Sydney’s story VOODOO depicts an ape of indeterminate species but who nonetheless has a complex and interesting pedigree. While clearly not a gorilla he is, on the other hand , too large to be a chimpanzee as he can carry a human being. While of no known species his form seems familiar to us.Sydney attributes his design to the influence of many popular depictions of apes in popular literature that he saw when young. This ape of popular imagination( half-chimp half-gorilla) has his roots back in the mid-nineteenth century and his first progenitor might be said to be the French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. His sculpture of an ape carrying off a woman (1859) a rather sensationalist piece , became the inspiration for popular art and illustration for many years afterwards. Fremiet himself had a professional connection with the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where he was professor of anatomical drawing. That venerable institution had obtained the first Gorilla corpse to be seen in France. In 1859 Fremiet was given the task of reconstructing and animating it.

While the gait and pose of the creature were accurate his interpretation of the overall shape was not entirely correct( in the same way that early English paleantologists misinterpreted the Iguanadon). The head was not quite right and his gorilla had monstrous fangs . This reconstruction became the basis of his sculpture APE CARRYING OFF A WOMAN ,an absurd composition which owed as much to Poe’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE , a work which Fremiet knew well , as it did to the reconstructed gorilla skeleton. This sculpture  in turn became the model for many subsequent depictions , especially in popular illustration given its salacious tone .Edgar Rice Burroughs used this hybrid ape in TARZAN OF THE APES (1912) ,representing them as Tarzan’s own adopted tribe. By the time of his writing,of course, in the early twentieth century, the appearance of real apes and gorillas was well known and Borroughs named this hybrid the Mangani as if they were a real and distinct species.Thus from the fictional Mangani does The ape in VOODOO derive his origins . And true to the apes of popular fiction he carries off his own share of struggling women. Skipper Prossitt

Professor Stephen Hawking’s work on the nature of time and space has for myself and millions like me been both intriguing and bewildering.Being somewhat of a novice in the field of Quantum physics I took comfort from the fact that his awesome treatise was the outcome of an original ‘sense of wonder’ which informed his boyhood years, something he shared with most science fiction storytellers like myself. Embedded in the elegant, but, for us enigmatic equations is the playful reference to multi universes, doors to the past and the future and parallel realities where you and I live out our alternative lives! A cornucopia of inspiration and enough to father an endless flow of stories…
Stephen was dealt a cruel blow by the Universe when it passed a virtual death sentence on him at 21-but he has had his revenge. Living on for a further fifty five years, he has uncovered the innermost secrets of the Cosmos and exposed its true origins.
Now he joins that August company of those who seek the truth  – Sydney Jordan

“Such souls whose sudden visitation daze the world

Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind,

A voice that in the distance far away,

Wakens the slumbering ages”

Henry Taylor

 

A strangely shaped visitor, the first known object to enter the solar system from interstellar space was picked up and tracked by astronomers last October . The prosaically named 1l/2017 U1. was rapidly re- christened Oumuamua, a Hawaiian name in recognition of its discovery at the Haleakala observatory on that island. Although not visible , even through a powerful telescope, the sine curve of its light emission reveals it to be elongated and rotating on its long axis. Illario Vernelli, founder and administrator of the original Jeff Hawke website in Italy, has pointed out an uncanny resemblance between the discovery of Oumuamua and the opening sequence of the Hawke story OUT OF TOUCH, where an exploration party from Earth exploring the Saturn system, discovered a mysterious elongated object hiding in the ring system of the giant planet. It turns out to be an alien artifact, a craft of strange design and even stranger composition, as it’s made from anti-matter. Oumuamua itself, did not pass near to Saturn as it dipped into the Solar system ecliptic at a very steep 33degrees, entering inside the orbit of Mercury , dipping past that of the Earth and exiting again in the space between our world and Mars.

 

Its appearance also resonated strongly with the openIng sequence of Arthur C Clark’s RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and although there was initial speculation about the possibility of Oumuamua being an alien craft, with even such eminent voices as those of Steven Hawking commenting on this distant possibility, subsequent analysis has revealed it to be a rock, albeit an interesting one. The size of its hyperbolic orbit shows it to be a visitor, not from the Oort Cloud but from interstellar space and thus , originally from another star system .

The complete OUT OF TOUCH story can be found in JEFF HAWKE COSMOS vol5 no2 and BBC’s SKY AT NIGHT devoted its January 2018 programme to Oumuamua which us still available on Iplayer. Skipper Prossitt