Category Archives: Reference Director!

Freakflag Guitar Technology: Way Huge’s Atreides Analog Weirding Module

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Written by RL Thornton of Freakflag

Believe it or not, the Way Huge Atreides Analog Weirding Module is an actual electric guitar pedal, thanks to innovative electronics wizard Jeorge Tripps and the Jim Dunlop Company. Guitar pedals sit on the floor between the guitar and the amplifier. They’re stomp-boxes: you hit the switch with your foot, and they shape the signal — boosting it, clipping it, delaying it, filtering it, or throwing it through controlled chaos. One pedal is “spice”; a chain of them is a recipe. Some pedals create fuzz, distortion, overdrive (distortion’s mild cousin), chorus, reverb, delay, phaser, and flanger. But the Weirding Module is much more. It’s part synthesizer, part artifact, part fever dream.  As Jim Dunlop Company put it:

Jim Dunlop: A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care—that the balances are correct.

Fear is the TONE killer! You are about to enter a world where the unexpected, the unknown, and the unbelievable meet. Take a spectacular journey through the wonders of space and the mysteries of time. From the boundaries of the incredible to the borders of the implausible.

The Sleeper has awakened! The Way Huge Atreides Analog Weirding Module offers a kaleidoscope of organic synth-like tones—this consciousness-awakening device produces a monophonic effect with many layers that can be manipulated as needed through dynamic playing technique and adjustment of each of its several sliders.

This unique guitar pedal began with Frank Herbert’s legendary 1965 novel Dune and the late director David Lynch, who decided to produce the first Dune movie in 1981 even though Wikipedia stated that he had “had not read the book, was not familiar with the story, or even been interested in science fiction.”

When Lynch was working on the movie, he knew that the Atreides used the mental technology of the female-oriented Bene Gesserit to give their warlike desert allies an edge against the evil Harkonnen and the Emperor’s Sardaukar killers. But how could Lynch bring the Gesserit technology to the screen? Lynch knew that the Bene Gesserit “witches” were expert manipulators of sound, so he came up with “weirding modules” that used sound as a weapon, and Lynch ended up with this approach:

As you can see, inspirations can be found anywhere, and electric guitar pedal designer Jeorge Tripps obviously saw more in Lynch’s “weirding module” than anyone thought.

Jeorge Tripps (from his conversation with JHS Pedals’ Josh Scott):  It really was inspired by the 1980 Electro Harmonix Mini Synthesizer Keyboard, which was used by Van Halen on the last tune on Fair Warning, “One Foot Out the Door.” It’s something that I’ve always been a fan of. I’ve always loved those things. They literally are made of plastic and cardboard — I’m not joking. They made them for one year, from 1980-1981. That’s what inspired it. I was just like, “Oh my God, this is so cool. I want my guitar to sound like that”.

You can make it sound different and do different things according to how you play. You can’t just hand the Atreides to somebody that just plays their stuff [without experimenting]. If you jump on it and automatically start playing Stevie Ray Vaughan, it’s going to sound like crap. Just utter garbage. But if you plug into it, and [play around] to find out what [the settings] do, you’re going to experiment and go, ‘Oh, wow.’

However, the best way to understand the Atreides guitar pedal is to hear it in action. Go and click on the pedal demos and have a blast. It’s one of those rare cases where a prop from SF cinema inspires a real piece of musical technology — a “weirding module” you can actually stomp on.

Atreides Guitar Pedal Demos

 

Space Opera and Progress

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Guest Post by Joseph Hurtgen:  For its grand narratives, space opera borrows from the horse opera or western. The horse opera relies on a 19th-century vision of American progress, relying on the mythos of finding vitality and riches as a result of westward expansion; space operas map similar assumptions onto galactic expansion. Indeed, space opera constitutes a comprehensive reworking of westerns and lost-race stories, even getting its name from the western horse opera.

Westerns, centering around progress, were easy for space operas to appropriate, and space opera transposes many superficial elements and overriding themes from the western genre. Bank robbers and data pirates alike challenge the establishment of governance over wild, untamed space. But lawmen enforce the dictum of progress, riding horseback or in spaceships across vast unsettled territories or galaxies in pursuit of outlaws: the vastness and lawlessness of the old West has its binary in the vastness of space. The challenge of seeing progress through is visually punctuated by those vast and empty vistas. Another challenge to progress comes in the form of the other, whether in the guise of native populations or aliens. These figures often read as a roadblock to progress and manifest destiny, standing in the way of “going boldly . . . ”

