Available for a week on the BBC iplayer
And indefinitely on the World Service documentary archive
Sunday Times:
An emblem of what Marina Warner calls “orientalist fantasy”, flying carpets appear more in Hollywood films than the Arabian Nights. But Cathy FitzGerald, the presenter and producer of this enchanting half-hour, maintains a strong sense of magic as she quizzes a St Andrew’s physicist, a Japanese astronaut and a Pakistan-raised engineer [sic] who has chronicled their history. A lovely programme, also aired earlier in the day, that looks down at the prayer mat — and up to the stars.
Paul Donovan
The Secret History
I have uploaded the full text of my story, The Secret History of the Flying Carpet here.
Pulp fiction
I wrote in an earlier post that I grew up reading the classical Urdu epics. True, but not entirely. I don't want to give the impression that I grew up in a high-brow literary household. Far from it. I collected comics and I read adventure stories. I never cared for the long, turgid novels by Dickens or Dumas. Tried to read them, couldn't and probably never will. I loved the action-packed fantasy novels of John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I still collect and read. With Dickens, I felt like watching automata going about their clockwork lives. His work never breaks its bounds. Dumas is swash-buckling but boring. Burroughs, in my humble opinion is fantastic. From page 1 of Princess of Mars, I was hooked. In a PC world, Burroughs' text is full of racism, imperialism and the superiority of the fighting white man (Confederate) but you've got to give credit where it's due. He's good. My measure for good is Italo Calvino: in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino lists lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity as the things he values most in stories. Incidentally, he reckons that Dumas has all the ingredients. I reckon that Burroughs has them in spades. My hope is that one day, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (creators of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) will write a graphic novel based on the Princess of Mars. They show what they are capable of in the first chapter of the League, Vol 2 (the Phases of Deimos, to be precise!). If they do it, it'll be a monster.
The Magic Carpet Flight Manual
Coming up on the BBC World Service.
BBC WORLD SERVICE Friday 24 September 2010
BBC WORLD SERVICE Friday 24 September 2010
www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice
A tale of flying carpets, rockets and dreams, this programme examines why people still care about magic in an age of techno-wizardry... and how it feel when science threatens to make magical objects real.
Web-dreaming one day, writer Cathy FitzGerald stumbled on a site belonging to a museum in Iran. It purported to tell the "true history" of the flying carpet and detailed its many uses – military, as a means of aerial attack; commercial, as a vehicle for the transport of goods; and cultural, as a device to help readers in the library at Alexandria reach the high books. The article appeared across the web, rarely with any caveat or credit.
In search of a "real" flying carpet, Cathy tracks down the article's author, Azhar Abidi, who helps her separate carpet fiction from carpet fact. She goes on to meet a physicist working on levitation in the quantum world, and a Japanese astronaut who took a carpet ride in space.
Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves.
Presenter/Cathy FitzGerald
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