psmv5: The Hopkins Manuscript

A chance find in a book sale at St. Giles Cripplegate, in the course of an expedition to be noticed properly in due course. A nicely made paperback from Persephone Books, rather like what the French call broché. It looks, when viewed top or bottom, as if it is gathered and glued – so, if not sewn, at least not perfect, which I now know means that the pages are only held together by the glue pasted along the left hand fly. Glue which eventually dries out, whereupon the book falls apart.

Sherriff was a successful writer of novels, plays and film scripts and this (reference 1) is his venture in what we now call science fiction, something which, it seems, a lot of the authors of his day – say the middle half of the twentieth century – tried their hand at. Probably best known now for his First World War memoir, Journey’s End.

This book runs to around 400 easy read pages, plus literary preface, plus astronomical afterword. I got on with it rather well, liking the author’s light touch. A little old fashioned maybe, almost a period piece in the way of an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel on television, but close enough to my own time to catch on.

The story being what happens to a chicken farmer in a small way in Hampshire, a gentleman farmer with a private income, when there is an astronomical catastrophe in the form of the moon crashing into the earth. He gets several months’ notice of the catastrophe, so a good part of the book is about how he and others handle that knowledge, kept secret from the population at large by the authorities for as long as they could manage. And then the catastrophe is not all that catastrophic, with the moon crashing into the Atlantic, which ends up as a rather desolate plateau. Lots of people get killed, but it is well short of what we would now call an extinction event.

Much talk from the chicken farming world. That is to say, chickens in a small way, bred as much for show as for consumption. The sort of thing still championed by the people at reference 4.

I found the afterword, by George Gamow, most interesting. A famous Soviet astrophysicist who was driven to defection, eventually to the US, in 1933. First, he talks of the friction of the tides on the beds of the oceans slowing down the rotation of the earth, by an amount which amounts to 14 seconds a century and which seems rather lot when viewed in geological time. A figure which is very different from that given at reference 7. Furthermore, getting onto the length of the day, it was frustrating to have no idea how you count the 9,192,631,770 vibrations a second of reference 8. It is a lot of significant digits.

Second, he talks of the moon receding from the earth by around a third of an inch a month, say a metre every ten years. A figure which is rather different from that given at reference 9, but one which would result in the moon having left the earth about 5 billion years ago.

But at least the letter following the introduction snapped above (reference 10) suggests that it is all much too complicated for me. I shall just settle for these important astronomical variables changing over long periods of time, but not at a rate which is likely to bother me, or indeed the human race in general.

Another lucky find.

References

Reference 1: The Hopkins Manuscript – R C Sherriff – 1939.

Reference 2: Journey’s End – R C Sherriff – 1928.

Reference 3: https://persephonebooks.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.poultryclub.org/. A not very sophisticated website. Clearly more chicken than geek.

Reference 5: https://www.poultryclub.org/media/resources/files/PCGB_Show_Rules_effective_from_10_August_2021.pdf. The rules and regulations pertaining to poultry show.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gamow.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance.

Reference 10a: Lunar nodal tide and distance to the moon during the Precambrian - James C Walker, Kevin J Zahnle – 1986.