Super warriors

I am busy at work revising Roll the Bones and doing 1000 other things today, but nevertheless I found these stories compelling enough to share with you. The first shows that megalomania is alive and well. From Scotsman.com:

TURKMENISTAN’S president, Sapamurat Niyazov, has ordered construction of a university to be named after his book Rukhnama, which is held as a sacred text in the ex-Soviet republic.

The university will be completed in 2010 in the capital, Ashgabat.

In Rukhnama, meaning “the book of the soul”, the autocratic leader dispenses moral guidance for citizens of the Central Asian nation.

It is mandatory reading for every Turkmen in schools and workplaces.

Convicts must take an oath involving the book upon their release from prison.

University to take name of leader’s book

The second also comes from the former USSR, and deals with half-man/half-ape super soldiers. Also from the Scotsman:

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors

I searched the New York Times archives and couldn’t find anything on this, so it may very well be bogus.

Too bad Stalin didn’t have more imagination–imagine what great soldiers human/tiger hybrids would be. There was a pretty cool minotaur in the Narnia movie, too, so I could see something like that working out pretty well. This was the kind of stuff that got Marlon Brando into trouble in The Island of Dr. Moreau, but I guess it’s a dream that dies hard.

Here’s some final words from Ed Wodd (spoken by Bela Lugosi) to mediate on, from Bride of the Monster:

“Home ? I have no home. Hunted ! Despised ! Living like an animal. The jungle is my home. Then I will show the world I can be its master. I will perfect my own race of people, a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world.”