Nowhere Plains (2005 & 2008)

UNSA is an invention/extrapolation of my own, but I subsequently discovered that there really is a United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (forming the somewhat less mellifluous acronym UNOOSA). The office’s site is about as boring as you would expect a United Nations department’s internet presence to be. Of course there is also the European Space Agency, whose site is actually worth visiting if you like that kind of thing.

The British Experimental Rocket Group was an organisation headed by Professor Bernard Quatermass in Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass BBC TV serials from the 1950s. B.E.R.G.’s operations were only slightly lower budget and a little more disastrously cavalier than they would be if the UK really had a space exploration program in the Fifties: the first British astronaut mutated, absorbed his crewmates like a fungus and went insane; The Professor’s plans for moon bases were hijacked by malevolent extraterrestrial slimes intent on colonising Earth; an excavation of a crashed space ship at Hobbs Lane tube station unleashed a Martian—inspired bout of violent telekinesis, homicide and mass psychosis in nearby Londoners.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of the works referred to or quoted in the text of ’Nowhere Plains’. There’s a lot of creative DNA from Alan Moore, Orson Welles, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard in this project, but all of the following were influential in some way, directly or otherwise:

Films, radio and television:

Ambrose, David — Alternative 3 (1977)
Baker, Roy Ward — Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Burton, Tim — Mars Attacks! (1996)
Cartier, Rudolph — The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955), Quatermass and the Pit (1958)
Haskin, Byron — The War of the Worlds (1953)
Hyams, Peter — Capricorn One (1978)
Kubrick, Stanley — 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968)
Méliès, Georges — A Trip to the Moon (1914)
Menzies, William Cameron — Invaders From Mars (1953)
Welles, Orson — The War of the Worlds (1938)

Books and stories:

Arnold, Edwin L. — Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation AKA Gullivar of Mars* (1905)
Ashcroft, Frances — Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival (2000)
Ballard, J.G. — Myths of the Near Future (1982)
Bradbury, Ray — The Martian Chronicles AKA The Silver Locusts (1951)
Burroughs, Edgar Rice — The Barsoom/John Carter* novels (1917—1948)
Carey, John — The Faber Book of Utopias (1999)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner* (1798)
Conrad, Joseph — Heart of Darkness* (1899)
Defoe, Daniel — Robinson Crusoe* (1719)
Dick, Philip K. — Martian Timeslip (1964), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969)
Lewis, C.S. — Out of the Silent Planet (1948)
Lovecraft, H.P. — At the Mountains of Madness* (1939)
Lowell, Percival — Mars as the Abode of Life (1909)
Moore, Alan — Watchmen (1986)
More, Thomas — Utopia* (1551)
Morton, Oliver — Mapping Mars (2002)
Poe, Edgar Allan — The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall* (1835)
Polo, Marco — The Travels of Marco Polo* (1298)
Smith, Andrew — Moondust (2005)
Swift, Jonathan — Gulliver’s Travels* (1735)
Wells, H.G. — The War of the Worlds* (1898)
Biographies and autobiographies of astronauts and cosmonauts too numerous to mention.

You can also read my article on utopianism, genomics and the enlightenment at the art magazine MAP’s website.

* Indicates a link to the actual text, mostly at Project Gutenberg although they’re usually also available from many other places.