Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.7 Interzone Today and Tomorrow

Following on from our previous post on the origins of Interzone, Andy Hedgecock, current co-editor, kindly agreed to be interviewed, and to share his thoughts on the past, present, and of course future of the magazine:

How aware are you of the origins of Interzone?

I’m reasonably aware of the magazine’s history, but I make no claim to academic rigour in respect of this. I’m not an obsessive sf historian!

There’s a fine line between being a raconteur or a bore, but I’d like to risk relating my personal history in relation to David Pringle’s Interzone, in particular my initial collision with the magazine in WH Smith in Southampton. It was late 1982, I think, and I was working down there as a researcher for a management consultancy, doing work I found morally dubious and making myself thoroughly miserable. This was a really bad time for me: I didn’t have the insight or sense of direction to change jobs; I wasn’t enamoured with a socio-political landscape in which greed, careerism and self-interest flourished; and the post-punk cultural scene was predictable, unchallenging and trammelled by a fashionable obsession with gloss and surface. It may sound familiar to younger people in 2014.

Anyway, at some stage of my visit to the South Coast I slipped out of the late lamented Polygon Hotel (known locally as the dead parrot for obvious reasons) and treated myself to a copy of this new magazine. I’ve probably projected my own needs and views onto Interzone, but it became a little beacon of hope for me – along with the new Channel 4, the anarchist newspaper Freedom, the radical writers working in Glasgow (including Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) and, of course, Michael Moorcock, whose cultural criticism and fiction stood in opposition to the ghastliness of the early 1980s. And I’m grateful to David Pringle for his role in that.     

I became a regular but non-subscribing reader in the early years. I’ve just been scrabbling about on the top shelf on a very tall bookcase looking for copies from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I nearly broke my neck, but I forgive you as it’s provided some interesting moments of nostalgia. The work that attracted me to early Pringle-era Interzone was Angela Carter, Pamela Zoline, John Sladek, Rachel Pollack, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard, Barrington Bayley, Keith Roberts, Thomas Disch, M John Harrison and, of course, Michael Moorcock. Many of those writers, as I’m sure you’ll have noticed, were associated with New Worlds and I think I saw Interzone as continuing in the risk-taking tradition of Moorcock’s magazine. Having said that, it also introduced me to writers whose work was new to me – Geoff Ryman, John Crowley, John Shirley, and Kim Newman, Colin Greenland, Greg Egan, Cherry Wilder, William Gibson, Beil Ferguson, John Gribbin, Gary Kilworth and Bruce Sterling. 

As the years passed Interzone became a bit too hard sf for my own tastes, but I kept in touch with it as an occasional reader and still enjoyed much of what I read. In terms of history, I know David Pringle was supported by a group that included John Clute, Colin Greenland (a massively talented writer and critic who I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing for the Andy Cox-era Interzone) and Alan Dorey, a writer and broadcaster who does a cracking music programme called The Musical Box, for Forest FM in Dorset. Well worth catching online.     

Do you see yourself as continuing in the tradition of David Pringle and previous editors?

I can’t answer for Andy Cox of other members of the editorial group but I certainly see a degree of continuity with the David Pringle era. David Pringle took the name from a risk-taking and experimental collection of stories by William Burroughs and it reflects very well the cutting edge and eclectic nature of his magazine. Andy Cox’s roots as a publisher and editor are in the slipstream magazine The Third Alternative, which published sf, fantasy horror and slipstream stories. TTA Press’ successor to The Third Alternative  focuses exclusively on horror, crime stories are published in Crimewave and the sf, fantasy, surreal, weird and otherwise idiosyncratic genre fiction we publish finds its way into Interzone. It’s still eclectic and we still like to take risks. Like David, Andy sets high literary standards for the stories we include. We continue encourage a degree of stylistic experiment and we’re interested in behaviour in extreme situations, diverse psychologies and liminal experiences. Like David Pringle we look for stories that offer new mythologies to enable us to make sense of our experiences and thoughts. If there is a disconnect between the late-Pringle era and the Cox-era it may be that the latter is a little less focused on scientific and technological development, but I wouldn’t like to have to defend that under rigorous academic examination!

