Jon HancockThe 1920s Channel: "Futuristic Vehicles in the 1920s"
YouTube
Meme-Free Zone and Other Lies by Marcus L. Rowland: "Forgotten Future - A Scheme for a Great National Monument"
Marcus L. Rowland has put the contents of the Forgotten Futures "CD-ROM" file on the Internet Archive:
https://ffutures.dreamwidth.org/2405753.html
Free to download, it remains a remarkable collection of stories, articles, illustrations and game material related to the scientific romances of Victorian and Edwardian fiction. A really great RPG, too.
#RPG #Games #ScientificRomance #ScienceFiction #Victorian #ForgottenFutures
Michael Surbrook's H.G. Wells sourcebook for the Hero System, "The Shape of Things to Come," is out now in PDF:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534645/the-shape-of-things-to-come-hero-6e
Hero Games Forum: Teaser pages from upcoming H.G. Wells sourcebook, "The Shape of Things to Come"
https://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/107564-the-shape-of-things-to-come/
Checking a half-remembered detail from Fred White's 1903 disaster tale "The Invisible Force," after @RogerBW kindly identified the source from my garbled recollection; of course, I've been sucked in immediately and am now re-reading the whole thing. I am reminded of the risk-oblivious approach to the unexpected taken by most adventuring parties:
“All right,” Lord Barcombe agreed, “I hope the clubs are safe. Is it wise to strike a match with all this gas reeking in the air?”
“Anything’s better than the gas,” Sir George said tersely.
(As it happens, it's because of a roleplaying game that I first read this story: it's included in Marcus L. Rowland's "Forgotten Futures"—www.forgottenfutures.com—which has an entire sourcebook full of terrible things happening to London, all very jolly if you're from further north.)
Futurism: "Scientific Romances in the Atomic Age: How the Golden Age of Sci-Fi Film Rediscovered the Victorian Era"
https://vocal.media/futurism/scientific-romances-in-the-atomic-age
#ScientificRomance #ScienceFiction #Film #Movies #SciFi #Verne #Disney
Reading an article listing anthologies of 19th century scientific romances and playing my regular game of "Do I already have a copy of that? I'm sure I have that. I should just go and check."
"The Time Traveller is actually rather a hopeless anthropologist. He arrives in this future terrain, and misunderstands everything"
An interesting short interview with Professor Roger Luckhurst from 2016 about the classic early scientific romances of H.G. Wells:
A couple of classic lines from scientific romances popped up in the Thog's Golden Oldies section of the latest Ansible newsletter:
· Biothermics Dept, or Why Polar Bears Do Not Exist: ‘It was evidently cold-blooded or nearly so, for no warm-blooded animal could have withstood that more than glacial cold.’ (George Griffith, ‘Stories of Other Worlds’, 1900)
· Limits of Vision Dept: ‘“That,” he said impressively, “is the blackest black you or any other mortal ever looked upon ... so black that no mortal man will be able to look upon it – and see it!”’ (Jack London, ‘The Shadow and the Flash’, 1903)