I remember the books which first began my fascination with writing and reading, and these were the Elric novels of Michael Moorcock. These books, dark and melodic and strangely romantic, opened up a vast world to me when I was still in Junior High, and remained with me from then on, to the point that I spent years enduring the slings and arrows of high school with “Blood and Souls for my Lord Arioch!!” scrawled across my binders. From the adventures of the albino kinslayer, his tragic love, his demon sword and his loyal companion Moonglum, I soon found my way to Corum, and Hawkmoon, and Cornelius, and all the other embodiments of the Eternal Champion, a concept which still excites my imagination like few others.

Certain authors have the power to forever influence your voice, your dreams, your pen. For me, Michael Moorcock was one of those literary giants. I am forever in debt to his imagination and amazing prolificness, and therefore, I am pleased to report the fact he was recently named the 25th Grandmaster appointed by the SFWA at this year’s Nebula awards.

The following is the speech presenting the Grandmaster Award to Mr. Moorcock at the Nebulas, as delivered by the incredible cover illustrator and artist Mr. John Picacio.

“When I first heard that I’d be here celebrating Mike’s Grandmaster Award, I was thrilled. And then came the horror…the realization that in the span of a few minutes, I’d have to do justice to one of the greatest writing careers we’ve ever known. Daunting, to say the least.

We can talk about Elric, one of the most popular creations in the history of fantasy, first published when Mike was barely 22 years old. We can talk about the Multiverse…Jerry Cornelius…the Eternal Champion…MOTHER LONDON…Hawkmoon…BEHOLD THE MAN…GLORIANA…THE CONDITION OF MUZAK…THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE. What about Mike’s legendary ability to craft classic novels in a mere weekend so he could pay his NEW WORLDS printing bills? How about a lifetime of awards heavy enough to crack a house foundation…a 1967 Nebula Award for BEHOLD THE MAN; his shelf full of British Fantasy Awards; the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; the World Fantasy Award; the Guardian Fiction Award; the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award; the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award; his 2002 induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame…we can do this all night long, can’t we? Michael Moorcock is, quite simply, a living legend. Period. And one who despises being called such, because he’s still vital, still rebellious, still questioning…still writing. He keeps going, which brings us to the present.

We’re here to celebrate Mike’s recognition amongst the Grandmasters of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Heinlein, Leiber, Clarke, Bradbury, Del Rey, Pohl, Knight…a few of the names inscribed up on SFWA’s Mount Olympus. Here’s the part that’ll make you dizzy though — many great writers are measured by what came before them, but Mike’s greatness continues to be measured by what has come after him. I’m not talking about his legendary Multiverse of characters and stories, but a multiverse of writers, artists, and creators worldwide that have either had their careers single-handedly launched by Mike, or been directly influenced by him at a primal level. That goes for many of you in this room, including myself, and I daresay, that includes some of tonight’s nominees and winners.

So here’s what we’re gonna do…in recent days, I contacted a few friends and a few heroes. I asked them for their brief thoughts on tonight’s occasion and I’m going to share a few of them with you right now.

Our first message is from the author of AMERICAN GODS, the 2002 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel — Neil Gaiman.

Neil — “Mike Moorcock changed the inside of my head. I read STORMBRINGER when I was nine, and that was pretty much that. My pocket money went on Moorcock books — which were gloriously being issued and reissued back then — and I read them and took what I could from them. It’s not long until you have a multiverse in your twelve-year-old mind, and you learn that every hero is the Eternal Champion, and suddenly you’re puzzling over Jerry Cornelius stories, with your head going places it hasn’t gone before.

When people ask me about my influences, I tend to forget Mike, much in the way that people listing the things that were important to them growing up, fail to list the earth, the air, and sunlight. He taught me that high culture and low culture were simply points of view, and that what mattered was the writing. His influence as an editor still reverberates today. We’re lucky to have him.”

Our next contributor is an author, an editor, and a publisher — all award-winning, sometimes all in the same day. He’s a Sidewise Award winner and one-half of MonkeyBrain Books — Chris Roberson.

Chris — “I was never quite the same after discovering the novels of Michael Moorcock in my suburban high school library. Elric, Cornelius, Bastable, and the rest of the multiversal gang expanded my brain into dimensions that I didn’t even know existed. I wasn’t the first to fall under his spell, and I won’t be the last. As writer and editor Moorcock has changed the nature of fantasy itself, expanding the definition of what fantastic literature is, and the uses to which it can be put. He is the brightest light in my own personal constellation of influences and inspirations, and I continue to labor in his shadow.”

Our next author has won two World Fantasy Awards and is the author of the brilliant CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, as well as the proud co-editor of THE NEW WEIRD — Jeff Vandermeer.

Jeff — “Mike Moorcock is quite simply the most creative and most generous person I’ve ever met. It’s Mike I think of whenever I’m approached by a new writer for help with something, because he embodies the idea of ‘paying it forward’. He has also been an enormous influence in both the variety and the quality of his fiction, and his various editing projects. I admire his restless curiosity, his sense of humor, and his sense of perspective. It’s been one of the great pleasures and honors of my life to know him. If only he could break his addiction to squid…”

Three down, three to go. Our next author is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner; a 2004 Nebula Award winner for “The Empire of Ice Cream”; and his latest novel is called THE SHADOW YEAR — Jeffrey Ford.

Jeff — “Every time I read a new slice of Mike’s enormous fictional output, I’m inspired by the work’s variety of style and form; its unbounded freedom of expression; it’s ability to find the profound in pulp, and to dismantle the bureaucracy of literature with a capital L; its astute politics; and its cosmic sense of humor. His creative talent is truly a multi-verse. What’s impressed me even more than his fiction, though, is Mike himself — affable, generous, and an unerring failure to stand on ceremony. Right now, I can picture him rolling his eyes at my testimonial. Congratulations, Mike.”

Our next message is from an author who, much like Mike, is never shy about defending what he thinks is right. He’s a multiple Hugo Award nominee and the author of PERDIDO STREET STATION, a 2002 Nebula Award finalist — China Mieville.

China — “‘Grandmaster’ is inadequate. Moorcock is the monarchomach, the sensei of dissident fantasy. Mad skills, pirate prose, ninja critique. We deserve a lot, but we only just, on our best days, deserve him. Where there are rules he brings righteous chaos, for which all we can do is give our profound thanks, we who are fortunate enough to have our souls sucked out by his evil crooning typewriter forged from black metal, we who read sitting on the toppled idols he leaves behind, the rubble of genre left by his awesome paraliterary rampage, breakfasting gratefully among the ruins.”

And finally, we have a few words from an author beloved by every creator I know…as a fellow professional once said, ‘We all worship him as a god, but at the end of the day, he bows to Moorcock.’ The creator of WATCHMEN, V FOR VENDETTA, and THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN — Alan Moore.

Alan — “Michael Moorcock is a wonder of the world, a colossus of Brookgate straddling his ancient city in a sentence. He’s a literary zeppelin commander who has never lost his faith in, nor completely left, the underground; the ultimate outsider just by virtue of his altitude above the herd. He scattered universes, planted movements, sowed the seeds of all the authors who came after him, like dragon’s teeth. His intellect and his inventiveness are only equalled by his insight, by his great compassion. From the deadline-plagued pulp sweatshops of his origins to Mother London’s dizzy pinnacles, Moorcock is the Eternal Writer.”

Mike, you’ve more than earned this night. On behalf of myself and the legions of readers and creators that you’ve inspired, enlightened, and championed, we cheer you tonight and we cherish you forever. Our most rebellious, heart-felt thanks, and congratulations on becoming the 25th Grandmaster of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Technology has always been extremely important to most Caledonians. In fact, the technology of society is often viewed in Caledon as infinitely more interesting then the people that technology serves.

Just such an attitude is not unique to Caledon, in fact, it may be essential for the development of technology itself. It certainly was prevalent in the ages of the “Great Inventor”. By modern standards, could anyone say that Edison or Tesla were “people persons”? Would we feel that they “had a life”? How did that single-mindedness and eccentricity create the world we have come to know?

The following is reposted from The New Yorker.

