Tonight’s selection goes with last night’s. Late 1860’s US SF. Ergo, for fun, another Lulu edition.
"No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."
Along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Three Little Pigs, Edward E. Hale’s "The Brick Moon" (1869) is one of the three great brickpunk classics of world literature.
Sandemanian technopreneurs look to the bold, bricks & mortar future, with a flywheel-launched, satellite-based global positioning system; but learn valuable life lessons instead.
Brick. It’s awesome stuff.
"The Brick Moon" was originally serialized in The Atlantic Monthly. And there is an interesting thematic connection with the Steam Man, above and beyond the nigh simultaneous publication. Apparently the inspiration for the Steam Man was – the BigDog of its day – this. "However, by observing carefully the cause of failure, persevering and perfecting the man-form, and by substituting steam in place of the perpetual motion machine, the present success was attained." Words to live by.
As I was saying, in "The Brick Moon", our protagonists are likewise weaned off unreal dreams. "Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough." Then, having put away childish things, they are soon enough hyrodynamically flywheeling tons of bricks into the lower atmosphere.
Here’s a free PDF.
Arguably, this version of the three little pigs is even better.
If you are more old school, here’s Gilgamesh: "Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly. Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?"
Brick. Awesome.
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Matt 03.18.08 at 1:56 pm
Unless you’re twelve, can we have a moratorium on the use of “awesome”? I must admit I’m getting pretty sick of it.
richard 03.18.08 at 1:58 pm
See, the Steam Man shows that there’s no need to be afraid of BigDog, and no uncanny valley. You can come out from behind the sofa, now.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 2:01 pm
“Unless you’re twelve, can we have a moratorium on the use of “awesomeâ€?”
Actually, I find it even MORE annoying when 12-year olds say it. Are you sure you would really prefer that?
Matt 03.18.08 at 2:15 pm
Well, when a 12 year old says “awesome” you can at least understand it. When an adult does it they sound either silly or like they are trying to keep up with the kids (another form of silly, I guess.) It’s like saying “like” all the time. That’s to say, terrible.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 2:20 pm
“When an adult does it they sound either silly or like they are trying to keep up with the kids (another form of silly, I guess.)”
Well, I think the problem is that you aren’t hearing it right, then. Because, after all, it’s not like the kids are all into the brickpunk. That’s so 19th Century.
Righteous Bubba 03.18.08 at 2:21 pm
What word’s, like, as awesome as awesome? It’s awesomelicious in its awesomeage.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 2:22 pm
Awesometastic. Awesomecalafrajelistic.
Watson Aname 03.18.08 at 2:58 pm
Isn’t “awesome” about 15 years out of date with self respecting kids?
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 3:02 pm
“Isn’t “awesome†about 15 years out of date with self respecting kids?”
I had been assuming so, and will continue to do so until someone shows otherwise.
Matt 03.18.08 at 3:19 pm
You’ve been too long out of America, John- ride any bus full of school kids in the US today and you’ll have yourself an ear full of awesome. Not to mention kids like Matt Y, to whom it’s become a sort of disgusting verbal parasite attached to his writing. Sadly, it’s also perfectly typical. And awful.
russ 03.18.08 at 3:25 pm
Here is another awesome version of the three little pigs (courtesy of Green Jelly):
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 3:31 pm
Sorry, you still aren’t attuning your ear to catch the most rarified valences, matt. Just for starters, it’s true that kids still use ‘awesome’. Yes, that’s fair enough. But it’s no longer awesome to do so. And somehow that is what makes all the difference.
jack lecou 03.18.08 at 3:33 pm
Everybody better stay off matt’s lawn.
Matt 03.18.08 at 3:36 pm
The worst sort of irony, John, is the type that tries to be ironic but manages to only be actually trite. I’m afraid that all uses of ‘awesome’ fall into that category. And if I had a lawn you’d be damned right you’d need to stay off of it!
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 3:41 pm
“The worst sort of irony, John, is the type that tries to be ironic but manages to only be actually trite. I’m afraid that all uses of ‘awesome’ fall into that category.”
