J.G. Ballard, Pop Art and the New Wave in Science Fiction

Although J.G. Ballard is not always associated with science fiction, he started his career writing short stories for the science fiction magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds. He later remarked that it was only through these short stories that he discovered what sort of writer he wanted to be. 

Shortly after the publication of his first story in 1956, Ballard visited an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery that left a lasting impression on him. Now recognised as a key moment in the emergence of Pop Art, ‘This is Tomorrow’ featured works produced by the Independent Group, which included the artists Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Alloway, Nigel Henderson and Alison and Peter Smithson.  The artists formed groups, each producing an installation that represented their vision of the future. The Smithson-Henderson-Paolozzi partnership used found objects to depict the remnants of civilization after a nuclear disaster, while Richard Hamilton’s collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, presented a world entirely constructed from popular advertising. Ballard was particularly inspired by these pieces, and the way they interpreted the modern cultural landscape. 

The exhibition reinforced his belief that artists were ahead of writers in acknowledging the significance of the media and accelerated developments in technology. Ballard explored similar themes in his own writing, which he explained as a desire to decode the myths of everyday experience. This experience was intimately bound up with a fascination for material culture, an aspect of Pop Art that Ballard admired. He observed that ‘Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future’. 

Because they shared many interests and influences, Ballard and Paolozzi later became collaborators and friends. The art and literature journal Ambit, edited by Martin Bax, was a testing ground for their experimental ideas. Paolozzi’s imagery appeared in Ballard’s notorious fake advertising campaign and his use of assemblage and collage techniques was mirrored by Ballard in the form of short stories such as ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, which would later appear in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition. 

April 1966 ed. of New Worlds

1990 ed. of The Atrocity Exhibitio. 

Perhaps because of these influences, in the 1960s Ballard was linked to the ‘New Wave’ avant-garde science fiction movement. Taking its name from the New Wave in French cinema, the movement’s writers were distinguished by their preoccupation with popular culture, often experimenting with unconventional literary styles. However, because he was very much immersed in the culture he was writing about, Ballard was generally dismissive of attempts to locate his work within a particular literary tradition, at the risk of neglecting its populist origins. 

Ballard was never a conventional science fiction writer. In many ways he saw himself as an observer of the present day, finding more inspiration in contemporary society than in the dream of a distant future. Stating his influences as the surrealists, advertising, the mass media and developments in science and technology, Ballard pushed the boundaries of science fiction with his concept of ‘inner space’. Unlike the intergalactic fantasies of outer space, Ballard described inner space as ‘the internal landscape of tomorrow that is a transmuted image of the past’, a form of speculative fiction that reflected the obsessions and imagined landscapes of his characters.

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

On Decybernation

The suggestively titled ‘On Decybernation’ is the name of a report written by the British management cybernetician Stafford Beer, as part of Project Cybersyn (1971-1973). This has been the subject of previous posts on the blog. Cybersyn was one of Beer’s biggest claims to fame, a cybernetic initiative to manage the national economy of Chile. The aim was to build and implement a system to boost economic production, while also maximising self-regulation at the level of factories and workers. The history of Cybersyn is extensively chronicled in Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. The Decybernation report has never been published, so I went with a colleague to view it in the Stafford Beer archive (at Liverpool John Moores University) last April. 

The report was written in April 1973 at a key turning point in the project (the Chilean President Salvador Allende would be overthrown by a military coup the following September). The report details Beer’s frustration that the technology his team had developed was not being used as he’d originally envisaged. Beer believed in the power of cybernetics to change the organisation of government but, perhaps unsurprisingly, others were more interested in how the technical components of Cybersyn could be used to support existing structures. 

‘On Decybernation’ muses on the relative successes and failures of Cybersyn, highlighting the need to understand the project as an instrument of revolution; beyond changing systems of economic production, Beer outlines his ambition for Cybersyn to change the very organisation of society, beginning with government institutions. Without this level of change, he concludes, ‘we do not get a new system of government, but an old system of government with some new tools’. 

I thought it might be interesting to reproduce a few passages from the report here, for those interested in Beer’s cybernetic theory of government: 

If we want a new system of government, we have to change the organization of the established order. All my proposals as to how this should be done have been discarded as ‘politically unrealistic’. Maybe they were. In that case it was for others of our group to make alternative proposals. For without any practical proposals for changing organization in the established order, we cannot have a new system of government.

[…] 

If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Project Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people. 

If what we wanted to do was to display the technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people. 

If we wanted to ‘help the people’, this was a social objective, and the outcome is ambiguous. For if the invention is dismantled, and the tools used are the tools we made, they could become instruments of oppression. This would count as failure. 

If we wanted a new system of government, then it seems that we are not going to get it, This too must count as failure. 

Any one person who has worked on this team may have a complex motivation, in which the technical, technocratic, social and political objectives are mixed in unique proportions and constitute his own ‘objective functional’. 

This would explain the confusion, and the disagreement about success. 

While, at first look Cybersyn reads as a classic science fictional case of techno-utopianism, Beer’s perspective shows a genuine belief in the project as an instrument of social change and dismay to see that potential going to waste. The fascinating reference to ‘decybernation’ encapsulates this sense of a critical threat to the dream of cybernetic revolution he saw in Cybersyn and its socio-technical possibilities.

