The Transcultural Fantastic at Leeds

The Transcultural Fantastic seminar series – hosted at the University of Leeds in 2018-19 – aims to opens up the rich traditions of the Fantastic from a transcultural and interdisciplinary perspective, investigating utopian and dystopian thought in art, fiction and film, as well as science fiction, folktales and fantasy literature.

The series seeks to conceptualise and problematise the Transcultural Fantastic and discuss the following questions:

• What are the local and global contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What is the critical and political potential of the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What drives multi-media and artistic expressions of the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What is the role of translation and publishing in the creation and consumption of the Transcultural Fantastic? 

This inquiry into the transcultural is grounded in the local, highlighting the regional and the provincial as part of the wider transcultural imagination. Leeds and the University’s Special Collections strengths in the Fantastic are important in this space, as is the city’s own history of the Fantastic, being JRR Tolkien’s inspiration for Middle Earth and the site of the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1937. The series also explores the importance of ‘the North’ in recent publishing ventures such as the Northern Fiction Alliance, which has a strong focus on translation and the intercultural, as well as being firmly rooted in the local.

Questions around place and origin feed into the broader international dimensions of the Fantastic, informed by the research specialisms of the organisers. The Transcultural Fantastic depends on, and benefits from, a global and multilingual exchange of ideas, cultures, traditions and media. Events in the series are listed below.

Semester 1 – Local Contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic 

‘Fantastic Leeds’ – seminar exploring the history of the Fantastic in Leeds, coupled with an exploration of selected items from Special Collections.

‘The Old Gods Return’ - Professor Tom Shippey discusses Norse Mythology in contemporary novels.

‘Realms both Real and Unreal’ – Simon Armitage reads from and discusses his revised translation of the medieval epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Semester 2 – Global Contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic 

‘Beyond Tomorrow. German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Century’ – Ingo Cornils examines humanity and technological progress in German film and literature.

‘Works in Progress‘ – research presentations from the series organisers and other colleagues working on the Transcultural Fantastic.

‘Publishing and Translating the Transcultural Fantastic’ – workshop to explore publishing opportunities and potential anthologies.

‘From Cyberpunk to Biopunk: On Posthuman Technologies’ – Lars Schmeink traces the shift from cybernetic and prosthetic transhumanist fantasies of 1980s cyberpunk to critical posthumanist interventions in contemporary SF, or biopunk dystopias.

The series organisers are Ingo Cornils (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies), Sarah Dodd (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) and Liz Stainforth (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies).

The series is funded as part of the Sadler seminar series at Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book - Online Exhibition for 2017

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelmscott Press)

Continuing in the vein of my recent utopia post, next year will see the launch of a new digital exhibition for the University of Leeds Library's Special Collections - Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book.

The centrepiece of the exhibition comprises two significant copies of Thomas More's Utopia, held in Special Collections. The first is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben. The second is an 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image right).

The theme of utopia will be explored through its dialogue with More’s text, addressed directly by Morris in the foreword to the Kelmscott Press edition, and by drawing attention to the production methods and collection histories of both.

For example, the re-printing of Utopia by the Kelmscott Press reflects Morris’s interest in the book as a work of art and his belief in the transformative role of art and culture in social life. In the short essay, ‘The Ideal Book’, he wrote:

The picture-book is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to man's life, but it gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive.

Update: the exhibition was launched in 2018 and is now hosted on the Leeds University Library website.

A Dream of a Low Carbon Future: New Graphic Novel for 2016

View of York's streets in 2150

In 2013, I wrote a post about the graphic novel project 'Dreams of a Low Carbon Future', coordinated by James McKay, a comic artist and manager of the doctoral training centre for low carbon technologies at the University of Leeds. The launch of the novel was accompanied by an exhibition at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, featuring selected items from Leeds University Library's Science Fiction Collection in Special Collections. Following the success of the first novel, James is now working on a second novel, to be launched at the Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival on the 5-6 November 2016.