Our Own Devices

Does technology drive history?

by Jill Lepore

James Prescott Joule, whose findings led to the first law of thermodynamics, spent his honeymoon jury-rigging a thermometer to take a reading at the top and bottom of a waterfall where a lesser man might merely have canoodled. Joseph Henry shredded his wife’s silk petticoat to make insulation for the coil of wire he needed to wrap around an electromagnet. Thomas Edison didn’t wash, and was convinced that changing his clothes would alter his body’s chemistry, and not in a good way. Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve hundred electric lamps for the city of Strasbourg. He was also afraid of earrings, peaches, touching people’s hair, dropping tiny square slips of paper into bowls of liquid, and eating food whose cubic footage he had not been able to estimate at a glance.

The foibles of the eccentric inventor, so often trotted out, have long been cold comfort to the kind of person so mechanically inept and lacking in engineering ingenuity as to suffer countless failures before finally perfecting a method for removing the shrink-wrap on the package from Amazon without destroying the book. (Patent pending, so I can say only this: you might think, as I did before my breakthrough, that it requires the use of your teeth. It does not.) The book is Maury Klein’s “The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America” (Bloomsbury; $29.95), a history of the harnessing and selling of power. The steam engine. The electric motor. The light bulb. To Klein, the quirkiness of the men who invented modern America, even their shabbiness (Edison called his first two children Dot and Dash, and treated them, on days when he noticed them at all, like pets), is a badge of their genius and the price of our prosperity. Their machines, the engines of our abundance, make us who we are.

Klein’s book reads like a fairy tale: one thing is always leading to the next, inevitably, and changing everything, overnight, with the wave of a wand. Edison “conquered the world of electricity,” Klein declares of the day, in September of 1882, when the man known as the Wizard of Menlo Park illuminated the first four hundred electric lights installed in New York City, including twenty-seven in the editorial rooms of the New York Times. Edison flipped the switch himself, from a circuit at the offices of his backer, Drexel, Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, ushering in, as Klein argues, “a new era of technology, and with it changes in lifestyle that separated themselves from the past.” When contemporaries disagree, when technological change looks less than revolutionary to people living through it, as it can, Klein is puzzled and impatient. “In every way satisfactory,” a reporter for the Times ho-hummed, in a column on page 8 of the next day’s paper, expressing appreciation that, although the new electric lamps looked just like the old gas ones, they were brighter, didn’t flicker, and didn’t stink. “The newspapers gave the event surprisingly thin coverage,” Klein complains, “and never fully grasped its significance.”

Klein himself rarely fails to reach for the full significance of events. (“Every material achievement that would characterize civilization during the next two centuries began with the possibilities opened by the steam engine,” he writes of James Watt’s invention.) “The Power Makers” is at once grandiloquent and granular. At technical descriptions, Klein excels. In explaining a disadvantage of Edison’s direct current—the greater the current, the bigger the wire needed to conduct it—he offers this nifty illustration: “to light Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street, the conductors would have to be as large as a man’s leg.” If you haven’t given Boyle’s law much thought since the Reagan revolution, reading Klein will reward you with an excellent course in heat, electricity, and magnetism, at very little cost to your composure. That a long-standing tradition argues against the inescapability of our machine destiny is to Klein of very little interest. In the book’s prologue, he tells the story of a character he has made up, a nine-year-old boy named Ned, who visits the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and marvels at the enormous steam engine on display in Machinery Hall (“He felt so tiny standing before it, yet it seemed not the least threatening”); in the middle of the book, Ned, now twenty-six, travels to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, where he watches electricity at work (“Ned stared wide-eyed at machines washing, wringing, drying, and ironing clothes, baking bread, washing dishes, heating rooms and even whole houses”); and Klein ends his book with Ned, a seventy-two-year-old grandfather, taking his first subway ride, to the World’s Fair in Queens in 1939, and visiting the City of Light (“where night never comes”), a scale model of an electrified, illuminated New York with a twenty-two-foot-high Empire State Building.

This device, a Ned’s-eye view of the world, has a gee-whiz, corny charm. It also has crippling limits. Of the war beginning in Europe, in 1939, of the disastrous state of the American economy, “Ned didn’t know what to think.” In Klein’s history—which begins before the American Revolution and ends on the eve of the Second World War—nothing really bad ever happens: no strikes, no Civil War. “Building the World of Tomorrow” was the motto of the 1939 World’s Fair, and it’s Klein’s motto, too. (Unlike Ned, E. B. White, who reported on what he called the fair’s “murky bath of canned reverence,” did have a few thoughts in his head, along with a cold: “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”) You can learn a lot about how the magnetic telegraph works in “The Power Makers,” but not that Samuel F. B. Morse was a Northern apologist for slavery who ran for Congress in New York, in 1854, on a platform which held that abolitionism was a foreign Catholic conspiracy aimed at destroying the United States, and who, when the war came, regretted that Lincoln had the advantage of the telegraph against the less well-wired Southern states. (Nine days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had all the telegraph wires connecting Washington to points south severed.) In Klein’s account, Morse enjoys unrivalled success with the telegraph in 1844; finds domestic happiness four years later, when he marries his young, poor, deaf cousin; makes a valedictory trip to Europe to visit Hans Christian Oersted’s laboratory in 1856; gains “both fortune and fame at home and abroad”; and dies “rich and revered in April 1872.” This stuff might be appealing. But when the sun goes down and the power goes out there’s fairy dust all over the place, glittering in the dark.

“To a larger degree than most people care to admit,” Klein writes, “we have become what our technologies made us.” This argument, like Ned’s pre-atomic, wide-eyed wonder at technology and Klein’s celebration of the ingenious and endearingly eccentric “men who invented modern America,” has its own history—a history that, Lewis Mumford once argued, needs to be recovered “if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.” The idea that our machines make us who we are can be traced to the eighteenth century. “Man is a toolmaking animal,” Benjamin Franklin said, by way of classifying the species. Enlightenment philosophers believed in a rational universe that operated by deducible laws—a universe that worked like a clock—and thought that new and better ways of making and doing things would lead, one day, to the best of all possible worlds. The eighteenth century’s magnificent inventions, especially Watt’s steam engine (1769) and Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793), seemed to bear them out. What was once done by hand could now be done by extraordinary machines, machines that would liberate mankind from toil, machines that words could scarcely describe.

In 1829, Jacob Bigelow, Harvard’s Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, published a widely read treatise titled “Elements of Technology,” which popularized the term “technology” in something like its current sense. In 1861, the year that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, telegraph wires reached across the continent. (“May the Union be Perpetual” was the heartbreaking sentiment from California, on the eve of four years of devastating civil war.) The following year, Congress authorized construction of the transcontinental railroad. (The golden spike linking the Eastern and the Western lines was driven into the ground in Utah, in 1869.) When Bigelow delivered an address at M.I.T., in 1865, he marvelled at how the world had changed in the three decades since he had published his “Elements of Technology.” War had torn the United States apart, but trains and telegraphs promised to tie it together again: everywhere, technology was changing everything for the better, saving the Union, making us who we are. To Bigelow’s generation, technology seemed to be driving, and even redeeming, the course of human events. His M.I.T. address reveals something more, too: the close alignment between nineteenth-century Americans’ sense of their manifest destiny to settle the continent and their faith in their machines’ ability to help them do it. Jacob Bigelow’s faith was not clockwork Deism but mechanical millenarianism. “Next to the influence of Christianity on our moral nature,” he said, technology “has had a leading sway in promoting the progress and happiness of our race.”

Awestruck wonder at machine-driven, millennial progress animated the nineteenth century the way the obsession with innovation animates American culture today. It’s what Perry Miller called the “technological sublime.” In prints and paintings, “Progress” was pictured as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Inventors and the people who operated their inventions abounded. (The occupation “engineer” first appeared in the U.S. Census in 1850.) “Men of Progress,” they were called, and “Conquerors of Nature.” The genius of Eli Whitney was said to rival that of Shakespeare. More usually, the triumph of the sciences over the arts was figured as the defeat of the ancients by the moderns: the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamship “a mightier epic” than the Iliad, and any fool could see that James Watt had a thing or two on Cicero. Surely the eccentricities of genius were to be smiled upon. (Klein, who writes of these men with much the same fervor as the head of the Patent Office, practically sighs with relief when their needy wives and children get out of the way of progress: John Fitch, an inventor of the steamboat, marries a woman who “nagged him constantly until Fitch, unaware that his wife was again pregnant, carried out his threat to leave”; Joseph Henry is lucky to find a “quiet, supportive wife who made his home a safe haven.”)

