Science Fiction Theatre: Postcard From Barcelona

The subject of this month’s post was selected based on a temporary move to Spain, and the ‘Postcard from Barcelona’ reference proved impossible to resist! The title is borrowed from episode 30 of the 1950s-60s American science fiction television series, Science Fiction Theatre, a forerunner to programmes like the Twilight Zone, also featured here in a recent post.

Hosted by the film actor and former war correspondent Truman Bradley, each episode would begin with a simple science experiment, related in some way to the theme of the show. The shadow of war loomed large in experiments that would demonstrate the power of electron beams or the destruction of model cities, but this was usually tempered by optimism about the potential scientific advances to be made. For example, the intro to Postcard from Barcelona focuses on the construction of solar powered space stations; Bradley comments, ‘solar power can give man a powerful weapon with which to destroy himself or it can give us scientific opportunities for discoveries that will benefit the world’.

The topic of the episode extrapolates from the idea that these space stations already exist and were built by aliens to collect scientific data about Earth. The mysterious postcards from Barcelona (perhaps a suitably exotic and alien location for 1950s America) are received by the scientist Dr Keller, found dead at the beginning of the story, who is described as ‘the greatest scientist of the age’. It transpires that both Keller’s ‘sub-quantum theory of the universe’ and the compound elements for a numerical wonder drug were posted to the doctor exactly a year before he announced them to the world. The episode ends with a final postcard, sent in the code language of cybernetics, from the life forms to whom Keller owes his discoveries. The mantle then passes to his daughter and two former colleagues to keep the secret of the alien space station orbiting Earth.

While the scientific content in the series was minimal by today’s standards, real-world technologies and scientific problems were often the point of departure for the stories. The wider popularisation of science in this period was influenced by the craze for hobbyist magazines, which would usually also publish SF (described then as scientific fiction). Titles such as Modern Electrics, Electrical Experimenter and Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback in the 1930s, were later followed by a proliferation of anthologies and cheap paperback novels during the post-WWII publishing boom. The ascendency of television in the 1950s explains the emergence of a series like Science Fiction Theatre as part of this trend.

It's not surprising, then, that in the re-imagining of 1950s America in Back to the Future, Science Fiction Theatre features as George McFly’s favourite TV programme...

Covers Without a Cause: SF Cover Illustrations

To complement the surreal selection of 70s SF album covers from earlier this month, I decided to post on SF book covers... with a twist. The titles I’ve chosen are ones where the subject depicted on the front of the book has little, if any, resemblance to the story of the novel. It’s a problem that’s plagued pulp fiction generally but particularly SF; the mass production of cheap books from the 1940s onwards demanded a high turnover of titles, with publishers’ in-house artists usually working to a brief following the established formula of spaceships and aliens. However, the passage of time has given some of these books a certain charm, or at least enough entertainment value to raise a smile.

The three covers featured here are a somewhat piecemeal selection, and the tip of the iceberg in terms of the SF genre but a good starting point that will perhaps spawn a sequel post. Here goes...

1. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H.P. Lovecraft. Highly influential in the SF, fantasy and horror genres, the stories of Lovecraft offer plenty of terrifying visual fodder, or so you might think. The cover design for this Mass Market Paperback edition (1985) of his collected short stories shows an odd, brown scaly creature (not, to my memory, resembling anything in the stories) sitting on top of an unconvincing pile of disembodied heads. Maybe the artist assumed the title was a typo, since the creature’s appearance is definitely more dragon than Dagon.

2. The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax. The first (and only?) novel by the writer and consultant paediatrician, Bax’s experience as a doctor informs this tale of post-apocalyptic societal collapse. The hospital ship of the title sails around picking up casualties of recent wars, a futile undertaking that does little to mitigate the impending global disaster. Clearly, it’s a gloomy theme, and one that could use some help exciting a reader’s attention. So it’s the old sex sells cliché that kicks in for the Pan Books edition (Picador imprint, 1977). Even allowing for the tenuous link to the practice of ‘love therapy’ in the novel, the cover (and the covergirl) are pretty wide of the mark. And if you bought the book for the cover alone, you were bound to be disappointed with the contents.

3. The Caltraps of Time by David I. Masson. The writer and former Curator of the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds) was the subject of a former post, in which you can read more about his life and this, his only published collection of short stories. Suffice to say, these tales of curious features of language and temporality are not well served by the book cover in this New English Library edition (1976). It is, of course, a classic case of ‘safe SF design’ (when in doubt, draw a spaceship). I’m sure it saved many a tortured conversation about how to visually represent time, phonology or linguistics but it doesn’t do justice to the original and inventive themes in the stories.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: 1970s Spaced-out Album Covers

A Journey through Space and Time in 10 Cosmic Album Covers of the 1970s.

