SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE IT WAS CALLED SCIENCE FICTION—We look at works of proto-SF. Tales of travel to other worlds, of alien beings and robots, and of interplanetary war date back decades and centuries prior to the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, often cited as the first true science fiction story. Well before the term “science fiction” was coined, works such as Johanne Kepler’s Somnium and Lucian of Samosata’s satire True History included elements of what, today, we define as SF! We’ll examine these and other works of science fiction before it was called science fiction.
Following are the slides that will be shown during this presentation, just as a back-up!
8) PRESENTATION/GALLERY: AIR SHOWS AND AVIATION MUSEUMS
Many SF fans are modelers and fans of old airplanes. This is a presentation on airshows and aviation museums. These include the RAF Museums (London and Cosford), the National Air and Space Museum (Washington), the USAF Museum (Dayton), the Imperial War Museum (Duxford), the RCAF Museum (Trenton), and the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum (Ottawa).
WWII-era Lancaster bomber, Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, Ottawa.
During my life as a business traveller, I spent the equivalent of more than three years on the road: airplanes, airports, hotels, meetings, taxis, rental cars….. That’s one reason why I missed so many monthly MonSFFA meetings, and several ConCepts as well. One benefit at least was that I could arrange side visits. Some destinations had air museums. Other destinations even had an air show.
This is a presentation on some of those places. Note that you’re seeing only a small selection of a vast number of aircraft. All are rare, and some are irreplaceable last examples.
Note: the slides that our in-person audience will see during this particular presentation have been uploaded to our Website and are viewable, here below. Click on a slide for a closer look.
From the earliest days of science fiction, space travellers travelled to the Moon, to Mars, to Venus, and to the other planets as they were discovered. Early science fiction – before the late 19th century – treated the planets as just different earths. Science fictional tropes from the late 19th century right to the Space Age declared Mercury to be an oven on the side facing the sun and a freezer on the other. Venus was a planet of swamps, jungles, and dinosaurs. Mars was a cool desert planet, with all the water in the canals.
Then, science had its little say. Starting in the early 1960s, the first interplanetary probes knocked down the tropes of science fiction. Or as T.H. Huxley (1825 – 1895) put it: “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
But have no fear, there were plenty of other ways to look at the planets … and more planets to look at.
After this presentation, scroll down for more bonus content, a review of the club’s recent field trip, with accompanying photo gallery.
The Mysterious Orbit of Mercury
8) CLUB FIELD TRIP TO MONTREAL AVIATION MUSEUM (MAM)
On Saturday morning, September 9, a group of dedicated MonSFFen visited what they found to be an unassuming yet top-flight local museum.
There’s a whole lot of aviation history packed into the Montreal Aviation Museum (MAM), which occupies not a former hangar or anything equally spacious, but an old cattle barn on McGill University’s Macdonald Campus in furthest West Island Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue.
The place is as much a workshop as a museum, with tools, blueprints, reference photos, and tarnished old aircraft parts scattered about amidst the various exhibits! And, visitors are able to get up close and inspect the finest of details on most of the aircraft; unlike most museums, there are very few rope-barriers in place to keep people at a certain distance from the exhibits.
(Photo by Cathy Palmer-Lister.)
A keen enthusiasm for Canadian—and particularly Quebec—aviation is a hallmark of this hidden gem of an institution, as are the aircraft restoration and reconstruction projects undertaken, overseen by a devoted team of friendly volunteer-members. One of these fellows had parked his beautifully refurbished early-1960s Corvette in the parking lot; if the same care and attention to detail applied to this classic sports car was any indication, the aircraft awaiting us within were sure to please!
having checked out the vintage Corvette, Danny and Joe head inside to view the planes! (All photos by Keith Braithwaite unless otherwise indicated.)
Of note was one such restoration project: a WWII-era Fairchild Bolingbroke Mk. IV aircraft, which was housed in a dedicated wing of the museum. The nose and cockpit of this maritime patrol aircraft has been restored, along with her gun turret, while the rest of the plane remains a work in progress; engine parts, and sections of the fuselage and wings were strewn about, on-deck for an expert face-lift!
Angle forward, looking into cockpit and nose compartmentReverse angle, from nose compartment looking into cockpitCloser views, nose compartmentCloser views, cockpit
Gun Turret
Fuselage detailAwaiting restoration
Parked outside on the lawn, meanwhile, was the battered fuselage of a Canadair CF-104 Starfighter jet, recently acquired and slated for restoration beginning early next year.
Starfighter fuselage, walk-around
Also outside…Joe checks his shot of these engines (photo by Cathy Palmer-Lister).Nose section (photos by Cathy Palmer-Lister)
On display with the finely finished planes on show in the museum’s second-floor main hall were various period photographs, historical documents, associated artifacts and equipment, engines, flight suits, and some of the tools employed to bring these old birds back to life.
Explanatory panels provided information about each plane or notable event in Canadian aviation history, like “Le Scarabée,” a French Blériot XI that made the first flight over a Canadian city—Montreal!—in 1910.
Large-scale model of Scarabée hangs above full-scale reconstruction of aircraft
The aircraft’s engine; Danny and “Le Scarabée”Scarabée was reconstructed from original plansOther aircraft include the Curtiss-Reid Rambler…
Fairchild FC-2 Razorback, a pioneering bush plane…
the all-Canadian Fleet Canuck…
and the famous Noorduyn Norseman (here minus a wing), built in Montreal!