No nineteenth-century inventor was more prolific than Thomas Edison, no career more epic. (Klein assures us that Edison, after the premature death of an unhappy first wife who “found solace in eating,” married a nineteen-year-old girl who dutifully undertook “the difficult task of learning the role of wife to a famous man.”) Edison filed his first patent, for an automatic vote-recording machine, in 1868. When he set up his laboratory at Menlo Park, in 1876, he promised “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” He kept that promise, averaging an almost inconceivable forty patents a year—one every nine days—for a lifetime total of more than a thousand. He filed his patent for the incandescent light bulb in 1879, but 1882, the year he lit up New York, marked his personal best of a hundred and seven. Given the pace and scale of technological change, and the enthusiasm for it, it’s no wonder that, in Edison’s age, the past, the present, and the future seemed to be linked together by an unending chain of machines.

“There is no end to machinery,” the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle wrote in his 1829 essay “Signs of the Times.” Carlyle dubbed those times “the Age of Machinery,” about which he was less than sanguine. The world begins to look like one great machine, “the Machine of Society,” he observed. “Considered merely as a metaphor, all this is well enough,” he went on. “But here, as in so many other cases, the ‘foam hardens itself into a shell,’ and the shadow we have wantonly evoked stands terrible before us and will not depart at our bidding.” The worship of the mechanical was, to Carlyle, something akin to religious delusion (“our true Deity is Mechanism”), one he compared to seventeenth-century New Englanders’ belief in witchcraft. “Practically considered, our creed is Fatalism; and, free in hand and foot, we are shackled in heart and soul.” We may be blind to those shackles, blinded, as he put it, by a fog as thick as London’s, but we are just as surely “fettered by chains of our own forging.”

In 1831, in an essay in the North American Review, an Ohio lawyer named Timothy Walker offered one of many rebuttals to “Signs of the Times.” Machines not only define us and drive progress, Walker argued; by liberating the ordinary man from drudgery, they make a different kind of living possible. In that sense, they drive democracy. As the century progressed and the speed of change only increased, nearly everyone—critics and boosters, dystopians and utopians, on both sides of the Atlantic—seemed to agree that machines were driving history. “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us,” Thoreau wrote from Walden Pond. The question was no longer whether machines were driving the course of human events but where. Any answer to that question, of course, involved as much prophecy as history. In 1848, John Stuart Mill found it “impossible not to look forward to a vast multiplication and long succession of contrivances for economizing labor and increasing its produce; and to an ever wider diffusion of the use and benefit of those contrivances.” If the coercion of labor was brutal and unrelenting, if the era’s economic development was uneven and unstable—there were several major depressions in the United States between 1819 and 1929—these things, too, seemed only further consequences of technology. In 1867, Karl Marx argued, “It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” That was the gloomy version. To Edward Bellamy, the future looked brighter. In “Looking Backward,” Bellamy wrote about a man who fell asleep in May, 1887, and woke up in September, 2000, to find a socialist utopia in which the “labor problem” had been cured “as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, machines had become the yardstick by which Americans and Europeans measured the rest of the world, on a scale beginning with barbarity and ending with civilization. If machines make us who we are, the lack of our machines makes other people different from us and, usually, lower down on the scale. Consider James Mill’s “History of British India” (1817). Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) believed that there was no better “index of the degree in which the benefits of civilization are any where enjoyed, than the state of the [society’s] tools and machinery.” The more machines, the higher the degree of civilization. The fact that Mill had never been to India proved no obstacle to his demonstrating, in six volumes, that Indians were stalled near the lowest stage of development, just past barbarism—something that was easily measured by the state of their technology, which suffered from “a great want of ingenuity and completeness in instruments and machinery.” For years, Mill’s “History” was required reading for British civil servants heading to India, where regular steamboat service began running on the Ganges in 1834; by 1852, news of the second Anglo-Burmese war was sent from Kedgeree to Calcutta along newly erected telegraph lines; in the eighteen-sixties, the British promoted cotton manufacturing and the expansion of the railway—which grew from two hundred miles of track in 1857 to twenty-five thousand miles at the end of the century—when the American Civil War blocked supplies of American cotton. (None of this has a place in Klein’s account. The Civil War doesn’t happen in “The Power Makers,” and neither does the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Klein’s fabled America is an island, unconnected to wars in Europe, unconnected to markets in India, unconnected to almost anything or anyone—with the notable exception of other inventors—outside the United States.)

If, in the nineteenth century, the idea that machines make people who they are helped justify imperialism, it played a similar role in the twentieth century, when it influenced modernization theory, a set of ideas that served both as a model for historical change and as a rationale for American foreign-policy intervention in postcolonial states: every society, once on board a train called Progress, makes station stops at Literacy, Urbanization, Capitalism, and Democracy before reaching the end of the line at Prosperity. In short, the proposition that “we have become what our technologies made us” has a long and not always edifying history.

Historical narratives in which machines drive history look like this: x machine produces y kind of society. “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist,” Karl Marx wrote, in “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in 1847. Lewis Mumford, in his meditative 1934 “Technics and Civilization,” made this swap: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” For Klein, Edison flipped the switch on “a new era in American life,” the age of abundance.

This logic is usually called “technological determinism,” and is something that Mumford himself, during the course of his career, repudiated and vigorously attacked as “a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development.” Precise definitions are hard to come by, but in its purest form technological determinism looks a lot like the nineteenth-century idea of progress and holds that machines are the most important force in human history, that they follow a fixed path through set stages, and that they bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change. The printing press led to the scientific revolution. The cotton gin carried slavery to the American West. The automobile drove city dwellers to the suburbs. The Pill gave birth to the sexual revolution. Surgical strikes numbed us to the agony of war.

These statements have a ring of truth; they’re useful, insightful, and worth considering. And, at first glance, they’re pleasing: you can picture the steam engine, the clock, the light bulb, the printing press, the cotton gin, the Pill, the automobile. You find yourself silently nodding in agreement. Technology changes our lives all the time, in little ways and big ways, sometimes profoundly, very often for good, and sometimes for very great good. Really, it’s not such a big leap to believe that technology drives change, and drives history. Asked to guess which is the more powerful force in history—gadgets you can tinker with or wispy, diaphanous ideas—most people would put their money on gadgets. And why not? The printing press versus, say, predestination isn’t really a fair fight, unless you’ve got a lot of time to think about it, and to read books—printed on a printing press. In some parts of these United States, daily life is like living in a museum dedicated to the proposition that technology is destiny.

But what if x isn’t all that triggers y, or even what mostly does; what if it just looks that way, because we are living y? It’s easy to forget that some of these y’s started long before the x’s, suburbs before automobiles. And none of the x’s tell the whole story; the Pill, while not a small thing, wasn’t everything. Statements like “The light bulb ushered in the age of abundance” employ a grammar suspiciously like that of advertising copy. Viagra will save your marriage. Electronic voting will restore faith in American democracy. The iPod will make you groovy.

Technological determinism isn’t so groovy anymore, at least among many historians of technology, who, while granting the enormous importance and influence of technological change, do not generally find it to be deterministic. The American cultural historian Leo Marx once argued that the Second World War represented the high-water mark of technological determinism in the American imagination. The plot of the “historical romance called Progress,” he believed, began to fall apart at Hiroshima and unravelled still more every time modernization theory failed in practice. Since then, the word “progress” has become increasingly freighted, at least among historians of technology. “Progress: Fact or Illusion?” was the title of a 1996 collection of essays that Marx edited with his colleague Bruce Mazlish. In “A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium” (M.I.T.; $39.95), Robert Friedel tells a story that starts with a plow carving up the earth and ends with Apollo landing on the moon. The idea that “things could be done better” holds his analysis together, but, as he is at pains to clarify, “this is not the same as a faith in progress or the belief that the necessary trajectory of history or human experience was upward.”

