A solar-powered mag-lev train system, via serial consign.
This concept drawing by Craig Hodgetts for a movie based on the book Ecotopia is quite eerie and beautiful.
The structures seem to glow in the twilight, like silicon flowers that bloom at dawn to drink in the sun.
“All we are doing is taking humanity to the next level. Unifying the race. No more prejudices. No more conflicts. No more have’s and have-not’s. No more us and them. That’s why we chose Madripoor as the point of ascension, where rich and poor are so rigidly divided between hightown and lowtown. But soon there will be just the one. Just the Terran.“
“I… don’t understand. You’re making… a celestial?”
“Of course. What did you think celestials were?”
“They are uni-minds of entire planets. Clad in armor.“
Jack Kirby look what you’ve spawned.
I told Chuch to sing an alien lonely love song, a song yearning for a type of love that we do not have the concepts to express.
“
‘The Pollinators of Eden’ by John Boyd, 1969. Penguin Books, 1978. Cover painting by Peter Cross.” From jovike’s flickr.
I picked up this edition from a Book Exchange here in Austin. I find all sorts of gold at this store. This painting is so weird and otherworldly. What’s unfortunate is that there probably isn’t a scene in the book that matches the strange alien beauty of this cover.
It’s twilight on another world, before the sun rises or just after sunset, and the flower analogues are blooming. But these flowers are just the above-ground manifestation of a rhizomatic network of semi-conscious flora. They have detected the presence of human beings on the planet, and the human-faced seeds are the beginnings of an autoimmune response system that will breed simulacra to try to communicate with the outsiders (concept stolen from Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris).
NOTE:This post was written to introduce a new blog which has since been merged into this blog.
Some of you may know me as an interdimensional hyperbeing, others of you may know me as cartoonist William Cardini. This marks the debut of Mark P. Hensel, public intellectual blogger.
My intention with this blog is to demarcate, describe, and discuss an aesthetic that I’m interested in and a producer of: Folk Sci Fi
The impetus for this comes from two places:
My work as a part of the art collective/publishing company/noise band the Gold County Paper Mill, where the term “Folk Sci Fi” originates from, and a discussion that I had with my fellow blogger and good friend Ivan Lozano.
We were talking about whether or not science fiction is pop culture. I think that although pop culture has appropriated geek culture (and how and why that has happened is another blog entirely) to the point where the two are almost synonymous, geek culture is not everything that science fiction is.
Geek culture is Star Wars, its space opera, its fantasy and super heroes. There are themes in science fiction that go beyond these things and take the long view.
This sci fi is a vast inhuman consciousness floating in the emptiness between galaxies.
This sci fi is manufacturing visions of the wind-swept rocks of dead Mars, of the slow collapse of civilizations, of vast unknowable structures.
This sci fi is about sluggish transformations and the future of humanity.
It is trying to portray the inhuman.
Pop culture, by definition, cannot encompass these themes: its pop, its a bubble, its of the moment and totally humanistic.
What I’m trying to catalogue here, with this blog, is when pop culture, or folk, briefly touches these themes. That liminal zone is where folk sci fi dwells.
But this blog is an experiment, a public environment for me to explore my ideas. Feedback is encouraged. Welcome, let’s see how this goes! I’m planning on posting every Tuesday.
Thanks to everyone who came out for the opening! It was as cold as Hoth out there but I think we all had a gud thyme. I’m going to have gallery hours from 7-9 pm on Wednesday 12/10 and 12/17, and from 12-5 pm on Saturday 12/13 and 12/20, if any of y’all wanna stop by. Here’s some images from the opening:
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