While talking about his tv film THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS in July 1968 – five months after I was born – Kneale said, “You can’t write about the future. One can play with the processes that might occur in the future, but one is really always writing about the present because that is what we know.”
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jotter
I quickly secured the scriptbooks for the preceding two serials in the cycle, THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and QUATERMASS II. The book for that fourth serial, simply entitled QUATERMASS, emerged as a novelisation by Kneale containing material not in the serial, including the elderly Quatermass getting laid by a woman in her late forties. I remember distinctly a moment in that scene where, with Quatermass’ wrinkled paw on her breast, she says, in a small voice, “I’m only me.”
QUATERMASS remains Kneale’s only full-length novel. I still have it on the top shelf in my office.
Comments closedI found a shot of an engraving of Roman finds in London. The text: “Roman remains from St Michaels, Crooked Lane, 1831. Plate XLIV, Vol. XXIV, p.202. The Wren church of St Michael’s was demolished in 1831 to make way for King William Street. The items are all Roman pots and parts of pots, generally of a useful rather than decorative kind.”
Crooked Lane. Useful vessels.
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I found one in Germany on eBay, still in its plastic box. The battery slot won’t bloody open, so it’s dead until I get it to a shop, but I’ve got it. Little smaller than I expected, and the strap is horrible so I’m going to change that out soon. But it’s a lovely little thing, for quiet and easy days out and about, and I’m very happy I have it.
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Artist and technologist the Rev Dan Catt had a spare Bee Pioneer unit and gifted it to me. it’s an AI listening device. I’ve lately gotten curious about the state of play in AI assistance – did a newsletter about it — with special interest in both intentional physical-operation devices like the Rabbit R1 and the things that melt into the background, which is what the Bee is. Wrist strap or, as I’m doing it, a clip that’ll attach to a shirt or belt.
On Dan’s recommendation, I’ve ordered a faraday pouch for it and I charge it in a silent room – because it will hear the tv as well as conversations when I wear it outside the office, and it will turn back on when it’s charging. It’s slow to catch up with work-account email – anything newer than a day or two, it can’t see — and it needs to be trained to look for the correct spelling of names in my work contacts.
You can change the voice on the associated iOS app, and the one I’m using sounds a little bit like Gildart Jackson pretending to be a 1940s BBC announcer, which amuses me.
I have no idea if this thing will have real utility or whether it’s just a nightmare ear in a box. But I’m going to play around with it, wait around and see what it can easily be connected to in the future, and see what it can do.
One CommentThere is something peculiarly British about having the chance to go to space and not being able to afford it.
The British Experimental Rocket Group, as troubled and beset as it is in these stories, still somehow has a whiff of empire lost. Previous to NASA, the biggest and most expensive exploratory agency in the world was the office of John Barrow, second secretary of the British Admiralty, who over thirty years sent ships all across the planet to fill in the gaps in their atlases.
Also: of modernism, of new worlds. Britain was still launching Black Knight rockets. Nobody knew that future was already lost.
Comments closedWhen designer and technologist Matt Jones joined the similarly skilled Jack Schulze and Matt Webb in their company, they resolved to change the company’s name to reflect this new partnership, and asked me if I had any ideas for a name. I suggested the British Experimental Rocket Group, which would shorten to BERG.
I still have a white lab coat embroidered with the BERG logo and my surname. They only made two of the personalised white coats. William Gibson has the other one.
Comments closedProfessor Bernard Quatermass is the director of the British Experimental Rocket Group. A dream of a British space programme that survived the Ministry of Supply’s failure to pay for the future.
An unproduced prequel to the sequence would have seen Quatermass travelling to 1930s Nazi Germany and meeting Wernher von Braun, thereby setting the young Quatermass on his path towards the British Experimental Rocket Group and a life of horror.
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40mm case, parachute strap. Not a manual wind, which is what I was looking for, but I did need a casual analogue in grey, and there it is. I like the simple styling of the thing: it’s pleasantly utilitarian. Details here. And yes, the markers at 12 and 6 are ever so slightly pissed to my eye too, on the item itself and on the photos on the website. Style elements apparently come from the French Navy – it does have a faintly nautical air to it. I’m happy with it.
Currently 15% off, which is why I decided to splurge a little.
2 CommentsEric Brown was close to being Britain’s first astronaut.
The British Interplanetary Society proposed modifications to the V-2 in 1946 to make it a viable suborbital article, and also reusable. Access to V-2 technology and that early access to von Braun put Britain ten years ahead of the rest of the world. They called it Megaroc and submitted the pitch to the Ministry of Supply. Eric Brown was head of the line to test fly the thing, and that could have happened as early as 1949.
If Britain hadn’t been bankrupt. If a third of London hadn’t been missing.
I wrote a book around this notion, called MINISTRY OF SPACE.
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