A personal, but by no means exhaustive, selection – in chronological order:

From Germany, Tangerine Dream - Alpha Centauri (71)

From Germany, Tangerine Dream - Zeit (72)

From the UK, Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (73)

From Germany, Can - Soon over Babaluma (74)

From the US, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (75)

From Japan, Far East Family Band - Parallel World (76)

 

From the US, Boston [first album] (76)
 

From Canada, Rush - 2112 (76)
 

From the UK, E.L.O. - Out of the Blue (77)
 

From France, Jean-Luc Ponty - Cosmic Messenger (78)

Do Communists Dream of Electric Shepherds?

In spite of much sci-fi being inspired by leftist politics, the influence is not obviously mutual. The utopian visions of the future so common among 19th century socialists have been rolled back by successive generations of dour ‘scientific’ pragmatists who have accommodated the dreams for the future to the demands of the moment. Today, with the far left generally unable to influence the tenor of political life and a technologically driven ecological disaster beckoning, it is perhaps unsurprising that faith in the future and of human beings’ capacity to use technology for the benefit of all is at a low point.

Rallying against this state of affairs, and following on from the accelerationist manifesto, lefty ‘media platform’ Novara Media has begun to take seriously the question of what the future might look like. So far, the group’s weekly video slot, IMOBastani, has proffered two dystopian visions of how capital might reproduce itself in the future (clue: it’d be bad) and one socialistic alternative predicated on the use of automation to largely eliminate the need for alienated labour. This has inspired a self-consciously sci-fi response, reflecting on the post-capitalist universe depicted in Star Trek. As far as I can see, no critique of the Novara perspective from a curmudgeonly ultra-left yet loveably tweedy medievalist perspective has emerged in the month or so since these pieces were published, so here’s one from 1889. In sci-fi, socialism, as in life: nothing changes and nothing stays the same.

The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling

“You’re travelling through another dimension – a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop: the Twilight Zone!”

Late 1950s/early 1960s American television broadcasting remains associated with the celebration of traditional values and the provision of wholesome family entertainment – nothing too daring or threatening which might offend commercial or Establishment interests. Rod Serling, a successful script-writer for radio and television plays, had become frustrated by over-bearing network control and the demands of sponsors, and was in search of his own project. As creator of The Twilight Zone, which initially ran from 1959 to 1964, he achieved that ambition. Within the constraints of the time – and in appearance, he conformed to the clean-cut image of his era – Serling crafted a truly pioneering series of half-hour stand-alone episodes, ranging freely across science fiction and fantasy themes. Many episodes were written or adapted by Serling himself, but he was also able to utilise the talents of authors Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, who constituted an informal writing team, later supplemented by George Clayton Johnson. They were able to draw on a wealth of as yet unfilmed science fiction material – notably short stories – for the scripts; among the well-established authors to make a one-off contribution was Ray Bradbury (‘I sing the body electric’). The show also featured many young actors in the formative stages of their careers who went on to greater fame, including Dennis Hopper, Donald Pleasance, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds, in addition to both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, pre-Star Trek.

By Serling’s own admission, the quality of episodes was variable – some betray the limitations of a demanding shooting schedule, the expectations of a mainstream audience and technical restrictions which are apparent in the effects and often in the sets, but at its best it transcended those constraints. There was considerable ingenuity and originality in episodes such as ‘Five characters in search of an exit’, whose protagonists know neither where, nor who, they are. Not only did this episode echo Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, Six characters in search of an author, it also prefigured the plot of the 1997 film Cube. Investigations on the nature of reality were a frequent topic, memorably tackled in ‘A World of Difference’, whose central character finds he is living in a script – or else the script has become his life. ‘Person or persons unknown’ has parallels with Philip K. Dick’s later novel, Flow my tears, the policeman said, in its depiction of an alternate reality where the central character awakes in familiar surroundings, only to find that no-one recognises him. The Twilight Zone reflects Serling’s personal belief in science fiction as a vehicle to explore contemporary issues, with recurring representations of Cold War anxieties and meditations on the widespread fear of imminent nuclear attack and the aftermath of disaster, in episodes such as ‘Time enough at last’ and ‘The shelter’. As an avowed liberal, Serling used other episodes to promote civil rights and attack the lingering anti-Communist paranoia in the wake of Senator McCarthy’s ‘witch-hunt’ and the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led directly to the blacklisting and exile from Hollywood of actors, directors and writers, for their supposed support for the Soviet Union and Communism.