Rather than multiple visions, this second novel focuses on one dream of a low carbon future, viewed through the eyes of a young girl in the year 2150. The story unfolds in the form of a history lesson, which goes through the changes to the environment that have taken place in the last 100 or so years, particularly in the northern region of England. For example, the caption for one frame (see above) reads:

Lazing in the sun, the port of York straddles the estuary of the River Ouse where it opens out into the saltmarshes of the Bay of York. Once Caer Ebrauc to the Celts, Eboracum to the Romans, Eoforwik to the Saxons, Jorvik to the Vikings, and finally York, its days are numbered, with scientists predicting it will be fully under water within a century. Already, although a thriving port with floating leisure complexes, large numbers of residents have had to evacuate, to be replaced by Da Hai You Min (Sea King) settlers in kychys (floating communities), gaining a living in the ocean of reeds that line the bay.

The inevitable submersion of York under water (by 2250) is not portrayed negatively here. James's thinking is that our current challenge is to attempt to imagine environmental change positively, in contrast to the dystopian tropes that pervade disaster movies.

While coming up with solutions to the environmental problems humanity faces is no easy task, the novel explores such possibilities, drawing from the contributions of school children, students, sustainability researchers and professional artists. The emphasis is primarily on low-carbon technologies but also on changes to the way people live, and is less a plan or roadmap to the future than an imaginative response to future eventualities. Difficult as it is to think of ourselves living and being otherwise, the project shows how stories and SF narratives can help us to try. 

500th Anniversary of More's Utopia - Connected Communities Festival

I've written on the blog before about Utopia and the early printed and Kelsmcott Press editions of Thomas More's work in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections. The name Utopia refers to the island counter-world to which the characters of the story travel, and can be read as both the good place (eutopia) and no place (outopia). While More's island reflected the expanding geographical knowledge of sixteenth century Europe, during the eighteenth century the spatial utopia gradually gave way to a temporal model and utopian narratives became aligned with the idea of a better or alternative future.

Originally published in Latin in 1516, this year sees the 500th anniversary of Utopia, and a number of projects and special events to celebrate the occasion. Among these was the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Connected Communities Festival 2016; this year’s Festival theme was Community Futures and Utopia. I've been involved with the Festival as part of the project team for My Future York. Inspired by work with York Libraries and Archives and the York Past and Present Facebook group, the project explores the potential of utopian thinking for heritage in York and focuses on how these debates can be harnessed in important ways for local democracy. It encompasses a range of temporal perspectives; from thinking about housing plans that didn’t happen to inviting ideas for the future development of the city.

Utopia logo

More's island of utopia

The Festival was in partnership with The Somerset House Trust’s 'Utopia 2016: a year of Imagination and Possibility'. The designs for the 'Utopia 2016' season (see flag above) were created by Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge studio. They are inspired by Thomas More’s 22-letter Utopian alphabet, which appears in early editions of Utopia with the Latin translation underneath. You can download a copy of the Utopia alphabet here.

To read more about heritage utopias and the My Future York project, visit http://myfutureyork.org/futures-utopias/

In Focus: Science Fiction - University of Leeds Event

Date: Saturday 29 March 2014

Time: 11am - 12pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds

To coincide with a current display, 'Dreams of a Low Carbon Future' (10 February - 31 March 2014), this discussion will highlight works from the Science Fiction Collection, held in the University of Leeds Library's Special Collections.

There will be the opportunity to see early pulp magazines, illustrated volumes and rare editions of highly influential works of SF literature. Come along to learn more about these futures past and the history of the collections. A short presentation will be followed by questions and discussion.

For directions to the Gallery, please visit: http://library.leeds.ac.uk/art-gallery-visit

The Reader Speaks

In June last year (see my Digital Library post), I publicised the Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories covers by Frank R. Paul, available to view via the University of Leeds' Digital Library.

