If you haven’t read Matthew Hughes’ The Other then, on the bright side, you have something to look forward to.

Of course if you have read The Other, there may still be a bright side: because although they haven’t (yet?) been collected in print you can now download ePub formatted digital versions of seven short stories about the more or less hero of The Other, Luff Imbry from their publisher, Angry Robot Books.

They’re each less than a dollar (if my inner currrency exchange is working) and they will fit just fine on your Nook, Sony Reader, iPad, or anything else that can read an ePub book, including your computer.

Luff Imbry is a bit of a rascal. He’s an antiquities trader who specializes in recently redistributed wealth and, sometimes, in wealth that hasn’t quite yet been redistributed, but could be. He’s a gifted forger, too, and in that (at least) he reminds me of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy mysteries… though since he’s quite gifted in the girth department, Luff Imbry may be more of a heavyweight.

Angry Robot’s FAQ also suggests the stories may be available in the Amazon Kindle Store, but as you can probably see from that click I couldn’t find them there. Maybe they’ll show up in the near future.

Hughes’ Archonate novels are often compared to the science fiction and fantasies of Jack Vance, and with good reason; in fact we discover along the way that the Archonate’s Earth may even be the Old Earth of Vance’s Dying Earth stories… just a little while before the balance of the Universe shifts back to magic (or "sympathetic association") from its more rational state of science.

They’re fine stories, and wonderfully well told, and you just ought to go and read them if you haven’t. A good place to start might be Majestrum.

Technorati Tags: matthew hughes, archonate, the other, luff imbry, science fiction, epub, digital book, ebook, sont reader, nook, ipad

Though that doesn’t preclude comedy.

The Empire City (also known as Technotopia) of The Automatic Detective is a place in which the cheerful exuberance of the retro future all came true, sort of, in ways that were a bit unexpected. So, yes, we’ve all got a shot at a flying car, but in practice the gadabouts of Empire City are not exactly standardized and the many models are each plagued by niggling problems like, for example, the Buzzbugs: you’d call them ornithopters, except that their plastic wings and their beelike bodies are based on insects rather than birds. They’re a swell idea, but they have this habit of stalling, which is not your optimal behavior in a flying car. Opting out of the Buzzbug, you might try a Hoverskid, unless you were quick enough to ask yourself what the “Skid” part of their name was all about. In fact there’s only one model in all of Empire City that rolls on wheels, or more accurately, on wheel: that would be the Unipod.

Every one of these vehicles is fatally flawed in a unique and inventive way. And that tells you a lot about Empire City. The City’s a victim of almost random invention. Yesterday’s advances get recycled and today’s ill-advised replacements show up to crash, burn, mince, and mangle all over again. The question of why, exactly, that is, is rarely asked. Until we meet Mack Megaton.

Mack is not an automatic detective. Mack is a cab driver, although originally he was an unusual (and unusually dangerous) robot built by a mad scientist intent on (you guessed it!) dominating the world. For one reason or another, though, Mack decided that he’d rather not go in for world domination – which led to his creator’s imprisonment in a place I really, really wish I’d made up myself. It’s the Moriarty Asylum for the Criminally Inventive.

Mack is better now. He’s in therapy. But folks are still just a little bit worried about what would happen if his original programming were to kick back in.

And that’s where we begin. The Automatic Detective invites us on a hard boiled adventure through this dysfunctional World of Tomorrow where we meet all sorts of characters we didn’t quite meet in Raymond Chandler’s stories – like Jung, the intelligent gorilla, who’s Mack’s best friend, and like small, green and sinister scientists, and like Lucia: a swell dame, maybe. And, you know, maybe not.

The real journey here is Mack’s passage toward something like humanity. The story’s propelled by his decision at the beginning to break into a domestic disturbance at his neighbor’s apartment and that, as mundane as it sounds, is the first step in both the mystery of what the heck made Empire City what it is, and Mack’s growth as a sentient, if mechanical, being.

An Automatic Detective, in fact. Just picture Philip Marlowe. But paint him red, add few hundred pounds of near-indestructible shell, and don’t forget a buried inner drive to Destroy All Humans.

