The Reader Speaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insensible May issue

Attractive November issue

Soviet Dystopia: We

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

First Edition, 1924

Various copies, including some from University of Leeds Library

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

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

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

The Guardian's Art from Mars

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Texas A&M/Cornell

This beautiful feature from the Guardian represents the best pictures sent back from NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity, over a decade spent photographing Mars.

From dazzling dunes to vast craters to space blueberries, these amazing shots are full of imaginative possibilities and offer a glimpse of life on the Red Planet.

Asimov's 2014 World Fair

What better way to start 2014 than with Isaac Asimov's 1964 New York Times article, 'Visit to the World's Fair of 2014', a speculative glimpse 50 years into the future, published on the occasion of New York City's hosting of the World's Fair. In it, Asimov imagines a world which sounds very much like our own:

“The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages.”

“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.”

“Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.”

Even those domestic issues close to home do not escape scrutiny:

“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotope batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.”

Mindful of the threat of nuclear war that overshadowed the Cold War years, Asimov writes, “if a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So [...] let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future”, a sentiment that perfectly embodies the spirit of SF literature and seems an apt way to see in the New Year.

Mechanical Muses: The Legacy of Automata in SF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shock of the Numan: Electric Music to Freak your ‘Friends’

It is safe to say that Gary Numan (solo, or with his Tubeway Army) was never a critical favourite, but perhaps the time has come to recognise his contribution to a particular strand of dystopian science fiction and musical innovation. As a pioneer of popular synthesiser music, he brought both content and medium from the margins and the avant-garde to Top of the Pops. The mechanised sound and image was undoubtedly refined from Kraftwerk and David Bowie’s earlier templates, but his lyrics, at least up to 1980’s Telekon, are imbued with the bleak futurism of his literary heroes. The defining album Replicas, released in 1979 at the height of both Numan’s creative powers and popularity, is based on “a series of short stories... concerned with London in a few decades time”, distilled into a set of three/four-minute pop songs. This is his explanation of one of the central themes, and specifically those of his first number one single, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’:

Machines were made with cloned human skin, making them almost identical to humans. These were called 'Friends' and carried out a wide range of services from police officers to prostitutes. The only difference was the eye, they had a horizontal black bar as the pupil, rather like a sheep.

By his own admission, Numan was consciously echoing concepts expressed in the work of Philip K. Dick, primarily his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – probing the nature of reality, the essence of humanity and the notion of the simulacrum. The resultant sound was like nothing on earth, with Gary an alien, android or replicant, constructing a cold, otherworldly persona. Part of the same song/story cycle, ‘Down in the Park’ (“where the machmen meet”) combines sci-fi imagery with the alienated, violent dystopias of Crash and A Clockwork Orange, performed live in all its strangeness. Then there is his rendition of ‘M.E.’, with Numan rising, caged, as if from the subterranean depths of Metropolis, before emerging, cutting a singular figure in his jumpsuit as he intones lyrics of isolation and despair from the perspective of “the last machine left on Earth”. His other number one single, ‘Cars’, remains a prescient vision, which certainly resonates with anyone exposed to the UK’s public transport network on a regular basis, while ‘I Nearly Married A Human’ captures the elusive Numan sense of humour (though in fact he married a fan, one of his devoted Numanoids). ‘Listen to the Sirens’, the opening song on the first Tubeway Army album, references another seminal Philip K. Dick novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, in its introductory line; he is also an avowed admirer of J.G. Ballard, though he never paid homage as overtly as his contemporaries the Normal did with their ‘Warm Leatherette’.

So much for the texts; Numan’s pop-cultural influences extend from the groups who followed the path he charted, such as Depeche Mode, the Human League and Japan, to luminaries of the formative New York hip-hop scene – Afrika Bambaataa commented that he “was so spooky, so spaced out and it sounded like the future of music to me.” Just as Gary himself has acknowledged his debt to various literary inspirations, there is a sci-fi novel featuring a character speaking entirely in Numan lyrics (Sean Williams, Saturn Returns, 2007), and then there were the Sugababes, returning him to the top of the charts by sampling ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’; you can even visit a themed establishment in Wolverhampton, the Numa Bar. In truth, it is easy to mock the man for his love of flying, conservative politics, and especially the unabashed ambition to succeed, which aroused the ire of the late 70s music press – then, as now, he and his music were deeply unfashionable. Fashion is nothing if not fickle, however, and there have been suggestions of a critical re-appraisal. For all the variability of his later output, the early albums (1978-80) stand as his legacy, bridging the worlds of popular music and dystopian literature like no-one before, or since – yesterday’s ridiculed eccentric may yet prove to be tomorrow’s prophet.

More's Utopia: Historically Bound

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

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelsmcott Press)

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

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

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