Arturo Aldunate Phillips

Aldunate Phillips (left) with Norbert Wiener

In November 2020, I wrote a post about a project I’d been involved in, to translate Juana y la cibernética (1963), a short story by the Chilean SF writer Elena Aldunate, with my colleague Ana Baeza Ruiz. The publication, a Spanish-English bilingual edition of the story, had an online launch at the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid. During the event, Ana and I reflected on the translation and aspects of the story we’d found intriguing. One of the questions raised by Juana concerns cybernetics itself. The plot, which revolves around an erotic encounter between the protagonist (Juana) and her factory work station, never explicitly touches on the topic of cybernetics and is very far removed from Norbert Wiener’s influential definition of ‘the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal’. However, the human-machine relationship which is central to the story does suggest a thematic link to the idea of cybernetics as it relates to the imaginary of robots and automated life. 

This is where the figure of Arturo Alduante Phillips (the author’s father) comes in. A writer-poet and engineer, Aldunate worked for the Electricity Company in Chile (later Chilectra) and as a university lecturer teaching courses in cybernetics. Even more significant, he published two books on cybernetics, Los robots no tienen a Dios en el corazón (Robots do not have God in their hearts) (1963) and Por las fronteras de la cibernética (On the frontiers of cybernetics) (1973). In the first of these books, published in the same year as Elena’s story, Aldunate Phillips explains the fundamentals of cybernetics and the current state of the discipline in relation to machine intelligence, as well as discussing the implications for industry, construction and healthcare. A contemporary review remarks that the book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about how today’s scientific developments will contribute to ‘the material progress of the world and the social transformation that will follow from their application’.

Pages from Los Robots (1963)

In this context, the reference to cybernetics in Juana appears to be less incidental, as it seems likely that the topic was discussed in Elena Aldunate’s family. There is one moment in the story that especially chimes with the issues and debates covered by Aldunate Phillips in his book. Juana remembers some articles she's read in the newspapers: ‘One day the machines will rebel against their masters. They will not depend on them, they will take control of their future’. By contrast, Los Robots is dismissive of the idea of autonomous automated life. One of the concluding remarks in the book reads ‘I believe that it will never be given to the machine to replace the capacity of the human brain, which will continue to be the inspirer, the guide, the one that will have to manage the world of machines’. The message of Juana is more ambiguous and can be read as a cautionary tale. In the final passages, in the consummation of Juana’s desire, she is simultaneously released and obliterated by the machine’s motions: ‘The movement demands surrender […] its expression is burning, lacerating’. An interpretation of this ending might be that humans underestimate machines at their peril, with Juana’s fate serving as a warning about the destructive tendencies of automation…

Day in the Life of a Tech Hub Librarian

I was going through some old files the other day, when I came across a speculative writing exercise I did for the Dream of a Low Carbon Future project back in 2014. The brief was to use the model of the future envisaged by the project (based on people, societies, and the human and physical environment) and write a 'day in the life' of someone from 2150. Reading it back now, some of these ideas already seem out of date (!) but anyway this is what I came up with... 

The Tech Hub Librarian

Let me describe for you the conditions of my life in 2150AD. I live a fairly solitary existence. I’m not exactly a social pariah but my position in my community is a precarious one. Now at 60 years of age, with no close family, it hardly seems to matter much, although loneliness sets in from time to time. I should be grateful, at least I’m never cold; a side-effect of living in the hub is the abundance of surplus heat generated in powering the knowledge servers. My job title ‘librarian’ is somewhat deceptive. The general understanding of such a role was for many years closely associated with books and written papers, and it was those things that initially drew me to the profession. I was always attached to the romantic idea of preserving material culture - caring for the books and artefacts accumulated over centuries and so treasured by 20th and 21st century societies - that old-fashioned notion of the ‘authentic’. The reality, of course, is vastly different. The hubs constitute a digital cultural record, made up of 0s and 1s. It’s not much to look at; rows and rows of servers punctuated by the odd terminal. There’s a popular myth that these hubs still hold and protect the original treasures. In fact, most of them were sold off long ago into private collections; no one really noticed, what with all the flooding and famine. And goodness knows what happened to them after that! 

Long-held prejudices persist, however, the old ‘knowledge is power’ stereotype... Naturally, it gives us librarians a bad reputation. We’re treated with general suspicion, subject to occasional threats and one extremist group is out to prove we’re a sect of information overlords, who control the inner workings of society. Par for the course, I suppose. Perhaps once there was some grounding for this conspiracy theory. Back in the 21st century, huge server warehouses (probably resembling the hubs of today) used to guide the investment of trillions of assets all over the world, prolonging the boom years and delaying the inevitable financial collapse of world economies by almost 100 years. Sinister stuff. Now, the economy is relatively transparent, although the Citizen’s Income allocation gets more farcical every year. Yes, gone are the ‘knowledge societies’ of the 21st century. A popular, widely held view is that culture is dormant and we’ve returned to the Dark Ages. Odd time to be a librarian, eh? 

It’s all nonsense though! The concept of high culture may be dead but a different kind of cultural value has taken centre stage: know-how, as opposed to Knowledge with a capital ‘K’. There’s still an appetite for heritage in my community but more in the form of family history, which has always been popular. That’s what the majority of the hub’s visitors come for. In the 21st century, there were companies that compiled huge databases of information, digitized from written records: birth, death and marriage certificates, newspapers etc. The floods wiped most of them out but there are still records, saved from the Amazon servers, of individuals’ purchasing history. An odd kind of family history if you ask me but people seem to be fascinated to learn that on the 23 May 2050 great great grandad bought a new birdfeeder. They obviously find all that consumerism rather quaint.