Technorati Tags: the automatic detective, a lee martinez, science fiction, hard boiled, retro future, robots, flying cars, mad science, sci fi, retro, noir, raygun gothic

Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner)

I used to wonder if my sleeping self were a completely different creature than the waking me who’s typing this now. My sleeping self, I thought, had his own personality, his own urge to survive, and simple wants: to be left alone so he could survive – which meant, of course, not waking up.

My sleeping self could carry on a short conversation. He might promise to do anything, if it seemed like once he’d made the promise, he’d get to survive (sleep). He even might answer the phone and do those things remotely. Once he picked up the phone and just said “Why are you doing this to me?” before he hung up.

He had a fairly short window in which to make the world go away because after a couple of minutes the waking me would take his place. So he was wily. Often enough I found myself dealing with what he’d done as my day went on.

But the sleeping me was nothing compared to the alternate self of Galloway Gallegher, as we see in this collection of short stories by Henry Kuttner.

Gallegher, says Gallegher, does science by ear. He doesn’t know how. Somehow – in spite of not having a lot of formal training – his subconscious has picked up a lot of knowledge along the way and if his conscious mind just gets out of its way it can do such amazing things that it makes him the most gifted – if unusual – inventor in the world.

Fortunately for his subconscious, this happens when Gallegher is supremely drunk. It’s fortunate because that happens pretty often.

And that’s the setup for each of these stories – because although Gallegher (drunk) can solve just about any problem that’s presented to him he does it "by ear", using whatever materials are at hand – and sometimes, whatever he can have delivered. He doesn’t make notes, and he’s suspicious of any attempt to record what he’s up to. He’ll meet with clients, cobble together some bizarre machine to solve their problems – often more than one at a time – and then pass out, leaving Gallegher (sober) to try to figure out what’s happened. Why, for example, he now has a machine that’s eaten all the dirt in his back yard and does nothing else except to sing "Saint James Infirmary". And, just as often, why everyone seems to be out to get him.

I remember Henry Kuttner mainly for his fantasy stories from the 1940s and 1950s. They were among the many pulp stories reprinted when I was young. Discovering these, though, was a great pleasure – they’re science fiction screwball comedies, and I just wish there were more of them.

Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner)

Four of the five Gallegher stories were written in 1942 (under the name Lewis Padgett), before Kuttner went off to war. The last was published in 1948. The near-future world of these stories is one in which rapid changes in technology have confused matters a bit – especially in the legal system – and that makes us feel right at home there, doesn’t it?

These stories were first gathered together as a book in 1952. This Planet Stories edition has a new cover by Tomasz Jedruszek and some fine interior illustrations by Brian Snoddy, a new introduction by F. Paul Wilson, and the original 1952 introduction by C.L. Moore – Kuttner’s wife, herself the author of Shambleau and the Jirel of Joiry stories.

Highly recommended!

Technorati Tags: science fiction, henry kuttner, robots have no tails, planet stories, paizo publishing, astounding magazine, lewis padgett

Just Imagine - now available at Amazon

This is momentous news, dear reader, and I have no idea when exactly it finally happened – but the world’s first all singing, all dancing science fiction musical is finally available on DVD.

“Just Imagine” was a landmark film, in which the 1920s and 1930s vision of the future was captured for all time – with amazing miniature sets and rockets, the most famous of which rose out of the prop room to become Flash Gordon’s rocket, in the movie serials – and it is simply not to be missed by anyone who loves the retro future.

It is also a profoundly silly film. Don’t let that stop you.

For years, it’s been impossible to find a commercial tape or disc of this movie, though bootlegs showed up often at eBay.

Just Imagine was an early sound picture – it was released in 1930 – and it features both Maureen O’Sullivan and the vaudeville comic El Brendel. The film takes us (and Brendel) to the astonishing world of 1980 – where we all have flying cars and New York is a multilayered city of public and private transportation, with traffic cops on floating platforms

Just Imagine - now available at Amazon

blowing their whistles at us. The sets are fantastic; the rockets are wonderful; and it’s just sort of mind-blowingly naive and silly.

There is (of course!) a trip to Mars, but possibly the best times are to be had here on Earth with its arranged marriages, its food pills, its whiskey pills, and its numerous jokes about Prohibition.

If Metropolis is our serious and socially conscious great-uncle of the retro future, Just Imagine is its jazz age slaphappy cousin.  The one we actually want to hang out with.