The subtlety of the distinction between the “idea of progress” and the “culture of improvement” is easily lost. And skepticism about progress can, and nearly always does, go too far. True, the introduction of the railroad to India didn’t destroy the caste system (as Karl Marx predicted it would), and maybe the automobile hasn’t made China suburban, but pacemakers regulate heartbeats, and television (or ICBMs, or, who knows, but something else involving engineers) brought glasnost, and the iPod did make you groovy. Really.

But Friedel’s point is important. Measuring an invention only by its eventual effect obscures other possible outcomes and, finally, distorts the historical record. The day in 1977 when my brother got a TRS-80, we thought it was some kind of cross between a television and my sister’s cassette tape recorder; we didn’t shout, “Wow, the information age has arrived!” Even the Tandy Corporation would have been hard-pressed to see that coming. It looks different now, of course; the TRS-80 wasn’t a dead end; it was a big deal. The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history that can explain both what we thought then and what we know now. A method that ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be true) but will fail to prove it. That Times writer who, in 1882, called Edison’s illumination of New York “satisfactory” may have had a motive for downplaying the story—slighting the much-puffed Edison, maybe—but it’s more likely that he just didn’t think electric lamps were really all that different from gas ones. And, arguably, at the time, they weren’t. Klein considers this a failure of the reporter’s perception—he “never fully grasped” the event’s significance—and waves it away, while himself writing grandly about the “power revolution” we can see from here, looking backward. But the reason historians often avoid labels like the “power revolution” is that observers like that guy at the Times may have had a point. At the peak of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, only one employee in ten worked in a factory. Also, industrialization happened differently in different places: in the United States, telegraph wires followed paths cut by railroads; in India, the telegraph came first, because British civil servants needed to get word of rebellion more than they needed to travel faster. And, for the whole of the nineteenth century, more Americans spent their days doing housework than doing any other kind of work.

Technology can be sublime, but machines aren’t something that happens to us; they’re something we make. That is, they’re less like meteors that come crashing into our planet (actually, “billiard balls” appears to be the preferred metaphor) than like toddlers (O.K., that one’s mine): sure, they crash into you a lot, and change your life, but they didn’t come out of nowhere and, if you set your mind to it, you can teach them manners before they get to be bigger than you. “The story of the power revolution offers more than an interpretation of the origins of industrial America,” Klein writes. “It suggests another insight into the most elusive riddle of all: What is an American?” Klein’s answer to the question Crèvecoeur famously asked in 1782—“What then is this American, this new man?—is disheartening, to say the least. He is a man whose machines run roughshod. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the toddler over the meteor every time. Setting limits. They say it’s all about setting limits.

Long silent bus rides can be good times to reflect….or not.

Ancient

The mirrors of the ancients set the legendary sky ablaze.

Their quill traced the heavens, their compass revealed the earth and parceled their souls into chests of midnight fire.

The bear, the ram, the hunter, the hare, each foretold their fates.

Delicate frescos detailed all that had been, celestial filigree showed all that would be.

A star for life, a star for love, one for fury, one for fool, one for you and one for me.

Each star told a story, each star held a key.

Rising and falling, flaring and fading as the seasons turned and turned.

The ancients are long dead now, all I have are half-cast charts stolen from dark visions, smuggled through waking dreams.

I scrawl imperfect wisdom until the need is past, I am both quill and compass, bear and ram, hunter and hare, fury and fool. Perhaps I am both you and me.

I have no more chests of midnight fire, each has been traded away and lost. Yet I need no art to know my past, I need no craft to see my future.

I need no stars to feel the dance in my bones, to taste the bitter dust of summer, hear the trilling song of spring.

We each tell a story, we each hold a key.

Rise and fall, flare and fade…as the seasons turn and turn.

Everyone loves a good fairy tale…especially when it concerns a gorgeous blond, who defeats the witch to gain the heart of her stalwart hero, who also happens to be a totally rad free climber.

However, there is a lot more to the story of Rapunzel then being the poor relation of such better known fairy tale babes as Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. In fact, it may be that the primal lessons to be found in the story of the girl with the really long hair are even more relevant to us today then they were when the story was first crafted. After all, don’t we all just long to let our hair down sometimes?

The following is reposted from the New York Review of Books.

The Girl in the Tower

By Alison Lurie

At first glance, most famous fairy tales seem so implausible and irrelevant to contemporary life that their survival is hard to understand. The story of “Rapunzel” involves a heroine with hair at least twenty feet long, and “Hansel and Gretel” asks us to believe that two children abandoned by their parents in the forest will find a house made of gingerbread. But these and other tales live on because they are dramatic metaphors of real life. “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, represents the two greatest fears of children—that they will be abandoned and that they will be imprisoned. Many adults, if they think back, will remember one or both of these fears, though usually in a less extreme version. We occasionally felt neglected, disregarded, unsupported—unloved. Or we felt overprotected, overindulged, intruded upon—loved, but in a very possessive, almost scary way.

The wicked stepmother who has no food for her children and the wicked witch whose house is made of cake and candy are dramatic, exaggerated images of two kinds of bad parent. They reappear symbolically in real life every Halloween, when the traditional warning “Never take candy from a stranger” is revoked: when we send our own children out into a dark world to forage for sweets, and stay home to give handfuls of candy to kids we don’t know.

Different features of a fairy tale may be centrally important to different readers. When I taught children’s literature I discovered that for two of my students “Hansel and Gretel” was essentially about a brave and clever girl who saves her brother from danger. For another, it was about a brave and clever boy who figures out how to find his and his sister’s way home by marking their path through the woods. Later a friend told me that she had always thought of the tale as a warning against a greed for sweets.

Individual fairy tales change in popularity over time. “Rapunzel,” for instance, was once much less widely known than “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” or “Snow White.” Currently, however, it is becoming more popular, with nearly three thousand entries on Amazon alone. Some of the Rapunzel entries, of course, are duplicates, but even the first hundred include fifty-one separate retellings, revisions, and spin-offs, including a pop-up book, a picture book starring Barbie as the heroine, mysteries, thrillers, romance novels, young adult fiction, and a pornographic S&M novel. It is a complex story, which includes many classic themes, including a witch who is serially both kinds of bad parent: first imprisoning and then rejecting her daughter.

The earliest known appearance of the tale in print occurs in the Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile, published in Italy in 1637. His “Petrosinella,” like the later and better-known version in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Household Tales, begins with two intense cravings: that of a pregnant woman for a plant that grows in a garden next door, and that of a witch for a girl child.

In Italy, Spain, and France, the plant the expectant mother longs for is parsley; in Grimm it is called rapunzel. According to botanists, this may be Valerianella locusta, called Feldsalat in Germany, and in English corn salad or lamb’s lettuce. Or it may be Campanula rapunculus, known in Germany as rampion or Rapunzel-Glockenblume. There is an ancient and widespread folk belief that the food cravings of a mother-to-be must be satisfied—if they are not, she risks bad luck or a miscarriage. There may be scientific truth behind the superstition: possibly in these cases important nutrients are missing from the diet. A poor woman who is pregnant in the wintertime, for instance, might lack vitamin C, folic acid, and iron; and one characteristic of both parsley and lamb’s lettuce is that they are resistant to frost.

Today, though between 50 and 75 percent of pregnant women in America report food cravings, a wish for salad greens is rare. Expectant mothers are more likely to crave fresh fruit, especially strawberries. A desire for chocolate or sweets is also common, and may suggest that the mother-to-be has previously denied herself sugar in order to remain fashionably thin. (On the Internet today it is easy, if you have $28.99 plus postage, to buy maternity T-shirts that read THE BABY WANTS CHOCOLATE, THE BABY WANTS ICE CREAM, or THE BABY WANTS STRAWBERRIES.) The medical disorder known as “pica,” a hunger for nonfood substances, may occur in pregnancy as a compulsion to eat clay, plaster, toothpaste, or laundry starch; it has sometimes been explained as a need for calcium.