Reciprocal Dialogues: Researching Digital Culture and Science Fiction

It feels like a very long time ago now, but back in January 2020 (pre-the first UK lockdown), I gave a talk at the University of Birmingham in the Centre for Digital Cultures. The theme 'Researching Digital Culture and Science Fiction' gave me the opportunity to draw together the threads of my research over the last few years, and speak about many topics I've covered in the blog in one form or another, including J.G. Ballard's invisible literature, Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction, and the Transcultural Fantastic.

Niall Gallen - who invited me to Birmingham - produced a write-up of the talk here, which includes some great critical reflections and insights. Niall is a doctoral researcher in the department of English Literature (Birmingham), whose thesis explores Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G. Ballard and contemporary responses to technological acceleration. He is also a committee member of Research/Curate, a network for postgraduate students researching curation, art, or objects within an academic context. His recent projects include co-editing a special issue of Alluvium journal on 'Futurity in Crisis'.

Thanks to Niall for this piece and the original invite to speak. I really enjoyed the conversation with other researchers and students affiliated with the Centre.

Juana y la cibernética

November 2020 saw the online launch of a new Spanish-English parallel text translation of the science fiction story Juana y la cibernética (1963) by Elena Aldunate at Desperate Literature, Madrid, for La noche de los libros.

Elena Aldunate (1925-2005) was born María Elena Aldunate Bezanilla in Santiago de Chile, the daughter of the mathematician and engineer Arturo Aldunate Phillips, who was also a published author. She worked as a writer of stories, articles and radio scripts, from the 1950s onwards. An early pioneer of science fiction writing in Chile, Aldunate was one of the first women authors to become associated with the genre through her story anthologies, including El señor de las mariposas (1967) and Angélica y el delfín (1977). With Ilda Cádiz, Hugo Correa, Antonio Montero, Roberto Pliscoff and Andrés Rojas, Aldunate was also involved in the founding of the Club Chileno de Ciencia Ficción, which began in the 1970s. 

As critics have noted, Aldunate’s stories consistently explore psychological themes, such as loneliness, repressed desire and existential crisis, from the perspective of women protagonists. In a biographical essay on Aldunate by Barbara Loach, she quotes the author as saying that ‘one is constantly being filled with experiences and one has to know how to take advantage of what one sees, hears, lives [...] Only with this basis can the imagination be given wings: that is, make fantasy with a foot in reality, and with elements that will be difficult to refute’.  Aldunate’s literary influences include Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Chilean authors Hugo Correa, María Luisa Bombal, Marta Brunet and María Elena Gertner. 

Reflecting on the emerging legacy of Aldunate, Andrea Bell observes that, although she was ‘occasionally profiled and her books reviewed in the Chilean press, her work has only recently come to the attention of literary historians’. During the last decade, the re-publication of Aldunate’s stories in collections such as Cuentos de Elena Aldunate: La dama de la ciencia ficción has helped to remedy this situation, and introduced the author to a new generation of readers. However, little of Aldunate’s writing has been translated into English, an oversight we sought address through the production of this new bilingual edition of Juana y la cibernética. Among the most remarkable and disturbing of Aldunate’s stories, it narrates an ambiguously erotic encounter between the character Juana and her factory work station. 

The seeds of this idea for a translation were planted a while ago at the start of 2018, but the planning became more concrete because of my involvement in an event series at the University of Leeds: The Transcultural Fantastic (co-organised with colleagues Ingo Cornils and Sarah Dodd). The joint aims of the series were to open up the 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. A workshop on ‘Publishing the Transcultural Fantastic’, which took place on 15 March 2019, featured insights from Terry Craven, co-owner of Desperate Literature; researcher Ruth Kelly (University of Oxford), who has worked on publishing projects in Bangladesh and Uganda; and Sarah Dodd, who, in addition to her role at the University of Leeds, is co-editor of the online magazine of speculative fiction in translation Samovar. The workshop discussed methods for contributing to a body of scholarship that has concerned itself with recuperating the Fantastic from contexts beyond the Anglo-American tradition, as well as alternative approaches to publishing, through small presses, short editions and print on demand, which offer more responsive and dynamic publishing routes. The series also contributed funding for the print edition of Juana.

You can find out more about the translation here: https://desperateliterature.com/product/juana/

Saga

Guest post by Peter Martin, see also Old Rope blog: https://oldrope.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/saga/

A comic about an alien family on the lamb in a flying tree in space? You had me at comic, but yes, obviously I want to read that. It’s been going since 2012? Why has no one told me about this sooner? My dear friend Giro recommended me the curious tale of the Saga, er, saga. Yeah, it’s not a great name I grant you, but to quote Lisa Simpson, it’s apt – APT! At the time of writing, the 54 issues of the series have been collected into nine volumes, with six comics comprising each story arc. The series is planned to finish at 108 issues or 18 volumes. I have read four so far and it is these that inform the below.

Drawn by Fiona Staples and written by Brian K Vaughn, Saga follows the plights of Alana and Marko, a couple who are on the run from both sides of an intergalactic war. Their crime is falling in love with the enemy and having an interracial baby, a political affront to the two extraterrestrial species embroiled in the long-standing conflict. They hop from planet to planet, hunted by soldiers, hired assassins, irate parents and disgruntled exes, all the while just trying to live a normal family life.