This is a great day. A tremendous day. It’s good to be here in the future. Now if they’d just release “Madam Satan”. But that’s another story.

Technorati Tags: just imagine, retrofuturism, retro future, futuristic, movie, film, science fiction, musical, sci fi, comedy

The City Beneath Us

I’m especially interested in the appearance of the tunnels during the 20′s and 30′s, as part of the research for a gigantic personal project of mine. Heller’s book doesn’t disappoint there, but I found that I was captivated by the wealth of historic detail about the struggles to create and maintain the system – first opposed by those who thought it was impossible or ill-advised, and later plagued by the political impossibility of raising the nickel fare – which lasted for nearly 45 years – so that the system could be properly maintained and expanded.

I was amazed to learn that the short test run of a pneumatic subway was constructed secretly (and illegally!) before 1870. That’s how desperate the city was to give its immigrant population some means of getting out of the overcrowded tenements of lower Manhattan – one of the prime motivations behind a public transportation system.

The three lines were built using several different techniques, depending on the composition of the land they were cutting through. While tunnels were driven through rocky sections, a “cut and cover” technique was used wherever possible. Utility lines (already a labyrinth beneath the city) had to be rerouted so that trenches could be cut below the streets and then covered over, the streets being restored above the heads of the workers who then completed the work. Where stone was removed from the tunnels it was moved, with carts, cars, and mules, and crushed so that it could become part of the concrete that formed so much of the tunnel lining. This work was largely done at the turn of the twentieth century and the engineers worked brilliantly within the limits of their technology.

The design itself was so good that even after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 there was little damage to the tunnels except where they passed closest to the World Trade Center. When those tunnels were rebuilt, the modern engineers made only minor modifications to the hundred year old bracing design that had worked so well.

Likewise the construction of the subway lines that passed underwater used techniques that are very similar to those used in the trans-Bosporus tunnel now being built in Istanbul. Whatever else you can say about the turn of the 20th century, those were days in which builders rightly believed that they could accomplish just about anything.

Like any public transit system the New York subway has had its rough times, its encounters with bankruptcy, its intrigues, and its rebirths. It’s where Heller’s book deals with Robert Moses that I just had to smile. Moses is a polarizing figure in New York history and he was no friend to public transportation. When I’ve read about Moses’ role in the creation of the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, he’s described as a visionary – but because so much of that vision was based on the automobile and its highways he’s very nearly demonized here. He is always a figure who seems larger than life, either way – though from this 21st century vantage I have to lean toward the Transit Museum’s view of him. New York would have been far better served through the improvement and expansion of its public transit.

The text runs for just 81 of the book’s 245 pages – the rest is given over completely to the vintage photographs that introduce us to the workmen and sites that, street by street and borough by borough, gradually knit themselves together into a functioning network that now carries people rapidly and reliably through all of Manhattan and its outlying areas. And while that complete process took decades it’s still true that its original framework – the IRT line – came together in just the first four years of the 20th century, at a time when the city was growing and changing at an unprecedented rate. Mounting and completing such a major project in the middle of that growth and change was – and remains – a staggering achievement.

The City Beneath Us – Building the New York Subways at Amazon.

Technorati Tags: new york, subway, public transit, public transporation, manhattan, irt, brt, ind, urban planning, 20th century, engineering

Yep – the evil Fox Empire did indeed axe Futurama several years ago – but they’ve been so pleased by its sales on DVD that they’ve contracted for up to four direct to DVD movies from Matt Groening et al.

Each of the direct to DVD movies will also be sliced up into separate episodes for airing on Comedy Central (and – one assumes – elsewhere, as time goes on). This first movie is scheduled for a November 27th release on DVD.

“Bender’s Big Score” sends the crew of Planet Express on a time traveling adventure that involves nudist alien Internet scammers, Leela’s love life, and Fry’s buttocks. It is not to be missed.

Technorati Tags: futurama, futurama movie, dvd, matt groening, retro future, animation, comedy, bender’s big score

Subway Style: 100 Years of Architecture & Design in the New York City Subway

For example, who knew how interesting the evolution of turnstiles would be? And since these stations have been in constant use for up to a century or more, their layout and design has repeatedly been adapted to new systems for ticket-taking, seating, vending, and just about anything else that happens in a subway station… by design, anyhow. This may make the mainly modern photographs in the book problematic for me, but if anything it makes them even more interesting to explore. Still there are quite a lot of period photos and some great graphics used to advertise the subway and its destinations over the years.