In that post, I mentioned that Paul's distinctive style became closely associated with these and other Hugo Gernsback publications. Now more than six months later I wanted to follow up with another Paul-related interest story by going beyond the covers of the magazines and into the obsessive, paranoid, and often downright strange territory of readers' letters. Most of these early pulps had a section devoted to readers' letters and the SF magazines were no different. 'The Reader Speaks' was a forum for fans to show their appreciation, or consternation, at the stories featured in each issue. But it was a letter from a Morris Miller of Brooklyn, NY, in an edition of Wonder Stories from January 1934 that drew my attention, primarily for its subject matter:- the artwork of Frank R. Paul. In his letter, Miller writes:

The attractive cover of the November issue depicts most remarkably the superb ability of its creator, Frank Paul, whose work, by the way is becoming less fantastic and more convincing, as well as within the bounds of reason. But I hate to have to see him draw an insensible picture like the one which appeared on the May 1933 cover. I hope the editors try their best to avoid such absurd means of arousing wonder in those not acquainted with our mag. I guess that is about all it can do. I also note the much improved lifelikeness in the faces of characters drawn by Mr Paul.

This is not the only topic covered in the letter, of course; there's a summary of the reader's favourite stories, a request for a science news section and speculation about the existence of canals on Mars:- 'perhaps they are not canals but some other super-structures which may account for everything...' However, the editors make it their first priority to address the comments relating to the cover artwork, responding with:

You seem to like our covers, like the majority of our readers, but there are a few who claim that they are too ‘gaudy’ or ‘loud’. We do not deny the fact, but we do say that it is necessary in order to have a newsstand sale. These covers are very attractive and draw the eye of passers-by, who may be persuaded to buy the magazine because of this fact, and thereby we acquire many new science-fiction fans who would not now be acquainted with the magazine if it weren’t for this. If we took a vote, we’d probably find that a large percentage of our readers were introduced to science-fiction by the cover of Wonder Stories.

Here, a debt is acknowledged to Paul's covers for drawing the eye and exciting interest in a potential 1930s SF reader. It's easy to imagine how these distinctive images would stand out on a crowded newsstand but perhaps this would be small comfort to a reader like Miller. The oddest thing is that a comparison of the 'attractive' November issue and the 'insensible' May issue reveal (to my eye) few discernible differences, although I could be missing something. For a man that can make sense out of canals on Mars, maybe a robot with tentacles is not too much of an imaginative stretch. But a flying man? That's evidently a bridge too far...

Insensible May issue

Attractive November issue

Soviet Dystopia: We

This year sees the ninetieth anniversary of the first publication in English of Evgenii Zamiatin’s seminal dystopian novel, We (Russian Mы/My). Pre-dating, and possibly influencing, the two major depictions of all-powerful state control in twentieth-century English literature, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is undoubtedly the least well-known of the three. In part this stems from its troubled publishing history; written in 1920-21, We was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, though its reputation in the west has continued to grow with the years.

First Edition, 1924

Various copies, including some from University of Leeds Library

With the Bolsheviks having only just secured power, Soviet authorities took a predictably dim view of Zamiatin’s prescient portrayal of totalitarian rule, set in the ‘OneState’ of the twenty-sixth century and narrated by citizen D-503. Its absolute ruler is the Benefactor; every aspect of life is timetabled, from work schedules to ‘Personal Hours’, and the buildings are constructed almost entirely of glass, to allow for constant state surveillance. Given the emphasis on the collective in the imagined OneState, and also its themes of conformity and psychological confinement, We can be read as a reflection of Zamiatin’s fears for the future after the Russian Revolution of 1917. This seems to have been the interpretation of the literary censors, who immediately banned it, the first book to suffer this fate in the Soviet Union; the novel was finally published in the USA, by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1924. In fact, Zamiatin (a naval engineer by profession) also took inspiration from a period spent working in the ship-yards of Tyneside, where he supervised the construction of ice-breakers. We reflects the contemporary trend toward the mechanisation of labour and ‘scientific management’, notably the time-and-motion studies of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, that the author first observed in the UK. Clarence Brown, translator of a later English edition, comments that:

“characters behave as nearly as possible as if they themselves were fail-safe pieces of hardware.”

