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.

The 'Linear City': Imagining Newcastle's Future in 1965

Histories of city planning can give fascinating insights into the built environment of different localities at particular moments in time. Even more tantalising are those plans and developments that never came to pass, the lost cities of the future that are buried in archives and planning departments. There is a science fictional element to these speculative architectural documents, some of which have been the focus of research projects. Recent examples include My Future York at the University of Leeds and Managing Change in Future Cities at Newcastle University.

A particularly striking idea, drawn from the second project, is the 'Linear City' of 1965 - a visual concept that appeared in the Northern Architect in July 1965. This was the subject of a recent news article, in which project leader Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones explained that 'the idea was to treat the region as a series of distinct areas - the city, the countryside, the seaside, the lakeside, the hill town - to reflect the different features and asset of the places but all within one region and all connected together by a new fast speedy transport system'. In the image below you can see a visual representation of the monorail system the designers envisaged, which could have been lifted straight off the page of a SF novel.

Linear City Image from Northern Architect (1965) 

Monorail passengers gaze down at the traffic far below and look out over the futuristic city skyline in the next image:

Linear City Image from Northern Architect (1965) 

These design ideas testify to the hopefulness of 1960s Newcastle and capture the spirit of a time that looked forward to improved living conditions and quality of life for the densely populated city. Alternative futures like this one, brought to light by the Future Cities project, also encourage thinking about alternatives in the context of contemporary urban development, meaning that the city of the future is constantly being renewed and reinvented for the present.

Thanks to Bethany Rex for the link and for drawing my attention to this topic.

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/

Blake's 7 Fanzines

A long time ago (2012) in a library far, far away, this blog delved into the SF history of the University of Leeds architecture, debunking rumours that buildings such as the Roger Stevens had been used as locations for classic dystopian films like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Another SF series sometimes associated with the Leeds campus is Blake's 7, although it was in fact Leeds Beckett University where part of the programme was filmed, featuring in the 'Children of Auron' episode from 1980.

Now, following on from last year's announcement about the University of Iowa Libraries' project to digitise 10,000 SF zines, Blake's 7 is back in our orbit with a recent post on the Hevelin Collection's tumblr revealing more about the fanzines and the fan wars connected to the British TV show. The Blake's 7 Wars were a series of disputes in the 1980s between fans and some of the creators and actors over for-profit US conventions, which, fans feared, would restrict and compete with fan-run events.

In keeping with this fanlore was the tone of the zines themselves. The inside cover of the first issue of The Forbidden Zone, seen here, testifies to the themes of resistance and struggle with which the character Blake was identified, reading: 'Forbidden Zone Issue One is dedicated to the liberation of fantasies and resistance to those who would suppress our dreams'. More details of the fan wars and the Hevelin collection can be found here.

Covers Without a Cause: SF Cover Illustrations

To complement the surreal selection of 70s SF album covers from earlier this month, I decided to post on SF book covers... with a twist. The titles I’ve chosen are ones where the subject depicted on the front of the book has little, if any, resemblance to the story of the novel. It’s a problem that’s plagued pulp fiction generally but particularly SF; the mass production of cheap books from the 1940s onwards demanded a high turnover of titles, with publishers’ in-house artists usually working to a brief following the established formula of spaceships and aliens. However, the passage of time has given some of these books a certain charm, or at least enough entertainment value to raise a smile.

The three covers featured here are a somewhat piecemeal selection, and the tip of the iceberg in terms of the SF genre but a good starting point that will perhaps spawn a sequel post. Here goes...

1. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H.P. Lovecraft. Highly influential in the SF, fantasy and horror genres, the stories of Lovecraft offer plenty of terrifying visual fodder, or so you might think. The cover design for this Mass Market Paperback edition (1985) of his collected short stories shows an odd, brown scaly creature (not, to my memory, resembling anything in the stories) sitting on top of an unconvincing pile of disembodied heads. Maybe the artist assumed the title was a typo, since the creature’s appearance is definitely more dragon than Dagon.

2. The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax. The first (and only?) novel by the writer and consultant paediatrician, Bax’s experience as a doctor informs this tale of post-apocalyptic societal collapse. The hospital ship of the title sails around picking up casualties of recent wars, a futile undertaking that does little to mitigate the impending global disaster. Clearly, it’s a gloomy theme, and one that could use some help exciting a reader’s attention. So it’s the old sex sells cliché that kicks in for the Pan Books edition (Picador imprint, 1977). Even allowing for the tenuous link to the practice of ‘love therapy’ in the novel, the cover (and the covergirl) are pretty wide of the mark. And if you bought the book for the cover alone, you were bound to be disappointed with the contents.

3. The Caltraps of Time by David I. Masson. The writer and former Curator of the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds) was the subject of a former post, in which you can read more about his life and this, his only published collection of short stories. Suffice to say, these tales of curious features of language and temporality are not well served by the book cover in this New English Library edition (1976). It is, of course, a classic case of ‘safe SF design’ (when in doubt, draw a spaceship). I’m sure it saved many a tortured conversation about how to visually represent time, phonology or linguistics but it doesn’t do justice to the original and inventive themes in the stories.