The background of manifest destiny is space opera’s most important link to the horse opera. America’s western frontier comprised a vast, uncivilized space for the young American nation to conquer and, in so doing, exercise its sovereignty, preparing the nation for its later status as a colonial, military, and economic superpower. Manifest destiny was a crucial part of the great American dream of progress. By conquering the lands west of the Mississippi, subduing the native populations there and bringing order to the wild, Americans would annex a country excelled in area by only Russia. Controlling the resources of 3.8 million square miles would secure the United States’ position as a major player in global politics and trade. In effect, westward expansion meant progress. Horse operas operate under the mythos of taming the wild west to fulfill the dictum of progress. Given that westerns trade in nostalgia, the actions of heroes in westerns are always interpreted as moving the country ever toward its glorious future.

The first space operas were overlaid with the theme of progress, the western’s thematic raison d’etre. That borrowed sense of progress took on the same assumptions about race and nationality as Western narratives. That is, indigenous tribes, aliens, or really just anyone non-white and non-American or non-European, depending on the derivation of the tale, stand in as figures to dominate as a way of achieving the dream of progress.

The ideal of progress was rationalized as a guiding principle of Western political philosophy beginning in the 19th century. W.G.F Hegel’s concept of spirit held that history, read as human history, was on a trajectory toward the creation of a perfect society. But, problematically for non-Europeans, the perfect society was perceived as Western. Thus, Hegel’s vision of progress was used to justify Western imperialism, with all of its barbaric practices. Space opera, a subgenre that plays with ideas of galactic empires with worlds to conquer, reflects the aims and impetus of empire as progress. It’s not hard to see that the most popular space operas–Star Wars and its ilk–focus on the grand themes of history, the rise and fall of galactic empires.

Alastair Reynolds, a popular space operator, connects his fictional worlds to the Western project of political philosophy to achieve human progress through governmental intervention. In The Prefect,Reynolds describes the citizens of the Glitter Band as incapable of being trusted with “absolute freedom” (Reynolds 2007: 90), a time tested justification for increasing governmental power over citizens. Reynolds all but spells out the social contract theory of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Too much power had been devolved to the habitats. For their own safety, central government needed to be reasserted” (Reynolds 2007: 90). And again, engaging with social contract theory, Reynolds considers what would occur if people were, sans government, “abandoned to their own worst natures” (Reynolds 2007: 90). Reynolds uses the language and argumentation of the Western ideal of progress through government intervention, removing autonomy from the individual to ensure a safe, ordered society.

Progress as a theme has a double side. What counts as a challenge to the Metropole is progress for the colonized other. The nascence of the space opera, a post-world-war 20th century, came at a time when the practice of colonization was in fierce review. Populations that had at one time existed in innocence to the technologies and practices of civilized nations were now in possession of the products and techniques that had once set them apart from colonizing powers. This plays out in space opera with aliens and hybrid figures commandeering the flagships of the empire to defend their pocket of the universe or strike out in search of their own worlds to conquer.

Progress for one group is almost always destruction for the other, even when space is unlimited. Perhaps over the millennia, evolutionary pressures have hardcoded humans with a desire to hoard resources while denying others what they need. The progression of others reads as a threat to our own survival. Consider, to that end, the shadows cast by the sun-eclipsing flying saucers of Independence Day. Yes, the cost of progress is almost always that somebody else has to go down in a blaze of laser glory. And the great conflict of the narrative of progress is that, all too often, the figure standing in for our cultural hero is in someone else’s crosshairs.

Joseph Hurtgen is a Ph.D. in English Literature, specializing in Science Fiction. He writes mind-expanding science fiction and analyzes sci-fi on his blog, Rapid Transmission.

I Love You, Tomorrow

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By John Hertz:  I don’t mean this one despite Otto Binder and even Virgil Finlay.

Last spring I put here something I called Et in Arcadia Ego, Latin for “And [even] in Arcadia, I am.”

In the study of classical Greek and Roman art that’s a famous tag, signifying “We human beings may find ourselves facing Death even in what seems a place of carefree pleasure.”  About what that in turn signifies, opinions differ.

I brought it, in my opinion-differing way, for a pointer to an element of S-F appearing where it might be a surprise if it hadn’t been elemental.

Here’s another.

A man I know oddly collects (I mean, I know him oddly, but thinking about it he collects oddly too) Elizabethan courtly riddles, not in a Bet-you-can’t-guess-this way but as a kind of poetical pastime, whether actually documented in history or merely in that style.  Someone gave him this one.  I’ve been trying to trace it.

I never was, but always shall be.
No one has seen me, nor ever will.
Yet I have the confidence of all
Who live and breathe
On this terrestrial ball.

As you saw from my title above, it’s Tomorrow.

Pretty.

And, I realized, if I may adopt the phrase, one of us.

Some citizen of Electronicland showed me this link. Neither complete nor conclusive, but the best I’ve found.

The Most Audacious Parts Are Its Digressions

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by John Hertz: (luckily reprinted from Vanamonde 1313)

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation –
’Tis said (for I’ll not answer above ground
For any sage’s creed or calculation) –
A mode of proving that the Earth turned round
In a most natural whirl, called gravitation;
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

Man fell with apples, and with apples rose,
If this be true; for we must deem the mode
In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose
Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road,
A thing to counterbalance human woes.
For ever since immortal man hath glowed
With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon
Steam engines will conduct him to the Moon.

Byron, Don Juan Canto X, stanzas 1-2 (1823)
Steffan & Pratt eds. 1982, Wolfson & Manning rev. 2004, p. 375

I’m a philosopher; confound them all!
Bills, beasts, and men, and – no! not womankind!
With one good hearty curse I vent my gall,
And then my stoicism leaves nought behind
Which it can either pain or evil call,
And I can give my whole soul up to mind;
Though what is soul or mind, their birth or growth,
Is more than I know – the deuce take them both.

Canto VI, st. 22; p. 269

Byron (1788-1824) died with Canto XVII incomplete; he had said he meant to write fifty, or a hundred; the 14-stanza fragment of Canto XVII, all we have, was found and published in 1903 (W&M p. viii).

Shelley (1792-1822) praising what he’d seen said “Nothing like it has been written in English” (W&M p. ix); Keats (1795-1821) hated the swing between satire and sentiment (p. xx); Scott (1771-1832) said DJ “sounded every string of the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones” (Edinburgh Weekly Journal 19 May 1824, quot. E. Coleridge [grandson of S. Coleridge 1772-1834] ed., Wks. of Byron v. 6 p. xix, 1903).

Swinburne (1837-1909), “neither a disciple nor encomiast of Byron [said] ‘Life undulates and Death palpitates in the splendid verse….  This gift of life and variety is the supreme quality of Byron’s chief poem’” (E. Coleridge id.).

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) applauded “the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method….  like all free and easy things, only the skilled and mature really bring them off successfully,” (A Writer’s Diary pp. 3-4 (L. Woolf ed. 1954, quot. W&M p. xxiv).

“Like most major satire, Don Juan had its origin in indignation….   danger of the modern reader’s … failing to notice the passages which struck most contemporary readers as politically shocking….

“The most audacious parts of the poem are its digressions….  a poem unfinished and unfinishable….

“The skill of the rhyming contributes…. to jerk together the most incongruous concepts … cosmogony and mahogany…. oddest he / modesty….  violent enjambments….  No word … is too familiar or commonplace to be used….

“Several of his friends assure us that the style of Don Juan is an echo of Byron’s conversation….  Don Juan is almost as full of human beings as the Canterbury Tales [Chaucer, 1387],” I. Jack, English Literature 1815-1832 pp. 67-69 (1963).

Juan is Anglicized: J like jewel, two syllables rhyming with “new one”, “true one” (Canto I, st. 1; p. 46).  This is (natch) an independent version of the man in legend; here, though some adventures are affaires de coeur, he unlike e.g. Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) does not go “conquering” women, angels and ministers of grace defend us.

Speaking of Chesterton

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By John Hertz:  Walking round the Pasadena Chalk Festival (the 26th annual, goshwow) last month, I happened to see, besides lots of swell visual art, this line from Chesterton:

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?

I couldn’t place it, so I asked the American Chesterton Society, from whom I have just learned it appears in Maisie Ward’s Return to Chesterton at p. 161.

You probably know two novels of his we may say are in our field, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday. He wrote 80 books, 200 short stories, 4000 essays, several hundred poems, and plays.  He illustrated the first published collection of poetry by Edmund Bentley, who invented the clerihew – indeed Clerihew was Bentley’s middle name.

Chesterton was a man of colossal genius in more ways than one, standing 6 feet (2 m) tall and weighing 20 stone (280 lb, 130 kg).  During World War I, when a lady in London asked why he was not out at the Front, he replied, “If you go round to the side, Madam, you will see that I am.”

I mustn’t omit to recommend his Charles Dickens and Saint Thomas Aquinas – I don’t apologize, the author already has.

Return to Chesterton is a supplement to Maisie Ward’s biography of him. I recommend her too.