The first two editions of Interzone, 1982.

What do you consider your greatest achievement in your time at the magazine?

If I may I’ll choose something from a personal perspective that’s about opportunities I’ve been given. In terms of achievement I’d rather identify something on behalf of the editorial collective.   

There are two things I’m really delighted to have been able to do. One is to have been able to take part in interviews with writers such as Ken McLeod, Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett, John Shirley and Susanna Clarke. The other, and the more important, has been to help find really impressive work by new and developing writers, some of whom had gone on to establish formidable reputations. And I think that brings us onto the greatest achievement element.  We’ve passed a number of important milestones: 10 years of the TTA Press ‘flavour’ of Interzone under Andy Cox’s stewardship; we’ve contributed to Interzone being published for more than 30 years; only around a dozen Nebula award-winning stories were published in magazines and one of those is a story we selected, Eugie Foster’s 'Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast'; we’re the current holder of the British Fantasy Society award for Best Magazine / Periodical; and we’re nominated (again) for a Hugo Award in the Best Semiprozine category. All of which is very encouraging, it’s nice to receive recognition, but I think the thing I’m most proud of is helping Andy Cox set very exacting standards in terms of literary worth, originality and storytelling energy when we select tales for Interzone. We have a good record in terms of Interzone stories being selected for prestigious anthologies, which is far more important than winning awards and celebrating our longevity.  Most of the time Andy and I converge very quickly on what’s promising but not quite right for us, what’s brilliant, what’s bad and what’s simply baffling. It’s a painful process at times – particularly when I get an email-based poke in the ribs for exhibiting spectacularly poor taste. Over the past 10 years we’ve worked with some absolutely brilliant writers – Nina Allan, Neil Williamson, Jason Sanford, Aliette de Bodard, Georgina Bruce, Suzanne Palmer… That list, off the top of my head, reflects something that isn’t our achievement but it is something we should celebrate. Over the past decade we’ve seen an increasing number of stories by women writers in the mag.  

Do you think that science fiction has become more ‘mainstream’ in popular culture over the three decades since Interzone was founded?

I think it’s roughly as mainstream as it was in the early 1980s. There have been some notable entries into genre storytelling by writers very much associated with literary fiction, for example Jane Roger’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But hasn’t there always been this traffic across the sf&f vs ‘litfic’ border? Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Virginia Wolfe, Don Delillo, Richard Brautigan, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain …? I suppose we could point to Haruki Murakami, Will Self and George Saunders as writers who take a hatchet to genre boundaries by mixing sf, fantasy, crime and absurd realism throughout their work. But even that isn’t something that’s developed in the past 30 years.  But all three of those writers draw on the work of Pynchon and Vonnegut, with the same cavalier approach to literary and genre tropes and techniques whose careers took off in the 1960s. 

The concerns of genre and mainstream writers have changed over the years – I’d argue more attention is paid to issues of environmental sustainability, and debt seems to be a more frequently recurring motif. We receive a lot of stories dealing with survival in extremis, the misuse of power and control and shifts of identity.  But these are perennial themes in sf and fantasy. 

I think the literary mainstream and inventive genres revivify each other by trading structures, tools, techniques and obsessions. But I believe that has always been the case.

Interzone 221; artwork by Adam Tredowski

How do you see the future of Interzone and more widely, (science fiction) publishing?

Blimey. Isn’t it interesting how sf editors fall apart and become mumbling wrecks when you ask them about the future? I don’t think we operate in a prophetic way: we celebrate the wondrous and astonishing in storytelling and marvel at the creative way writers and artists invent, remix and repurpose ideas and symbols. If we get hung up on making predictions Interzone might become predictable. It’s not our role to predict the next big thing, just to recognise it when it ambles to the door of TTA Towers.    

