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.
December
2017 marks the centenary of the birth of a British science fiction pioneer,
Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific author and visionary who anticipated the moon
landings and the use of telecommunications satellites, he is perhaps best known
for his association with Stanley Kubrick’s seminal psychedelic sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
With an
interest in mystery, science and space travel from childhood, Clarke became a
keen fan of science fiction in his adolescence, when he avidly read the
emerging American magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories.
His collection of these early sf publications totalled several hundred, before
being dispersed during his travels in World War Two. In 1936, Clarke had moved
from Somerset to London, where he worked in the Civil Service as an auditor at
the Board of Education – he lived firstly at Newport Square, Paddington, and
then from 1938 at 88 Gray’s Inn Road, Bloomsbury, where he shared a flat with
his friend and fellow science fiction fan, Bill Temple. Already an active
member of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), of which he was eventually
to become Chairman, Clarke wrote to Sam Youds that, given the flat’s spacious
rooms and central location, “no doubt many SFA [Science Fiction Association]
and BIS meetings will gravitate here eventually.” The address 88 Gray’s Inn
Road shortly became the Society’s headquarters. It was also here that Clarke,
now writing in earnest (though primarily non-fiction), met fellow enthusiasts,
including several influential figures in the formative years of UK science
fiction. Among the visitors were E.J. Carnell and Walter Gillings, John Wyndham
(then known as John Benyon Harris) and Maurice Hanson, editor of the UK’s first fanzine, Novae Terrae; Carnell,
Clarke and Hanson were co-editors from the November 1937 issue, and it was the
former who re-named it as New Worlds on becoming sole editor in 1939.
Walter Gillings, Arthur C. Clarke & E. J. Carnell at Leeds, 1937
Clarke
was a delegate at what has been described as the world’s first science fiction convention, in January 1937 at Leeds, West Yorkshire, together with Carnell,
Gillings, Hanson and the author Eric Frank Russell. It was at that meeting that
it was decided to designate Novae Terrae
as the official publication of the SFA. Clarke’s first published short story,
‘Travel by Wire!’ appeared later that same year in a fan magazine, Amateur Science Stories, edited by another
of the convention attendees, Douglas W.F. Mayer at Brunswick Terrace, Leeds 2.
Clarke’s wartime work in the RAF on a classified radar project, the prototype
Ground Control Approach system, introduced him to the potential of micro-waves
and radar. He prided himself on basing his fiction on scientific fact and
anticipating developments in technology, notably the exploration of the moon
and the launch of geostational orbital satellites for telecommunications. After
the War, Clarke consolidated his scientific credentials by taking a degree in
physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics at King’s College, London.
His 1948 short
story, ‘The Sentinel’, originally submitted (unsuccessfully) for a BBC
competition, was later adapted by the American Director Stanley Kubrick as 2001: A Space Odyssey – Clarke worked
extensively with him on the preparation and writing, having been installed in
New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel as early as 1964. Kubrick had abandoned the
traditional screenplay; instead, as Michel Chion relates, he “decided to write
a novel with Clarke that would serve as the basis for making the film.” As the
production became ever more protracted, Clarke’s 2001 ‘novelisation’ was published separately, after the film’s
release, to be followed by various sequels: 2010
(also filmed, in 1984), 2061 and 3001. He also gained wider recognition
from well-received works such as Childhood’s
End, The City and the Stars and Rendezvous with Rama.
Arthur C. Clarke with astronaut Neil Armstrong, 1970
Clarke moved to
Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1956, where he pursued a long-standing interest in
deep-sea diving, but maintained his position as the UK’s best-known science
fiction practitioner. The 1969 Moon landing, which Clarke had long predicted
and regularly incorporated into his work, reinforced the scientific basis of
his fiction, together with developments in telecommunications satellites. His
status was confirmed by a knighthood in 1998 and, in his later career, lending
his name to various TV shows investigating well-known mysteries and paranormal
phenomena: Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980), Arthur C. Clarke’s
World of Strange Powers (1985) and Arthur
C. Clarke’s Mysterious Universe (1994). He died in March 2008.
Photographs from the
1937 Leeds Convention were taken by Harold Gottliffe, and reproduced with
thanks to his daughter, Jill Godfrey, and Rob Hansen, whose site is an
invaluable resource on the history of UK science fiction fanzines.