In the Grimms’ tale, the expectant mother grows pale, weak, and sickly; she tells her husband that if she cannot have the rapunzel that grows in the witch’s garden, she will die. Responding to her desperation, he climbs the garden wall and steals the plant she craves. On a second visit the witch catches him; she allows him to take the greens, but only if he promises her the baby when it is born. In the Pentamerone it is the mother-to-be herself who steals parsley from the garden next door and has to give up her child, though not for several years. There is also a variant Italian tale, “Prunella,” that leaves out the pregnancy: instead the child herself steals plums from a witch’s tree, and is caught and imprisoned.

The heroine of all these stories has the same name as the plant, though sometimes in the diminutive form: Basile’s heroine is called Petrosinella, and in French she is Persinette. Symbolically, the child replaces and becomes what has been stolen and eaten. (There is an echo here of the still current folk belief that whatever a woman craves during her pregnancy will later become her child’s favorite food, for which there may also be a scientific explanation: an infant who has not received enough vitamin C before birth, for instance, might want more afterward.) Popular experts on diet and cooking claim that we are what we eat, and it is not unusual for people to be called “Candy,” “Carrots,” “Honey,” “Sugar,” or “Peaches,” both in real life and in fiction. (Though Judy Blume says that the names of her famous character Fudge and his little sister Tootsie were not consciously chosen for this reason, chocolate was for a long time her favorite food.) More darkly, there is the implication that a child is a consumable commodity. As Maurice Sendak’s “Wild Things“ (who were, he has said, based on his own aunts and uncles) put it: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

To many readers, the most memorable feature of “Rapunzel” is the incantation “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” with its accompanying image of a beautiful young girl standing in the window of a tower with her magically long golden hair hanging down outside. At first, the witch who has adopted her will climb up the hair to visit her, then a wandering prince will do so, with far-reaching consequences. Finally, the witch will hang Rapunzel’s chopped-off tresses from the window, and the prince, deceived, will climb them. If Rapunzel’s hair had been of a normal length, none of this could have happened. Of course, for centuries almost all women in Europe and North America had what we would now consider very long hair, though it was not always visible. As Marina Warner points out in From the Beast to the Blonde,^[1] for many years loose hair was the sign of a virgin or an unwedded girl, and thus stood for youth and innocence. After a woman married she usually pinned her hair up and/or concealed it under some sort of cap or wrapping, except in private.

Long, thick hair has always been thought beautiful and erotically alluring: artists and writers have celebrated it as the sign of a lush, intensified womanliness. In nineteenth-century America it was a source of pride if you could actually sit on your hair, and to lose it was a disaster: when Jo in Little Women sells her thick chestnut mane it is treated by her family as a kind of minor tragedy. Similarly, in “Rapunzel” and its variants the witch often begins her revenge by violently chopping off the heroine’s long hair.

The witch’s and later the prince’s demand that Rapunzel let down her hair echoes a colloquial phrase first recorded in print in the mid-nineteenth century, though it may be much older. To “let down one’s hair” (or “let down one’s back hair”) still means to relax and drop one’s reserve, to act or speak freely and unguardedly. This is what Rapunzel does, first when she accepts the prince as her lover, and then when she asks the witch why she is so much heavier to pull up than he is. (In the first and less bowdlerized edition of the Grimms’ Household Tales, Rapunzel asks why her dress is getting so tight, alerting the witch to a pregnancy that later results in twins.)

But though long, thick hair was often referred to as “woman’s glory,” it was also her burden. Washing it, drying it, combing out the tangles, brushing it (fifty to a hundred strokes a day were recommended in ladies’ magazines), plaiting it, pinning it up, and taking it down took a lot of effort. The gifted children’s writer E. Nesbit dramatized this problem in a 1908 fairy tale called “Melisande: or, Long and Short Division,” where the princess’s golden hair grows so fast that she is almost immobilized. The date is significant, since in the early twentieth century many women could and did decide to wear their hair short. This choice, which now seems more or less inconsequential, was seen at the time as a serious, even dangerous sign of sexual freedom and independence—and often criticized as unattractive and unfeminine. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is a famous exploration of these issues.

In several modern versions of “Rapunzel” the heroine is oppressed by her magically elongated braid, which is so heavy and bulky that she can hardly move about her tower room. In the young-adult novel Golden by Cameron Dokey (2006), she exclaims, “You think this is beautiful?… You try living with it for a while. I trip over it when I walk. Get tangled up in it when I sleep. I can’t cut it.”

A recent teenage novel, Letters from Rapunzel, by Sara Lewis Holmes (2007), takes a scientific approach to the problem of Rapunzel’s hair. Here the first-person heroine is not really named after a German plant; she adopts the pseudonym because she has to spend hours every day in study hall supervised by a teacher she calls the Homework Witch. Though she feels helpless and imprisoned, her essential problem is one of parental abandonment. Her father is also confined—hospitalized with depression (which she calls the Evil Spell)—and her mother works long hours to support the family and spends most of her free time visiting her sick husband.

Having learned that human hair grows an average of six inches a year, the narrator calculates that the real Rapunzel must have been in her tower for eighteen years, which would make her thirty-one. No doubt because, to a junior high school student, this is an impossible age for romantic adventure, she concludes that Rapunzel did not age in captivity. The lesson is clear: if you remain confined, you cannot grow up. Holmes’s heroine, like the heroines of most young-adult novels, eventually manages to rescue herself by taking responsibility for her own future.

Bruno Bettelheim remarks in his classic analysis of the fairy tale, The Uses of Enchantment, that “Rapunzel” is “the story of a pubertal girl, and of a jealous mother who tries to prevent her from gaining independence—a typical adolescent problem.”^[2] But it can also be seen as a story about the adoption of a poor and beautiful young girl by a prosperous but overpossessive older woman, who later takes drastic but eventually unsuccessful measures to isolate her daughter from the world and especially from men. Sometimes the child is literally imprisoned in a tower; in other cases, the captivity is more symbolic.

This plot, of course, also appears in classic adult literature. Dickens’s Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, shuts her ward Estella in a huge, decaying house and tries to teach her to hate all men. In Henry James’s The Bostonians, Olive Chancellor essentially buys Verena Tarrant from her parents with greenbacks rather than green plants, takes her into her Boston mansion, and attempts to possess and control her life. In both cases the heroine eventually escapes, but only with great difficulty and not necessarily into a better life.^[3]

In the traditional tale of “Rapunzel,” the character who trades garden produce for a poor neighbor’s child is an unsympathetic figure. In Grimm she is called Mother Gothel, which at the time was a common designation for a godmother, but she is not the sort of good fairy godmother who grants wishes. She is not actively cruel, however, until her daughter falls in love with a man. Mother Gothel considers this a betrayal, and becomes enraged, but the love affair is presented as innocent and natural, and the story ends with Rapunzel and her prince living happily ever after in his kingdom.

Contemporary versions of “Rapunzel” often have a different emphasis, and perhaps for a contemporary reason. Over the last few decades, more and more well-to-do Americans and Europeans have adopted the children of poor parents, often from third-world countries; and because of local cultural prejudices, most of these infants have been girls. (Between 1971 and 2001 US citizens adopted 265,677 children from abroad; 64 percent of them were girls. The process continues: in 2005, 22,728 children were adopted, again mostly girls.)

Generally, adoptive parents are treated in the press and television and by friends and relatives as good, kind, and generous. Many modern versions of “Rapunzel” take the same attitude. (”The witch was never unkind to Rapunzel. Indeed, she gave her almost everything the child could have wished for,” says perhaps the best of these retellings, by Barbara Rogasky, beautifully illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.) The witch’s problem is that she not only wants to protect her child from the dangers of the world outside; she does not want the girl to grow up and leave her—fears and desires that many parents, perhaps particularly adoptive parents of only one child, will recognize. In the traditional story this natural wish takes a pathological form; yet in most versions the witch is not punished. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, her possessive love for Rapunzel is selfish and foolish, but not evil, and “since she acted from too much love for Rapunzel and not out of wickedness, no harm befalls her.”