Those of a certain age may recall long-defunct airlines Nordair and Quebecair, each here represented with an assemblage of assorted memorabilia.
Several promotional models of sleek Air Canada jets were included, too—the kind one might see mounted in the window of a travel agency.
Air Canada SST, never to be!
Canada’s famous aerobatics teams, the Golden Hawks and the Snowbirds, were showcased in one wing of the building, and the legendary Avro Arrow was represented, as well!
A number of airliner seats were arrayed about the museum, providing seating for those in want of a respite!
Numerous large-scale models of aircraft hung from the ceiling above the actual, full-scale planes. Model aircraft, in fact, could be found throughout the museum, presented either individually or as components of a skillfully crafted diorama.
First Canadian air pageant
Diorama, Bolingbroke production line
Last, but certainly not least, an exquisite collection of aviation art was hung in the museum’s gallery, including a stained-glass piece that drew the attention of MonSFFA president Cathy Palmer-Lister, whose hobbies include the fashioning of such works. Featured painters include Jim Bruce and Don Connelly.
Artist Jim Bruce included photos showing the step-by-step creation of his airbrush painting depicting a TCA Vickers Viscount airliner.
This is a brief history of information storage. In some cases, this meant very hard copy. Humans have this need to record our thoughts. This became institutionalized through religion, bureaucracy, graffiti, Shakespeare, and science fiction. We’ve painted on cave walls, carved on stone, used animal skins, plants, and chopped up trees. Now we’re on the least archival of all: computer storage.
Where will our thoughts be a century from now? A millennium from now? Beyond that? Will our digital media fall apart faster than a pulp science fiction magazine in the hot sun?
eBay For Fun and Profit and Other Internet Sales Opportunities
This panel discussion gives an introduction to sales on eBay, including the trials and tribulations of finding material, how to price it, how to ship it, and how to deal with feedback. Yes, and the taxman may cometh as well.
eBay started as an auction site, but today, most sales are by fixed price. Why the change, and what is the advantage of one over the other.
Others are invited to contribute their experiences on eBay, on other internet sales sites, or on their own web sites.
Mark Twain’s A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur’s Court(1889) was not the first time travel story. However, it was probably the first in the subgenre of the person transported to an earlier era, who decides to bring his new home “up to date” as part of his survival plan. 21st century inflation has brought us from one individual to entire islands, fleets, and towns.
We invite people to discuss their favourite time travel stories of this genre. We’ll begin with the following.
Axis of Time, series (aka World War 2.0) by John Birmingham (2004 – 2007, plus short fiction)
1632 series (aka Ring of Fire), started by Eric Flint; expanded into a shared universe with many contributors, many novels, much short fiction. Their online magazine also features non-fiction articles and discussions of how to adapt 21st century technology to the 17th century. And it’s still going strong.
This month marks the 55th anniversary of the opening of Expo 67, still remembered as Montreal’s finest moment. The centrepiece of Canada’s Centennial celebration, Expo is constantly ranked among the greatest World’s Fairs.
Rather than pavilions conforming to cookie-cutter designs, the finest architects provided their imagination. Designers, filmmakers, and others put together a 1,000-acre showplace and playground. Everyone who was anyone was in Montreal that summer, from performers to world leaders.
Expo showed us the future. Computers examined problems that today, a 12-year-old could carry out on their smartphones. We could use the videotelephone. We could see a model of Air Canada’s supersonic transport, already on order for service in the far-off year of 1980. We could ride on the new-fangled Hovercraft. We could take a monorail, although it was called the minirail – this was the 60s after all. We could stand in line for hours to see the Labyrinth: the forerunner of IMAX. In the pavilion of the Indians of Canada, the First Nations told their story, which was different (to say the least) from patronizing, romanticized displays at earlier World’s Fairs.
Some of the future came true, some … not so much. Over the next hour, we’ll see photos from my personal collection, taken as a budding young photographer, completed by images and videos from the Internet
We live in a world of science. We also live in a world of cartoons. Naturally, cartoon creators have their own self-consistent rules of science. The best known: Wile E. Coyote runs into thin air, but only falls after he looks down. Another character is shot by a cannonball, but the perfectly circular hole in his middle heals rapidly with no aftereffects.
About 10 years ago, I gave a MonSFFA presentation on the Cartoon Laws of Physics. One of the flaws in the Cartoon Laws of Physics is … nothing has been said about chemistry. And so I’ve updated my old presentation with a proposal (possibly for the first time) that the famed Cartoon Laws of Physics should be supplemented by the Cartoon Laws of Chemistry.
Some of the Cartoons Laws of Science have been confirmed in real life, at least partially. One such case occurred during World War II, in the interaction between the British heavy cruiser HMS Sussex and a kamikaze pilot. The kamikaze lost.
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SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE IT WAS CALLED SCIENCE FICTION—We look at works of proto-SF. Tales of travel to other worlds, of alien beings and robots, and of interplanetary war date back decades and centuries prior to the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, often cited as the first true science fiction story. Well before the term “science fiction” was coined, works such as Johanne Kepler’s Somnium and Lucian of Samosata’s satire True History included elements of what, today, we define as SF! We’ll examine these and other works of science fiction before it was called science fiction.
