I met a customer from a Goodwill store,
Who said: A desktop computer of beige
Sits on the back shelf. On it, o'er a door,
A sticker stuck still advertised: storage,
And fax modem, and Intel processor;
Tells that its maker well those features met
Which yet survive, ready for lifeless screens,
The four-gig hard-drive, and micro diskette;
And on the bay coverplate, these words entreat:
"etower 500is, eMachines;
This computer is NEVER OBSOLETE!"
No one around exclaims. Late on Monday
In dusty store it stays, tower discrete,
Priced with orange tag; the sale ends today.

Septipods depicted by Carl Hoffmann from the dust cover of the German hardback edition.

Noon: 22nd Century (Полдень. XXII век; 1961) is an anthology of Russian sci-fi vignettes set in what later became known as the Noon Universe. It tells an optimistic history of humanity's progress from colonizing the planets of our star system to reaching other systems, and our first encounters with alien intelligences, or the remnants thereof.

It was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who are best known in the English speaking world as the writers of Roadside Picnic, which was adapted into the movie Stalker and has greatly influenced Russian post-apocalyptic aesthetics.

I'm blogging about Noon because it was recently brought to my attention that one of the stories, "Pilgrims and Wayfarers", includes a species of octopus starting to make its way onto land and into the trees (and beyond?)

Since the book doesn't have a plot as such, other than world-building humanity's progress and following the comings and goings of various recurring characters (such as Gorbovsky, below), I'll cover "Pilgrims" on it's own and how it relates to tree octopuses, then follow up with some things I found interesting in the other stories, as well as some meta information.

I don't intend this to be a complete review of the world and themes of the book, as I am writing this only shortly after having first read it. I also have not read any of the other books in Strugatskys' Noon Universe, so if I misconstrue or miss something that was later explained, let me know.

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What if I told you the secret of antigravity was revealed to the public in seemingly specific technical detail in a newspaper article over 120 years ago, only no one noticed or remembered?

On January 17, 1897, a science correspondent for The San Francisco Call recounted his visit with a peculiar foreigner who was keeping a secret:

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Article in the Boston Post, 1913-01-20:

ALUMINUM HATS HIGH COST FOE

—

Benyon Would Have State Supply Them Free.

—

Aluminum hats as one solution of the high cost of living are advocated by John F. Benyon, a Boston writer and publisher. He says they would save millions of dollars every year and shatter the high cost of living.

Mr. Benyon declares that when he announces his candidacy for Congress or the Legislature he will run on an aluminum hat platform.

—

WOULD HAVE FREE HATS

He proposes to introduce a bill making compulsory the wearing of aluminum hats, which would be supplied without charge by the State to every young woman when she attains the age of millinery indiscretion.

These hats, says Mr. Benyon, would be durable, artistic and inexpensive. With a simple turn of the wrist they could be bent into the shape prescribed by the latest dictates of fashion. They would be warm and light and would last a lifetime. The statute he proposes would permit the owner to paint her aluminum hat any color she fancied, and to tack on any simple trimming that appealed to her individual taste.

It is estimated that the general adoption of Mr. Benyon's aluminum hat scheme would save more than $400,000,000 per year in this country alone, now expended in promoting milliners into the capitalistic class.

This $400,000,000, applied to the high cost of living, would buy about 67,000,000 barrels of flour, or pay the grocery bills of every family in New England for about a year.

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"Drom Lunarius" is a short sci-fi/fantasy story by Richard A. Lupoff printed in the Feb. 1979 issue of KPFA Folio, a publication of the eponymous Berkeley, CA radio station.

It's about an intelligent camel named Sopwith, a carefully-bred, nearly albino racing camel who one night looks up at the moon from some dunes near the Mediterranean. Because of the "aeroplanar half of his ancestry", Sopwith also has great snowy wings, and so he flies up into sky to escape to the moon, which is not quite as NASA would have us believe:

The camel strolled across the pale plain, sniffing the fragrant lunar atmosphere. Soon he found himself in a garden. Tall trees grew on all sides, their trunks rising toward the ball of earth far above. Bushes grew with flowers in dazzling colors. Bunches of berries hung temptingly. High overhead in the vines the camel could hear the songs of tree octopi and the scuttle of feathered airworms.

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Did Gerald Heard's The Riddle Of The Flying Saucers influence Ed Wood's infamous 1959 movie Plan 9 From Outer Space?

In Plan 9 (viewable on YouTube), after watching stupid, stupid humanity progress from firecrackers to hydrogen bombs, aliens come to Earth to stop our inevitable discovery and use of "solaronite", a substance that would cause a chain-reaction, detonating the Sun and hence the entire universe. (Wood was a bit mistaken about the scale of the universe, but never mind.)

This is, more or less, one of the theories Heard puts forward in his book for the earthly visitation of flying saucers. In Heard's theory, our dalliances with atomic weapons -- which he argues affect sunspot activity -- could be a trigger action, causing the sun to irradiate all life in the solar system. The inhabitants of Mars, who have been observing us, are trying to either stop us -- by messing with missile tests -- or at least warn us of the danger we pose to both them and ourselves.

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After AFDB technology was rediscovered by paranoids in the 1920s, psychotronic practitioners sought to diminish this threat to their control. One method was through disinformational propaganda, such as this example from British Pathé:

While seeming to winkingly encourage the use of psychotronic protection, Pathé's design actually promotes poor deflective coverage, allowing ground-based psychotrons free lateral access to the wearer's brain. The hope of the Psychotronic Elite was that bad practices such as this promoted in newsreels and other popular mass media would overwhelm paranoid samizdat, thereby diverting would-be paranoids -- who might have only heard vague whisperings that ALUMINUM = FREEDOM -- from the proper beanied path.

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Is fashion an extension of architecture, or vice versa? Is a fancy car a type of suit in which to strut around the road? Are clothing and housing phenotypical traits that natural selection is now acting upon? In the future, will we wear our homes like hermit crabs wear shells, our bodies whittled down by evolution and surgical manipulations to the barest essentials? These are some of the questions Gerald Heard raises in Narcissus: An Anatomy Of Clothes (1924).

The thesis of this book is that evolution is going on no longer in but around the man, and the faster because working in a less resistant medium. Man becomes like a wireless valve, a transmitter which in the process immensely amplifies the current that he receives. When the Force that shaped all life evolved man, it seems that it kept him henceforward un-specialised, gave him, strangest of gifts, no vocation and equipment but, if not at one blow, freedom, innate opportunism. This was reserved for the favourite. To all the others their function and place. They sink into their groove, deeper, ever deeper; they run their appointed race; they become every generation more perfectly adapted to be what they are. Vague Trial and Error pass into the exquisite precision of instinct: restless wandering, physical preparation for doubt, distress and conflict, settle into a functioning so appropriate that by all to whom it befalls Nirvana is attained. Desire becomes ever obviously compassable until it follows unrest beneath the vast sea-level of indifference, and Life is justified in all her children: she has rounded their day in perfect completeness. But man she has not completed. That is her supreme bequest to him: he shall finish the story as he likes.

While the short book consists mostly of a history of clothing trends and their relation to architecture and the cultures that produced both, Heard's real goal, laid out in the final chapter, is a manifesto of fashionable transhumanism: we will reshape ourselves, both culturally and physically, through our most intimate of all technology, clothing.

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Cliquez pour agrandir.

Les Pieuvres de Paris ("The Octopuses of Paris") is a French novel by Pierre Zaccone. Sadly, it's not about giant octopuses hosting drunken parties on their backs as they float down the Seine. Much like the equally misleading Trail of the Octopus, these octopuses are only metaphoric.

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