I recently finished rereading, for the first time in many years, one of my childhood favorites, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I was immediately struck that the dates Bradbury imagined for his tale of human colonization of Mars are 1999-2026, setting the main action of the book in what is now today. Writing around 1950, Bradbury imagined a world fifty years hence where interplanetary travel was easy and the threat of nuclear war made Martian colonization a looming necessity. Almost musical in its rhythms, the writing is nearly timeless. But to today’s reader, there are more than a few anachronisms that sadly serve to break the spell Bradbury casts. Not least of these is his emphasis on the threat of total nuclear annihilation, which (though it still most definitely remains today) now seems almost quaint.

Yet an even more striking example is found in the chapter entitled “Way in the Middle of the Air.” In it Bradbury imagines a still segregated American South faced with a voluntary, sudden mass exodus of African Americans to the new colonies on Mars. Bradbury uses the device to examine and uncover the simultaneously hidden and vitally present role of black people and black culture in the social fabric of mid-20th Century South. It’s still a very effective critique, but what stood out most to me is not so much anything Bradbury had to say about race relations, but the fact that a brilliant, educated, committed futurist of the 1940s and 50s could more easily imagine his grandchildren living on Mars than in a desegregated South. This fact hit home even harder in light of the recent election of Barack Obama.

There are many, many joys to be had in The Martian Chronicles. That Bradbury was wrong about the relative possibilities of space travel and race relations is one of the greatest. If Bradbury were alive today [See correction, courtesy of reader Kenz, in comments] I’m sure he’d agree.

Wikihistory is a short science fiction story about a group of future time travelers’ journeys to the mid-20th century. Structured as a series of posts to a message board or wiki, Wikihistory is good mix of alternative history and science fiction, which in several ways again makes the point that science fiction is often just history in disguise. (Thanks Rob and Feeds.)

Ken sends Yahoo’s list of the ten most historically inaccurate movies. Granted, all of them—Braveheart, The Patriot, Gladiator, 300—have their problems. But it would be very easy to find ten more egregious offenders than these.

Curacao, Triple Sec, Cointreau, Grand Marnier? Confused about the difference or trying to decide which tipple to use in your Cosmo? A London “cocktail enthusiast” provides relief with a short history of orange liqueurs.

This post may be even shorter than usual. I’m writing from Breckenridge, CO where I’m enjoying a couple (very cold) days of skiing. (The conditions are epic in case you’re wondering.) But I didn’t bring my laptop, so I’m writing this on my Blackberry. It seems to be working fine, but I don’t think I’ll have the patience or thumb strength for more than a couple hundred words or so.

Once again this semester I’m teaching a history of science-focused Western Civ. survey, and once again I’m using Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt to try to shake my students of their preconceptions about scientific progress and Western exceptionalism. I love Robinson, but I have read YRS several times now, so instead of YRS, I brought another of Robinson’s books with me on my vacation: Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in a trilogy about climate change in the very near future.

So far, FSR isn’t nearly as brilliant as YRS. It’s not even as creative as Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Nevertheless, even in the first 150 pages of this comparatively unremakable effort, Robinson’s seemingly endless font of knowledge is revealed again in an extended passage about the NSF panel review process.

A lot of public historians and digital humanists are very rightly baffled by the grant application and evaluation processes of NEH, IMLS, and other federal grant-making agencies. It is indeed a pretty arcane process, especially to the novice, but one good way to wrap your head around it is to serve as a panelist for a program in your field. I have been lucky enough to serve on a couple panels for NEH and IMLS, and in addition to a great intellectual experience and a fantastic way to make new friends in your field, serving as a panelist is probably the best way to learn what makes proposals succeed and what makes them fail. I guarantee your own grant proposals will be vastly improved by the experience. If you get a chance (the agencies frequently put out calls for panelists), I’d jump on it.

If you can’t serve on a panel, however, take a look at Forty Signs of Rain. Ignoring the intrigue and vaguely dirty progam officer that assist the broader plot line (I assure you, in my experience, actual program officers are among the most honest, impartial, and helpful people), in the first half of the book Robinson provides a very good account of the proposal and peer review process at NSF, which is more or less the same as that at NEH and IMLS. I’m not saying it’s right on the money, but as an easy and readable glimpse at the grant making process (especially pp. 134-145, where Robinson describes the panel room itself), it’s definitely worth a read. And if you’ve never read anything by Robinson, this is as good a reason as any to get started.

New Stella Artois website uses brewer’s long history, period costumes to sell beer. See especially “L’Origine.”

Science Fiction Timeline of Inventions. Learn when the taser, credit cards were first proposed as science fiction.

The History of LOLCats from G4.

Star Wars, the baroque version. Like steampunk, but older.

(Via Old is the New New.)

I’m currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb Mars Trilogy, an imagined history of humankind’s colonization of Mars. The first in the series, Red Mars, was published in 1992. It was followed in 1994 by Green Mars and in 1996 by Blue Mars.

I have said here before that most science fiction takes the form of historical narrative, and the Mars Trilogy is no exception, chronicling the “terraforming” of Mars from the arrival of the first human colonists in 2026 to their fight for independence from Earth in the 22nd century in a story that roughly parallels the outlines of American history. But what is most interesting to me about the Mars Trilogy are the subtle adjustments Robinson made to that story line as he completed the books in serial. It’s clear that Robinson altered the course of his future history in response to the actual history that was so quickly unfolding around him during the course of the early-90s. Thus in 1992′s Red Mars, we find the “First Hundred” settlers chosen almost entirely from the ranks of American and Russian military scientists, with a few European and Japanese civilians thrown in for good will. But in 1994′s Green Mars—in a shift that clearly parallels the geo-political shifts of the early-90s and the rise of globalization in the mid-90s—we see American and Russian national influence on Mars greatly reduced and replaced by powerful corporate “transnats” which run everything from Martian mining operations to its police forces. This is just one example of how, in order to construct a plausible history of the future, Robinson had to respond “on-the-fly” to the momentous events playing out in his present.