Look, matt, this isn’t even remotely correct. For starters, are you seriously proposing that 12-year olds are capable of being ‘trite’? I’ve never seen it happen.
ajay 03.18.08 at 3:42 pm
I don’t think the Brick Moon is practical. In order for it to work as a longitude-finding device it has to stay over the Greenwich meridian, which means a geosynchronous orbit – more like 30,000 miles up than 4,000. He’s got his maths wrong. If you put it into a polar orbit at 4,000 miles, or any other altitude for that matter, it’ll stay in that plane as the world turns beneath it and be useless as a longitude-finder, because it won’t be over Greenwich the whole time.
What he should have suggested is a Brick Orrery. (Similar to the idea of finding the longitude from the orbits of Jupiter’s moons). Launch a number of small Brick Moons into equatorial orbits of differing periods, and you’ll be able to tell the Greenwich time very accurately from looking to see which ones are in view when and in what relation to each other. (“Ah, I see from my Mariners’ Collected Orrery Tables that Brick Moon Alice will be in conjunction with Brick Moon Dorothy at 21.34 and 5 seconds Greenwich time tonight. I shall adjust my chronometer accordingly.”)
From the Greenwich time plus the local time (determined from the time of sunrise, sunset, noon, or the rising and setting of the fixed stars) you have your longitude.
If a colony is to be built, it must be made of something. It would make the most economical sense to use materials found on Mars for colonizing instead of transporting the materials from Earth. It was suggested in a paper by Bruce Mackenzie from The Case for Mars III conference that bricks could be made from the Martian surface for underground structures. My senior thesis is to try to make such a brick.
http://www.marssociety.org/portal/TMS_Library/MAR_98_064/view
rea 03.18.08 at 3:45 pm
I though for a few minutes that this author was the guy who was the featured speaker at the dedication of the cemetary at Gettysburg (where Pres. Lincoln also made a “few appropriate remarks”), but no, that was his uncle and namesake, Edward Everett.
The author, however, is the same man who wrote the famous story, “The Man Without a Country.”
Johan 03.18.08 at 3:45 pm
This is a great idea, really.
But I’m curious about the Creative Commons license: As CC is for copyrighted material only, you can’t really license a work that is already in the public domain, can you? So even if E. E. Hale now re-licenses his work under the relatively generous BY-NC-SA license, it is not really valid, at least not the Non-Commercial condition. For example, if someone else would publish The Brick Moon commercially (I hear there’s a lot of money in brickpunk these days), the CC license would not stop them from doing so.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 3:51 pm
johan, my understanding is that I could copyright my edition. (I don’t seriously suppose anyone is going to steal it and try to make money, despite the world being filthy in money chasing brickpunk.) By saying CC I guess I’m saying that if someone wanted to give away my nice PDF somewhere for free, they could.
But if you are right I should probably stop bothering to put the CC on.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 3:54 pm
ajay, “The Brick Orrery” is a great story title. And Martian bricks are a cool idea. There’s a future in this whole brickpunk thing!
Matt 03.18.08 at 3:58 pm
John- it’s not 12 year olds that are being trite- that’s why I said that “unless you are twelve” you shouldn’t use “awesome”. It’s _you_ who are being trite when you use it. Not even trite, really. Just silly.
Righteous Bubba 03.18.08 at 4:05 pm
Awesome argument and it’s ABOUT AWESOME. Awesome.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 4:06 pm
Yes, I understand what you are saying, matt. What I am saying is that you are misunderstanding the word ‘awesome’. So here we are.
richard 03.18.08 at 4:17 pm
I like brickpunk even better than my previous favourite, stringpunk. If I didn’t hate writing so much I’d be working on a trilogy right now.
Righteous Bubba 03.18.08 at 4:29 pm
Anyway, thanks for the book.
John Holbo 03.18.08 at 4:30 pm
You are quite welcome.
ajay 03.18.08 at 4:31 pm
20: I’m thinking unauthorised sequel? Possibly with lots of other strange 19th century sects in space. The Sandemanians may have got there first (no doubt they received a helping hand from Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Victorian Science Hero) but no doubt the persecuted Mormons are looking enviously at the prospect of a safe adobe haven in orbit. And can the Plymouth Brethren and the Agapemonites be far behind?
