farmerman wrote:Chum-I guess Ive actually seen some of those Bradbury stories on one of the old shows on SCiFi or HBO. Its not that I dont read SCiFi, Im just not an afficionado . I can enjoy some and, like the old Poe or Lovecraft tales, I can appreciate them but not be taken up .
I remember Steve King once wrote a couple of works that were specifically about "how he got his story lines". It was interesting how the "Hard SUpernatural" and some of the merely strange were thought through.
All the scifi of that Rex is speaking, is I guess, would be called HSF. Where there is an actual science principal involved, not a Star Trek , wherein Spock, Bones and Kirk go back to a world made of gangster mimics, (Although that was developed at a time when the multiverse hypothesis was being derived)
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a hoax centered on the first crossing of the Atlantic in a balloon and sold it to the New York Sun. It appeared on April 13, 1844 headlined in an extra heralding: "The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!" The story went on to say: "The great problem is at length solved. The Air, as well as Earth and the Ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has actually been crossed in a balloon!"
The story that followed was about five thousand words in length. To summarize it, Monck Mason had applied the principle of the Archimedian screw to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon. The gas bag was an ellipsoid thirteen feet long with a car suspended from it. The screw propeller, which was attached to the car, was operated by a spring. A rudder shaped like a battledore kept the airship on its course.
The voyagers, according to the story, started from Mr. Osborne's home in North Wales, intending to sail across the English Channel. The mechanism of the propeller broke, and the balloon, caught in a strong northeast wind, was carried across the Atlantic at a speed of sixty or more miles an hour. Mr. Mason kept a journal, to which, at the end of each day, Mr. Ainsworth added a postscript. The balloon landed safely on the coast of South Carolina, near Fort Moultrie.
The names of the supposed voyagers were well chosen by Poe to give credibility to the hoax. Monck Mason and Robert Holland were of the small party which actually sailed from Vauxhall Gardens, London, on the afternoon of November 7, 1836, in the balloon Nassau and landed at Weilberg, Germany, five hundred miles away, eighteen hours later. The others named by Poe were familiar figures of the period.
Poe used a plan of having real people do the things that they would like to do. The balloon hoax, however, lasted for only a day. The Sun itself said on April 15, 1844: "Balloon -- the mails from the south ... not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England ... we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous."
Poe went on to bigger and better things, although like many talented artists, his real fame and fortune were to elude him in his own lifetime. People fondly remember Poe for Murders in the Rue Morgue and the Tell Tale Heart but newspaper aficionados will think of him fondly as the author of the balloon hoax.
http://www.historybuff.com/library/refballoon.html
If I were God I would have done things a bit differently...
