The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

Dave Lebling · 02 Jul 2010, 18:09 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dlebling at hyraxes.com (Dave Lebling)
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2010 14:09:41 -0400
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <94D6B826-B3FE-47A0-9CBE-6C58CC5747FB at liftingfaces.com>
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Message-ID: <AANLkTilJqhvgt2IaPfDDRV6ZPXucYgOmOyt-Iq46DPpx at mail.gmail.com>

He's told us some of his main sources for obscure words, such as "Mrs.
Byrne's Dictionary" and books on the Byzantine and Roman Empires. I don't
think he needed to spend much time with a microfiche reader, if any.

I also think you overestimate the availability of NASA Apollo prints. Some
were only released in the last few years, for example.

But at least we are in violent agreement...

-- Dave

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com> wrote:

>
> On Jul 2, 2010, at 1:22 PM, Dave Lebling wrote:
>
> > I'm really fairly amazed at the level of nit-pickery over this question.
> Let us cast our minds back to the thrilling days of yesteryear (the late
> 70s), when Wolfe wrote SotT. There was no internet on which you could look
> up all the thousands of then-unreleased Apollo program pictures, there were
> a few places you could find pictures in hardcopy (Life -- already moribund,
> National Geographic, a few coffee table books, etc.). As an SF fan, I'm sure
> he had resources such as the F&SF cover -- or not, he may not be a pack rat.
> >
> > It seems quite obvious that the description he wrote is based on his
> memories of various photos and paintings he had actually seen, but he very
> likely wasn't staring at an actual photo when he wrote the words. Even if he
> was, who's to say he might not have taken auctorial liberties with what he
> saw?
> >
> > I know that after many re-readings of SotT, my minds-eye image of the
> "canonical" Apollo photograph is now the (non-existent) one Wolfe described.
> >
> > -- David Lebling, aka vizcacha
>
>
> David,
>
> Wolfe also built an entire SF series with hundreds of extinct words which
> he found through diligent research. I wouldn't put hours spent at the
> microfiche table past him, and those NASA photos would have been released
> I'm almost certain. Hell, most of the images currently found on Google are
> from prints from the 60's and 70's, some of them autographed.
>
> However, I'm of the same mind as you, that he cobbled together the perfect
> composition from a few iconic images. I think the image in my head in that
> pinakotheken, is a wide shot of an astronaut standing on Earth's surface
> with a flag in his hand and an Earth rising over his shoulder. You can't see
> a staff in his hand without it being wide enough, etc.
>
> ...ryan
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