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.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: 2001 and other Space Oddities

The English author Arthur C. Clarke, one of the delegates to the world’s first science fiction convention, speculated in his short story ‘The Sentinel’ (submitted for a BBC competition in 1948) about the existence of a mysterious pyramid on the Moon. This edifice was apparently to be activated as a transmitter to project signals across the Galaxy in the event of its discovery; the implication being that both Earth and Moon had received ‘visitors’ in the distant past. The story formed the basis of one of the most celebrated science fiction films of the 1960s – released even before Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps on the moon – and, simultaneously, inspired a less celebrated song.

American band the Byrds had already shown an interest in science fiction themes in songs such as ‘Mr Spaceman’ and ‘CTA-102’; their principal songwriter Roger McGuinn was one of the first musicians to invest in the newly-available Moog modular synthesiser, which he purchased at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. McGuinn had previously been known as Jim, but after a flirtation with the Subud spiritual movement, its founder Bapak advised him to change his name on the basis that it would better “vibrate with the universe.” Bapak sent Jim the letter ‘R’ and asked him to send back ten names starting with that letter; as McGuinn relates, “I was into science fiction so I picked Rocket and Retro and React... Roger was the only proper name in the whole bunch of words I chose and the guru thought I was mad.” In 1968, the newly-renamed McGuinn then adapted Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ as ‘Space Odyssey’, with co-writer Robert J. Hippard, the lyrics relating how “in nineteen and ninety-six we ventured to the moon... here we saw the pyramid, it looked so very strange”, to the accompaniment of a futuristic sound-scape generated by the Moog synthesiser.

  

Meanwhile, American Director Stanley Kubrick, having also been inspired by ‘The Sentinel’, was filming a version which eventually bore the title 2001: A Space Odyssey on its release in 1968. Clarke was involved in the screenplay, incorporating elements of several of his other short stories, and re-wrote his original concept into a novelisation to accompany the film; in both, the pyramid had now become an enigmatic monolith. The project even incorporated designs and drawings first used in the Soviet propaganda sci-fi film Nebo Zovyot [The Sky Calls]. While 2001 was widely acclaimed for its ambitious scope, special effects and striking imagery, Kubrick rejected the score commissioned and composed by Alex North in favour of stirring classical music, notably the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ by Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.

After the 1969 moon landing, before the Space Age gradually faded from the wider public consciousness, there was another spate of space-themed hit singles (alongside numerous failed attempts to cash in on the space-craze), including the apocalyptic imagery of Zager and Evans’ American number 1 ‘In the Year 2525.’ The most successful, critically and commercially, of these opportunistic efforts was undoubtedly David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. The tale of Major Tom’s doomed excursion to the stars, released only days before the Apollo landing, accompanied by exotic mellotron and stylophone instrumentation, remains perhaps the pinnacle of space-themed popular music, coinciding perfectly with man’s last ‘giant leap.’

Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.6 The Origins of Interzone

Interzone: “a New Worlds for the 1980s”

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.

Alan Dorey has also written a far more comprehensive feature on his own involvement with the Leeds group.

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

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

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

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