The Tree of Science Fiction Weapons
Via io9, check out Susan Treister’s epic map of science fiction weaponry from the dawn of the genre till now. Ms. Treister aligned the weapons on a successive series of Qabalistic trees of life (nice scheme… no, her attributions don’t look correct, but nice try!) A stunning piece of work!
In A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security Treister has drawn up a history documenting innovations of imaginary and fantastic military technology. These include the ‘Raytron Apparatus’, a form of aerial surveillance, which was described in ‘Beyond the Stars’ by Ray Cummings in 1928, or the ‘Control Helmet’, from ‘Easy Money’ by Edward Hamilton in 1934. The timeline starts in 1726 with the ‘Knowledge Engine’ in Gulliver’s travels and carries on up to the present day. It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic to manifest themselves into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack of Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895. The format in which she organises this information is the schema of the connected circles of the tree of life or the Sephirot, from the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, a representation of linkages between the worlds above and the physical world below and which map stages of transformation between these realms.
(io9: The Epic History of Sci-Fi Weapons from 1726-2008)