Several modern adaptations of “Rapunzel” for adolescents seem to function as cautionary tales. They offer not only support to a girl who needs to escape an overpossessive parent, but also sympathy for the mother who has trouble letting her go. They encourage teenagers to seek independence without feeling guilty, and parents to accept the inevitable. Zel (1996), for instance, by the best-selling author Donna Jo Napoli, is a lively, dramatic retelling of “Rapunzel” as a historical novel. It is set in the remote sixteenth-century Swiss Alps, where magic and the almost total isolation of the heroine both seem believable. The story expresses both sympathy for and criticism of the witch, who will give her beloved adopted daughter anything but freedom, and ends up almost driving her mad in near-solitary confinement. “She had to be tied to no one but me,” the witch thinks. “Me, no one but me.”

Of course, Zel eventually meets and falls in love with a young aristocrat. Meanwhile the witch, exhausted by her own possessiveness, by the spells necessary to maintain Zel’s captivity in the tower, and by her own guilt, becomes a powerless ghost, able only to silently witness the traditional happy ending, which incidentally takes place in a warm semitropical country—the sort of country from which many adopted babies come today.

Some contemporary teenage versions of Rapunzel not only sympathize with the witch figure but blame the original mother. Cameron Dokey’s Golden, for instance, splits Rapunzel into two different young girls. One is born totally bald, rejected by her mother, and brought up on a remote farm by the loving, small-time sorceress Melisande. The other, who has yards of golden hair, is Melisande’s real daughter, who has been put into a state of suspended animation and imprisoned in a tower by a magician. The girls are thus more or less the same age, and can become friends and share adventures. Both end up with suitable husbands and remain close to Melisande. This story both excuses the guilt some adoptive parents may feel for depriving a mother of her child and supports the search of grown children for their birth parents.

Adèle Geras’s The Tower Room (1990) is a realistic modern version of Rapunzel, though one that eventually reverses its moral. It is the first volume of an engaging and well-written trilogy set in 1962 in a posh English girls’ school, apparently based on Roedean (the alma mater of both Princess Diana and the sisters in Ian McEwan’s Atonement), where Adèle Geras herself was a student and the exact contemporary of her heroine, Megan. The girls at “Egerton Hall” are cut off from the world, but life there is described affectionately and in fascinating detail. Megan’s parents are dead; and her adoptive mother, Dorothy, a teacher at the school, is cool and distant rather than overpossessive. “In my heart,” Megan writes, “I regard her as only a guardian and never think of her as a real mother…. She did try to be like a mother to me during the holidays, but it was as though she were copying maternal behavior she had seen in other people, and not quite succeeding.”

As it turns out, Dorothy is in love with a young lab instructor called Simon who hardly notices her. Instead he falls for Megan, climbs a convenient builder’s scaffolding to her tower room, and seduces her. When Dorothy discovers the affair she flies into a hysterical rage and orders them both to leave. Soon Megan finds herself living in a squalid studio flat near the Gloucester Road underground station and working in a coffee bar, waiting long hours for Simon to return from a distant ill-paying job. It takes her only a couple of months to decide to leave him and return to Egerton Hall and her two best friends (who are ingenious contemporary versions of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty), finish the term, and go on to Oxford. In a sequel (Pictures of the Night) she not only manages to accomplish all this, but is happily reunited with Simon. The lesson seems to be that if you are denied real parental affection you should resist the impulse to compensate by quitting school and running off with a young man, even if he is your true love.

The colorful and lavishly illustrated Sugar Cane: A Caribbean Rapunzel, by Patricia Storace (2007), is intended for children rather than adolescents, but it also includes a partially sympathetic witch figure, a sorceress called Madame Fate. Though everyone on the island fears her, she provides the girl called Sugar Cane with a beautiful garden, a lovable pet monkey, and—an unusual innovation—a first-rate education:

Since Madame Fate was a conjure- woman who could bring people back from the dead, all Sugar Cane’s teachers were special…. Her guitar teacher was a five-hundred-year-old Gypsy from Spain, and her piano teacher a jazz master from New Orleans. An Arabian philosopher tutored her in mathematics. She learned poetry from a Greek epic poet, and storytelling from an African griot.

Sugar Cane, like the Grimms’ version of the story, unites the lovers through music, when a young man hears the heroine singing in the tower. It also alters the traditional ending to include a happy musical reunion with both of Sugar Cane’s original parents.

Not all modern versions of “Rapunzel” show sympathy with the witch, and a few of them penalize her, though not severely, at the end. This is true of Lynn Roberts’s Rapunzel: A Groovy Fairy Tale (2003), which appears to take place in New York in the 1970s. Both text and illustrations are very much of the period—cartoonish, way out, and upbeat. There is no pre-story involving any variety of lettuce: the heroine simply lives on the top floor of an apartment building with her mean Aunt Esme, who rides a motorcycle with the license plate EV1L. When Aunt Esme discovers her niece’s friendship with a high school rock musician, she forces her to climb down a rope made of her own cut-off hair into what looks like a rather scary part of Manhattan. Rapunzel has to spend the night alone in a littered shop doorway, but she and her boyfriend and his band are soon happily united. Aunt Esme’s only punishment is that without Rapunzel’s hair as a kind of magical escalator she has to climb at least five flights of stairs to reach her apartment.

Barbie as Rapunzel (2002), which is based on a short Disney film, also features an unsympathetic adoptive parent. Again there is no prologue: we simply hear that the heroine is kept as a servant by “Gothel, a mean witch.” The text reads as if it were made up by a six-year-old out of bits of fairy tales and Barbie doll promotional material. Rapunzel is a rather blank character, but this may be the result of a deliberate choice on the part of the author or publisher. As a former Mattel Company executive, Ivy Ross, puts it,

[Barbie] isn’t anything in particular, so she become a vehicle for [girls'] dreams, their aspirations, their frustrations—their dress rehearsal for everyday life. Even when she’s in a new movie, Barbie acts Rapunzel.

Barbie/Rapunzel, like most Disney heroines, has some embarrassingly cute animal companions—in this case a bunny rabbit and a fat little dragon with pink wings. Also, like all Barbies, she gets to try on different costumes, which presumably can be bought in the local Toys “R” Us. Eventually she goes to a ball, discovers her long-lost father (he is a king, making her a princess), and marries a prince who resembles Barbie’s boyfriend Ken. The witch ends up imprisoned in her own tower. In the view of some psychologists, the final reunion with only the father (which also occurs in many versions of “Hansel and Gretel”), makes sense, either because it fulfills the daughter’s unconscious desire to have him to herself, or because the witch is really the mother in disguise. (Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde, points out that in fairy tales it is often the older women—mothers, stepmothers, godmothers, witches—who have real and sometimes evil power, while fathers “tend to be excused responsibility” and rather weak.)

In the Grimms’ tale of “Rapunzel” (though not in the Pentamerone), the prince is a fairly ineffective figure. After he climbs Rapunzel’s hair into the tower and is confronted by the witch, he jumps from the window in despair and is blinded by thorns. Both he and his beloved then wander about alone in misery for several years, but at last they are reunited and when Rapunzel’s tears fall on his eyes his sight is restored. In many modern versions the hero is a stronger character. These stories usually omit his blinding, or treat it metaphorically: he gets a concussion when he falls from the tower, and cannot remember Rapunzel and his love for her; or his glasses are broken and he can’t see her; or he believes that she has abandoned him rather than been banished to the wilderness by the witch. In the end, however, the lovers are reunited, one way or another. Men may appear to desert or forget you, the moral seems to be, but not forever.

There will surely be more versions of “Rapunzel.” Already a full-length animated Disney film is in production and scheduled to be released in 2009. The director, Glen Keane, has declared that it will be “a story of the need for each person to become who they are supposed to be and for a parent to set them free so they can become that.” Clearly, there are parallels here to recent young-adult versions. But Keane has also said that the movie’s visual style will be based on the painting The Swing, by the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Since the point of this painting, also known as Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette, is that the young man standing below the swinging girl (though not the viewer) can see up her foaming skirts, Disney’s new “Rapunzel” may turn out to have an unexpectedly erotic undertone.

MARS! Just the word is filled with amazing possibilities, and perhaps more then any other heavenly body it is dear to the hearts of Steampunks everywhere. So near, and yet so far. Our closest planetary neighbor, as unlike the rest of the solar system as our own Earth is. Our desert sister.

