#Podcast rec for the day, for my #SFF #Writers and readers:
Acid Horizon's "Solarpunk and Its Discontents" discusses the difference between the superficial aesthetics of progressive politics in contemporary SF lit and film, and the much more conservative structures that are maintained in plenty of fantastical stories.
Does your work ever interrogate the political assumptions in your world-building? Or just take the use of common genre tropes and settings for granted?
https://podcasts.apple.com/tr/podcast/solarpunk-and-its-discontents-the-politics/id1512615438
@MLClark When you get around to "Tomorrowland," this very theme comes up. A progressive future fell to a fascist. How and why?
In the T-land universe backstory, the story of Plus Ultra is one of great rises and falls. With great minds come great egos.
Any group with Edison and Tesla as two of the co-founders was doomed from the get-go.
The 1939 prequel novel posits the question, should +U share the nuclear knowledge with the U.S. government to stop Hitler?
(Einstein did send such a letter.)
Morning, Stephen! 😊
Does this tie in to any of the fiction writing you've been thinking about pursuing after the space program history is complete?
I'm getting echoes here of some of what you've mentioned with respect to scripts written and pitched in the past. What would you say your thematic/historical interests tend to be, when writing stories of your own?
@MLClark Amelia Earhart, Nikola Tesla, H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, references to Walt Disney and Orson Welles, etc.
Since Disney killed the franchise, they'll never fill in the gaps, so I took it upon myself to do it.
I began a fanfic called "Tomorrowland Down." It begins after the events of the novel, with the 1940 London Blitz. Nix is a child caught in the Blitz. He's rescued by Earhart and Wells.
The idea was to bridge the novel and the 1984 events in the movie ... (2/x)
@MLClark I thought it was pretty good -- I did a lot of historical research to make it as accurate as possible -- but nobody was reading it. T-Land fans said they wanted more, but no one was downloading. So after writing about a third of it, I shelved it and moved on to my history book.
After you watch the movie, if you want more I'll gift you the novel. It's in young adult style but it certainly poses some moral dilemmas. (3/x)
@MLClark I have a Tomorrowland wall in my office, filled with references to the movie, the novel, various people and events in the +U universe.
I also have a Star Trek wall over to the left. 😊
Anyway ... Hopefully you find the time one day, because the universe certainly posed its share of moral dilemmas. (4/4)
(Told ya it was going to be a screed.)
@MLClark It occurs to me that T-Land universe stories inevitably center around a loss of innocence. Even my fanfic was about a loss of innocence.
The questions they all seem to pose is, what do you do once you see things as they really are?
Philosophical questions abound in the T-land universe. It's a shame it never had a chance to grow.
@MLClark Good morning!
My next novel is a fictional tie-in to an historical event, the Vanguard test failure on December 4, 1957:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK6a6Hkp94o
As for T-Land ... Warning, long screed follows ... 🙄 😴
When you watch T-Land, the antagonist is David Nix. All our other characters have life stories, but Nix?! Nothing.
The prequel novel is set in early July 1939, including the first world SF con in NYC! Also involves the NY world's fair.
Historical characters abound ... (1/x)