Demystified

Welcome to part two of the two-parter... Last week we explored what happens when a gold rush gets out of hand. But most people forget there was another place famous for it’s gold rushes, one whose cultural history was just as shaped by outlaws and mining towns. This time, we go to the other great frontier, where it rains on the rock and there’s golden soil in a red centre. You’d better run, you’d better take cover.

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Welcome to the two-parter... We all love a good Western - Sergio Leone’s ‘no name’ trilogy propelled Clint Eastwood to new stardom, and Tarantino’s modern adaptations make great films. But what’s at the centre of any good Western? Old weathered prospectors panning the rivers and traversing deserts for it, desperados and gunslingers duelling over sacks of it, bank robbers carrying it off in big bars... you’d be surprised how far people really went to find it.

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Straight roads, bathhouses, sewers and plumbing, fresh-water readily available, underfloor heating, city-planning, and public works. If those all sound like the trappings of modernity, or at the very earliest the Roman Empire, you’d be right at first glance. But what if an apparently pacifist society had all these things thousands of years before Rome was a gleam in the eye of Romulus? And that all of this had disappeared, with no explanation, centuries before Augustus left his brick city one of marble?

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It’s no surprise that ships are the source of so many mysteries. As Eric Idle famously quipped: worse things happen at sea y’know! We sail off into the mists, with a song in our hearts and holds full of cargo, and our loved ones pray for our safe return. Well, sometimes you’ve got to be careful what you wish for, because you might not like the way it comes true...

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Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron - all directors whose visions of life from other worlds captivated us and inspired us to think bigger. Alien fiction goes all the way back to the turn of the 20th Century, where H.G. Wells horrified us with visions of tripods and heat-rays. Nowadays aliens are mostly consigned to theoretical science - they certainly exist, but likely as bacteria. But for a brief moment in a New Mexico desert at the start of the Cold War, they’d never been more real...

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Dogs are a man's best friend for good reason - loyal, brave, loving, empathetic. But many young children are scared of dogs, and it's stories like this, deep in the dark forests of enlightenment-era France, that show you exactly why. They’re serving man, in more ways than one...

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Death is a natural part of life. On a cosmic scale, it’s believed the universe will one day collapse in on itself, and be reborn in another big bang. On a smaller scale, we humans are born, live our lives, and then die. It’s a cycle so old and ubiquitous that many cultures have even enshrined it as a part of their mythology. So what happens when that cycle is reversed - when the dead come back to life?

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Ah, the court of a king. Nobles in all their finery, servants waiting on hand and foot; grand castles and splendid balls. But behind that facade of civility lies a dark underbelly of backstabbing and politics - so dark in fact that some would even turn to what they would consider sacrilege to get ahead. En amour comme à la guerre, tous les coups sont permis...

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There are many occurrences in history that may make you take a second look. Some things are worth a double take, they seem so strange that it makes it almost impossible to believe. Sometimes you've just got to put on your red shoes and dance the blues - but what about when a whole city of people spontaneously decides to do just that, for no discernible reason, to the extent that it’s considered a plague?

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The winds whip down from the north, biting at the edge of the small cabin. An emaciated man sits at a table, the lone candle flickering. In the darkness, his stomach starts to growl. And in his mind, a demon starts to take hold. Or so they say - to some, it’s madness; to others however, the hunger isn’t just a metaphorical monster, it’s a literal one. And what happens when that age-old monster comes face-to-face with the modern world? Some hungers can never be satisfied...

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