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Rockets & Raytheon: Green Energy From Space?
Entitled “Space: The Crucial Frontier”, 1981 saw the release of a substantial report by the grandly named Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. The council, chaired by Jerry Pournelle had coalesced from an earlier group advising the incoming Reagan administration’s transition team. The 1981 report would be the council’s first major public publication. “PREAMBLESpace…
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Rockets & Raytheon: Tor, Baen and a Congressional Scandal
With Speakers of the House being in the news, today was an opportune moment to proceed with a long promised but undelivered installment of this ad-hoc series on rockets, right-wingers, strange ideas and fandom. When I was mapping out Debarkle in my head, I knew there would be a number of recurring characters. One character…
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Rockets & Raytheon: Jack Parsons
In the previous post in this increasingly irregular series, I looked at the thread of esoteric thought within science fiction and how it worked syncretically with the genre’s apparent philosophical materialism and pro-technological stance. The idea in these essays is that there is something in particular about rockets that joins multiple separate topics: These connections…
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Sub-genres and fascism
This was provoked by a minor discourse on Twitter which I won’t quote because the original take wasn’t some terrible thing, it was a reasonable idea — I just think it is incorrect. Essentially, somebody was speculating whether the relative popularity of fantasy over science-fiction reflected the current fascist trend in wider society. I think…
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Rockets & Raytheon: Fandom, Science and the Esoteric
In the previous chapter of this set of occasional essays, I looked at the fandom connections with rocketry both as a hobby and as a discipline. The first half of the twentieth century saw multiple connections between technical hobbies and genre fiction. For example, Hugo Gernsback built up his proto-science fiction fandom on the back…
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Rockets & Raytheon 2: Verein für Raumschiffahrt
The underlying theme of space and the military was not one that I set out to highlight in Debarkle. However, it runs through this story from the early chapters onwards. In Chapter 4, I discussed Sam Moskowitz’s 1954 history of fandom The Immortal Storm. In discussing international fandom, one of the groups Moskowitz highlighted was…