Saga is no ordinary comic and not just because it is narrated by a baby. Though it would be disingenuous to say that the medium is all unsubtle macho superhero fodder – and also conceding that I am no expert – it’s rare to get something so rich and varied in the mainstream (it’s published by Image, one of the big three publishing houses). Saga’s themes of family, motherhood, racism, war, politics and sex, while by no means unique to this book, are a rich and refreshing blend. Not only are the heroes young struggling parents, they are actively refusing to fight in the war that rages around them, setting this story apart from much of the work we might wish to compare it to. Pacifism is seldom at the forefront of popular sci-fi, bristling with blasters, troopers, space-battles and laser-swords, nor its fantasy counterparts with whopping big blades, magic and monsters. That’s not to say that Saga doesn’t have its fair share of any of the above – it does in spades – and barely an issue goes by without some form of gratuitous, albeit funny, violence.

Our protagonists are basically sexy alt-rock tattoos come to life. Alana, with her dyed fringe and unlikely post-natal smoking bod, is from the planet Landfall where the locals sport delicate insect-like wings. Her beau is Marko, all brooding brows, trench coats and a massive pair of curly goat horns. Phwoar! Don’t worry, they regularly go at it like hammer and tongs, as if unable to resist the collective yearning of hundreds of thousands of swooning readers. Sex is never shied away from throughout the pages of Saga, be it the impossibly hot and passionate form in the early days of Alana and Marko’s relationship, the lovesick longing of the hit man loner reminiscing of his time getting it on with an armless spiderwoman (armless not harmless, she too is a deadly hired assassin) or the seedy underbelly of alien sex work where anything goes. Taboo is a strong undercurrent, from forbidden love in the prism of societal racism lived by our heroes or the homophobia experienced by journalists Upsher and Doff, to alien fetishism, subversive literature and indeed the belief in peace in a time of war.

Taboo also bleeds into real life with several instances of censorship affecting the book. As a young mother, Alana is regularly shown breast-feeding Hazel – tolerable until it graced the cover of the hardback edition prompting squeamishness from retailers. Digital editions of the book were also briefly censored for an act of homosexual fellatio, shown on a blurred TV screen. The American Library Association included Saga in its 2014 list of the ten most frequently challenged books that year, for containing nudity, offensive language and for being “anti-family, … sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.” And people wonder why it sold so well.

Like many endearing works of serialised fiction, one of Saga’s strengths is its cast of thousands. Alana and Marko may be recognisable lead characters – fit, loveable, morally right – but they are ably supported by a bonkers, imaginative and genuinely diverse bunch: Izabel the disembodied severed-at-the-waist war casualty teen baby-sitter, a sort of floating ghost with hanging entrails; Prince Robot IV, from a breed of royal androids with TVs for heads; the Freelancers, with their distinctive definite articles, The Will, The Stalk, The Brand; Marko’s relatably in-the-way mum and dad, but doting grandparents to Hazel; Lying Cat – a giant feline who speaks only to tell if someone is fibbing or not; whatever the heck loveable fan-favourite Ghüs is; and of course D. Oswald Heist, author of the dangerous polemic that ‘radicalised’ Alana and Marko.

A Night Time Smoke, the fictional novel by Heist, is shown in glimpses through the perspectives of characters on all sides of the war. From what we know of it, at face value it’s a fairly trashy affair, akin to pulp fiction or throwaway romance of the Mills and Boon ilk. Coursing through its pages, however, is the outrageous message that war is – get this – ‘bad’ and worse, the cover art shows us that the principal characters, Contessa and Eames the rock monster are from different races.

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for a text within a text. From The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle), to K/L. Callan’s Marx, Christ and Satan United In Struggle (Stewart Home’s Red London), to The Benefit Of Christ Crucified (Luther Blissett’s Q), to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), to the endless quotations of Stewpot Hauser and Out To Lunch (Ben Watson’s Shitkicks and Doughballs), to the book within the book within the book within the book neo-pulp madness of Bobo the Monkey (Steven Well’s Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty). It’s all good baby and super meta.

Returning briefly to the issue of diversity, something that many well-known comics have struggled with in recent years. Though I am sure there are plenty of books telling stories other than those of hetro-normative, mostly white massive ab-ed and big boobed superheroes, it’s fair to say that many of the medium’s biggest sellers still have room for improvement. Clumsy attempts to make minor characters ‘come out’ still result in shitfits from keyboard warriors lamenting the fact that writers can’t make new, minor, LGBQT or POC heroes that they can ignore. Saga shouldn’t need to be lauded for starring loads of women (including breastfeeding mums), gay characters and every kind of alien-sexual preference you can think of, but it does feel uncommonly vibrant.

It’s not all politics, proxy wars, racism towards ‘horns and wings’ and baby McGuffins. Much of the story is about how hard it is to be a parent, the challenges of keeping relationships afloat and the pressures of daily life. There is much that is relatable despite the fantastical settings. Gun for hire The Will munches space-cereal and sulkingly blanks his ex’s calls. There are translation problems (the Horns speak some sort of Latinate, Esperanto language). Alana gets an acting gig on a space soap opera. Marko takes their toddler on play-dates. Unions struggle against employers. Mums – albeit ones with TV screens for faces – take their kids to the beach. People have baths. This is key to making the world of Saga appealing and enduring. It’s not all decapitations and saggy-testicled ogres, there’s hues of real life in all its humorous mundanity. And it does make you laugh. Liar Cat and the Royals with TV heads are the gifts that keep on giving and Staples’ artwork veers between heart-string tugging poetry and mischievous comedy.

