squash.

Much later...19? 20? I ended up visiting the mental health unit at the R D and E Hospital in Exeter. I called it Bedlam...it was a massive gothic building perched at the end of the site, entry through a huge flight of stone steps up into a door you always feared might shut behind you forever. Inside, as my brain erupted with obssesive behaviours disruptive to life, all was bege officers with beige soft armless chairs found only in mental health settings. Men wearing sandals and socks talked to me about my dreams. And I helped them fail to diagnose the obvious.

Hometown mental health unit for outpatient maniacs. Now a hotel, when before it was a maze of narrow staircases and staff who said things like “'Shrooms” to appear down with the kids. I in my long sleeved purple top wasn't even a drug user, although I was just starting to self medicate rather badly.

The counselling unit at my University deserves a mention, as I was in it virtually every week for three years. It was falling down, and the offices were tiny. I always dreaded seeing someone I knew there. When I did, we manoevered around and around to pretend we weren't going in there. He and I are now both writers, but he is a far more famous and richer one than I.

The new local unit. I've never been in it. Apparently the top job of any staff member is to help the patients watch Jeremy Kyle all day. Have we really progresses from the days of head cages and hosings down?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 03.03.14

Spaceboules!!!

I've been writing a lot, in a quiet, secret place, about family holidays recently. I think this is because of my folk's getting a little bit older, and my mother's health not great, I guess I want to try and ollate all the good things we had in one place.

It's a good exercise for the memory as well.

This tale is extrapolated from a holiday in Southern France, courtesy of Eurocamp. It was the second half of our trip, after a week in Biarritz, and we had fetched up in Hourtin, in claret country. Across the Garonne, you could see a nuclear power station looming above the vineyards, a squat concrete building on the North bank of the river.

Sea beaches, blasted by Atlantic winds, were places where the skin was stripped from your face and the waves rolled in with primal force. Safe swimming could only be done at a beach on an inland lake, with a quay I unsuccessfully fished from. Our campsite had an unusual feature; an air raid siren used to summon fireman to the station. First night I was there it went off at 3am, and I lay terrified, expecting armageddon while trapped in a foreign land.

I used to wath petanque in the shady locale of Hourtin town square. This was the version of kiddy beach boules played with heavy metal ball bearings a couple of kilogrammes in weight. The pastis sipping locals could pitch these things accurately to an inch from twenty yards away, and cause clanking mayhem on the rough ground favoured for play. The sound they made was amazing.

Of course I cajoled my parents for a set, and eventually prevailed, despite the fact they were about 6 quid for a pair. I had two pairs, and a little wooden jack type ball. My favourite set were exquisitely cut with triple interlocking rings into the shiny surface of the steel, like a 16^th century astrolabe or some other piece of astronomical equipment.

But where to play? I played on the grass next to our tent, but this was boring, the petanque landing with a dull thud like a shot putt, and rolling only a short and predictable distance. Yawn. There was no proper rink like some French campsite's had, the nearest thing I could find was a gravel area romatically sited near the campsite toilet complex.

I began to pitch, nice set versus slightly less nice set, typically adding commentary. The light was fading, the nuclear alarm silhoutted ominously against the twilight. I was dismayed to find that the gravel was scuffing my new boules, which I fondly imagined were similar to the balls of Plutonium found in the “Fat Man” Nagasaki nuke. But as the light got worse, I noticed something more amazing.

Everytime the petangue landed on the gravel, or hit each other, they were giving off sparks. The granite based gravel chips must have had incendiary qualities, there was a shower of auroral flame in minuture every time the ball hit the ground. In retrospect, I wish I could have just lain in the dark, and taking care not to crush my own head, thrown the petanque up and down right mext to my black-black-black-brown eyes to be drawn into the macro world of fireflashes and electro-flame, asteroid collisions on unknown worlds.

All while the Uranium in the gravel toasted my genetics, I would revel in these magnesium cream coloured events, and try and take photographs, and try and wish myself back there to be 15 again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28.02.14

The Sexuality of Sci-Fi

We are the only sentient species we know about at present, in a universe where the possibilities are nearly infinite.

It is thus disappointing, if unsurprising, that we can only see things through our own tediously heterosexual and missionary position eyes. Our imaginations, when they should be alive to every possibility, are thinking only of England.

We are so boring. This young child playing with his Star Wars figures, could see all manner of fun and games involving Squid Head and a Gammorean Guard, while EV9D9 the Smash Martian torture-bot of Jabba's Palace looked on approvingly. But no, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was only rubbish old male to female, humanoid snogging going on. The brilliantly realised array of species that frequented the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba's Sail Barge were about as sexual as a packet of crisps, save for the constantly ejaculating phallus that was Jabba himself, his scenes with Leia a blatant earth bound bukkake signifier.

As the Holiday Special showed us, Wookies like pornography featuring humans, rather than other Wookies, and how disturbing is it that Han Solo gets the white girl, but Chewbacca's father has a black woman served up to him as his fantasy?

Contemporaneously, H2G2's Zaphod Beeblebrox may have been sporting an extra head and three arms, but there was nothing to show that his dealings with Trillian were anything past Page 32 of the Joy of Sex.

We all know that Kirk may have been canoodling with all manner of green skinned – or more shockingly for 1968, black skinned – women in the traditional manner, but leap forward into the Next Generation, and the excitement of the final frontier was sharing screen time with Nescafe advert style sexual tension with Doctor Crusher and Captain Picard, and with Riker and Councillor Troi – another example of a mixed species relationship being portrayed in typically heterosexual penis to vagina coupling.

The First Contact movie presented us with the spectacle (cringing!) of Data getting it on with the Borg Queen, but for all his announcement that he was “Fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques” it was clear that this android to cyborg corpse coupling was going to be of a very standard format. Indeed, any alt-sex activities of the Star Trek Universe were always of the cloning, or assimilating variety.

It wasn't until Star Trek Voyager, that anything different to these standards were offered up to the viewer – Harry Kim had some form of bizarre intercourse with the ever stunning Musetta “Mansquito” Vander - “I'm not sure that was even legal” - and Kes and Neelix's long term interspecies relationship revealed some interesting little tit-bits about Ocampa sexual physiology that were very different from ours.

Still all het though. Even the radically inhuman creations of Species and Splice engaged in fairly conventional heterosexual intercourse.

The world of sci-fi literature, however, had been a bit more open to alternatives. Arthur C. Clarke's universe was hard-sci and asexual a lot of the time, aside to joky references to shipboard relationships with genetically engineered apes called Simps in “Rendezvous with Rama”. However, by the 80s, there were open references to homosexuality in the relationship between an American and Russian astronaut aboard the Leonov in 2010, the “Feys” of 2061, and butch surfing spacedudes recalibrating their sexuality in “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

Going back to the 1930s, Olav Stapledon, in “Last and First Men” actually envisaged fully realised, highly complex and rather incomprehensible successor species of man, with sub-sexes and full intercourse involving a large group of individuals, but these were a later species of man, albeit barely recognisable to us, rather than aliens.

I think it is David Bowie, who else, who actually through the vision of Nicholas Roeg, gives us an idea of what a realistic form of alien sex could be...messy, genital-less, and with no-need for penetration at all.

And indeed, for all the stress and violence it causes, higher forms of life in the universe will probably have abandoned sex. And who can blame them?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry