Hal Duncan’s “The Whenever At The City’s Heart

Tangent, an online magazine that reviews short fiction has a review of Hal Duncan’s “The Whenever At The City’s Heart which appears to an awesome story and well placed in the Fantasy side of the Clockpunk genre. Here is the review from Tangent which should give people a good idea about the story.

The first story in the 25th anniversary issue of Interzone, Hal Duncan’s “The Whenever At The City’s Heart,” is a striking mix of “clockpunk” and fantasy, a sense of grand Baroque whimsy coming through in both the telling and the details. The kaleidoscopic structure of the story centers on the great clock tower, the titular “whenever” in the heart of his imagined, nameless city. All glittering glass and brass and mirrored cogs and grinding gears, the tower contains inside it a microcosm that keeps the streets around it following “their paths through time” in an apparently clockwork universe.

As the story begins, however, the watchtower’s bell is inexplicably out of synch, and the world around it grows chaotic, the city “adrift upon its rock, a myriad of singularities spiraling around it.” The narrative switches back and forth between those spiraling singularities, fanciful and surreal, and the tower’s watchman as he struggles desperately to get the universe back in order, but alas, order may be just something “tossed out by chaos as a glib aside.”

Duncan’s imagery is razor-sharp, and his prose playful and poetic, all but making verse out of the vocabulary of today’s physicists. Additionally, while it may initially seem impenetrable, the story holds together better than much of the High Modernist poetry it reminded me of stylistically (and happily, its tone is far removed from their overwrought aristocratic gloom). “Whenever”‘s complexity and sensibility will certainly not be to every taste, but even if you’re initially skeptical, you may find it growing on you with rereading, and even if you come away feeling the whole is less than the sum of its parts, there is much to enjoy in its richly imagined fragments: the sandminer listening to a blind boy’s song; the battle-scarred veteran soldier losing himself with a dreamwhore for a little while; the ruling angels and human rebels battling in the streets.

Hand Crafted Woodencrafts

I came across this website not so long ago. They seem to be based in New Zealand and the woodencrafts that they have are not exactly automata since they require a person to move them but they are still pretty cool. If one were writing a Clockpunk story then one could use them as precursors to true automata. Check out their website at the following URL: http://www.allwaze.com/woodcraft-animated.htm

Memory Cathedral Revisisted

A few years ago Infinity Plus did an interview with Jack Dann who is the author of the Clockpunk novel Memory Cathedral. In the interview Jack goes into details about the background about Memory Cathedral and why the novel is not strictly alternative history but can even be thought of as secret history.

So is this alternate history? I think I am probably picking the nits here, but I would think it is secret history, the history that could have been, but we don’t — or can’t know — if it had been. I excerpted a story from The Memory Cathedral, which I reworked and [to which I] added 5,000 words of new material. It was titled “Da Vinci Rising,” and Gardner Dozois bought it for Asimov’s Science Fiction. In that story I have Leonardo’s flying machine affecting Florentine history, changing history. To my mind “Da Vinci Rising” would be alternative history. Something different from the secret history of The Memory Cathedral.

Check out the interview at the following URL:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intjd.htm

World’s Smallest Wooden Clock with Wooden Gears

 

Here is a picture of the world’s smallest wooden clock with gears. The height of the movement is only 2.2 cm! (Source: Paul Gerber’s website)

Mechanical Clockwork Screensaver

Found via Brass Goggles, here is a really cool  mechanical clock screensaver. It was free for a day which I seemed to have missed but even the shareware version, which has some limitations is pretty cool. Check it out here.

http://www.3planesoft.com/pages/clock.html

The Duck Automata of Vaucanson

One of the most famous automata builders of the 18th century was Jacques de Vaucanson about whom Voltaire said, ” “A rival to Prometheus, [Vaucanson] seemed to steal the heavenly fires in his search to give life.” Although he built a large number of automatas his most famous was the duck automata (pictured above). The automata could flap its wings, and even eat grain. A replica of the duck has been created at a Museum in Grenoble, France. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the cultural impact of the Duck automata.

The Digesting Duck of France was unveiled by its creator, Jacques de Vaucanson, as the first automaton able to metabolise food and digest it, expelling waste just as a mortal duck, in the spring of 1739. During The Enlightenment, a time of mechanisation of labour, the idea that human beings could be replaced by these enigmatic, never-tiring aberrations of nature created a cultural revolution. These mechanisations of eighteenth-century France probably inspired the illustrious duck of the master toy-maker, Jacques de Vaucanson, which won the heart and admiration of the whole of Europe.

Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck followed the principles of Descartes’s mechanistic universe, and bolstered the Enlightenment-era belief that animals were just meat machines, but automatons nonetheless. The ability to create life no longer was the domain of God and of living organisms, but was now captive in the hands of man’s genius. These ideas terrified and excited many people, but were one of the major ideological changes from a natural to a mechanistic world view.

Vaucanson quickly capitalised on the commercial success of his first android, modelled after a recent sculpture by Antoine Coysevox then in the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries, with the launch of a shepherd who played the tabor and pipe. The most acclaimed member of Vaucanson’s trinity of entertaining equipment, however, was the notorious eating, digesting, and defecating duck. Whereas the rustic flutist inhaled, exhaled, and dexterously moved his fingers over a musical instrument, this barnyard variant of Phil’s and Hero’s bejewelled birds eagerly swallowed kernels of grain to excrete them in the metamorphosed shape of pellets. Unfortunately, this amazing transformation proved fraudulent. The delicate droppings were not the natural result of simulated peristalsis, but of a secondary device triggering the sphincter where a masticated plop lay hidden.

Da Vinci @ Wired

The Wired ran a truly fascinating article on Da Vinci a few years ago. It shows that Da Vinci was indeed in a league of his own and sheds light on Da Vinci the roboticist! Here is the link and an excerpt below:

The historical record offers no mention of da Vinci having built a cart. Pedretti, however, unearthed a potential clue. “I found a fantastic document, date 1600,” Pedretti says. “It’s a description of a banquet held in Paris to honor the new queen of France, who was a Medici. On that occasion, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger observed the presentation of a mechanical lion. It walked, opened its chest, and in place of a heart it had fleurs-de-lis.” Pedretti pauses, gathering more papers. “This document, which was totally unknown, says this was a concept similar to one that Leonardo carried out in Lyons on the occasion of Francis I.” It appears da Vinci had engaged in high tech diplomacy circa 1515.

The cart, suggests Pedretti, may have been an early study in an emerging da Vinci sideline. Leonardo, he believes, created animated spectacles centuries before the great age of the European automata of Jacques de Vaucansan and Wolfgang von Kempelen. “The irony of the whole thing is that there is not a single hint in Leonardo’s manuscripts of this greatest technological invention,” Pedretti says. “Imagine to have a lion walk and stand on its legs and open up its chest – this is top technology!” What happened to those pages of drawings that would have revealed the inner workings of these wondrous devices? Perhaps they lie misfiled in some lost archive; perhaps they were destroyed by some church authority in the manner of Albertus Magnus’ mechanical woman, smashed by Thomas Aquinas as a work of the devil.

Half a millennium on, the cart could, says Rosheim, not only rewrite the history of robotics but also bring another da Vinci to light: da Vinci the roboticist. “If it was simply a spring-powered cart, it would not be that big a deal,” he says. “What’s significant is that you can replace or change these cams and alter how it goes about its path – in other words, it’s programmable in an analog, mechanical sense. It’s the Disney animatronics of its day.” The individual parts, interestingly, are not original to da Vinci – gears, cams, and the verge-and-foliot mechanism were all familiar concepts, particularly to clockmaking, the nanotech of da Vinci’s day. Indeed, as the historian Otto Mayr has noted, “clocks and automata, in short, tended to be very much the same thing”; clocks, in 16th-century dictionaries, were considered just one type of automata. But the possibility is that da Vinci married two ideas and created, in essence, a clock on wheels – turning the segmenting of time into the traversing of space – well before anyone else had thought of such a thing. No one could have done it as elegantly, in so compact a package, says Rosheim. “The robot cart is one of the most significant missing links in studying Leonardo. Suddenly, many drawings are making sense.”

Clockwork Insects

The folks over at Cabinet of Wonders have an awesome post on Clockwork insects. It seems that the creator was inspired by the almost Clockwork precision of insects so he decided to combine Clockwork mechanisms with insects. Here is description by the creator of the clockwork insects regarding how the whole thing began (via Cabinet of Wonders via Technovelgy).

“One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two. After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been exploring and developing the theme ever since.”
(Source: Technovelgy.com)

The amazing thing is that you can actually buy these insects at the Insect Lab Studio if you have the money that is since most of the insects cost more than $500 at the site.

I Love Clockpunk

 

A friend of mine noticed this item, an “I Love Clockpunk” sweatshirt, on Amazon and forwarded the link to me. I had no idea who came up with the idea about the swearshirt but here it is. It seems to be related to the punk genre of music, other than that I do not have much info. Please let me know if someone knows more about it.

Here is the link to the item on Amazon.com.

Gun Powder Flask-Sundial Compass Watch

Found via Watchismo– a portable compass watch from the late 16th century. Here is the scoop from Watchismo.

Portable watches had only been around a few decades when this multi-function timepiece was built in southern Germany circa 1590.

Consisting of a round powder flask made of rosewood with inlaid and engraved rosette-shaped ornaments of brass and bone. A small clock with 1-12 hours twice situated on the outer ring. The small funnel of bone is closed with a springy lid made of brass. Below the center under the engraved lid with a transversally placed hinge, there is a horizontal sundial with indication of the hours from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening. A small compass with north-south indication but without correction for the magnetic pole. The string gnomon is stretched by opening the lid and is only valid for one latitude. On the side of the flask, there is an opening to a funnel-shaped small pipe which is placed in the socket and allows for filling up the powder flask. Diameter 10.8cm