Montaigne again

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By John Hertz:  The other day I brought you something by Montaigne. Here’s another one (Essays, Bk. III ch. 13 “On experience”; Screech tr. 2003).

Truth itself is not privileged to be used all the time and in all circumstances: noble though its employment is….  you [could] release truth … not merely unprofitably but detrimentally….  No one will ever convince me that an upright rebuke may not be offered offensively nor that considerations of matter should not often give way to those of manner [p. 1223].

But wait, there’s more.

A king is not to be believed if he boasts of his steadfastness [against] the enemy if, for his profit and improvement, he cannot tolerate the freedom of [one] who loves him to use words which have no other power than to make his ears smart, any remaining effects of them being in his own hands.

Now there is no category of [persons] who has greater need of such true and frank counsels than kings do.  They sustain a life lived in public and have to remain acceptable to the opinions of a great many on-lookers: yet, since it is customary not to tell them anything which makes them change their ways, they discover that they have, quite unawares, begun to be hated and loathed by their subjects for reasons which they could often have avoided … if only they had been warned in time and corrected [p. 1224].

Various comments come to mind, but I omit them.  Even I do that sometimes.

For the Love of (Another) Mike

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By John Hertz:  I’m reading M.A. Screech’s second edition (2003) of Montaigne’s Essays.  Dr. Screech collates the different versions, translates the many quotations, and annotates.  That’s the literary present tense; he died June 1st (1926-2018).

Montaigne once said congenially “the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation,” and yes, his name Michel Eyquem de Montaigne points to the land from which, after his life, has come one of the greatest wines in the world, Château d’Yquem (and don’t miss it in Nabokov’s novel Pnin).

He was a skeptic (or, in Commonwealth language, a sceptic), but not in the unhappy sense so often brandished now; as Dr. Screech warns, “Today the very word scepticism implies for many a mocking or beady-eyed disbelief” (p. xxxvi).  He famously asked “What do I know?” and tried to answer.

Of course I expected to keep agreeing and disagreeing with this man, and I haven’t been disappointed.  I thought this passage (Bk. I ch. 56; M.A.S. ed’n 2003 at p. 360; paraphrasing Nicetas; in fact the chapter is “On prayer”) well put.

the factions of princes are armed with anger not with zeal … zeal itself does partake of the divine Reason and Justice when it behaves … moderately but … it changes into hatred and envy whenever it serves human passions, producing then not wheat and the fruit of the vine but tares and nettles.

Wishing you the same.

Ctein Plunges Ahead

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By John Hertz:  He has just the one name, pronounced “k’TINE”.  Not even “Mr. Ctein”. The United States grant no titles of nobility, nor knighthoods, so we need not speculate as to whether he might ever become Sir Ctein or Lord Ctein. Rules get exceptions, and I myself humbly acknowledge having now and then the favor of acquaintance with a baron, or even a duke, but in his case the possibility seems doubtful.

You may well know him.  He has long been part of our community, and has appeared here.

His widest renowned accomplishment may have been his mastering the subtle and difficult dye transfer photographic process.  It is unequalled in photochemistry.  He may have been the leader in the world.  Fortunately he as a photographer is also a superb technician.  He has exhibited at the World Science Fiction Convention.  Unfortunately the maker of essential dye-transfer ingredients ceased production.  Fortunately he was able to stockpile a supply.

In 2015 he and John Sandford published a science fiction novel, Saturn Run.  It was his first fiction and his co-author’s first science fiction.  This adventure too was extraordinary.  You can see my interview with Ctein here (PDF file, starts at p. 17).  I thought Saturn Run Hugo-worthy.  Ctein said “Naah.”  Anyway in 2017 its paperback followed.

Thereafter he began a collaboration with David Gerrold, who told us in February some of it would appear soon.  It has; “Bubble and Squeak” in the May-June Asimov’s.

It is not a comedy, despite the title and many puns – one, seeded at the start, comes to fruit so much later it may deserve comparing with Walt Kelly’s architecture of “Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia”; another is so exquisite I may be forced to excuse reliance on a sadly unscholarly mispronunciation; another unfortunately prevents me from telling you it’s Sloane, solid Sloane.

The thrust of the story is a near-desperate adventure.  It’s hard.  It conforms (if I may use the word in connection with these authors) with Theodore Sturgeon’s “Science fiction is knowledge fiction” – another great pun, consider the Latin.  It has compassion and even a case of conscience.

It will gratify some readers and trouble others.  I spent half an hour with a friend discussing the ending. But these are deep waters, Watson.

It isn’t news for David Gerrold to publish science fiction.  It’s still news for Ctein.