The Stars of Exupery

 There is a kind of law of the shortest distance to the image, 

a psychological law by which the event  to which one is subjected 

is visualized in a  symbol that represents its swiftest summing up.

                                        Wind Sand and Stars, A. de Saint-Exupéry

He fell out of the sky in 1935. 

Antoine de Saint Exupéry was born into a noble but impoverished family of Lyon, France in 1900. He became a pilot in the years between the world wars, transporting people, mail, and goods around North Africa and the Med, frequently flying over the Sahara. That desert, and its peoples, were so far from the modern hazards of life in Europe in the 1930's, that they captured his imagination and, along with his other adventures in far flung places, gave life to a series of books, rich with limpid prose, exquisite descriptions, and timeless reflections on life and love. 

It was in the Egyptian part of the Sahara that De Exupéry crashed, during a race from Paris to Saigon, in 1935. Of his many plane crashes, this one - and the 4 days that it took him and his copilot to be found - were the most influential on the rest of his life. Hope and fear, mechanics, mirages, and hallucinations, coffee and oranges, and a passing Bedouin got him out of the situation, and no doubt led to Saint Exupèry's career as a writer. 

The best loved and most widely distributed of his works is The Little Prince. It's one of those books that everyone should have read, and once read, you will probably decide to read it again. It's a short read, most people can get through the whole book in about an hour.

The planets

The timeless emotions and apparent simplicity of the story has enchanted children and adults alike for the best part of a century. The book has been translated into 571 different languages and dialects making it the second most translated book in the world after the Bible, which in a way is a little ironic '  Saint Exupèry, a Frenchman, struggled to learn to speak English fluently, and never came to grips with any other language, despite a wartime sojourn in New York and a long, globetrotting career. 

To celebrate the book, HG Safari's region Exupery was created, a region on OSGrid courtesy of Unadecal Masala, back in the Spring of 2022. I tasked Wizardoz Chrome to bring together a build that would convey the book in images and 3D installations, and she in turn involved Cherry Manga and Tina Bey in the design and creation of the installation. 

Cherry came up with a unique EEP so that the sky on Exupery is filled with hand drawn stars and more.

Everyone's favorite characters in the book are undoubtedly the Rose, with her endearing naiveté and vanity, and the Fox, a poem of a creature whose words are likely to bring a tear to your eye without ever descending into mawkishness.

The Fox

The region was inaugurated back in June 2022, with a HG Safari tour and a reading in English by Em Jannings (you can see photos of the event in the blog post 'The Gift') from The Little Prince. 

Inworld Review has had a studio on Exupery since 30 October 2022 - the first guest at the new venue was photographer and all round digital artist Nyx Breen here is the video of his interview who is always great value at any interview, with the added value of the always bubbly Veritas McMaster enthusiastically supporting in Youtube Live Chat - she is still much missed!

So, a talk show about flying around the hyperverse is filmed on a sim dedicated to a famous flyer.

You can visit Exupery any time, to see for yourself this lovely tribute to one of the world's most precious novels.

HG Address: hg.osgrid.org:80:Exupery