Vaughn has made clear that much of the inspiration behind the narrative of the book came from the birth of his own child. Let’s leave the final word to him:

I realized that making comics and making babies were kind of the same thing and if I could combine the two, it would be less boring if I set it in a crazy sci-fi fantasy universe and not just have anecdotes about diaper bags … I didn’t want to tell a Star Wars adventure with these noble heroes fighting an empire. These are people on the outskirts of the story who want out of this never-ending galactic war … I’m part of the generation that all we do is complain about the prequels and how they let us down … And if every one of us who complained about how the prequels didn’t live up to our expectations would just make our own sci-fi fantasy, then it would be a much better use of our time.

Computing Utopia

[The following is a draft excerpt from an article written with Jo Lindsay Walton called 'Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction', which appeared in this month's issue of Science Fiction Studies]

In speculative and science fiction, computation is often represented as morally ambiguous, at odds with human concerns or not entirely explicable within human frames of reason. One notable example can be found in the trope of the supercomputer, wherein anxieties about artificial intelligence and automation combine to produce an entity capable of superseding or displacing humankind. For example, Kendell Foster Crossen’s Year of Consent (1954) features the totalitarian supercomputer SOCIAC, who manipulates the “consenting” population via forms of social control. Likewise, Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Last Question’ (1956) centres on the human-created supercomputer Multivac (and its successors) and their obsession with the question of how to reverse entropy. They work on the answer over a hundred billion years, long after the end of humankind and the universe itself. 

The imaginary of the supercomputer, then, is entangled with both positive and negative impulses. These impulses crystallize in the tension between computational utopia’s promise of superior knowledge and reason, and the threat of an oppressive and dystopian calculative order. The history of cybernetics is laden with comparable tensions. In popular culture, cybernetics has frequently been conflated with robotics or computer science, an association that was formed through early media reactions to it. The 1948 publication of Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, gained enormous press attention and led to response articles such as ‘Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?’ (American Monthly 1953) and ‘Man Viewed as a Machine’ (Scientific American 1955). 

In fact, cybernetics refers to a far broader set of concerns, which can be glossed as the study of systems governance, including organic, machinic, and socio-economic systems. It also includes the study of self-governance: how systems constitute and stabilize themselves, how they adapt to changes in their environments and how they survive or fail to survive damage or the introduction of new elements. It is the study of communication, feedback and control that came to define cybernetics as a field of inquiry. 

This interest in feedback, and the maintenance of equilibrium through feedback mechanisms is also the thing that most clearly connects cybernetics with economics. In particular, there are links between cybernetics and neoclassical models of markets and economies as self-governing systems, entities which accomplish an optimum distribution of resources through the self-stabilizing interactions of supply and demand. These principles were at the heart of what came to be known as the “Chicago school” of economics through figures such as George Stigler and Milton Friedman. Both worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG), funded by the US National Defense Research Committee during World War II, and links have been traced between cybernetic experiments in defense systems carried out in the SRG and Friedman’s later work (Mirowski, 205-206). Mike Featherstone foregrounds this link in his study of the underpinnings of contemporary capitalist thought: 

Friedman’s free market economics presented a computational vision of freedom and social relations, which transformed economy into an apolitical closed space defined by machinic interactions, cold strategic decision making, militarised risk assessment and management, and a complete lack of empathy for the other who was similarly imagined through the lens of cybernetics. (94) 

The characterization of “machinic interactions” is central to Featherstone’s argument that “it is possible to understand the development of late capitalism through its embrace of techno-science and specifically cybernetic theory over the course of the 20th century” (82). This view, while valid, rests on a partial interpretation of the cybernetic field. Historian Ronald R. Kline has argued for the disunity of cybernetics, not only in its multiple meanings, but also with regard to “the different paths cybernetics took in different countries” (7). To some extent, these histories have been obscured by dominant narratives, which inform ideas – in both science fiction and contemporary politics – about the inseparability of cybernetic theory from capitalism. Yet the uptake of cybernetics in countries with distinct social and political trajectories presents a challenge to such ideas. 

An important, if unrealized, project that marks a chapter in the diverse history of cybernetics is Project Cybersyn (or Proyecto Synco in Spanish), a Chilean initiative funded under the socialist government of Salvador Allende between 1971 and 1973. Cybersyn was directed towards the development of a cybernetic system to manage the economy and communicate with factories that had come under government control as part of Allende’s nationalization efforts. The project was a collaboration between Chilean technical experts and Stafford Beer, a British research scientist in management cybernetics. Beer was interested in cybernetics as “the science of effective organization” and how it could be applied to the field of industrial management (Beer, Decision and Control, 425). 

Project Cybersyn was intended to manage economic production using the feedback of data from the factories. Statistical software programs were designed to model factory performance scenarios, based on analysis of the data, enabling the Chilean government to regulate production and pre-empt crises with effective action (Medina, 6). Despite limited technological resources, consisting of one central computer and a network of telex machines, the project went some way towards developing this system (Pickering, 250). The main objectives of Cybersyn were to maximize economic production while also facilitating self-regulation of the factories. It thus represented an attempt to incorporate devolved decision-making and worker autonomy into a cybernetic management system. For Beer, the design constituted “a weapon against state bureaucracy” (see Medina, 170). 

