The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen

Four years after publishing Ralph 124C 41+ in the pages of his pop technology magazine Modern Electrics, Hugo Gernsback published a second, far less studied work in his second imprint, The Electrical Experimenter.  This novel, The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen, ran from May 1915 to February 1917.

As a work of fiction, the novel is insufferable.  It reads as a series of lectures on physics, chemistry, and astronomy, all situated within a stock fantastic setting and strung together with the thinnest of narrative expositions.  But because this is a budding work of “scientifiction,” and beholden to the Gernsbackian tenets of scientific rationality, the narrative has to explain exactly how these lectures are transmitted from locations such as the Moon or Mars.

And here’s where things get interesting.  Münchausen, before leaving for Mars, sets up a relay station on the Moon capable of receiving his long distance audio transmissions and amplifying them for reception by the novel’s narrator, I.M. Alier, on Earth.  Gernsback selects the obscure recording device known as the telegraphone, patented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, to be the substrate on which Münchausen’s transmissions are recorded for rebroadcast in the form of serial fiction.

The telegraphone was the first device to demonstrate the principle of magnetic recording, in this case on a spool of tightly wound wire that rotated past a recording head.  The affordances of this gadget –– its recording capacity, its read/write ability –– determine the pulse of the novel.  Each monthly installment begins with a “shrill, high-pitched note” or a “piercing screech in my ‘phones” and ends with “an abrupt, sharp click” or a “snapping noise and a rhythmic low sizzling.”  Thinking like a magazine editor, the Baron keeps a close watch over the length of his transmission and cuts it off before it runs over his quota.

“But I note by my chronometer that the time is up and in a few seconds the telegraphone wire on my radiotomatic on the moon will be to full capacity.  So I must cut off short.”  (137)

Yes, this work is clunky as a piece of fiction.  But Gernsback’s “gadget stories” use narrative (or something like it…) to systematically work through the affordances of various devices, real and imagined.

“that spooky post-geographical feeling”

A curious add-on is now available for Google Earth, the proprietary software that synthesizes satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data into a searchable, virtual globe. If one turns off all Earth-related layers—roads, traffic, borders, labels, and terrain—it is then possible to overlay what is called OnMars, a series of .kml files that “wrap the Earth’s sphere in Mars basemaps.” The result is a virtual model of the red planet, updated weekly with the latest images from the fleet of satellites currently in Mars orbit. This three-dimensional globe, accessible from any PC with broadband access, can be tilted, zoomed, set rotating, and when angled just correctly, takes on the syntax of a flight simulator’s camera eye. Yet when one enters a Martian location into the “fly to:” field such as “Victoria,” the crater on whose rim the SUV-sized Opportunity rover is currently perched, Earth’s skeleton of geographic coordinates surfaces from under the image of the Martian sands, and we are given a list of ports, streets, cities, and islands within the former British Empire as it stands grafted onto the virtual space of this synthesized alien landscape. OnMars unearths our originary experience of Martian space as the image itself. Find out how you can help!

Martian Photography

As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the “thats the way, I like it” song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.

Despite the report’s several bogus or grandiose claims–that landscape images of Mars are “becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary,” that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red–there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer’s experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, “Actually there’s nothing in this picture that isn’t rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery.”

Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it’s as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.

“Mars is under attack!”

About a month ago, the commerce, justice, and science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee announced in a press release the drafting of a bill that would put NASA’s annual budget $290 million above the President’s request for the FY 2008. However, they also announced that the bill to be put before the appropriations committee would contain language that forbids “funding any research, development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests.”

In response, The Mars Society, led by Robert Zubrin (outspoken advocate for Martian exploration and designer of a direct human mission), began a fax and phone blitz, calling on members and interested people to contact their local representatives. The slightly ridiculous campaign announcement reads: MARS IS UNDER ATTACK!

The appropriations committee met yesterday, and approved the commerce, justice, and science spending bill. The bill does not appear to contain any of the threatened anti-Mars language.

It makes me uncomfortable that the highest placed push for a human expedition to Mars has always seemed a mere (or FINAL!) stepping stone in the Bush Family policy, with Bush Sr. promising a return to the Moon and to Mars in 1989, and Jr.’s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004.

It makes me even more uncomfortable that the number of accounts from credible scientists and politicians who say that the human exploration of Mars is simply unnecessary is always tempered by the incredible amount of positive Mars-related press that NASA receives. In the rhetoric for and against human missions, the quality of data we have been receiving from robotic missions is simply too good to ignore.

So while the debate continues, something strange is happening to the red planet. The response by one reader of the Space Politics blog to this post gives me pause. “[...]we have maps of Mars that are an order of magnitude better then those of the Moon. In fact Mars is better mapped then most of the Earth.”

The map currently being developed by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter is available online. The map ranges from a global perspective to a resolution the width of a beach ball.

What is so interesting to me about this discussion on the future of Martian exploration is that even while it goes on right now, a material tangibility is being married with evocations of some fantastical, dreamlike existence on both sides of the debate. While I can’t go very far with this right now, it seems fitting to quote the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy: “Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up in the night sky, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from the very beginning–a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.”