There is however one area in which a spot of crystal gazing is essential. Magazine production isn’t cheap and distribution is really, really expensive, particularly if you have an international readership and particularly if there is a lot of fluctuation between currencies. So the online publishing option has its attractions. Having said that, a lot of readers enjoy Interzone as an object (with, we hope, stunning artwork and colour) that drops through their post box every two months. I’m part of the generation for whom the graphic interface version of internet arrived in their thirties and I still prefer to read from paper. I think there will be a need for print publication for the foreseeable future, but the e-version of the mag will become increasingly important. Sustainability and cost will both become increasingly important issues I suspect. The big problem is whether people will pay for online literature – I suspect the shift to e-publishing will exacerbate the crisis relating to paying creative people for cultural output. People seem increasingly reluctant to pay. This is reflected, for example, by the fact that increasing numbers of writers and editors have ‘day jobs’ that subsidise the work they love doing. This is a problem for publishing in general rather than sf publishing. 

In terms of the genre, we may see another swing of the pendulum back to technology and science as a focus for sf; there may be more intense exploration of psychological inner space; we may see more satirical sf. We may plunge into a period of deep pessimism with stories that undermine the notion of progress, or we may experience a wave of high energy optimism focusing on growth, development, possibility and problem solving. I don’t know. The message to our contributors and potential contributors is – as always – surprise us.

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.

Subversive Urbanism

I came across this blog at a film showing of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Or rather, I came across the blog's author, Phil Wood. Funnily enough, I'd seen him give a presentation more than a year before at a Leeds Psychogeographers event, otherwise known as urban walking. The title of his Tumblr site, Subversive Urbanism, reflects his interest in this field, and surveys some of the lesser known architectural sites across Europe, Asia, Latin America; as he notes in the introduction, 'most of us actually live in places that you’ve probably never heard of'. The images Phil posts are striking, often haunting and utterly science-fictional, particularly those from former Soviet countries. This example (see below) is a Yugoslav war memorial, an enigmatic concrete structure, upturned to the sky like an alien bloom or an extraterrestrial transmitter.

Stone Flower, a monument to the victims of Jasenovac

Little wonder, then, that I should see him at a Tarkovsky film. Stalker itself is a meditation on inner and outer space, with most of the action taking place in the mysterious Zone, a site fabled to have the power to grant peoples' deepest desires. Phil has visited many of the places where films like this were shot; let's hope his travels through urban space will continue to generate memorable images and insights into architectural and urban endeavours all over the world.

The Political Unconscious: Kadare's Palace of Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structures of Soviet Science Fiction (I)

“... an avant-gardist long after the days of the avant-garde who dreams the dream of the avant-garde one last time in the seclusion of his own room.”

Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov: The man who flew into space from his apartment (London: Afterall, 2006)

The Strange City is the title of a current exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, by Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov and his wife, Emilia. It takes the form of a journey through the ‘strange city’, comprising related installations which variously suggest notions of dream, the labyrinth, time-and-space, utopia; reviewing the exhibition, Matilda Bathurst found it “haunted by whispers of J.G. Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges.” The Kabakovs’ previous exhibits in the UK include pieces for Star City: The Future Under Communism (2010) at Nottingham Contemporary, and a recent installation, ‘The Happiest Man’ in London, at the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3 gallery (2013). Critic Boris Groys traces the connections in the Kabakovs’ work between Soviet revolutionary propaganda and the subsequent ‘space heroism’ of Yuri Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts, summarising that:

“The official Soviet cult of space exploration... [was] a blatant misuse of the cosmic utopia of unlimited free movement... [with] an ideological excess of parades, rituals and ceremonies... the Communist project was originally a global, cosmic project.”

Image from The Strange City, 2014

The Kabakovs consciously reference a tradition in Russian philosophical and scientific thought expounded by Nikolai Fedorov (1828/29-1903), author of Philosophy of the Common Task, rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and ‘Cosmist’ Aleksandr Chizhevsky (1897-1964), whose overlapping theories of cosmic conquest, resurrection, space travel and the perfectibility of man were adapted, sometimes uncomfortably, to fit an early-Soviet Utopian vision. Philosophy of the Common Task, posthumously published by friends and followers of Fedorov, was a key text in this respect, roughly summarised by its translator Elisabeth Koutaissoff as a  “utopian vision of universal human kinship”, where man’s great ‘task’, or duty, is “to regulate the forces of nature, to defeat death and bring ancestors back to life.” The fusion of belief in science and technology to improve mankind with mystical, even occult, ideas was not outlandish in pre-Revolutionary Russia; the two were compatible and these historical precedents of ‘scientific mysticism’ were carried forward into early Communist thinking, and informed the art and theory of Constructivism.