Cybersyn control room

A comprehensive history of Project Cybersyn is the subject of a 2011 book by Eden Medina. Her study focuses on the relationship between computer technology and politics, and the difficulty of embedding political values in systems design. In the case of Cybersyn, she argues that this can be seen in the frequent mischaracterization of the project as a tool for centralized government control of the economy, despite its outwardly decentralized approach. Indeed, in January 1973, when The Observer broke the news of Cybersyn to the English-speaking public, the headline simply ran “Chile run by computer.” In an allusion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cybersyn, the “first computer system designed to control an entire economy” had allegedly been “assembled in some secrecy so as to avoid opposition charges of ‘Big Brother’ tactics.” Later that year, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup and Project Cybersyn was never completed. Under the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, economic policy was remodelled by a group of Chilean neoliberal economists called the Chicago Boys, some of whom trained under Friedman. In the decades that followed, information technology became increasingly integrated into global finance and financial markets were rapidly expanded, deregulated, and diversified. 

In his novel Synco (2008), the Chilean SF writer Jorge Baradit offers an alternative history of Project Cybersyn. It opens six years after the coup of 1973 which, in a parallel version of events, is dismantled with the assistance of Pinochet. The completion of Synco – “the hidden leviathan [...] the mechanical eye of socialist Chile” (Baradit, 29-30) – has transformed Chile into a fully-fledged cybernetic state. The country’s capital of Santiago provides the backdrop for the main action of the story and it is here that the protagonist Martina returns after some years in Venezuela. She is startled at the changes wrought by Synco but she soon becomes disquieted after witnessing the full extent of its political influence and surveillance. While the circumstances that lead to this totalitarian regime are never fully explained, it is implied that a cybernetic model of government is inextricable from centralized state control, and the collaboration between Pinochet and Allende serves to bolster the system. Synco’s power grows and by the end of the novel its network begins to effect changes in the language and geography of Chile. In the final scenes, as Martina is flown out of the country, she sees military jets heading the other way for a final showdown with this “god made of wires” (230). 

The novel’s bleak view assumes the inevitability of Cybersyn’s techno-totalitarian trajectory. The actual project, by contrast, was fragile and fledgling. Its computing resources were minimal. Devoted to a broadly “decentralizing, worker-participative and anti-bureaucratic” form of economic management (Beer, Brain of the Firm, 257), it was tantalizingly poised between a model and the thing itself. Along these lines, Medina maintains that “there is historical value in studying innovative technological systems, even if they are never fully realized” (Medina, 10). The recognition that systems like Cybersyn cannot be measured only by the logic of ‘what happened’ is an important one and highlights the question of making visible alternatives to dystopian economic computation.

References

Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly (November 1956): 6-15. 

Baradit, Jorge. Synco. Madrid and Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008.

Beer, Stafford. Decision and Control. London: Wiley, 1966. 

---. The Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane, 1972. 

Crossen, Kendall Foster. Year of Consent. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1954. 

Featherstone, Mike. Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2017. 

Fliegers, Serge. “Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?” American Monthly. 76 (1953): 53-61. 

Hawkes, Nigel. “Chile Run by Computer.” The Observer, 7 Jan 1973. 

Kemeny, John G. “Man Viewed as a Machine.” Scientific American. 192 (April 1955): 58-67. 

Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 

Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 

Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. 

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches Of Another Future. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.

Australian SF Fan Fiction and Conventions

The other day I was thinking about the SF encounters I had while visiting Australia last year, including a trip to the exhibition ‘'Synthesizers: Sound of the Future’, which I wrote about back in October.

The reason I went to Aus was to research digital heritage collections, but this project turned up some intriguing SF connections of its own. HuNI, a digital research and discovery platform developed in partnership with Deakin University, was one of several interesting efforts I learned of to foster new approaches to researching cultural collections.

It works by drawing together records from across different research, museum and archive collections and lets people make their own connections between them, based on their field of interest. If you go on the ‘Collections’ part of the site you can see a list of public collections created by researchers. This consists of a range of topics, from railways, to skateboarding, to Australian literary journals. While browsing through, two collections in particular caught my eye; one called ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Fan Groups and Conventions’, the other ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Small Presses and Publishing Houses’, created by Gene Melzack.

Here was an insight into a whole world of SF fandom and writing previously unknown to me; prolific fan editors such as Susan Smith-Clarke, or small fanzine clubs like the Futurian Society of Sydney, contemporary with the Leeds-based fanzines Futurian and New Futurian, which were featured on the blog previously. Or Australian SF publishers including Chimaera, Orb and Ticonderoga Publications that have been going since the 1990s, alongside more recent efforts like Twelfth Planet Press, established in 2006. What’s more, HuNI allows the connections between groups, fan conventions and publishing houses to be mapped visually (see image). In this way, I was able to learn that the fanzine editor Bruce Gillespie helped to found the small press Norstrilia (1975-1985), which published Greg Egan’s first novel.

To learn more about HuNI, you can read this Medium article by Deb Verhoeven and Toby Burrows.

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.

A Spanish Anarchist View on The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed found an appreciative reader in the Spanish anarchist Victor García (the pseudonym of Germinal Gracia). Here, we reproduce the brief summary of the novel he included in his untranslated 1977 work on utopias and anarchism. Gracia was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war clandestine anarchist movement in Spain who had subsequently spent decades exiled in Venezuela and France. A voracious reader, traveller and linguist, Gracia was concerned that the classic works of anarchism that had shaped his ideological development and that of his comrades were no longer appropriate for disseminating anarchist ideas. In Le Guin, Gracia perceived an imagination capable of translating their shared ideals for a contemporary audience.

Taken from: Victor García, Utopías y Anarquismo. Laguna de Mayrán: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1977, pp. 101-3 (my translation):

Because it doesn’t have established pre-requisites, science fiction offers its readership all kinds of fantastical situations.