The Political Unconscious: Kadare's Palace of Dreams

I recently read a translation (from French) of The Palace of Dreams (Nëpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave) by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare with my book group at the University of Leeds Library. Whether it's SF is up for debate, but the events of the novel are certainly dystopian and understood to be informed by Kadare's experiences living under state totalitarianism in Albania during the 1970s and 1980s.

In it, we are presented with the central character of Mark-Alem, a member of the powerful but inauspicious Quprili family. This ancient Albanian dynasty have a long and fractious history within the Bulkan empire, sporadically falling out of favour with the ruling Sultans. Nevertheless, soon after the story begins Mark-Alem is selected to work in the prestigious Tabir Sarrail (The Palace of Dreams). Widely known as the state’s most secretive organisation, the workers select and interpret the dreams of the country’s citizens, which are gathered on horseback from all corners of the empire. Each week a Master Dream is selected and presented to the Sultan, as a means of anticipating plots to overthrow the authorities. 

Mark-Alem quickly and inexplicably rises through the ranks of the Palace but is often disorientated navigating his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Tabir Sarrail, and constantly baffled as to why he is distinguished from his peers. Part of the clue lies in a quote that featured on the front cover of my edition of the book:

And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure...

The Quprili family name means 'bridge', so the suggestion is that Mark-Alem sacrifices himself in order to ensure the family's continued influence. By having an agent in one of the state's most powerful institutions, the Quprilis can ward off potential conspiracies against them. There is also a nod to one of Kadare's earlier stories in this reference to the bridge, The Three-Arched Bridge (Ura Me Tri Harqe).

What I find so interesting about the story is the idea of the Palace of Dreams itself. In this system, the consciousness of the people is at the mercy of its government and the motif of the dream, which can often be associated positively with the capacity to imagine (utopian) alternatives, is presented in a scenario that allows for no alternatives, and actively precludes them. Lenin's quote from Pisarev on the importance of dreams, that 'if there some connection between dreams and life then all is well', is turned on its head here. As Mark-Alem's uncle, the Vizier, tells him towards the end of the novel:

Some people [...] think it's the world of anxieties and dreams - your world, in short - that governs this one. I myself think it's from this world that everything is governed. I think it's this world that selects what it wants from the abyss.

My reference to Fredric Jameson's study in the title captures the sense in which the so-called unconscious is deliberately put to work serving the political ends of a totalitarian regime. In Jameson, this relationship is figured differently; Ian Buchanan's commentary of Jameson's criticism and his uptake of utopia as a critical method offers an insightful summary:

Utopia is figured as the repressed; its conspicuous absence in most cultural texts is thus a symptom of a deep resistance. Of course the fact that texts are actually cast as symptomatic means this particular repressed is, thankfully, irrepressible, that is to say, insistently returning. The larger goal of Jameson’s criticism, then, is to diagnose the source of this censorship, and, in the same gesture, perform a kind of cultural “talking cure” by bringing into the open the repressed idea of Utopia as it exist in popular and other texts.

In The Palace of Dreams, then, the idea of utopia is repressed in the manipulation of the people's dreams. The novel's ending is ambiguous, is there a hope of return, of the resurgence of alternatives? Or is Mark-Alem irrevocably in thrall to the sinister dream-world, through which the state exercises its control?

Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard - University of Leeds Event

Date and Time: Saturday 3 May 2014, 10am-4.30pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds



This workshop-conference, 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time', which took place earlier in the month, was co-organised by myself and colleagues Dr Richard Brown and Chris Duffy (University of Leeds). Here, I'll try and give an overview of what was a thoroughly interesting day of research sharing and lively discussion. The theme - space and time - was deliberately broad to allow for the inclusion of papers exploring diverse aspects of Ballard's writing, including physical and psychological zones of transit, modern consumerism and post-cultural spaces. Being in the Gallery, Ballard's visual art influences were also a central focus of the conference. Papers covered topics including:

* Non-places of Modernity
* Collective Memory
* Space and Mediation
* Romanticism
* Modernism and the History of the Future
* Desire, Class and Consumer Millenarianism
* Invisible Literatures
* Inner Space and Geometries of the Imagination

The keynote speaker, Dr. Jeanette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University), started off the day with her paper, ‘Fascisms and the Politics of Nowhere in Kingdom Come’. After presenting Giorgio De Chirico’s little-known, interwar novel Hebdomeros (1929) as a narrative of 'nowhere' that resists all sense of orientation, she spoke about how in the novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard takes up, and re-conceives, the 'nowhere' motif as part of his surrealist analysis of contemporary history, politics and culture. Within the surrealist imagination, an imagination rendered artistically and politically out-of-place in an emerging Fascist Europe, 'nowhere' repeats as a resonant motif for interrogating narratives of geo-political displacement, homelessness and exile. Baxter argued that fascism returns in modified forms in Ballard’s contemporary 'nowhere', from the 'soft-totalitarianism' forged by the illusion of consumerist choice, to the neo-fascist communities that commit racially-motivated acts of violence against displaced, immigrant workers.