I could wish for more examples of mosaic and ceramic work, I guess – we do face the problem today that we can’t take our own reference photographs in the stations – but that’s due to the material I’m looking for. It’s certainly not a failure of the book itself.

At right is a detail I especially like – a modern addition to the Roosevelt Island Station, it uses forms that date back to a 1930 design in order to blend in with the existing fixtures of the IND line.

Here it is. Go forth and browse.

Technorati Tags: new york, subway, photography, mosaic, metalwork, ceramic, architecture, design

And sure enough, I already knew the man’s work even though I had known nothing about him. Stevens, like those other designers I mentioned, cut his designer’s teeth during the futuristic 1930′s – and like them, he was able to turn his hand to just about anything that was manufactured, from cars to trains to boats to kitchen appliances.

Like Dreyfuss, he was an eminently practical man when it came to product design. But Stevens also had an innate grasp of how people would be affected by the objects he designed. A perfect example of that is the fact that it was Stevens who put a window in a clothes dryer. What had been a featureless cabinet suddenly became animated, hypnotic; the dryers were styled very much like early televisions and in showrooms across the country people just stopped and… watched them. That one decision shows a pointed insight into the way we respond to objects.

Through his long association with Evinrude, Stevens defined for us what an outboard motor should look like. He often took ungainly machines with jagged, mechanical profiles and streamlined them in casings – just the way designers were encasing steam engines in rocket-shaped, teardrop shells. Likewise he worked for many years for Studebaker, and – not to neglect the the ridiculous – he reinvented Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobile.

Yet one of his best remembered legacies of the 1950′s is his invention of the phrase “planned obsolescence”. He saw this as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” That’s far from the most sinister application of the phrase – which is to design products so that they will intentionally wear out within a certain timeframe, so that the buyer has no choice but to buy again.

Even in its more aboveboard meaning there’s a kind of manipulation in the idea that doesn’t sit well with us. But in the past three decades industries have gone far beyond this, with the scheduled introduction of incompatible hardware, data formats, and operating systems, so that we are expected to buy the same content again and again to work on these new devices – especially where the older ones are no longer available. Steven’s phrase and intent seem somehow innocent, at this stage.

This handsome book gives us many examples of Stevens’ designs from every period from the 1930s to the late 1970s, and a good deal of insight into the ideas and client relationships that lay behind those designs.

One of the things that pleases me about these designers is the total world canvas they were able to paint. In the late 20th century industries became more and more specialized. But in the century’s early days it was more than ever possible to be a generalist – in any field, not just in design – and the overall style of the period makes their collective work somehow hang together, like the inevitable result of ongoing progress. It’s a fascinating period to study, and – maybe – to envy, just a little.

Technorati Tags: streamline, industrial design, retro, brooks stevens, product design, evinrude, studebaker, planned obsolescence

Christopher Payne’s photographs are a sort of urban archaeology that digs down not through sand or sediment, but through the layers of our forgetfulness. Because these remarkable industrial monuments are still there. They’re just ignored.

Some of these subway power substations are still in use, rebuilt and equipped with more modern equipment; while many, which make for the most interesting pictures, are abandoned. Those photographs are dreadfully still and fascinating – peeling paint, drifts of debris, and pools of standing water frame the massive power converters and banks of switches and gauges in these innocuous buildings, sprinkled throughout the city.

A power substation received power from one or more powerhouses through massive underground cables. The power converters look like gigantic turbines. Their function was to spin, powered by the incoming AC current, and by spinning generate the DC current that powered the subway.

Payne’s book includes period photographs of manned substations, several shots of the exteriors of these buildings, which blend into their setting and are largely ignored, and – best of all, for me – the photographs of these lost installations with their titanic machinery in decay. The pictures make wonderful reference, which was my reason for getting the book, but they’re beautiful and interesting in their own right. I’m a sucker for early 20th century technology and machinery, of course. But I don’t think you need to be, to be moved by the neglect and decay of these immense machines that once were the embodiment of our progress and hope for the future. Technorati Tags: new york, subway, photography, machine age, industrial design, retro, vintage, power, electrical, machinery, technology