Christmas on Mars

An old friend of mine who was part of the forming of the SF convention CoastCon (and even earlier fan activity) sent me his fan-made music video called Christmas on Mars.  I guess you could call it a traditional Christmas filksong.  Given the renewed interest in Mars these days, I thought this post might reflect some of the past interest in Mars, specifically in Science Fiction and Science Fantasy.

Now here’s a good old-fashioned science fiction Christmas carol, performed on Christmas Eve (on Earth) 2013.  Originally performed at a company Christmas party back in 2008, but it was written way before the movie of the same name.

 

     lyrics to Michael Sanborn's 

     CHRISTMAS ON MARS

 

The children are sliding down the sand dunes

While the robots trim the tree.
Both moons sparkle up above us
And the eggnog pills are free...

Chorus:

Though our spaceships travel

Out among the stars,

We're snuggled at home:

It's Christmas on Mars.

There's holiday cheer

In the oxygen bars.

It's that time again:

It's Christmas on Mars.

Li li li (etc.)

The energy blobs

Wheel and bob

In the town promenade.

Let's raise a cheer

For the Laser Brigade!

While the fresh-grown Snow Clones

Serve warp-berry pie

And the zeppelins soar

In the pink winter sky...

(Spoken:) "Wait, zeppelins?!" (I hear you thinking.) "Zeppelins could never
float in the thin Martian atmosphere!" Ah, but what you're forgetting is that these a
re future zeppelinspowered by advanced Martian anti-gravity technology!

(Sung:) That's why they can fly!

(Chorus)

Beam the festive gamma rays!

Blast the craters all ablaze!

Crash the comets to amaze

The Old Ones!

Sled through the magnetosphere!

Chestnuts and ammonia beer!

Gone, the worries! Disappear,

The doldrums!

(Chorus x 2)

Christmas on Mars!

I hope you enjoy this fun filksong from an old-time fan and CoastCon supporter, Michael Sanborn.  Sorry he didn’t make it back this year for the holidays. 

Sprinkled through this post are just some of the many books inspired by Mars exploration.    Happy reading this holiday.

                     CoastConFan

Update:  I finally got the corrected lyrics for Christmas on Mars.  Sorry for any errors, but I blame solar flares for the garbled transmission!

 

 

 

Links of interest to the reader

Mars has always been of interest to Earth people   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mars_observation

Mars has spawned a lot of fiction over the years    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_in_fiction   and    http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mars

The Planet Mars by William Sheehan , readable on line   http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/MARS/CONTENTS.HTM

A copy of the script for the Orson Wells radio presentation of War of the Worlds 30 Oct 1938 http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/mars/wow.htm 

Project Gutenberg has a variety of free, out of copyright books you can download in a variety of electronic formats.  With a little bit of searching, you can turn up some interesting books there https://www.gutenberg.org/

Star Wars and Remembrance, 25 May 1977 and the 35th Anniversary*

Wednesday at the noon matinee in a small city, far far away; a personal memoir of geekdom, many years ago.

This 25th of May is the anniversary of the premier of Star Wars.  Weirdly, it is celebrated on the 4th of May due to some interesting misunderstandings or mistranslations of “May the Force be with you”.  The real general release date of the first Star Wars movie was 25 May 1977, which was a sleepy Wednesday when just another SF film was released without much fanfare in the middle of the week for a sultry noon matinee.  Yes, there were previously other private screenings and previews.  I’m talking about the full release to the general public.^

Anyway, I was working at GameScience, a company that designed and sold wargames during the developing period of the modern wargame industry during the 1970s.  We sold wholesale and retail and the famous Lou Zocchi GameScience catalogue had the most diverse listings of anybody in the industry.  Additionally, were also the first and only domestic makers of polydice, at the time.

Most, if not all the employees, were SF fans and gamers.  Many were involved with CoastCon as well, during the planning stage for the first CoastCon in later in 1978. + Things were a bit slow, so we took a long lunch to watch this new movie at the cheap matinee price at noon.  We didn’t hold up much hope that it would be really very good and the general consensus was that it was just riding on the coattails of bad TV science fiction fare of the 1970s.  We expected to at least get our two bucks worth.

We few took our seats and there weren’t but 20 or so people in the whole place, including us refugees from work.  The music and the credit crawler started, in the style of old movie serials and the lively music boomed:  maybe this won’t be too bad after all and worth a few chuckles.  By the time the Imperial battleship had slid over the screen, we knew this film was a cut above the usual SF Hollywood exploitation film.  It had classic elements, at times lovingly campy at others, new and rich.  We were hooked and vowed to see the film again later that night after work.  It’s rare for a film to surprise me and I sure got my two dollars worth on this one.  We decided to see it again.

No, this isn't me!  I found this on the internet.

Word still hadn’t gotten around yet about this obscure film and the evening show was fairly well attended, but no real crowds yet.  Remember this is the days before twitter (flash crowds were science fiction fare), before personal computers, before cell phones (only Star Trek had them).  The only instant news we had was radio or the TV, if you happened to be close to a set at the time.  Within days, word of mouth had gone out and lines for Star Wars became as long as those for Jaws (1975), the only other precedent we could cite for the phenomena. 