Such is the case of Anarres, the utopian planet created by Ursula K. Le Guin, nine light years from Earth, where the Odonians – anarchists who wanted to found a regime without authority or government, with solidarity as the basic norm of behaviour – chose to live in voluntary exile.

The Dispossessed is the work of a writer with a deep understanding of and open sympathy for libertarian ideals. It is the first work of science fiction in which anarchism is brought into objective focus without avoiding, which is to be applauded, the recurrence of human problems that no social regime could ever eliminate.

Three space days’ travel from Anarres we find Urras, the planet the Odonians left one hundred and sixty years ago. Shevek, a great mathematical physicist, is working on an equation as transcendental as those of Einstein and Planck, and as such is the first inhabitant of Anarres to visit Urras, where he is feted by the great and good and universities fight for his services.

Urras conforms to a system of state regimes more or less like our own, where the powerful live in unimaginable luxury while those in poverty would envy the conditions endured by the poor in our society. Shevek discovers this gradually:

The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch.

When Shevek, evading the surveillance of the powerful, manages to visit the poor neighbourhoods where a general strike is being planned, the people let him know that they are aware of the existence of Anarres and long to emulate its system. The greatest wish they express for one another is ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ ‘To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation…’ ‘I wonder’, the worker Maedda says to Shevek, ‘if you fully understand why they [the powerful] have kept you so well hidden… because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.’

Shevek returns to Anarres disillusioned. He has not revealed his theory because the powers that be in Urras only wanted to understand it to make themselves still more powerful and to subjugate the nine planets of their universe, which includes Earth: ‘A planet spoiled by the human species’, as Keng, ambassador of earth on Urras, explains:

We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is still habitable, but not as this world is.

The work of Ursula K. Le Guin could successfully replace, for modern minds, venerable tomes like At the Café and Between Peasants by Malatesta, Sembrando flores by Federico Urales, and Jean Grave’s The Adventures of Nono. While it suffers the impact of environmental pessimism, it holds fast to a glimmer of salvation: Anarres, refuge of the anarchists.

SF Images on the Mechanical Curator

I attended a British Library event in Edinburgh recently where I learned more about the activities of their Labs initiative, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Launched in 2013, BL Labs helps researchers develop new ways of working with collections content and data. In practice, this work ranges from making digitised collections more accessible, to facilitating the use of text analysis software and spatial mapping tools.

So, on to the SF part of the story. Many people who encounter BL Labs will have done so (perhaps without knowing it) through the images taken from its ‘Mechanical Curator’ project. This is a program that BL Labs created to extract images from 65,000 of the digitised books in the Library's collection. In 2013, as a result of this process, a million images were uploaded to Flickr Commons under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication, which means that anyone can copy, modify and distribute them, even for commercial purposes, without needing permission. The collection includes cartoons, architecture, adverts and decorative art, among other things. But there's also a Space and SF album, made up of astronomical and speculative space imagery (see example below).

Image taken from page 84 of La fregate l'Incomprise. Voyage autour du monde à la plume par Sahib.

These reminded me of illustrations from some of the Special Collections volumes included in the the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Visions of the Future’ (4 April - 11 June 2011) (see below).

Albert Robida Le Vingtième Siècle

Albert Robida Voyages Très Extraordinaires

For those who prefer chance encounters, there's also the Mechanical Curator tumblr page, which automatically publishes a randomly selected image from the collection every hour. And the public domain mark on the images has led to some interesting cases of creative re-use. Notable examples include artist Mario Klingemann's series of artworks using the images and the music video design for the song 'Hey There Young Sailor' by The Impatient Sisters.

SF History in Leeds, Scriven Bolton and Space Art

Thomas Simeon Scriven Bolton (1883-1929)

For this month’s post I decided to return to the theme of SF history in Leeds and the work of former Leeds resident Thomas Simeon Scriven Bolton (1883-1929). Bolton was a commercial illustrator and amateur astronomer, who lived in Bramley with his family from 1911.

As an illustrator, he specialised in astronomical subjects, also known as space art. Space art covered a range of drawing styles: illustrations of astronomical phenomena reproduced from telescopes; technical illustrations with overlaid graphics and text; and imagined planetary or lunar landscapes. Bolton produced all three kinds of illustrations and these were published in a number of newspapers, magazines and books in both the UK and North America.

Clive Davenhall, who has written an extended essay on Bolton’s art, suggests that he introduced several innovations into the field and describes his technique as follows:

Bolton developed an effective method for producing realistic lunar landscapes that involved making a model of the surface in plasticine or similar material, photographing it and then painting over the photograph. This approach was a development of the technique of modelling the lunar surface and photographing it under oblique light.

Being an amateur astronomer, Bolton also published many of his astronomical observations in science journals such as Nature and the Journal of the British Astronomical Association.

A lunar landscape by Bolton using the technique described above.

However, the SF connection can be found in Bolton’s work for magazines such as Popular Science. These types of publications tended to focus on topics of popular interest in astronomy, and on speculations about imagined worlds, planetary surfaces and undiscovered moons.

Bolton’s work thus shares affinities with the writings of SF fans and scientific enthusiasts, discussed previously on this blog, who saw their speculations as contributing to and advancing the sciences, particularly in the field of cosmology. A more detailed consideration of this topic is available here.

Tributes to Ursula K. Le Guin

It was only a couple of months ago that The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin was featured on this blog - not for the first time - in my post about planetary physics and inter-world relations in SF. Le Guin's double planet system is rendered to brilliant effect in her exploration of power and freedom in the societies of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres, and this contrast provides the framework for the ambiguous utopian currents that run through the novel.