Formed in late-1960s London, Hawkwind were the pioneers of a strand of Progressive Rock known as ‘Space Rock,’ incorporating cosmic themes and musical experimentation in a style which assimilated “repetitive hypnotic beats and electronic/ambient soundscapes.” Their shifting line-up was augmented by the addition of South African-born poet and writer Robert Calvert, who had been involved with street theatre and underground magazines, and occasionally by the English author and editor Michael Moorcock; both shared the same counter-cultural aspirations and background in the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area as the band, and brought literary and particularly science-fictional inspiration to Hawkwind’s sound.
From their first (and only) hit, 1971’s ‘Silver machine’, with lyrics by Calvert, and on the subsequent album In Search of Space, Hawkwind produced otherworldly music and explored science fiction themes, creating the template for a series of ground-breaking albums during the 1970s. In Search of Space and the follow-up album, Doremi Fasol Latido, introduced the ‘Starfarer’ concept, “a loose story line involving the adventures of Spaceship Hawkwind and its eventual crash-landing on Earth.” Calvert functioned as the band’s ‘resident poet,’ giving spoken-word recitals during concerts, composing lyrics and appearing as lead vocalist on record. Favourites on the UK’s then-flourishing free festival circuit, Hawkwind presented an on-stage spectacular with dancers and lightshow to accompany their live performances – captured on 1973’s Space Ritual, regarded as “the ultimate space rock album.” Lavishly packaged, the artwork was by regular associate, graphic artist Barney Bubbles, who also wrote a short sci-fi story of Spaceship Hawkwind for the performance programme, building on their existing overall Starfarer concept of the band travelling through time and space. Calvert’s manic-depressive condition and the demands of touring took their toll, and he drifted in and out of the line-up, his role on stage and as lyricist intermittently filled by his friend Michael Moorcock as a self-confessed “understudy,” who contributed ‘The Black Corridor’ (adapted from his own 1969 novel) and ‘Sonic Attack’ to Space Ritual.
A prolific author and, from 1964, editor of the magazine New Worlds – where he had published some of Calvert’s poetry – Moorcock found acclaim with the Cornelius Quartet of novels, following the weird and wonderful adventures of central character, Jerry Cornelius, a psychedelic harlequin-secret agent, an anti-hero of the times, picking his way through the debris of ‘swinging London’ and all points beyond. The first of the novels, 1968’s The Final Programme, was filmed in 1973 (though the result was much to the author’s disapproval); Mick Jagger was reputedly approached to play the lead, only to decline the Cornelius role as ‘too freaky.’ The Jagger connection was not coincidental – amongst other endeavours, Cornelius fronts a pop group known as the Deep Fix, a name Moorcock used in turn for his own musical project when he came to record the 1975 Concept Album The New Worlds Fair. In the same year he contributed lyrics to, and was credited as the originator of, Hawkwind’s album Warrior on the Edge of Time – based on his concept of the Eternal Champion, a recurring character found in different guises throughout his work, including Jerry Cornelius. The connection between author and group was further cemented by a series of dubious genre novels attributed to Moorcock and Michael Butterworth (though primarily the work of the latter, Moorcock’s name guaranteed respectable sales), beginning with Time of the Hawklords in 1976, featuring the band as protagonists in a series of sci-fi-inspired adventures.
Once Robert Calvert took the helm on a more permanent basis as lead singer and songwriter in 1976, he oversaw a shift in Hawkwind’s conceptual concerns. Their later-70s output focused more on dystopian and futuristic themes, closer in spirit to the contemporary work of J. G. Ballard than the fantasy territory they had previously explored, in keeping with Calvert’s experimental solo albums. This phase began with Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (referencing the classic magazines of early science fiction), continued with 1977’s acclaimed Quark Strangeness and Charm and culminated in their final album of the decade, PXR-5, the last to feature Calvert, and released after his departure from the band. Calvert and Moorcock (whose versatility saw him expertly turn his hand to any style within – and occasionally outside – the sci-fi genre) had similar preoccupations, and while Calvert was a captivating, at times eccentric and flamboyant front-man, the pair’s work is complementary. After Calvert left to pursue his own projects, Moorcock continued to perform with Hawkwind on a regular basis and worked with them throughout the 1980s, notably on the albums Sonic Attack and Chronicle of the Black Sword, “all but one of whose songs are based on his Elric saga (the other, ‘Needle Gun’ is about Jerry Cornelius).”