Meanwhile, a conspiracy of highly-placed Muggletonians, incensed at the implication that the sky is not (as they believe) a mere six miles above the earth, prepare an assault on the blasphemous flywheel launch facility from their armada of steam-powered Land Corvettes…
praisegod barebones 03.18.08 at 6:55 pm
How about the Ranters, Diggers and Fifth Monarchy Men.
ajay 03.18.08 at 7:17 pm
29: Perhaps a bit early for the period? They were all 17th century sects, I think. But they would make fantastic characters. Oh, what the hell, let’s have them.
Perhaps a radical abolitionist group launches their own armed Brick Moon in an attempt to destroy the Orrery – or at any rate hold it hostage – as a blow against the transatlantic slave trade? Under the command of John Brown! Harper’s Ferry in SPAAAAACE!
BillCinSD 03.18.08 at 7:28 pm
the world’s been going to h e double hockey sticks since the heyday of strawpunk passed.
praisegod barebones 03.18.08 at 7:43 pm
Weren’t the Muggletonians 17th century too?
ajay 03.18.08 at 7:54 pm
32: well, yes, but they lasted well into the 19th century, which is when they got aggressive about Weird Astronomy. Look, if you want to put Fifth Monarchy Men in Space, you can write your own brickpunk. I’m not stopping you. There are many worlds in the Brick Orrery.
rea 03.18.08 at 10:18 pm
Perhaps a radical abolitionist group launches their own armed Brick Moon in an attempt to destroy the Orrery – or at any rate hold it hostage – as a blow against the transatlantic slave trade? Under the command of John Brown!
Edward Everett Hale was a contemporary of John Brown, and was prominent as a fund raiser for armed resistance to slavery in Kansas in the decade before the Civil War.
md 20/400 03.18.08 at 11:10 pm
So sublime!
mijnheer 03.18.08 at 11:42 pm
The news is just in that Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. When I got into science fiction a long time ago, Clarke was one of my big three, the ABC of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke.
John Holbo 03.19.08 at 12:56 am
ajay, that’s brilliant.
belle waring 03.19.08 at 3:00 am
it’s so fucking awesome that my husband makes all these books, isn’t it?
ajay 03.19.08 at 10:20 am
38: ma’am, it is indeed awesome. (Who did the Rhino Bird logo, by the way?)
richard 03.19.08 at 1:45 pm
attempt to destroy the Orrery – or at any rate hold it hostage – as a blow against the transatlantic slave trade?
Dude, it’s brick. You can hold any city in the world to ransom by threatening to destabilise its orbit. My money’s on the Saint Simonians, or Captain Swing, in which case, look out Manchester.
jholbo 03.19.08 at 2:41 pm
“Who did the Rhino Bird logo, by the way?”
Zoë did it. Quite by accident.
ajay 03.19.08 at 2:58 pm
40: hmm… I can’t see Captain Swing trying to kill thousands of innocent working folk in Manchester. Sounds more like the kind of stunt that the Taiping or some similar Chinese rebel movement might try on, say, Shanghai (in order to purge it of foreigners). I’ll save that for the sequel, “Under the Mandate of Heaven”.
I notice, though, that the Saint-Simonians are exactly the sort of group I want – a strange 19th century messianic Christian socialist group who lobbied for a Suez canal. I can easily see them pushing for a French presence in the Orrery. Thanks!
Nigel 03.19.08 at 3:25 pm
Grant Morrison’s Seaguy, amongst other awesome things, had a moon made out of bricks, built by a mad Egyptian Pharoah. It was awe inspiring.
Johnny Pez 03.22.08 at 8:00 am
Perhaps a radical abolitionist group launches their own armed Brick Moon in an attempt to destroy the Orrery – or at any rate hold it hostage – as a blow against the transatlantic slave trade? Under the command of John Brown!
Why bother launching a full-fledged Brick Moon? Just have Brown seize the launch facility and use it to fire Intercontinental Ballistic Brickloads at selected targets:
James Buchanan stared thunderstruck at General Scott. “Charleston? Gone?” said the bewildered president.
“I’m afraid so, Mister President,” said Scott. “And we’ve just received a telegram from the abolitionist leader, John Brown. He says that unless every slave in the nation is freed in the next forty-eight hours, the next load of bricks will be aimed here, at Washington City.”
John Holbo 03.22.08 at 4:42 pm
This has been my favorite thread in a long time. Awe. Some.
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