S.C. Gwynne: His Majesty’s Airship interview by David Wilk

His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine — Sam Gwynne — Scribner — 9781982168278 — 320 pages — hardcover — $32.00 – May 2, 2023 — ebook versions available at lower cost

Sam Gwynne is the author of the outstanding Empire of the Summer Moon, a book I really loved. In this new work, he tells the story of a very different sort, documenting the British airship R101, but covering essentially the entire rise and fall of “lighter than air” powered flight. Like so many other airships, R101 crashed horribly in 1930 and killed almost its entire crew, including the leadership of the British airship industry, which at the time still hoped for an empire conquering means of travel. It was a massive case of a foolish, hubristic belief in something that could never succeed. It’s tempting to view this disaster as symptomatic of an empire in decline.

At least for a time, airships were a symbol of the future. R101 was, in fact, the largest aircraft ever to have flown and the product of what appeared to be advanced engineering. Somehow its supporters simply failed to recognize that these massive, hydrogen fueled, uncontrollable flying structures were bound to fail.

There is a captivating cast of characters at hand, including German inventors, well-to-do aristocrats to brilliantly flawed engineers, alcoholic flyers and even a Romanian princess and her doomed romance with the leader of the British airship program.

Gwynne is a masterful storyteller and is able to bring a previously obscure piece of twentieth century history to life for modern readers. It was a pleasure to speak with him about this book, his working methods as a writer of history, and a range of other topics as well. I’m looking forward to reading Sam’s next book, on any subject he cares to write about. He is that good a writer.

S.C. “Sam” Gwynne is the author of acclaimed books on American history: Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War, and The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football. He grew up in Connecticut, went to Princeton and Johns Hopkins, and now lives in Austin, Texas.

Sam has written for Texas Monthly and for Outside magazine. He was a Correspondent, Bureau Chief, National Correspondent and Senior Editor for Time Magazine and has also written for the New York Times, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, California Magazine, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, and other publications.

Author website. 

Buy the book from Bookshop.org

“Aviation history is nothing less than miraculous; it took a mere sixty-three years, after all, to get from the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong. Barely a century ago, however, our skies were filled with a bounty of gliders, biplanes, and flying boats; balloons, blimps, and zeppelins. With His Majesty’s Airship, the inimitable Mr. Gwynne explores in vivid detail how this dream bloomed, and how it, in time, fell tragically to earth. He has written both a remarkable history and an eye-opening revelation of technology’s recurrent phantasms.” — Craig Nelson, award-winning author of Pearl Harbor and Rocket Men

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David Wilk talks with Lyndee Prickitt about We Are Angry

Lyndee Prickitt’s powerful and engaging storytelling project, We Are Angry, fits readily into both the categories of interviews I am doing here – she’s both the author of the (book) project as well as the primary publishing impressario who put together an innovative form of digital storytelling. But the interview does need to go into just one category, so I have chosen to call it a Publishing Talks interview.  Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology about the future of publishing, books, and culture; Lyndee Prickett’s work is an important addition to that conversation.

We Are Angry is a fictional response to the very real and difficult issues of rape and abuse of women in modern India.

From the We Are Angry website:

“After the brutal December 16, 2012 gang-rape in New Delhi, many people in India and beyond felt a need to express their anger, fears and concerns about why this was happening. Women and men took to the streets to put a voice to their anger. Social media swelled with introspection and pontification. Anonymous mourners created real life and online commemorations. Movie stars satirized and campaigned. Artists painted street walls and canvasses. Actors staged plays in local parks and international cultural festivals. Screenwriters wrote movies. Singers sang.

The conversation across the nation changed. Women and their rights was not just a matter for earnest do-gooders and NGOs, but the topic du jour and the inspiration for a panoply of expression for weeks and months. And then the din quietened. People tired of talking about how women, at home and abroad, have been and should be treated.

We Are Angry is an effort to keep the conversation alive – fusing traditional fictional text storytelling with other media, bolstered by real news content and annotations, and showcasing a range of art and expression from a team of people who want to harness their anger and work creatively for change.”

Lyndee Prickitt is a multimedia writer and journalist. She created her company, Digital Fables, to tell stories using the web as a platform. After working with Reuters and the BBC for more than 15 years, she wrote and produced the award winning digital short-story, Weareangry.net. Though a native Texan, Prickitt lives in New Delhi with her Indian husband and their daughter.

We Are Angry was nominated for a Webby, won the Transmedia Story of the Year from Digital Book World, and was a runner up in the New Media Writing Prize. The Guardian newspaper called it “devastatingly powerful.”

There has been a great deal of discussion within the international ebook community about whether digital storytelling will migrate away from devices and out to the web. What Lyndee Prickitt has done with We Are Angry is a powerful example of how this can be done. When you land on the site, you are immediately offered two options, one to “read” and the other to “experience” the story. I suspect most readers choose first to experience the story.

I really like what she says on the We Are Angry site about this project:

“We are living in mixed media times and yet rarely do we find the media coalescing in a truly integrated and artistic way, a way that could take storytelling – especially issue-based storytelling – to another level, not replacing books or the linear text experience, but offering another construct.

We Are Angry is an attempt, a humble first attempt, at doing this: creating 360 degree digital fiction.”

Listen to this interview, then visit the website and experience the story for yourself. Let me know what you think about it.

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