The morning sessions 'Zones of Transit' and  '(In)visible Literatures' followed. In the afternoon, the sessions were themed around 'Consuming Futures' and 'Post-cultural Spaces', which featured a paper from PhD candidate Catherine McKenna (King's College, London), who catalogued 565 items from the Ballard estate. These will be the subject of a new book by Chris Beckett (forthcoming, 2015). An evening panel discussion, 'Ballard’s Shanghai Orientation', introduced special guest Fay Ballard, who shared recollections of her father, and spoke a bit about related influences in her exhibition 'House Clearance' (2 May-27 June 2014), at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery.

My own paper, entitled 'Ballard's Invisible Literatures', was included in the morning session and discussed the collection of ephemera known as invisible literatures, compiled during Ballard's lifetime and kept in his coal-shed:- he would describe them, aptly, as 'the most potent compost for the imagination'. They included material such as market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, promotional copy, technical journals and scientific manuals. I explored the significance of these texts further and traced their influence, focusing on Ballard's time as prose editor at the journal Ambit and his own modification of Surrealist collage in The Atrocity Exhibition novel. I also raised the tentative question of if and to what extent it might be possible to reconstruct Ballard’s invisible library as an object of study.

Thanks again to the speakers, delegates and to everyone that helped to make the conference possible.

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

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.

Dreams of a Low Carbon Future - New Graphic Novel Project

Artwork by James Mckay

Scientists based in the Energy Building at the University of Leeds have won £25k funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering to produce a graphic novel entitled Dreams of a Low Carbon Future. The novel will be a collaboration between scientists, artists, and school children, and will examine the issues of climate change and how we adapt our society to achieve a low carbon sustainable future.

The project is currently seeking artists and designers from the University's UGs, PGs, academics and support staff who are interested in participating in this project.

5,000 copies of the graphic novel will be printed. It will be launched at Thought Bubble Comics Festival in Leeds (23-24 November 2013), and exhibitions of artwork will be held at the Cartoon Museum London and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery on campus in early 2014.

High profile contributors include the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy & Climate Change, Prof. David Mackay, Futurologist and author of You, Tomorrow, Dr Ian Pearson, and US environmental activist and author of Endgame, Derrick Jensen.

The project is managed by James Mckay, a professional comics artist working for 2000AD magazine and manager of the Doctoral Training Centre for Low Carbon Technologies.

Participants are invited to contribute:   

* Comic strip art   
* Single images e.g. sketches/paintings
* Text e.g. poems, stories that could be illustrated by other artists   
* Design – help design, format the book and promotional material (e.g. posters, flyers etc.)   
* Concepts – what do you think the future will look like?

Anyone with Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Futurist/comics/graphic novels interests, or with interests in the environment, technology or science in general will hopefully find this a fascinating, unusual project to be involved in.

ANY contribution, no matter how small, will be valuable. Please contact James at j.mckay@leeds.ac.uk for further information.

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.1 The Campus Architecture

It has been noted that parts of the University of Leeds – the buildings constructed in the 1960s and 70s by architects Chamberlin Powell and Bon, many of which are now listed – have a futuristic look and would indeed form a suitable setting for science fiction dramatisations. Outlandish claims have been made for the use of the campus in Star Wars and Logan’s Run, which don’t stand up to even cursory examination, though definitive information about locations is difficult to find at first glance. I have also seen Doctor Who mentioned, but can’t verify that either. Despite rumours that scenes from both A Clockwork Orange and, perhaps less excitingly, Blake’s Seven were filmed on campus, these have proved to be urban myths. A Clockwork Orange apparently used underpasses at the then newly-built Brunel University, Middlesex. While resisting the temptation to actually watch Blake’s Seven as part of my research (best left as dim childhood memories), the Internet reliably revealed that at least one episode featured the Brunswick Building, part of the Leeds Met – then Leeds Poly – campus on Merrion Way. Though the building was demolished in 2009, this image from the Leodis site captures its science fictional spirit.

Incidentally, that part of the City Centre, including the Merrion Centre itself, features more of the same combination of imposing architecture and pioneering underpasses which are somewhere between Soviet and science fiction in style. Much of this being now discredited, the underpasses are boarded-up and the whole area is seemingly being prepared for regeneration around the forthcoming Leeds Arena, which is effectively on the site of the Brunswick Building.

So the University of Leeds campus remains an unused set, at least for sci-fi purposes, having last featured in an episode of Raffles (the gentleman thief) in the heady days of the 1970s. However, another Yorkshire Television production, a 1979 adaptation of the M.R. James story Casting the Runes, used the University’s Brotherton Library. It had first been filmed under the title Night of the Demon, in 1957, when the corresponding – and original – scene took place in the British Library. My own images, taken recently around the landmark Roger Stevens Building (completed in 1970), and featuring the walkway which connects to the enigmatically named Red Route – allegedly the longest corridor in Europe, unless that is of course another urban myth – attempt to suggest locations for a script yet to be written. Taking these photographs, speculating about the films which weren’t filmed here after all, and ones which might still be, also enlivened the monotony of the daily walk to work.

Watch the trailer for the 1979 TV adaptation of M.R. James' Casting the Runes on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rPvmFnUCgk (featuring the Brotherton Library)

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!