This latest exhibition makes those links explicit, as the visitor is guided around the large-scale installations which make up The Strange City, variously titled ‘The Empty Museum’ or ‘The Centre of Cosmic Energy’, where the work of Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) on the Noosphere[1] – itself an extension of Fedorov's belief in humanity’s ability to shape “the course of evolution and the fate of the planet” – and the grand Soviet Utopian projects such as Tatlin’s Tower are juxtaposed with fragments of propaganda posters, praising “the courage, labour, and reason of the Soviet people!”. The grim reality of that illusory dream of earthly paradise and cosmic unity, evidenced by famine, the GULag, the purges and decades of totalitarian rule, are unspoken, but undeniably present. This is another strand in what curator Robert Storr calls “Kabakov’s project of recreating the jerry-rigged workers’ paradise... [recalling] barely remembered nightmares.”



Model of Tatlin's Tower, 1919

A visit to Moscow’s Space Museum, explored in Part Two, reinforces the disjuncture between the Utopian vision and the Soviet reality, and provides another example of “the collapse of socialist dreams.”

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[1] Wikipedia: the “sphere of human thought”... “the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).”

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

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

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds



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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Star Gazing and the Inevitability of Full Space Communism

Part One

Russian revolutionary interest in science fiction was inevitably bound up with the trajectory of the Russian revolution itself. The veteran Bolshevik and intermittent opponent of Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov, wrote a pioneering novel on space travel in 1908, in the aftermath of the famously incomplete revolutionary upheavals of 1905. Red Star relates the story of a Russian revolutionary who travels to Mars with an alien agent to learn about how the Martians organise their society along communist lines. In 1924, the movie Aelita, Queen of Mars flipped the script, relating the tale of a Russian Civil War veteran and an astronomer who travel to Mars to aid a revolutionary uprising. Clearly, much had happened in Russia to change the parameters of how science fiction might be imagined in the preceding years. Russians were no longer apprentices but masters and teachers of the revolutionary act. Nevertheless, both Red Star and Aelita emerged at moments in Russian history when revolutionary enthusiasm and optimism were on the wane. Was this a case of red-tinted telescopes turning away from the reality of reaction on terra firma and up to the stars, where a more comforting reality might be imagined?

Poster for Aelita in Russian (1924)

Aelita, Queen of Mars is particularly notable for Aleksandra Ekster’s striking constructivist set design. By the early 1920s, a combination of industrial devastation and political pressure had left constructivism somewhat marginalised in Soviet society. In the face of increasing state control of politics and culture, and the reversal of ‘war communism’, signalled by the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy), the utopian impulse that had envisioned the categories of art and architecture dissolving themselves and becoming part of everyday socialist life was in decline. By the time of the release of Aelita, the dystopian science fiction novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin had been banned, while Bogdanov had been arrested by the GPU (although he was released after 5 weeks). The cinematic achievement of Aelita, Queen of Mars was illustrative of the Soviet Union’s continued cultural vibrancy, and the inspirational impact of constructivism on Soviet film, but it also indicated the way in which constructivism was being shunted to the side-lines. Other big names of constructivism, including Aleksandr Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, would become involved in film poster and set design in the 1920s as opportunities for Soviet construction dried up.

Aelita, Queen of Mars also shows how, in the context of gerrymandered soviet elections, secret police crack-downs and the failure of the German revolution, communists had to look to the stars to imagine the realisation of their utopia. A similar impulse can be detected in Alexandra Kollontai’s hopeful yet escapist utopian fragment, Soon.

The Soviet sci-fi vision would become more influenced by dystopian imaginings of the horrors of chemical warfare in the following years. Whether the post-war ‘return to the future’ in the context of the space race represented a re-emergence of political sci-fi utopianism will be the subject of Part Two.