Whilst Robert Calvert sadly died in 1988, Michael Moorcock remains a celebrated and successful author; a variety of splinter groups featuring original or one-time members of Hawkwind (including founders Dave Brock and Nik Turner) continue to tour the UK and world-wide, under a number of related band names. In their various incarnations they are recognised as innovators and prime exponents of a distinctive and enduring style, an influential and widely-respected group whose admirers include such diverse musical figures as Jello Biafra, Julian Cope, John Lydon and Henry Rollins.
Fifty years ago: a tumultuous year in a decade marked by rapid social, technological and cultural change, a snapshot of 1966 captures science fiction in the process of evolution, absorbing outside influences and re-defining its possibilities – a mirror of its wider social context. With the broadcast of the first Star Trek episode in North America that year, and Doctor Who going strong in the UK since 1963, science fiction had widespread exposure on the rising medium of television and, in Fantastic Voyage, one of the year’s most successful films. There was sufficient interest in publications beyond the mainstream to allow for a thriving sub-culture of independent journals and fanzines. Novels such as Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon and Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! were well-acclaimed examples of science fiction’s continued relevance, even as fresh possibilities emerged. Various factors, including a keen interest in ‘literary’ writers – notably William Burroughs, whose experimental novel Naked Lunch was first published as a paperback in 1966 – suggested new directions for genre fiction, just as modern art and popular music began to incorporate ideas from the avant-garde, which were in turn adopted by the burgeoning counter-culture. These developments helped to create a climate for a gradual move away from traditional science fiction toward more contemporary settings and subversive themes.
To be continued...
Part One
The highly-regarded English science fiction magazine, New Worlds, began a process of transformation in 1964, when Michael Moorcock took over as editor. Moorcock has written that he was “interested in broadening the possibilities of the SF idiom and New Worlds... seemed the best place to do it.” His predecessor as editor, E.J. ‘Ted’ Carnell, was a stalwart of the domestic science fiction scene since the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1930s – an attendee at the very first convention of 1937 – and perceived as being representative of an outmoded and conservative notion of the genre. By 1966, Moorcock’s avowed intention after replacing Carnell – to steer the magazine away from its increasingly dated preoccupations with alien invasions and far-flung galaxies, and to embrace contemporary art and avant-garde literature, such as that of Eduardo Paolozzi and William Burroughs – was being put into practice. February 1966 saw the inclusion of ‘A Two-Timer’ by David I. Masson, Head of Special Collections at the University of Leeds, who brought an academic rigour and keen interest in linguistics to the established time-travel formula.
Another writer eager to seize the opportunity to adapt and subvert familiar concerns was J.G. Ballard, already an established author but whose work at that time was moving in the same trajectory as the magazine, away from traditional themes and toward the experimental works for which he was to become (in)famous. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, relates that it was in fact Carnell, while associated with “a rather conventional view of the nature of science fiction”, who had begun to encourage this development as early as a decade before, and Moorcock who endorsed it. Carnell recognised “that science fiction needed to change if it was to remain at the cutting edge of the future” and accordingly urged Ballard to “concentrate on what I termed ‘inner space’, psychological tales close in spirit to the surrealists.” While his full-length books that year, The Crystal World and the short-story collection The Impossible Man, broadly conformed to genre expectations, he used New Worlds and the literary magazine Ambit (for which he contributed a lengthy review of Burroughs to the Spring 1966 edition) as vehicles to pursue his new direction. These “fragmented narratives” or “condensed novels” included ‘The Assassination Weapon’, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ (published in both magazines) and, appearing in the 1966/67 edition of Ambit, ‘The Assassination of J.F. Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race’, short pieces that were later to form part of one of his most notorious books, 1970’s The Atrocity Exhibition. 1966 thus found Ballard in a period of transition, publishing conventional work while simultaneously developing the more daring and disturbing approach which was to carve him a unique and hugely influential place in modern science fiction.
