American Radio Warblers Original Featherered
|
In 1938 Orson Welles invented a version of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (no relation), for an American radio station. His company, Mercury Theater, had already dramatised various books, such as The Count of Monte Christo and Dracula, but now Welles decisive on a new approach. At this time radio was still a new and powerful medium. The big radio networks such as CBS and NBC had only been going for in regards to ten years. These were nervous, jumpy times. Storm clouds were gathering over Europe, as Churchill put it. Britain was less than a year away from the most desperate fight for survival in it is long history, and most Americans felt that sooner or later they would be involved, too. Americans were getting used to dramatic stories unfolding on the radio. In 1932 came the original live broadcast from an actual war zone, when a reporter brought the sounds of a real battle from Spain into peoples homes. Then there was the mystery of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped baby son, which dragged on for various months. To this day there are galore unanswered question connected to this case. In 1937 there was the fatal crash of the airship Hindenberg, described by Herbert Morrison, of Chicago station WLS, in a recording put out the next day. “Oh, the flames, four or five hundred feet in the sky, it’s a terrible crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and the flames now and the frame is crashing to the ground, not rather the mooring post. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers”, he says, before breaking off for a few minutes, overwhelmed by the horror of it. It was at this edgy time that Orson Welles hit the airwaves of America with his new production. Welles had modified the story from it is cosy late-Victorian English setting to contemporary New Jersey, and he staged it as a series of progressively apocalyptic news reports. Listeners settling down to what they thought was a program of dance music abruptly heard it interrupted by a report of assorted explosions of ‘incandescent gas’ on the planet Mars, followed, after a few more minutes of music, by an consultation with a ‘professor’ at Princeton Observatory, assuring everyone that there was not one thing to worry about. From here the story gets wilder, as reports start out to come in of a Martian invasion in full swing. The Martians had landed, for reasons best known to themselves (and Welles), at the sleepy rural hamlet of Grovers Mill, and were deploying in the direction of New York City, propagating death and destruction as they advanced. The realistic effect was heightened by the use of authenti place names along the route. The result was more startling than anyone, including Orson, could have predicted. As it happened, with regards to half the audience tuned in late that night, and so missed the brief introduction, explaining that it was only a radio play that they were listening to. Thousands of humans panicked. The roads became blocked with persons and cars. Some humans hid in cellars, numerous wrapped their heads in wet towels to escape the harmful gas, a lot of grabbed their guns, announce publicly or officially they were going to help defend Grovers Mill. The public services were swamped. A man phoned the Bronx Police Headquarters and told the cop on the desk, “They’re bombing New Jersey!” “How do you know?” enquired patrolman Morrison. “I heard it on the radio. Then I went to the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs!” It would be a cheap response to laugh at the uncomplicated reaction of those Americans, almost seventy years ago, as they confused science fiction with reality, but in those anxious days, who knew what might be possible? Afterwards, Welles claimed it had not been his intention to cause mass panic, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. All the same, he ought to have known he was tapping into a well-established fantasy. The fascination with off-world actions goes back a long way if you think of the Greek gods as the firstborn space travellers, and Icarus was an early fatality when he flew too close to the sun with his wax and feather wings, after having been cautioned versus it by his father, Daedalus. As we all know, the wax melted and he fell into the sea… Science fiction in it is progressed form started out with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. In From the Earth to the Moon, which was written as a kind of travelogue, Verne has his space capsule with it is three man crew, fired at the moon from a cannon. This story influenced most of the initial space pioneers. Although not as highly educated as H.G wells, he used real technology analysis to arrive at the design of his cannon and manned moon projectile, and at the time of the Apollo missions it was recognised that he made a number of rectify engineering predictions. Sci-fi creative writing of recognized artisti value actually took off in the ’50′s and ’60′s. C.S.Lewis wrote his ‘Interplanetary trilogy’ in 1953; Voyage to Venus, That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet. These had a strong Christian and moral theme. Lewis, in the first place from Ireland, moved to England and finally became an Oxford don, so it’s understandable that his fiction was a bit shaky on the science. But he was an exception. Many sci-fi writers of the time were either scientists, engineers or mathematicians, now and again all three. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov (I, Robot) and Arthur C. Clarke are just three of a lot of that come to mind. Ray Bradbury is in a class by himself, for his beautifully crafted, poetic images of lost and crumbling civilizations on the Red Planet. Today there is less distance amid science fiction and science than there applied to be. Arthur C. Clarke is so well valued in scientific circles that he has had various craters named after him on the moon. Many of Clarke’s ideas have been applied by space engineers. For example, in 1963 he wrote a story called Windjammer, or The Wind from the Sun, in which space vehicles had enormously wide sails, made of exceedingly thin material. The idea was that they were propelled amidst the planets by ‘solar winds’, or pressure from the sun. The acceleration rate would be small, but a craft would in the long run attain speeds close to the speed of light, using no fuel at all. I read a great deal of time ago that the Russians had taken up the challenge and were building a space ship based on Clarke’s idea. As I write, this vehicle has just failed to launch, due to the failure of the firstborn rocket stage, not the space wings themselves, but such is the interest in Clarke’s concept, that there are programs being prepared in the US, Japan and Europe. Another of Arthur C. Clarke’s ideas was that of a tower stretching into space, as a kind of docking point for space ships. This idea is likewise receiving severe consideration. NASA’s business-like approach to the exploration of space from the ’60′s on has taken numerous of the mystery away from local space travel and has affected the popularity of sci-fi literature. The special importance and significance has shifted to films. Again Arthur C. Clarke showed the way with the classic 2001. Since then we’ve had Star Wars, Close Encounters, E.T., Alien, Independence Day, and of course, Star Trek. I must likewise mention Contact, the book and film by Carl Sagan, a scientist and writer who left us way too soon. He was largely responsible for NASA’s search program for extra-terrestrial radio signals. And now, just to come full circle, we have a re-make of War of the Worlds… Seventy years on, it’s true that we couldn’t be slanged by Welles’ radio play, but engineering is moving at such a pace that we are not genuinely sure anymore, what is possible and what is not. Anti-matter, anti-gravity, charm particles, alien abduction, fetch it on – the truth is out there. Personally, I won’t be astonished when they discover a way to travel quicker than the speed of light. Warp element two, Mr. Sulu, and straight on til morning. |
Kindle vs. Nook (updated 1/2/2011)