ancient disaster

is anyone watching "The Terror" (fictionalised version of the Franklin expedition, complete with added lovecraftian HORROR* i believe)

based on dan simmons' 2007 novel, which i haven't read

if so NO SPOILERS but is it any good? i was just rereading david c. woodman's two excellent books on how the inuit reported on this disaster (which completely changes the story) (and does include some weird shit, if not quite lovecraftian)

erebus and terror robbed in this poll btw

I just checked the novel out of the library last week after seeing it recommended on some Greatest Horror Novels list. Have not yet cracked it.

I don't know why they needed to add any HORROR, when the story already has a horrific blend of peak BE officer classes, cannibalism, pneumonia, scurvy, lead poisoning, the unremitting sub-zero winds etc...

I fell off this series after a couple of eps, but I read other people saying it was good.

dan simmons is a horror writer so i guess it's what he always adds?

the two versions of the actual real story are
A: "everyone is stuck on two iced-in ships when they eventually leave to march south except they all die, some of them eating others"
B (via the inuits): "everyone leaves the iced-in ships and spends quite a complex two years living off the land but not marching anywhere much until SOMETHING HAPPENS (tho no one quite knows what) and the remainer split into three parties, one remanning the ships and sailing them away (but not very far away), one marching and dying, the third staying put and dying , some of them eating others. the ones who sailed the ships, land and march -- some possibly a tremendous distance in one of several possible directions but no one is quite sure where they end up, hundreds of miles east or hundreds of miles south, or indeed how it all ends for the last ones"

A is possibly not very dramatic
B is all gaps and guesses needs a ton of added speculation to work as a story, with the caveat that the speculation that works best for a story may be wildly untrue

both A and B have a grim and terrible ending, which we know from the outset (no one got home; no inuit have come forward to say "oh they lived out their days with my ancestors")

fair enough, but I do prefer movies where less happens these days and think you might be underrating the dramatic potential of A (directed by bela tar and with barely a paragraph of dialogue for the first 3 eps!), and the point I jumped off this was when the daft oversized polar bear turns up.

yes it's weird in the inuit testimony books bears are NEVER mentioned even though i assume they are a fairly routine menace for one and all

one inuit who encountered them was a young hunter called kai (apparently short for kayak!) who -- after spotting a couple of wandering white guys hundred of miles from where everyone said they all died -- was himself killed by what his fellow inuit called a "very ugly walrus" (which is my favourite line in the book = "strangers among us" by david c.woodman)

a search reveals that walruses sometimes kill polar bears and humans. They are probably underrated as deadly predators in western fiction.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--LqJpmVwV--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/fuh8gmgmp6g0nujxjcj2.jpg

disasters 3-8 explained

FACT: The first sunglasses date back to the prehistoric Inuits who wore flattened walrus ivory specks, looking through narrow slits to block the haters/any and all bullsh*t to live their absolute best life pic.twitter.com/RNL4YgMtl7

— jeff (@dquyanna) May 31, 2019

Growing up my Gramma would tell me about white explorers who clawed out their eyes from the pain of going snow blind. The snow will bounce the UV directly into your eye sockets and even closing your eyes won't help.

— James Jimmy Jim (@KnikCage) May 31, 2019

yes i am reading the franklin books again

amundsen wore a version of these inuit sunscreen glasses (and also when relevant travelled by night when the sun would be behind them)
vs
scott ... did not

powered up youtube to watch a slew of mostly terrible "documentaries" about franklin via inuit testimony -- including a video of a talk by david c.woodman to accompany the franklin exhibition that greenwich maritime museum put on in 2018-19 which then toured to canada: woodman wrote the book that put inuit testimony upfront (two books in fact) and is a big cheery bear of a man whose life's dream (finding erebus and terror) worked out p well (erebus was found on the sea bed not far from where he thought it would be; terror was found sunk in terror bay and not -- as he thought -- in erebus bay) (erebus ba is also not where erebus was found and terror bay wasn't called that bcz the terror was sunk there)

woodman could not work his powerpoint slides and talked almost as much abt that as about the topic at hand (why was inuit testimony ignored for so long: ans = it wasn't really, it just too until the 21st century for the technology to back up what the inuit had always been saying) (which some people had believed and others had not)

anyway the exciting thing is that he believes the famous big corpse with very long teeth may yet be discovered on one of the wrecks (most likely terror) and that the vaults with the log books exist and will one day also be found

i also watched half of a very bad youtube on how the first searches were organised, with a terrible narrator and no hint that the iced up ships were remanned and sailed on from the place they first froze into the ice and have now been tracked down. the one good anecdote was that some prankster claimed a franklin message balloon had come to earth in their gloucester garden in 1851. franklin had no such balloons tho they were used in some of the searches for him, and they weren't -- as the youtube vid said -- "helium balloons", bcz helium wasn't theorised for another 15 years and only isolated in the 1890s

I know a song about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9H-Jt7_OJE