The lesson here is not to sell things short, even when the Hollywood hucksters don’t have much faith in a film.  Yes I was one of the few who actually saw the regular release of Star Wars the first time around.  But the secret was out very soon and within a week you couldn’t hardly get near a theater for the lines and the mousey little SF flick tossed out too the summer fans, ended up being the fox that roared.  

Those us, sitting in Wednesday matinee seats in small theaters all over the country were witnessing history.  Yep, we were there and that, with a couple of bucks might buy you a cup of coffee (hold the foam).  Years ago, I met a woman who saw Dracula when it was a first-run movie in 1931 and I was envious at her attendance at a historic cinematic event.  After 24 May 1977, I was no longer jealous. 

In my generation, the touchstone used to be “Where were you when your first found out that Kennedy had been shot”?  I’d like to propose a much happier touchstone of memory and remembrance, “Where were you when you first saw Star Wars”?   It really doesn’t matter if you saw it first run, or a month later, or even a few years back the first time.  They can’t take away that first time, especially if it was in a theater. 

Star Wars:  alive and well.  I just came back from MobiCon XVI and there was a healthy showing of Star Wars Fans in attendance.  Now Star Wars is mainstreamed, shown on TV and generally taken for granted.  SW clubs are still abundant and many are getting new members.  There are many Star Wars oriented groups now, both rebel and empire some are even neutral like the Mandalorians.   Star Wars has even jumped genres and become Steampunk.  Let’s face it, for better or worse, Star Wars is mainstreamed and become an integral part of our culture.  Right now there are budding anthropologists are writing Master’s theses about esoteric subjects in the Star Wars universe and its impact on us.  For those of us who remember a pre-Star Wars Era, the remembrance of that distant period will fade with our generation.  But who knows, a contemptible little film may premier out some boring Wednesday as summer fare, attended by few to be another culture-changer like Star Wars and a new generation will have their cinematic touchstone. 

                                                                                              CoastConFan

=====================

Footnotes for those that care and the overly detail-oriented (or the just plain bored)

My apologies to Herman Wouk for appropriating (kind of) the title to War and Remembrance, well not really.  BTW, the fellow is still kicking around, thanks for the stories about your generation!

*Yeah I know, it premiered 36 years ago, this is the 35^th anniversary. 

^Yup, I know there was a pre-premier on 1 May and I know there were other private and closed screenings.  I’m talking about the hoy polli of fandom, not the elite, not the insiders, not industry people.  In any case, those early, closed screening must not have generated much interest, because the pedaling of Star Wars was a pretty pedestrian trailer and no real follow-up hype. 

+Yes, Wikipedia says the first CoastCon was 1977 … it’s wrong.  CoastCon incorporated in mid 77, and the first convention was in 78. 

DON’T FORGET TO COME TO COASTCON, COMING SOON

  

 

 However, the cake is a lie!

Armor Steampunk Style – a short history of body armor from the Victorian Era to the middle 20th century

An iron heart and a steel breastplate – garrotters, dacoits, and lascars, beware!

As the renaissance ended, so did the importance of personal body armor, due to improving gun technology.  By the beginning of the Victorian Era (1837-1901), very few military personnel even wore a breastplate and metal helmet, other than combat engineers (sappers and miners) and heavy cavalry (cuirassiers).  Generally, the only metal vestige of armor was the officer’s gorget and even that was fading fast from military panoply

The American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War opened a new era of quick military movements where offense out weighed defense and outmoded Napoleonic Era zone control tactics.  This is also the period that began a renewed interest in personal protection that was light weight and portable.

By the Civil War American inventors came up with several “bullet proof” shirts or vests, none of which were very effective or light.  Generally they were a scam put upon gullible soldiers and those who did buy this armor were derided by the others.  Original account of a Civil War bullet proof vest The image to the right is an advertisement from March 22 1862, page 192, Issue of Harper's Weekly Magazine for a bullet proof vest.  Buyer beware.

 For the ultimate, real steampunk armor you have to go Down Under to Australia and check out the Ned Kelly Gang in the 1870s to 1880.  Their massive steel armor shirts and helmets would indeed turn bullets, but they were terribly heavy and the loss of mobility and poor peripheral vision in the viewing slits made these sets of armor very limited indeed.  They were so heavy the gang decided against leg armor as being way too cumbersome and so it was to prove their undoing.  The full story is on the Wikipedia link provided on their name.  More recently, Clint Eastwood emulated the Kelly gang in A Fist Full of Dollars (1964) in this rewrite of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel, Red Harvest and Kurosawa’s later 1961 movie, Yojimo.  So much for movie trivia.

The only successful set of body ballistic armor was made much like ancient Chinese armor, formed from many layers of silk.  Ukrainian born Casimir Zeglen was an unlikely armor maker as he was a Catholic Priest living in Chicago; who made the first commercially feasible bullet proof vest in 1897. Zeglen's vests were made of silk fabric.  Silk, like spider web material is incredibly strong for it size and has a high tensile strength, which made it perfect for strong, tightly woven ballistic cloth.  Zeglen’s vest was offered for sale at the astounding cost of $800 US dollars, well out of the range of all but the wealthiest.  He went on to produce sheets of the cloth, which could be made into a curtain to armor the passenger section of a vehicle.

