Lyceum & Book Club - Week 33 - Early View of Planets in Fictional Media
- Jun 24, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 24, 2022
Book Discussion:
Newton’s Tyranny
Listen to: section of album Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of “War of the Worlds” with narration by Richard Burton
“Forever Autumn” - Justin Hayward - 7:42 min
Read Articles:
Welles scares Nation - Oct. 30, 1938 - Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play is broadcast
Smithsonian - Infamous War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast was a Magnificent Fluke -
Slate - War of the Worlds Panic Myth
Watch Video:
The original ‘fake news’? ‘War of the Worlds’ at 80 - 3.36 min
Book to Read:
"The Martian Way" by Asimov - 1955 - 222 pgs - 2 weeks to read
From wiki:
The Martian Way is a science fiction novella by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the November 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), and Robot Dreams (1986). It was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (1973) after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.
There were originally no female characters in "The Martian Way", but Galaxy editor H. L. Gold insisted that one be included. Asimov complied by giving Richard Swenson a shrewish wife. It was not what Gold had in mind, but he accepted the story anyway.
When Asimov wrote "The Martian Way" in 1952, it was thought that the fragments making up Saturn's rings might be over a mile in diameter. It is now known that none of the ring fragments is more than a few meters in diameter.
The Martian Way was Asimov's response to the McCarthy Era and an early exploration of terraforming Mars. Asimov's distaste for the anti-Communist campaigns of McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee was expressed in his portrayal of John Hilder's anti-Waster campaign. Asimov wrote in his autobiography that he expected to be either lionized or condemned for his attack on McCarthyism, but the story actually generated no reaction at all. He said elsewhere, "I must have been too subtle—or too unimportant."
Asimov was particularly proud of the story's prediction of the euphoria to be experienced by astronauts on spacewalks which were then still 15 years in the future.
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