After the banning of We, and with cultural life suffering from the same authoritarian clampdown as the rest of Soviet society, Zamiatin, possibly fearing the purges which were to come, wrote directly to Stalin, asking to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union and pursue his artistic freedom elsewhere. Remarkably, his plea succeeded, and in 1931, he left the country. Though his exile was to Paris, rather than Siberia like so many of his literary colleagues and peers, he barely wrote again and died, by all accounts disillusioned and impoverished, in 1937.

Mechanical Muses: The Legacy of Automata in SF

Since 2009 I've been jointly responsible for maintaining the Leeds Verse database, creating catalogue entries for poetry from 17th and 18th century manuscripts. I rarely find anything in the way of interesting SF-related stories but I recently came across a poem called On seeing the Microcosm, dated September 1774, an extract of which reads:

Here all Copernicus's pains,
The labour of great Newton's brains,
What puzzled ages - one short view
(Each knowledge of the mind) can shew.
Inigo Jones with envious eyes
Might see the finished orders rise;
Raphael, outdone, behold, with grief,
The painted figures spring to life.

The description of painted figures springing to life was intriguing. After a bit of research, I discovered that the Microcosm in question referred to an automaton, one of the clockwork machines that became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. From the Greek meaning 'to act of one's own will', automata enchanted the courts of Europe, with their lifelike movements and musical chimes. During the French Revolution, they were so much associated with the ruling classes that revolutionaries likened them to the wealthy elites, 'bodies without souls, covered in lace'.

However, automata were sometimes exhibited to wider audiences for publicity purposes, hence the poem's full title of On Seeing the Microcosm, Now Exhibiting in the Red Lion Assembly Room, which originally appeared in Swinney's Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle. This particular automaton was credited to the British goldsmith James Cox, who was best known for producing mechanical clocks.

Along with Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin, Cox was also the creator of the famous Silver Swan, now the star attraction of the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle. Mark Twain describes his own encounter with the swan in Innocents Abroad:

I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.

Of course, the automaton has been a continuing source of fascination for scientists and novelists alike. Inspiring characters from Isaac Asimov's Bicentennial Man to Douglas Adams' Marvin the Paranoid Android (for a more comprehensive list see this Wikipedia entry, 'List of fictional robots and androids'), it has become a classic trope of SF literature. Perhaps one of its most memorable incarnations is in the character of 'False Maria', the Maschinenmensch (German for 'machine-human') from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Also notable for being the first feature length film of the SF genre, Metropolis tells the tale of a divided city: a utopian idyll above ground but below the surface a dark pit, where workers run the heavy machinery that keeps the city functioning. The image of Lang's Maria, a female automaton created to cause unrest among the workers, is an enduring and haunting screen icon.

Those interested to know more about the history of automata (as I was) can watch this excellent documentary, Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams, presented by Simon Schaffer:

More's Utopia: Historically Bound

A tradition of utopian writing, in which an ideal state or ‘other worlds’ are portrayed in order to cast a light on contemporary society, runs through English and European literature. The idea of utopia can be traced back to around 380 BC and Plato’s Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system, and discusses the concept of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds. The word recurs in a modern context in Sir Thomas More’s 1516 work Utopia, where he too sets out a vision of an ideal society. The meaning of utopia - literally ‘no place’ - indicates that the perfect state may be an unattainable goal, and it is often depicted via satire and parody. There are two notable editions of More's Utopia in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections; the first is a 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image), the second is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben.

