Marcus Rowland & Forgotten Futures

FORGOTTEN FUTURES NEWS For best results links from this frame should be opened as new windows. If you have a LiveJournal account see all updates automatically by friending ffutures_news

MARCUS ROWLAND is a London-based laboratory technician and author of FORGOTTEN FUTURES, the Scientific Romance Role Playing Game, a tabletop RPG based on Victorian and Edwardian science fiction and fantasy. The game is published as HTML and graphics files, distributed as shareware. A spinoff project is the FORGOTTEN FUTURES CD-ROM, a growing collection of Victorian and Edwardian articles, stories and illustrations (last update January 2005). A few of these articles are on this site, see the links below. The latest release for the game is FORGOTTEN FUTURES IX: IT'S MY OWN INVENTION, based tales of weird science and engineering by a variety of authors.

Marcus is also the author of DIANA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, its supplement ELVIS: THE LEGENDARY TOURS, and THE ORIGINAL FLATLAND ROLE PLAYING GAME

From January 10th 2005 the third FORGOTTEN FUTURES CHARITY CD-ROM is available. This contains Forgotten Futures IX and 18mb of extra material, a sampler for the full FF CD-ROM. So far the Charity CD-ROMs and other projects have raised more than £1460 for cancer research.

Marcus was the regular games columnist for Odyssey Magazine throughout its life, but the magazine has now ceased publication.

Marcus is single, and lives with 6000+ books, 1000+ games and supplements, and three pets, Sam Snake, Murphy and Cobb, corn snakes who have more sense than to get involved with role playing games or science fiction. A fourth, Cornelia, died earlier this year. He successfully lobbied for the creation of uk.rec.pets.misc, the first usenet newsgroup for pet owners in the UK. He has occasionally been known to dabble in fanfiction, which can be found on several sites.

He doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person. See his livejournal if you want a more regular update on his life.

Old Articles Etc.
A few examples of the material on the Forgotten Futures CD-ROM - to save web site space and minimise downloading time some illustrations have been reduced in size:

• NEW! Futures Dictates of Fashion by W. Cade Gall.
  An article on the history of fashion from the late 19th century to the 1970s... published in 1893 and not perhaps terribly serious.
• NEW! An Episode of Flatland by Charles Hinton.
  A different sort of two-dimensional world, the first time a complete uncut version has been put on line. Will be included on the FF CD-ROM release 6 and possibly the next Flatland RPG supplement.
• Thorne Smith's Fantasy Novels (all of them!)
  American readers should NOT follow this link since the stories are still in copyright in the USA. This will not be included on the FF CD-ROM.
• Pharos the Egyptian by Guy Boothby
  New for the FF CD-ROM release 5.0
• The River of Death by Fred M. White - Now complete! (818k)
• The Vickers Airship Catalogue - A catalogue produced circa 1923 with plans and illustrations (1.3 mb)
• Saved From Hydrophobia by E. H. Julian - An account of the disease and Pasteur's treatment. (343k)
• Perpetual Motion Seekers (anon) - describing several strange inventions. (1 mb)
• Snake Charming by Mark Lane - A visit to a snake-charming show. (526k)
• Zig-Zags At The Zoo by By Arthur Morrison and J.A. Shepherd - A humorous article on snakes at the London Zoo. (722k)
• Victorian Colour 3D Photography! (356k)
• Victorian Fax Machines! (506k)
• Nikola Tesla! (965k)
• Baron Munchausen! (2 mb including illustrations)
• A Transatlantic Tunnel (hurrah!) and Jules Verne (sort of)... (155k)
• New Kings on Old Thrones, an article on "true kings" of the Jacobite "monarchy" and other claimants to royalty. (152k)
• My Strange Pets and Other Memories of Country Life, a detailed account of a Victorian Scots farmer and menagerie-owner's life in the 19th and early 20th century. (550k)
• What The World May Come To, a serious article proving that the earth will eventually be pyramid-shaped! (121k)
• My School Days by Edith Nesbit; a memoir originally serialised in 1896-7, I'm not sure if it ever appeared elsewhere, which sheds some interesting light on her fiction. (279k)

Books in Microsoft Reader e-book format
I've been experimenting with this format. At the moment it seems too limited for the main Forgotten Futures documents, all of which include graphics larger than the maximum it allows, so I'm converting a few books that have few or no illustrations, are short enough for the conversion to work, and have aroused some interest in their HTML versions. There should be a few more of these e-books on the next release of the FF CD-ROM, but all material will also be present in HTML versions.

• The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (149k).
  Note: This is my first attempt at converting Forgotten Futures source material to this format; see Forgotten Futures III for an HTML version.
• Mr. Justice Raffles by E. W. Hornung (219k).
  A neglected novel featuring Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. Note that this book contains racial stereotyping which modern readers may find offensive. An HTML version is on the FF CD-ROM
• The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (198k).
  The classic nineteenth century hidden civilisation novel, in which an underground explorer discovers a buried Utopia. An HTML version is on the FF CD-ROM

See some favourite links

"We are all victims of this slime. They... ...fill our mailboxes with gibberish that would get them indicted if people had time to press charges" [Hunter S. Thompson predicts junk e-mail, 1985 (from Generation of Swine)]