Yet how did we first become fascinated with the wonders and horrors of the Red Planet. Long before Mr Welles ignited the modern age of infotainment with his famous radio invasion, Mars was being popularized by a scientist who has been largely forgotten by we non-academics…Percival Lowell.

The following is reposted from The Boston Globe.

The Man Who Invented Mars

Long before the space race and space shuttle, a brilliant, wealthy, charming Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell popularized the idea that we are not alone in the universe. As the next US spacecraft prepares to descend upon the Red Planet, it’s an idea worth revisiting.

By Nancy Zaroulis

AT 7:36 P.M. ON May 25, if all goes well, a stranger from Earth will land near the north pole of Mars. It is called Phoenix. To the unscientific eye, it looks like a giant winged bug. It has three legs and a 5-foot-wide central science deck. With its two solar panels deployed, it measures about 18 feet long. It is 7 feet high. It weighs 772 pounds. Its landing parachute is 39 feet wide. When it touches down on the Martian landscape, it will have traveled 423 million miles - the equivalent of almost 18,000 trips around Earth.

Approximately 17 minutes after it lands, its first signals will be received by its controllers. Then it will begin the task for which it was designed - a task that has never been performed before. It will extend its robotic arm and scoop up dirt and ice from beneath the Martian surface for analysis. It will be looking for evidence of life.

“Finding organic compounds on Mars will increase the probability that life may have or does exist there,” says Tufts University professor Samuel Kounaves, the lead scientist for the wet chemistry investigation on NASA’s Phoenix mission.

Somewhere, a 19th century Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell will be smiling.

Long before NASA was established in 1958, before JFK’s impassioned speech about the space race, and before any of the Apollo missions or space shuttle successes and disasters, Percival Lowell devoted much of his career and considerable fortune to trying to prove that Mars hosted intelligent life. Viewed through his telescopes, the ancient, baleful Red Planet was about the size of a dime. Lowell believed he was seeing a network of canals on its surface. Therefore, he declared, Mars holds intelligent life. It is not necessarily like human life, he emphasized, but it is intelligent enough to build canals.

It is Lowell’s vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.

In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw. He wrote articles about it for Popular Astronomy and The Atlantic Monthly. He lectured widely about it. He became famous and immensely popular. He was “of medium height, slim and handsome, with an athletic build and an intense expression,” his biographer, David Strauss, professor emeritus of history at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, writes in an e-mail. “His erect bearing and fastidious dress contributed to a commanding presence.”

Lowell enchanted the public with his charisma and the power and conviction of his beliefs. “He was a very effective popularizer of his ideas,” says Robert Millis, director of the Lowell Observatory. “He was the Carl Sagan of his day.”

The scientific community was less enthusiastic than the general public about the notion of intelligent life on Mars.

No matter. Wealthy, brilliant, charming when he wanted to be, Percival Lowell was confident in his heritage and convinced of his superiority to the “ruck and rubble” from Southern and Eastern Europe flooding onto America’s shores. He was also seriously inner-directed. And with what he was certain was his discovery of the canals, he had found his life’s work: to promulgate his sensational belief that Mars was the home of Martians.

LOWELL WAS BORN AT 131 TREMONT STREET in Boston on March 13, 1855, into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The first Percival Lowle, as it was then spelled, arrived in America in 1639 from Bristol, England (”the Venice of the West”), and settled in Newbury, north of Boston. His descendants flourished in the law, business, and the arts.

Percival Lowell’s upbringing was entirely conventional for a boy of his time and class: early instruction at a “dame school,” a couple of years’ education in France, attendance at Mr. George W. C. Noble’s school to prepare for Harvard. At college, he excelled in both history and mathematics. He won a Bowdoin Prize for his essay on England as a European power, and he gave a commencement address on “The Nebular Hypothesis.” Some people thought him the most brilliant young man in Boston.

After graduation and the obligatory tour of Europe, he settled into the family business, much of which involved the textile mills in the city of Lowell. There were - and are - many canals in that city. Before the first brick of the first cotton factory was laid there in the 1820s, Irish canal-cutters - intelligent life - dug the canal beds and built the granite walls to channel the Merrimack River’s water to power the mills.

Lowell chafed at life in cold, caste-ridden Boston. He was the most eligible bachelor in the city, but he was not happy. He served as best man at the wedding of Edith Jones and Teddy Wharton, but he himself did not want to be married. He became engaged to a Boston girl, but broke off the engagement - a more serious matter then than it is now.

A man of his time and class, Lowell was a patron of London tailors, a sometime presence on the American expatriate scene in Europe, a connoisseur of wine and spirits deeply opposed to the idea of Prohibition (which fortunately for him did not come in his lifetime). He was an avid reader of Greek and Latin classics in the original and of Chaucer in Middle English. He liked detective stories, too. An enthusiastic polo player, he was one of the founders of the Dedham Polo Club. Within his own household, he was something of a tyrant and was once witnessed kicking his butler down the front steps of his Beacon Hill home and throwing the unfortunate servant’s trunk after him.

At a lecture in 1882, Lowell heard about this exotic, faraway land called Japan - at the time, a place as alien, as mysterious, as Mars is to us today, possibly more so. Having made a comfortable fortune in his own right, he decided to go there. For a few years, Japan was all he desired in the way of adventure and separation from Boston. He wrote three well-received books about Japan, and he published a book of photographs about Korea - the first ever seen by the American public of that land. For a time, he served as minister for the first Korean delegation to Washington.

The lure of the Far East faded, however, when he encountered the writings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the French astronomer Camille Flammarion. There were, Schiaparelli said, “canali” on the planet Mars; Flammarion enlarged upon that idea. In Italian, canali means “channels”; a secondary meaning is “canals,” and that was the meaning - the misinterpretation - that was given to Schiaparelli’s assertion.

WHEN LOWELL WAS A BOY, he had been given a small telescope, and with it he gazed in fascination at the heavens from the roof of the family home at “Sevenels” in Brookline. Now, as an adult, he was about to embark on a new career: astronomy. It would bring him more fame - and more scorn - than he could have imagined.

Mars was to be in opposition to Earth in 1894 - closer than usual as it traveled its elliptical orbit, and thus in prime position for viewing. Lowell borrowed two telescopes and ordered another, with a 24-inch lens, from the best manufacturer in the country, Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport. He delegated a man to find a place with the clearest atmosphere for “good seeing.” Flagstaff, in the Arizona Territory, was delighted to receive him; the townspeople understood that the Lowell Observatory would bring them worldwide fame. Lowell built his observatory there on “Mars Hill”; eventually he built a 25-room “Baronial Mansion” there, too.

In the clear desert and mountain air, far from the constraints of Boston and free to gaze at the stars with his cherished “Clark,” Lowell was happy at Mars Hill. He spent much of the rest of his life there. From his garden and the surrounding desert and mountains, he sent exotic plants to professor Charles Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum. He hosted his many friends and, often, strangers; improbably, he dressed up as Santa Claus to help the local children celebrate Christmas.

The appearance of Lowell’s book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. Let the stuffy academic scientists and astronomers carp and criticize, let them proclaim that there could not possibly be life on Mars because the Martian atmosphere was too thin, its gravity too weak. Lowell knew what he knew. He envisioned Mars society as a kind of utopia, with a place for every man and every man in his place. On Mars, there was no nonsense about workers’ rights or labor unions or Progressivism or Socialism or any of the other discontents in the America of his time.

In 1897, Lowell had a nervous breakdown. At first his family tried to nurse him at home with the most up-to-date treatment: solitary confinement, no visitors, no reading material, no distraction or intellectual activity of any kind. Such a cure, Lowell said, was worse than the illness itself. After a month, he abandoned it. He went to Bermuda and then to the south of France to recuperate.

In 1901, Lowell returned to Flagstaff. Night after night, when the seeing was good, he would climb the ladder in his observatory to peer through the lens of his Clark telescope at the object of his obsession. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.

