From resurrecting a 2000 year old mummy to catalysing time travel, the power of lightning has been the magic ingredient in literature and Hollywood for decades, and no wonder. With unspeakable power, danger, dramatic CGI effects and the scope for tragedy, is there anything more dazzling or more fascinating?

 

Go back way before Steam Punk, back before Steven Spielberg, hundreds of years before HG Wells and you find that Renaissance scientists were pretty obsessed with the stuff as well, albeit for tech reasons rather than entertainment. Leonardo da Vinci certainly had his share of thoughts.

Green Sky

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Sarum Hydraulics was gripped with Kate Coe’s world in her new novel, Green Sky and Sparks. Here we have a meticulously described landscape where “power” is harvested from lightning in a stormy land heavy with dramatic, mountainous terrain. The comrades at Sarum Hydraulics think that they might book a short walking holiday there, although it could be a little rainy for a longer vacation and the green sky would certainly make it a holiday with a difference.

 

The castle in Meton has been built with quite an extravagant array of lightning conductors connected to a truly massive bank of capacitors down in the bowels of the rock ridge. But could this really work? Scientists will tell you that harvesting lightning is a toughie for various fundamental reasons. The technology in Coe’s Green Sky world is certainly thought provoking. Who knows where our technology might have gone if it went off in that direction in the five hundred years since the Rennaissance?

 

Might Lord Toru in Coe’s novels have been at the cutting edge of Ultra Capacitors and be planning to upgrade the castle array? Who knows, but he is a mighty inventive guy. We would have him as a tech entrepreneur here on earth.

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We are hoping that the Green Sky world develops some rugged hand hydraulics like our own products that will meet a big need in their lives. In the mean time, we are all looking forward to the next novel, Grey Stone and Steel.

 

Sarum Hydraulics loves electrical energy, although we will stick to a sky that’s blue when booking our holidays.

 

For more information on Green Sky and Sparks, head over to the author’s website

Green Sky Series