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelsmcott Press)

This second copy of Utopia forms part of the Howard de Walden Collection. The Roundhay Hall catalogue shows that by 1926, Lord Brotherton had purchased 117 volumes from the library of Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis VIII, Baron Howard de Walden (1880-1946) for his own collection, which he later bequeathed to the Library. While the works themselves were published between 1471 and 1889 (although most date from the 16th and 17th centuries), many of the collection were bound early in the 20th century with Rivière bindings. These sought to recreate binding styles that were contemporary with the period of the printed work, in-keeping with the fashion at the time. The firm of Rivière, active in London between 1840 and 1939, was famous for the quality of their workmanship, and their work was prized by collectors. However, although the subject requires further research, it has come to light that the techniques used were not always accurate so that in some cases the binding reveals more about the binders' knowledge of historic binding than about the binding styles themselves.

Perhaps, then, the ideal of the perfect binding, much like the ideal of the perfect society envisaged by More's Utopia, remains elusive and ultimately unrealisable. The mixing of memory and desire, quoted famously in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (see also the Memory-Technology-Utopia post on this blog), reflects that impulse to delve into the past in the hope of creating something perfect for the future, even if a sense of history becomes distorted the effort.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

The Bridges Between the Worlds

‘The Bridges between the Worlds’ by J.J. Grandville

Un Autre Monde, or Another World, is perhaps one of the most famous works by the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist J.J. Grandville. The ‘other’ world, created by the central characters of Dr. Krackq, Dr. Puff and Dr. Hahblle, is a satirical depiction of 19th century Parisian society, full of parody and political allusions.

Later acknowledged as an influence on the Surrealists, Grandville’s illustrations could also be regarded as early representations of science fiction:- visions of the future that drew from the contemporary interest in popular astronomy. ‘The Bridges between the Worlds’ (see above), also known as ‘The Bridge over the Stars’ and ‘The Footbridge between Worlds’, is one such example. A strange fusion of industrial innovation and intergalactic exploration, there’s something instantly appealing and memorable about this image, probably accounting for why it is one of the more commonly reproduced prints from Un Autre Monde. Fortunately, an entire copy of the book has been digitised and uploaded onto Flickr, which makes for easy viewing of Grandville’s beautiful illustrations.

A copy of Un Autre Monde is held in Special Collections, University of Leeds Library, and was featured in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011).

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.5 Professor Cyril Oakley

Professor C.L. Oakley (1907-1975)

David I. Masson was previously featured on this blog for his role in founding the University of Leeds SF collection by donating books from his personal library. The rest originated in the gift of Professor Cyril Leslie Oakley, who began in 1971 to present his own extensive collection of science fiction literature to the Brotherton Library's Special Collections.

Appointed Brotherton Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Leeds in 1953, Professor Oakley was a founding fellow of the College of Pathologists and at various times edited the Journal of Pathology and the Journal of Medical Microbiology. He was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of London in 1953, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957 and made a CBE in 1970. He died in 1975.

Sadly, there are few that now remember Professor Oakley but SF was just one of his many and varied interests. Former students and colleagues can recall a lecture on ‘Bug-eyed Monsters’ addressed to members of the Medical and other student societies. These were illustrated with slides of the magazine covers that later formed part of his gift, notably Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, which have recently been made available online. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to assume that Oakley's interest in SF was informed by his career as a scientist, and whether his lecture was delivered in a serious manner or just for fun (one would guess the latter), it is still indicative of the extent to which these realms were more closely aligned in the past than perhaps they are today. The time when SF stories were regarded as the speculative branch of science as opposed to complete fictions are therefore within living memory, and it's a period I'd like to explore further in this blog.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories now in Leeds University's Digital Library

Just a quick post to alert any interested parties to the fact that selected covers of the Hugo Gernsback-edited magazines Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories are now available to access via the University of Leeds' Digital Library (some images may require a University login). The covers viewable online are designed by Frank R. Paul, the artist most closely associated with Gernsback’s publications. Paul had studied to be an architect and, working in bright colours to offset the poor paper quality of low-cost printing, he became regarded as the most influential artist in the development of modern science fiction artwork. Here's a full list of issues with Paul's cover artwork in the Library's collection:

Amazing Stories

1927: April, May
1928: January-April, July-September, November
1929: January-March, June

Wonder Stories

1930: June, July, August

1931: April, June, August-December

1932: January-December

1933: January-June, August, October-December

1934: January, February, April-June, August, September, November, December

1935: January-October, December

1936: February, April

The completion of this project would not have been possible without the support of the Frank R. Paul estate, and is a step towards preserving these very fragile magazines.