Because Lowell wanted a base in Boston separate from his family, he bought a house at 11 West Cedar Street on Beacon Hill. The seller was a neighbor, an interior decorator, a woman not of his exalted class. In 1908, he married her. While in London on their honeymoon, they ascended 5,500 feet over Hyde Park in a balloon because Lowell wanted to photograph the paths to see how they (or the canals on Mars) would look from the air. In that year, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life.

Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called “Planet X.” The issue of intelligent life on Mars receded, but not much. By then, George du Maurier had published The Martian and H.G. Wells had produced a sensational fiction piece about Martians invading Earth, The War of the Worlds. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a pulp writer who later found immortality with his Tarzan stories, published the first of his Mars fantasies, A Princess of Mars, in 1912. It was an immediate hit. Burroughs wrote several sequels. Along with works by other writers, it was the beginning of the cottage industry that came to be called science fiction.

Despite having another breakdown in 1912, Lowell concentrated increasingly on Planet X. He never found it. He died at Mars Hill of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 12, 1916. A member of the Mars Hill community remembered that shortly before his fatal stroke, he had exploded in anger at a servant. He is buried there in a mausoleum shaped like an observatory with a blue glass dome.

Fourteen years later, in 1930, Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of a ninth planet: Lowell’s Planet X. Pluto, as it was named, has since been downgraded to dwarf planet status because it is so small, so lacking in what might be called gravitas.

NINTH PLANET OR NO, Percival Lowell’s greatest achievement was to popularize the idea of life on Mars. Astronomers had speculated about that possibility for centuries, but it was Lowell who implanted in the minds of earthlings, once and for all, the idea that we are not alone in the universe - an idea once as unthinkable, as heretical, as the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. Accordingly, in the decades after Lowell’s death, the science-fiction genre flourished. Novels, pulp magazines, and the new media of radio, film, and TV kept Lowell’s basic concept of Martian life alive, even if that fictional life was not quite the kind he would have approved of.

The public adored these speculative fictions - and sometimes believed them. On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company appeared in a radio production of The War of the Worlds, updated to suburban New Jersey. At the beginning of the program, an announcer stated that it was a fictional presentation, but many people didn’t hear that disclaimer. What they heard was a vivid, spine-chilling account of the invasion of New Jersey by Martians - not Percival Lowell’s wise and rather hidebound creatures, but quite nasty super-intelligent beings intent on destroying earthlings. Panic ensued; Welles was thrilled at his success. The lesson was that two decades after Lowell’s death, people were prepared to acknowledge that life existed beyond earth - and that it could come here with hostile intent.

During the first wave of Lowell’s fame at the end of the 19th century, Robert Goddard of Worcester dreamed of a voyage to Mars. His subsequent development of the liquid-fuel rocket was known to German scientists who made the V-1 and V-2 rockets during World War II. After the war, many of those scientists came to the United States, while some went to the Soviet Union, and the space race was on.

The leading US space scientist was the former head of the German rocket manufactory (and slave camp) at Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun. Like many of his peers, von Braun was enchanted by the idea of man going to Mars. He was also, like Percival Lowell, a popularizer. He published articles and a book about a Martian expedition; he also wrote a novel about Mars.

The space program needed government financing, and the hundreds of science-fiction writers and filmmakers flourishing by the mid-20th century fostered the public’s support for the program. People were eager to know about Mars, in particular. In 1976, Viking 1 and Viking 2 transmitted spectacular pictures of a ruddy landscape studded with giant volcanoes and riddled with deep canyons separated by stretches of vast desert. No sign of life was apparent. There has also been a continuing effort to receive a signal from space. This program, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), is of two kinds: active and passive. Those who favor passive listening warn that when we do encounter extraterrestrial life - or when it encounters us - it may not be friendly.

Finally, early in the 21st century, came life-altering news. The Mars Opportunity Rover had found evidence that Mars had been “soaking wet” in the past. Water meant life - or possible life, at any rate. Soon after that discovery, someone left a glass of champagne at the mausoleum of Percival Lowell with a note: “Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the sky” (Euripides, The Bacchae, circa 406 BC).

THE MARS WE SEEK, WITH OR WITHOUT canals and no matter what the Phoenix mission demonstrates, is Lowell’s Mars. The Mars of our imagination is his fantasy, transmogrified a thousand times by writers and filmmakers. The questions that haunted him - questions to which he believed he had found the answers - are questions that haunt us still. Is there life on Mars now? Or was life there once, long ago? If so, what form did it take, and how and why did it die? Is the secret of life on Mars the secret of our own fate?

Now scientists anticipate the landing of the Phoenix next month.

“We are investigating if the soil has the ability to support life, past, present, or for future humans who may land there,” says Tufts’ Kounaves. The Phoenix will carry four wet chemistry labs to analyze the Martian ice and soil, as well as the first optical and atomic-force microscopes. The craft has been sterilized in accordance with NASA’s planetary protection policy to ensure against contamination by earth organisms.

Some people wonder if the space program is worth all the money and effort.

Most definitely, says Maria T. Zuber, E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and head of the department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. “If you look at how our understanding of the universe, the solar system, and the earth itself have advanced from observations made since the dawn of the Space Age 50 years ago, it’s clear that the results have been every bit worth the investment.”

The Phoenix mission and its search for evidence of life on Mars is an important step forward in that understanding. Meanwhile, plans for “terraforming” Mars proceed. Terraforming means making the planet - any planet - fit for human life. This research is being conducted in Mars-like environments like Siberia, the Antarctic, and the Canadian Arctic. “The key challenge in making Mars habitable is warming it,” says Christopher McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, a lead researcher in planning for future Mars missions. “The way to warm Mars using technologies we have already demonstrated is to use super-greenhouse gases.”

McKay estimates it will be at least 25 years before we can establish a long-term research base on Mars and that warming the planet might take 100 years. One problem will be water: how to melt it, possibly make it fit for human use, and then transport it from the planet’s ice caps to the equatorial regions where the colonizers will want to be.

The late Carl Sagan had a solution. If we wanted to transport water across Mars, he said, “we would build canals.”

Long time readers may remember some time ago, I posted the tragic story of Sophie Lancaster, brutally murdered for being Goth while defending her boyfriend, who had been beaten near to death by the same thugs.

The story has progressed and the teenage culprits have been tried, convicted and sentenced. Cold comfort, this is true…but sometimes Cold Comfort is all we get. Again, my prayers go out to Sophie’s family and to Robert Maltby.

The following is reposted from the BBC.

Boys sentenced over Goth murder

Two teenage boys have been jailed for life for the murder of a woman who was killed for dressing as a Goth.

Sophie Lancaster was kicked and stamped to death by Brendan Harris, 15, and Ryan Herbert, 16, in Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, last summer.

The pair turned on Miss Lancaster, 20, in an act of “feral thuggery” as she tried to get them and three other youths to stop attacking her boyfriend.

Harris must serve a minimum of 18 years and Herbert 16 years, the judge said.

Brendan Harris had denied murder, but was convicted last month, while Ryan Herbert pleaded guilty before the trial started.

After the hearing, the Chief Crown Prosecutor for Lancashire Robert Marshall said: “Very occasionally, in spite of all the tragic and distressing cases that the CPS has to deal with, we come across a case that stands out as truly shocking.

“The murder of Sophie Lancaster and the vicious attack on her boyfriend Robert Maltby stand out for their utter pointlessness and sheer brutality.

“Worse still, it seems very likely that the attack started as a form of amusement for those involved.”

He extended his sympathy to the families and outside court, Miss Lancaster’s brother, Adam, 23, thanked people for their support.

“Although the sentences seem fitting and appropriate, no sentence is long enough to compensate for the loss of Sophie,” he said.

His mother, Sylvia, added: “Justice can never be done because it will never bring her back.”

Bus stations at sunset can be difficult places.

Solitude

I hear the colors of solitude run down my bare arm. I close my hand and tear slender moons in my palm as old scars wax from white to red in the damp chill.

I hear the colors of solitude flow over the scratched glass. I lean against the metal spine, my heartbeat bitterly purple as the sky goes blacker than my pulse.

I hear the colors of solitude race through the empty square. I pace in the enclosure like a story without a moral, like a brush without a canvas, like a thorn without a rose.

I hear the colors of solitude, and wish they would speak to me.