Classic Irish Sci-Fi Podcast, The Diamond Lens
- 6 minutes ago
- 2 min read
I'm sure some here are interested in Science Fiction and I'm excited to share a project I was involved with over the summer, as already mentioned here.
I first came across the stories in A Brilliant Void, an anthology of classic Irish Sci-Fi from Tramp Press edited by Jack Fennell, and teamed up with some very talented people in Skerriestheatregroup.ie to adapt them. The first one, The Diamond Lens, is a story that I found absolutely captivating, and I hope we’ve captured some of that in the adaptation. Written in 1858, it tells the story of a young man who becomes obsessed with the world he can see through his microscopes. This obsession leads him to some pretty dark places, but along the way he gets to see some remarkable things.
Sci-Fi is often used as a way of imagining the future: what could happen if this theory is true or this new technology develops etc. But older Sci-Fi can tell us something equally interesting – what seemed possible in the past. This story was written before the modern idea of the atom was firmly established and decades before anyone had even begun to speculate about electrons and protons etc.
Alongside that, some of the scientific detail included in the story is fascinating. Early on the narrator refers to his first microscope: a drop of water on the copper disc. It had never occurred to me that this could work in any meaningful way, but apparently it can. See here, (from around 7 mins)
And when the narrator finally develops his ultimate lens, cut from a diamond, he has to deal with the fact that the refractive power is such that the image is formed inside the lens. As I often struggle to explain to students, even a virtual image has a real location. In order to see it, he has to drill into the lens. I wondered was this detail even half-way plausible but chatting to Rory Geoghegan at the ISTA conference in June, he assured me it is. That image would presumably then be viewed through a second, eyepiece lens, I plan on trying to figure out the ray diagram for this when I get the chance.
But beyond the science, this project has given me a taste for melodrama. I love some modern fiction, with its restrained prose and pared-back story-telling – but there still has to be space for big stories where extraordinary things happen in extraordinary ways.
Also, I know there are some techies on here, and I found the technical aspect of this fascinating. The final version combines over 60 tracks, including the recordings of the actors, musical backing and sound effects, each one carefully manipulated to get the mix right. We had two great sound engineers working on this. A great example of how something can be creative as well as technical.
Full credits are there under each link.
I hope some of you enjoy it. We have two more episodes coming up over the next fortnight.
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