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.3 David I. Masson

The University of Leeds Library's Science Fiction collection largely originated from two sources. The first was Professor Cyril Leslie Oakley, who began in 1971 to present his own extensive collection of science fiction literature to the Brotherton Library (he will be the subject of a future post). The second, a major source of the collection's printed books, was David I. Masson, Curator of the Brotherton Collection between 1955/56 and 1979. Prior to that he had worked at the University as an Assistant Librarian, and been the Curator of Special Collections at the University of Liverpool, which now holds Europe's largest catalogued collection of SF material. 

David I. Masson (1915-2007)

However, Masson was also a published science fiction writer. In his 23 years at Leeds he wrote some of his most well known short stories, including ‘A Two-Timer’, the tale of a seventeenth-century man’s revulsion at the twentieth-century world he finds himself in and ‘Traveller's Rest’, originally published in 1965 in New Worlds magazine. Set on an alternate Earth where time varies with latitude, the story can be read as an allegory for the futility of war, and was probably influenced by Masson's own experiences serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. These, along with five other stories, were collected in The Caltraps of Time, published in 1968. All reflect his deep personal interest in linguistics and literature; ‘A Two-Timer’ is told entirely in 17th century English, and another story, ‘Not So Certain’, is about a linguist's exploration of alien phonology.

Masson came from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. His father, Sir Irvine Masson, was a Professor of Chemistry at Durham and Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield, while his great-grandfather David M. Masson was Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh. A friend of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, he wrote and published a 6-volume biography of John Milton.

David Masson died in Leeds in 2007.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

A Vision of Future Leeds from 1900

Leeds Beatified is the intriguing title of a publication from the Yorkshire Collection in Special Collections (University of Leeds). I discovered the catalogue entry purely by chance after searching for books about H.G. Wells, since the subtitle reads, ‘with apologies to G.H. Wells [sic] for the use of his time machine’. The anonymous author of the book is named only as ‘a disciple’, which, along with the title, carries the suggestion of the writer being somehow connected with the Church. Alternatively, this could perhaps be a disciple of Wells, who was latterly very critical of the Catholic Church and whose general views on religion were ambivalent. The tone of what follows certainly aligns itself more with developments in science than religion, but the beatification of Leeds (initially misread by me as ‘beautified’) is nevertheless an interesting idea.

So what were the author’s hopes for Leeds, a year into the 20th Century? Since we’re also at the start of a new year, this struck me as an appropriate topic. However, in the Leeds of the story, our first-person narrator has the benefit of a time machine so (after crossing the familiar territory of Headingley Lane and Woodhouse Moore), he very quickly finds himself transported to the year 1930. As one might expect, developments in Leeds are not so extreme at first. Perhaps the most notable event is the inauguration of decimal coinage. Anxious to know more of the future, our narrator hurries on to 1951, arriving in Roundhay at the height of Midsummer. In search of information, he ventures to the offices of the Leeds Mercury (in fact, the real Leeds Mercury had merged with the Yorkshire Post by 1939) to find out what’s been happening in Leeds for the last half century. By this point, the arcades are lit with electricity, and the newspaper helpfully has its own reading room and a librarian to point out issues of interest. It’s from the paper we learn that, in 1912 Manchester and Liverpool had broken away from the Victoria University and left the Yorkshire College derelict. Subsequently the University of Yorkshire was opened. The founding of the University of Leeds actually took place in 1904 so the author’s projection that the counties (or cities) would be interested in forming their own Universities isn’t completely wide of the mark. However, some of the other predictions are less accurate, albeit amusing, and in a few cases possibly wishful thinking. These include:

• A book on Etherspheres (?) is published (by a man from Leeds), demonstrating that the ultimate atoms, must necessarily be 12-sided figures.