The series’ distinctive title music was initially provided by Bernard Herrmann, a composer who had scored Orson Welles’s acclaimed Citizen Kane as well as being a regular collaborator with director Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo). Herrmann was already familiar with science fiction themes (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth), and later provided soundtracks for several of Ray Harryhausen’s films (including Jason and the Argonauts, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad). In his article, ‘Music in the Twilight Zone’, James Wierzbicki states that Herrmann’s atmospheric music “played a significant role in literally selling The Twilight Zone to sponsors”; certainly having a composer of such stature would have helped to establish the show’s credentials at the outset. From the second series French avant-garde composer Marius Constant took over theme music duties, and his eerie title became the one most strongly associated with the programme. Much of the show’s incidental music consisted of previously recorded ‘stock cues’ drawn from the CBS library, a far more economical process than commissioning original music throughout; once an initial fee was paid to the composer, subsequent use was royalty-free. Lud Gluskin was in charge of music for all CBS television shows at that period and as such, Wierzbicki notes, “had a substantial influence on music and the role it played in The Twilight Zone”, whilst producer Buck Houghton was responsible for the precise placement of sounds within each episode.

 After the cancellation of The Twilight Zone in 1964, Serling drifted into Hollywood hack-work, producing scripts and screenplays to order, unable to fully recapture his own vision. His name was later associated with Night Gallery, a less successful attempt at a science fiction television series, but with much-reduced creative input from him. By this time, he had become thoroughly frustrated with the limitations of the format, and its ever-present commercial constraints. The major networks still retained significant control over American television in the early 1970s, and the artistic freedom and independence which Serling and others craved remained many years distant. An articulate and highly intelligent man, always prepared to challenge conventions and to innovate, Serling made a conscious decision to “shy away from the year 2500”, being more interested in “what happens Thursday, not in the next century”, aligning him with subsequent visionary writers of the ‘near future’, such as J.G. Ballard and William Gibson. Rod Serling died in 1975, aged only 50, but his legacy lives on – forever synonymous with his name, The Twilight Zone has become ingrained in popular culture, the title itself used as an almost universal shorthand signifying the uncanny or the unknown. He would surely have wanted it this way.

New Project to Digitise 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines from University of Iowa Libraries

Back in 2012, the University of Iowa Libraries announced its acquisition of the James L. 'Rusty' Hevelin Collection of pulps, fanzines, and science fiction books. Hevelin died at the end of 2011 but he was well known, particularly in US science fiction circles, as an avid SF fan, collector and dealer. His founding of Iowa state's Icon and DemiCon SF conventions made the Univeristy's purchase of the collection a fitting one.

The items in the collection attest to Hevelin's years as a fan, during the evolution of SF fandom, and the announcement in October of plans to digitise 10,000 fanzines was motivated by a growing interest in the history of this movement. Fanzines to be digised include titles such as the The Phantagraph published in the 1930s-1940s in New York and the Leeds-produced Futurian War Digest (covered in previous posts Futures Past: SF History in Leeds, P.2 and P.4, an issue of which can also be seen in the SF montage that forms a background to the blog). These were DIY materials produced for a growing SF community and often distributed by hand. They also provided a chance for aspiring SF writers to publish their stories, some of whom, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke to name a few, would go on to become icons of the genre. The University's Curator of Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections, Peter Balestrieri, explained, 'some of the earliest works by these writers can be found in Rusty’s collection of fanzines, along with important writing from all of the major fans who created this new form of popular culture'.

There are plans to record the progress of the project to digitise the fanzines at the Hevelin Collection Tumblr, where updates will be posted.

An Appendix to Structures of Soviet Science Fiction: Visitor to a Museum

Following the previous feature, which touched on the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and its parallels with the ‘zone of exclusion’ created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the 28^th Leeds International Film Festival has screened two Soviet films which can be considered in the same light. Both were written and directed by Konstantin Lopuchansky, who worked as an assistant on Stalker, and both deal with post-apocalyptic environments. Lopuchansky’s screenplay for the first of these, Letters from a Dead Man (1986), was written in collaboration with Soviet authors Vladimir Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. The film depicts the aftermath of nuclear meltdown, a golden-tinted world of ‘perpetual twilight’ where a scholar, holed up in a makeshift shelter, copes with the devastation around him by writing and reciting letters to his son, who is presumed dead.

 

Posters for Letters from a Dead Man and Visitor to a Museum,

from 'The Apocalypse Quartet of Konstantin Lopushansky' at www.fright.com

 

The second, Visitor to a Museum (1989), has even been interpreted as a sequel of sorts to Stalker. Its main character travels through a vividly portrayed nightmarish wasteland (literally – it appears to be one vast rubbish dump) on a journey to visit the Museum of the title, which lies submerged under rising flood waters and can only be reached at low tide. In this blighted landscape, an underclass of mutated humans, known as Degenerates, are confined to reservations, where they persist in primitive forms of worship – their sole prayer is “let us out of here”. The central protagonist is disturbed by their plight and fascinated by their religious customs, later seemingly being adopted by them as a Messiah before continuing on his mission as a form of spiritual quest. The latter part of the film is particularly hallucinatory and harrowing; the ‘hero’ reaches the Museum, only to find that it is nothing more than a bleak island of ruins amidst the toxic sea. These evocations of a decayed civilisation, environmental ruin and social collapse are vividly portrayed throughout – a truly dystopian vision created at the very end of the era of Soviet Communism.