Of course there are lots more; as always Robinson is a gold mine. If you’re a fan of science fiction and/or alternative history, and you haven’t read the Mars Trilogy yet, close your browser and get to the bookstore.

To commemorate 30 years of Star Wars, the United States Postal Service has started painting its blue corner mailboxes to look like R2-D2, the lovable droid who first appeared in 1977.

I was three years old when A New Hope premiered, and standing in line for tickets with my parents outside Showcase Cinemas in Worcester, Mass. is one of my earliest memories. I’m not sure I need the post office to remind me how old I am, but as I child of Star Wars I appreciate the gesture nevertheless.

Upadate (3/30/07): So it turns out that the mailboxes have been installed to promote a series of Star Wars commemorative stamps. No surprise there, I suppose.

A quick one tonight from Popular Mechanics: The Top 10 F/X Scenes in Movie History. In fact it’s not a countdown of scenes at all, but rather a list of the most important applications of digital technology to recent filmmaking. Yet it’s ordered chronologically according to the dates of the films in which the techniques were first used, and it’s structured as a “top ten” list, so I guess it fits our bill.

Here’s another (crazy) example of how futurists (science fiction writers, etc.) look to history for process and inspiration. The FuturesWatch timeline begins in 1750 and simply carries forward to 2100 as if events from the late 18th century and events from the late 21st century qualified equally as history. Interestingly, FuturesWatch confidently documents things such as “First commercial fusion power plant” (2035) and “Period of increased social and civil unrest” (2055-2080), and only hedges when it comes to music: The timeline dates the end of “Rock and Roll” at 2010, but only tentatively suggests “World Beat?” as its replacement during 2010-2060. Perhaps it’s easier to write the history of future technology and politics than to do the same for art.

The topic of this spring’s Washington DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum was just announced on CHNM News, and I couldn’t be more excited. On May 15, 2006 Mark Sample, Jason Rhody, and Michelle Roper will discuss “Taking Games Seriously: The Impact of Gaming Technology in the Humanities” at Georgetown University’s Car Barn. This is right up Found History’s ally.

The forum’s topic touches on something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the extent to which fantasy and science fiction (both closely tied to gaming culture) are indebted to history for both substance and narrative structure and style—that is, the extent to which fantasy and sci-fi are written as history.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that fantasy is just alternative history and science fiction the imagined history of the future. The sources seem to say as much. The original Star Wars, for example, is framed from the outset as a story from the past. Introduced by the words, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the movie (and its sequels and prequels) goes on to present a plot based loosely in Roman history (“the Republic” vs. “the Empire”) and characters based loosely in Greek epic (Han Solo as the unseasonal hero, for example). Each Star Trek episode reproduces an entry in Captain Kirk’s diary, invariably beginning with a reading of the “star date.” Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a presented as a history of the third age of “middle earth” and even begins with an explanation of “archival” sources in its “Notes on the Shire Records.” A professor of Anglo-Saxon literature and language at Oxford and an expert in the chivalric romances of the middle ages, Tolkein borrowed heavily from the genre, which was itself a kind of fiction masquerading as true history. Finally, like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings also has its prequels in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. Indeed, the “prequel” seems a distinctive feature of science fiction and fantasy, and is yet another giveaway of the genres’ preoccupation with the past.

I first noticed the connection between sci-fi and history in my doctoral research, which examined the history of inter-war interest in science’s past, both in higher education and in more popular contexts such as World’s Fairs and museums. Among the most important figures in this story are George Sarton and Charles Singer, the founding fathers of academic history of science in America and Britain respectively. Exploring the correspondence of these endlessly-fascinating giants of early-20th century history, I noticed that both men (themselves close friends) enjoyed long personal acquaintances with H.G. Wells, the renowned author of War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and other science fiction classics. This led me to look more closely at Wells, and it turns out that while we remember him only for fiction, he and his contemporaries may rather have identified him as an historian. In fact, in terms of total number of words, Wells probably wrote more history than he did fiction, and his thousand-page Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind easily went to as many editions in the author’s own lifetime as the sci-fi books for which he is better remembered. Moreover, during his lifetime Wells traveled the world on paid speaking engagements, where he usually spoke on topics in history, religion, and ethics, rather than reading from his fictional works. Thus in Wells we see that sci-fi and fantasy are tied not only to history internally and textually, but also externally in the circumstances of their production and the interests of their authors.

Of course, I’m not the first person to make these connections. More recent authors of science fiction and fantasy most certainly have. Neal Stephenson, for example, definitely recognizes the connection, switching easily and expertly between stories set in the future (Snow Crash, etc.) and stories set in the past (his incredible Baroque Cycle). He sometimes even carries characters over from the past into the future (the mysteriously immortal Enoch Root, for instance). Another example is The Years of Rice and Salt by acclaimed science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, which in its account of what might have happened had the Black Plague destroyed European civilization entirely, is really alternative history rather than science fiction.

I’m not a gamer, so I can’t speak at length about how historical models play out in video games. But it seems to me that at least one genre of fantasy and sci-fi games, in which players retrace a highly-authored (albeit forked) narrative through a historically-inspired space (e.g. the Myst and Zelda franchises), seems ripe for this kind of analysis. I’m really interested to see what the excellent panel at the Tech & Humanities Forum has to say about that.