• All the back-to-back houses collapse after an earthquake in 1938, triggered by Mt. Vesuvius.

• Old factory chimneys are pulled down and air pollution laws passed sometime after 1902. Although ventilating towers are still needed, any designs require the approval of the Art Committee of the Council.

The most interesting events occur when our traveller reaches the year 1990, arriving in Sheffield to what is the most overtly science fictional scenario in the story. His discovery of the mysterious School of Musical Fragrance is followed by the revelation that the offices of the Yorkshire Post and the Leeds Mercury have been shut down. He finds out from the local ‘boots’ that from 1960 the circulation of newspapers gradually ceased throughout the country, to be replaced by telegraph machines, furnished in every house, on which all news is printed continuously day and night.

This early notion of a system which is very like the Internet is among the most exciting and plausible of the author’s predictions. But the mystery still remains as to who he or she is. The fact that all the events take place in and around Leeds would suggest a local resident. Indeed, just as the traveller begins to read of other historical world events, he realises he must return to 1900 and is ‘constrained to be content with Yorkshire’. So, taking full advantage of this slightly awkward narrative device, he returns home and leaves us guessing as to the state of the world beyond Leeds.

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.2 The World’s First Science Fiction Convention… in Leeds

An unassuming, quiet square between the University of Leeds campus and the city centre was the unlikely setting for the world’s first science fiction convention. Its origins lay in the formation in Leeds (in 1935) of the first chapter of the Science Fiction League outside the USA, and it was this group which later hosted what is widely regarded as the first ever SF convention. The event took place on 3 January 1937 at the Theosophical Hall, Leeds. Without the burden of the negative connotations which have come to surround the words ‘science fiction convention’, this appears to have been a low-key gathering (and exclusively male, which may have planted the seeds of future stereotypes). Around twenty fans attended, these well-dressed delegates including authors Eric Frank Russell and Arthur C. Clarke, local fan John Michael Rosenblum, as well as editors-in-waiting E.J. Carnell and Walter Gillings.

The convention programme is held within the Science Fiction Collection at the University of Liverpool, and photographs, believed to have been taken by another attendee, Harold Gottliffe (later Godfrey) were donated to the University of Leeds Library’s Special Collections. A group portrait is reproduced above, together with this recent image of Queen Square, which shows it to be relatively unchanged. A great deal of further information about the convention, and a comprehensive history of science fiction and its fans in the UK, can be found at Rob Hansen’s excellent site.

Whilst not strictly within the SF remit, it might be of interest to note here that the papers of Alfred Orage, founder of the Leeds branch of the Theosophical Society, as well as the influential Leeds Arts Club, are also held at the University of Leeds Library’s Special Collections. The Society is still based at the Theosophical Hall at 12 Queen Square, and continues to host a varied series of talks and events.

Brave New World…

A suitable opening, since this is entirely new territory for me. So first things first, welcome to the SF Forward blog, a forum for thoughts that find form through broadly science fictional themes.

The idea for the blog developed out of conversations with a friend and colleague of mine after we were involved in organising a science fiction exhibition at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (University of Leeds). Drawing from material in the Library’s Science Fiction collection, the ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011) exhibition explored the history of science fiction artwork, and when it finished we started thinking about ways to promote and provide access to the collection (more on this to follow). While not the largest or rarest in the country, the collection at Leeds is nevertheless an incredibly interesting resource. To give you a quick overview, it comprises over one thousand works, published from the nineteenth century onwards, representing the history and development of the SF genre.

I hope this blog will be a starting point for thinking about works in the collection but will ultimately develop beyond the collection too. So there you have it, my SF Foreword; roll on brave new worlds!