Carceri

Allow Me To Explicate

Whilst sitting and working (O so hard) this afternoon, Your Humble Scribe had a touch of nostalgia strike him betwixt the temples, for no good reason that he could perceive.  I refer, of course - obviously! - to that epic from "2000AD" way back in the day, "Harry Twenty On The High Rock".  Art!

     Actually, that's a wildly misleading cover picture, but it catches the attention rather, doesn't it?

     The story belts along at a pace, meaning you don't notice the plot holes, and it ends in a hopeful transition, with Harry Twenty reclaiming his surname of 'Thompson'.

     The titular 'High  Rock', you see, is a gigantic orbital prison that accommodates 10,000 of the hardest and most dangerous prisoners in the future of 2060; the jackbooted fascist future society simply consigns prisoners to this cage and doesn't care one whit about what happens to them, as long as it happens in orbit out of sight and sound of everyone else.  Art!

     Enter Harry, who has been sentenced to 20 years for smuggling. Not gold or guns or drugs - food.  He's a bit of a rebel, is our Harry, who insists on putting himself in harm's way to provide food for the starving, and harm's way leads directly to the High Rock.  The wretched inmates have their surname replaced with the length of their sentence, e.g. Ghengis Eighteen.  Art!

Harry's happy holidays begin

     The rules aboard the Rock are pretty simple: stay in line about everything, or the guards will kill you on the spot.  Or, they'll just put you out of the airlock.  There are no punishments or boundaries or limits or repercussions for the guards, they can (and do!) get away with everything.  Writer Gerry Finley-Day was inspired by the film "Escape From Alcatraz" and "Papillon", and the story is fondly remembered for good reason.

     Harry 20, obviously - of course! - is determined to escape, and so hatches a remarkable plan with the aid of Genghis Eighteen and Old Ben Ninety, who claims to have been the first inhabitant aboard the Rock.  They actually escape, via a crude home-made capsule, to an island in the Pacific.  But things are not what they seem ...

     There's a huge rebellion and the prisoners take over the High Rock - which triggers the disaster protocol of a satellite mounting a nuclear warhead being directed versus the Rock.

     I won't spoil the ending, but I would like to point out a couple of potential flaws.

     Where are all the female prisoners?  There are none aboard the Rock, for reasons I shall not delve into.  Is there a High Rockette? full of Harriet Twentys?

     And the cost of an orbital satellite containing over 10,000 inhabitants whose food and water needs to be sent aloft on a regular basis, not to mention what kind of power source it uses, rather stretches the imagination and the purse strings.  What about sticking them on the Moon and having them excavate their own quarters?  "Devlin Waugh", in a completely separate comic world, invoked the concept of "Aquatraz", which seems a whole lot cheaper.  Art!

     That's "The Raft" from "Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D."  It's an underwater prison that spends most of it's time - you may be ahead of me here - underwater.  Art!

     Well well well, haven't we blathered on for too long.  You see, the title of today's blog, "Carceri", is Italian for "Prisons", and I was going to add in a good few pictures by that most influential of artists, Giovanni Piranesi, from his portfolio of same.  Ol' Gio, you see, designed a series of impossibly immense prisons in his etchings and artwork, and even though they were of the eighteenth century, Conrad felt they were at least a speculative fantasy if not outright fiction.  Art!

     You can have this one on spec, because we will definitely be coming back to this theme.  

     No w for a pot of Darjeeling and a couple of fruit scones.  Back in a tick!

Big Bang Bomb Blunders

I think this will be the last of our affectionate glimpses at the phenomena of nuclear explosions as filtered via the combined lenses of Hollywood imagination and ignorance.  Art!

     Conrad can predict a couple of the criticisms that Ol' Spriggy is going to come up with for this one.  Art!

     This is a no-no.  In this scenario, a nuke has been detonated underground in an old mine-workings, rather than the typical above-ground method.  Unfortunately for Hollywood, no matter how big the detonation, the earth around the detonation point does not travel in 'waves' as we see above.  You get a subsidence crater that suddenly forms, and that's it.  Art!

     "EMP," confidently asserts one character.  "Electro-magnetic pulse.  It knocked the helicopter down."

     Another NO-NO, this one in upper-case.  EMP is only caused by nuclear detonations at height; one carried out underground would have protected the helicopter from EMP.  But - Things Exploding.  Art!

     O dearie me.  Still, they did get the subsidence crater right. Art!

     Stick to Bullet Ballet, John, not the Big Bang Bombs, there's a good chap.

Star-struck

Here we have another image from the BBC Astronomy Photograph Competition, this one set in the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago that belongs to Norway.  Art!

Courtesy Andreas Ettl

     I know, I know, it looks like DANGER! MYSTERON ATTACK!  Well, no, it's the Northern Lights playing o'er the waters of Skagsanden Beach.  Art!

     The map above shows the Lofies, and matey certainly had a trek to get to where the greenery was.  Well done that Nork!

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor is giving a presentation, not because it's fun and entertaining, but because the inhabitants of Arcology One are in a lot more peril than they realise.

     A whisper of conversation went around the massed audience.  At the press of a button, a projection of Earth’s nothern hemisphere sprang to life on the wall of the atrium’s common room.

     ‘Earth.  Date: Twenty Sixty Five.  Please pay attention to the schematics that display  trajectories of nuclear missiles being launched and on their way.’

     At the press of another button a mass of coloured traceries instantly overlaid the map.  The Doctor sped the display forward ten hours and paused it.

     ‘Pay attention to these eight launches from China,’ he lectured, picking the yellow schematic trails out with a laser pointer, then allowing the log to play for another minute, zooming out to show the whole of planet Earth.  The yellow trails arced slowly upwards, merely a fraction of the immense amount of coloured trails crawling and inching across the giant projection.  Suddenly they vanished and the display paused again, the Doctor turning to face his audience.

     ‘Take note of that.   Those missiles were targeted at the southern hemisphere, specifically at Australia, and they were destroyed within five milliseconds, by a particle beam weapon at a distance of six thousand miles from origin.’

     He zoomed in and scrolled downwards to show the great island continent.  Three narrow red threads crawled inland from a point no more than a kilometre offshore from Sydney, heading for the hinterland just beyond the city, and to another two sites where explosions blossomed.

      He's hinting at something, I'm sure of it.

A Fifty-Year Old Inedible Doughnut

Conrad came upon this in passing and, being naturally nosy, took a closer look.  Art!

     This is an artificial island, known formally as the Outer Trial Bank, and locally as "The Doughnut" thanks to it's shape.  It sits two miles off the Lincolnshire coast and is one of a pair of artificial islands constructed to see if a barrage could be built across The Wash to retain fresh water.

     The answer was 'No' and no further building took place.  This island is about two hundred and fifty yards across and whilst it's completely useless for making a barrage, it's home to three thousand seabirds.  We should charge them rent.  Art!

     This is the remnant of the Inner Trial Bank, which is a whole lot less impressive thanks to erosion.

Finally -

I think I'd better let those fruit scones settle and soak up the Darjeeling.