 

Of interest, Archduke Franz Ferdinand did wear a bullet proof vest on the day that his touring car received a bomb attack while in Sarajevo.  He survived the bomb but was shot in the neck later in the day; so began WWI.  His vest didn’t cover the throat.  Take note.

Different inventors played around with armor schemes, but nobody was buying until the outbreak of WWI.  The first piece of medieval armor to be reintroduced was the steel helmet.  But they were not brought back to stop bullets, which they didn’t, but the dangerous steel splinters of shrapnel from the hellish artillery.  The Germans and the Allies both introduced helmets and toyed with facemasks to stop shrapnel, but they were impractical and set aside.  The only vestige of the facemask experiment is the “Frankenstein” facemask mounting lugs seen on German and Austrian WWI helmets.

The U.S. Model 8A experimental helmet is another example of a throwback to medieval sources of a visored sallet.  It face is protected by a raiseable ballistic visor with eye slits.  The prototypes were produced in 1918 by the Ford Motor Company for trials but only 1,300 were made.  The interior was a standard Brody style suspension system.  Even more sallet- like were the earlier 1917 ridged M2 and M5A, experimental helmets, both without a visor. 

Body armor was also reintroduced in limited quantities by belligerents and experiments were rampant and often ludicrous.  The Germans had a massive set of armor made for machine gunners, since they didn’t move from their emplacements, but were constantly snipped at.  A super heavy breastplate could and did turn rifle bullets, but at the expense of movement.  Sniping got so bad that the Germany also had brow armor for the forehead and was held in place with those vestigial helmet lugs.  Finally, those lugs had a use.

Body armor was pretty much shelved after WWI, until the Soviets produced light steel breastplates for their combat engineers, shock troops and tank riders in WWII.  They wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet and might stop a 9mm SMG or pistol bullet at medium range … at least until the Germans improved their 9mm cartridges in 1943 and that was the end of that.

Our modern ballistic vests use space age concoctions of ceramics, graphite, and good old steel these days.  For now, body armor is back until new improvements in ballistics returns the knightly vestiges back to the museum.

 

Here are a few images of contemporary Steampunk outfits.  You can recycle an old medieval costume breastplate or make one fresh with foam sheets or fashion one out soft sheet aluminum or even go with the ever-popular chainmail look, with a few enhancements.  I hope to see a few sets of steampunk armor at CoastCon or Mobicon next year.  They would be good for a Call of Cthulhu RPG or LARP set in the 1880s!

                                                                                                 CoastConFan
------------------UPDATE 23 OCT, 2012----------------

After I posted this blog entry, I turned up this excellent steampunk armored corset from organicarmor.com and it was so different, I just had to add this piece to the blog.  I suggest a visit to their site if you like interesting armor.

-------------------Update 17 Jan 2013---------------------------

I finally found an image I have seeking for the WWI US Army experimental helmet for snipers and machine gunners which completely covers the head in a very medieval sort of way.  It might have been pretty good for shrapnel, but vision and hearing was highly impaired and it just wouldn't stop a rifle bullet.  Additional update:  As of May 2014, I inserted more information into the body of the text and some links to the helmet.

U.S. Experimental Model 8A, 1918

Update June 2016   --------------------------------------

If this article was of interest to you, I highly recommend you download a copy of Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, pub 1920 by Bashford Dean PhD, who was the curator of armor at the Met, printed by Yale University Press.  The book has a nice overview of the history of armor of earlier times leading up to WWI.  It shows a lot of very interesting experimental helmets I hadn’t encountered before, especially some of the visors that were attached to helmets.  The book also discusses a range of body armor along with ballistic cloth, much of which varies from medieval to the very modern in look.  Download for free from the Met at their website

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/helmets_and_body_armor_in_modern_warfare

It's lso available from the Internet Achive  https://archive.org/details/helmetsbodyarmor00deanuoft  and from another source  www.muraditutti.it/biblioteca-militare-virgilio-ilari/ancient-military-history/ancient-armor-and-weapons/1920_DEAN_Helmets-and-Body-Armor-in-Modern-Warfare

UPDATE: I have a new hat/helmet post 2 May 2017-- Mr. Pratt’s Gun Hat or How to Be Fashionable But Deadly in the Trenches   http://coastconfan.blogspot.com/2017/05/mr-pratts-gun-hat-or-how-to-be.html

 

Links of Interest

Here are a few additional links about Ned Kelly:

This is a great article about restoring and installing Ned Kelly’s armor in an Australian Museum http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/irish_in_australia/behind_the_scenes/kelly_gang_armour_installation

http://www.ironoutlaw.com/html/armour.html

 

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/02/dna-evidence-identifies-famous-armored-australian-outlaw/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/ned-kellys-missing-skull-discovered-in-the-cupboard-of-a-witch-in-new-zealand-8084276.html