‘Engineering Fiction: Literature and Science in Interwar Britain’ is the title of a talk that was given by Dr Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent) on 20 March 2015, as part of the University of Oxford’s Literature and Science Research Seminar Series (available to watch here and below). Her topic chimes with several previous SF Forward posts, including Futures Past, Part 2 and Part 4.
In the video, Sleigh describes the development of SF fandom between 1930 and 1950, covering the founding of fanzines such as Novae Terrae in 1936 (later to become New Worlds), the world’s first SF convention in Leeds and the founding of the London Branch of the Science Fiction Association with the involvement of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke.
Her particular area of interest is in the culture of the fans themselves, with an emphasis on the circulation of stories and reviews in their fanzines. Described unfavourably by C.S. Lewis as the fiction of engineers, Sleigh modifies this title for her talk (also the subject of a forthcoming book), to explore how the SF fan’s identity was created and performed on the page. She explains that many of these fans shared a fascination with science and engineering (although few worked professionally in scientific fields) but their identification with science was bolstered through writing. As Clarke himself once wrote in an early essay for Novae Terrae, ‘science-fiction authors have actually influenced future development to no small extent, and when space is eventually crossed […] science-fiction will have played an enormous part in the final accomplishment’. Sleigh’s theory is that by participating in the writing cultures of fanzines, fans believed they were participating in the work of science.
She ends with a reading of Star Begotten by H.G. Wells, which along with Sugar in the Airby E.C. Large and Star-Maker by Olaf Stapledon, was one of the most exciting books for SF fans in 1936-7. The story, she suggests, mirrors the way in which SF fans constructed themselves as a social group; the idea of martian rays altering human evolution is both a reflection and a fictional cause of why they felt like outsiders but also superior to those around them.
Thanks to Dominic Berry for drawing my attention to this talk.
The
origins of Interzone, one of the UK’s
longest-running and best-respected science fiction periodicals, can be traced
to Leeds in the 1970s, where several of its founders lived, worked and/or
studied. One group of enthusiasts, effectively the Leeds SF Group, met at the
Victoria pub in Great George Street on Friday nights, while the Leeds
University Union Science Fiction Society (LUUSFS) had been formed in the early
1970s by a group of students, among the most active of whom were John Harvey and Eve Simmons (they later married). John and Eve were also the founding
editors of the Society’s fanzine Black
Hole. Although ostensibly separate, there was some cross-over of membership
between the two.
Copies of the first issue of Black Hole, March 1974, from Leeds University Library's Special Collections; 'News from Leeds' contains mention of David Masson, Professor Cyril Oakley and Michael Rosenblum, all subjects of previous Futures Past features.
By early 1978, the
Leeds SF Group agreed to bid to host the next annual British Easter science fiction convention, or Eastercon, at the Leeds Dragonara Hotel (later the
Hilton); the bid was presented at that year’s convention, and won. Having
successfully organised this national event in 1979 – known as Yorcon – they
also were awarded the 1981 version. As this exceeded expectations, after much
debate, they decided to launch a SF magazine with the proceeds of the second
convention, Yorcon II. At around the same time that the Leeds group (David
Pringle, Alan Dorey, Simon Ounsley, and Graham James) came to this decision,
members of a London-based equivalent had independently come up with their own
proposal for launching a new science fiction periodical. The four based in
Leeds had some discussions with those in London (Malcolm Edwards, John Clute,
Colin Greenland, and Roz Kaveney), resulting in the pooling of their resources
into a single collective of eight people, all with an equal editorial voice.
The
founding group, admirers of the long-running SF magazine New Worlds, chose to take their title from William Burroughs’
(fictional) location for Naked Lunch,
and in 1982 Interzone was launched as
a quarterly science fiction magazine. It remains a highly-respected cornerstone
of British sf, with an illustrious list of published authors including Brian
Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Thomas M. Disch, Greg Egan, Harlan
Ellison, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Jonathan Lethem,
Michael Moorcock, Kim Newman, Rachel Pollack, and Bruce Sterling.
With thanks to Paul Annis for providing an invaluable wealth of background information on the Leeds science fiction scene in the 1970s and early 1980s, which forms the basis of this post.
