Parsons in Popular Culture
Before his death, Jack Parsons appeared in science fiction writer Anthony Boucher's murder mystery Rocket to the Morgue (1942) under the guise of Hugo Chantrelle. In the same book, a fictional version of L. Ron Hubbard appears as a character named D. Vance Wimpole.
Parsons' relationship with Hubbard also appears in Feral House's Apocalypse Culture, Paradox's Big Book of Conspiracies, Alan Moore's Cobweb story in Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions, and in the Jon Atack nonfiction book A Piece of Blue Sky. He was one of the characters in Craig Baldwin's collage film Mock Up on Mu. A character named Zachary Carsons, based on Parsons, appears in the 2001 film The Profit. Parsons also was the main villain of the Atomic Robo short story "Rocket Science is a Two-Edged Sword," wherein Robo prevents Parsons from attaining godhood through a system of magick infused with science.
He is referenced in Philip K. Dick's novel Dr. Futurity, in which the protagonist is named Jim Parsons. He briefly appears in a 2002 issue of Alan Moore's comic book series Promethea entitled "The Wine Of Her Fornications" where he is one of the adepts in the "city of pyramids" in Moore's version of the Binah sphere of the Tree of Life and is watched over by John Dee. A play about Parsons, Babalon, by Paul Green, was performed in London in December 2005 by Travesty Theatre. There is an entry dedicated to Parsons in The QI Book of the Dead by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. A stage play about Parsons by George Morgan, Pasadena Babalon, premiered at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 2010. It was directed by film and TV actor Brian Brophy. Adam Howden portrays him on a 2012 episode of the Science Channel series, Dark Matters: Twisted But True.
Read more about this topic: John Whiteside Parsons
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, parsons, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I will have no Parsons around me but such as drink deep, ride to Hounds and caress the Wives and Daughters of their Parishioners. A Virtuous Parson does nothing to test or exercise the Faith of his Flock.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)