It is often these themes - of living and being otherwise - that have come to the fore in the tributes to Le Guin, following her death on the 22 January. Here, I'd like to give a round-up of those that struck me the most, alongside some interesting interviews and sources that I've come across during the last few years.

Among the more comprehensive and interesting obituaries of Le Guin are those published by the Guardian, the New Yorker and the New York Times. The novelist Julie Phillips, who's currently working on a biography of Le Guin, writes in the New Yorker, 'Le Guin never stopped insisting on the beauty and subversive power of the imagination. Fantasy and speculation weren’t only about invention; they were about challenging the established order'. Meanwhile, SF critics John Clute (Guardian) and Gerald Jonas (New York Times) draw attention to her distinctive narrative style. Jonas writes, 'the conflicts (her characters) face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles'.

Fellow writers have also paid tribute and, in some cases, shared their recollections of Le Guin; Indian SF writer Vandana Singh knew the author over a number of years and quotes the famous line from The Dispossessed, 'True journey is return', in the title to her blog post. She also recalls of their correspondence, 'our exchanges, though infrequent, were always interesting. We talked about writing, but also about our mutual interest in non-human others [...] We discussed the tendency of modern humans to succumb to the techno-fix, even for complex issues like climate change. I think it was clearer to her than to most people that technology by itself can never solve anything if the underlying paradigm remains unchanged'. In Neil Gaiman's piece, 'A Magic of True Speaking', he remembers reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time, and writes that the book 'opened my head and made me view gender differently - not as something fixed, nor even as something important, but as something mutable and less pertinent than what kind of person you are; the trilogy made me look at the world in a new way, imbued everything with a magic that was so much deeper than the magic I’d encountered before then'.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

What better way to end this post than to hear from the author herself. Some links to Le Guin's wonderful and thought-provoking public speeches and interviews include:

The BBC radio programme 'Ursula Le Guin at 85', featuring commentators including Neil Gaiman, in which Le Guin speaks about her upbringing and her early encounters with other worlds through her Father's anthropological work with Ishi, the last known member of the Native American Yahi people.

A clip from Arwen Curry's 2018 feature documentary film about Le Guin called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. In this clip, Le Guin talks about the creation of the Earthsea novels: 'I start pretty much with place, and then the people grow up in the place'.

Transcript of Le Guin's 'Left-handed commencement address' to the 1983 graduating class of Mills College (Liberal Arts women's college in Oakland, California): 'Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the only direction is up. So that’s their country; let’s explore our own [...] I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is'.

Le Guin's speech, upon receiving the National Book Awards' Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She says, 'I rejoice in accepting (the award) for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long - my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction'.

Le Guin writing on the competing forces - or the yin and yang - of utopia, published on the Electric Literature site. In this piece, she suggests, 'my guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival [...] involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth'.

Esperanto and SF: A Potted History

Esperanto was invented as an international secondary language by Ludwig Zamenhof, who published his first book on Esperanto in 1887. He believed that a common mode of communication between people would eliminate the problems and misunderstandings of translation and ultimately lead to a more harmonious world system.

Zamenhof was not the first to come up with the idea of an international language. Like many others, he was motivated by the utopian impulse to create a better world, a universal vision that could, through language, overcome the divisions created by humankind. Esperanto is, however, perhaps one of the most famous – or infamous – of such languages, partly because of its widespread uptake and partly because it has been the subject of various parodies and criticisms. For example, it is believed that Esperanto provided the inspiration for Newspeak in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the introduction of a simplified universal language operates as a form of social control to restrict thought.

This leads me on to the topic of this month’s post: Esperanto and SF. While Orwell was sceptical about the implications of a language like Esperanto, many other SF writers have been fascinated by the positive reconfiguration of the world it might bring about, or the kinds of societies that might be amenable to a shared secondary language.

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld novels are perhaps among the most famous works to make use of Esperanto – in the second volume it is the language of the peaceful religion of the Church of the Second Chance. Likewise, the stories of lesser known writers such as Mack Reynolds explore issues of universal basic income and universal religion and language. In his 1974 novel Looking Backward From the Year 2000, a re-writing of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 work, the protagonist finds himself in a future where the revolution in communications and transportation has led to the large-scale adoption of Esperanto as an interlingua.

Morojo with Ackerman in costume in 1939

SF fanzines also have their notable Esperantists. Myrtle Douglas, known by her Esperanto name ‘Morojo’, was a fanzine editor from Los Angeles, who was active between the years 1939 and 1958. From 1939 until 1947, Morojo co-edited the fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation with the SF writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who she met at an Esperanto gathering. With Ackerman, she also attended the first World Science Fiction Convention (1939), for which they wore matching futuristic costumes (see image). From 1941 until 1958, Morojo published the zine Guteto, which promoted Esperanto among science fiction fans. After her death, Ackerman wrote of her, ‘she was an expert Esperantist’ and ‘a real science fiction fan’.

These examples reflect the overlap between the imaginary communities explored in the works of SF writers and the radical aspirations for Esperanto as a means of achieving societal transformation. Such experiments in invented language have been sporadic and, at best, only partially successful. However, like language, SF works to both represent and translate cultures, echoing the hopes and fears of the societies from which it is produced.

More information about the inclusion of Esperanto in literary works can be found in the online book The Esperanto Book by Don Harlow.

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.