Science Fiction in 1966 – UK: New Worlds and J.G. Ballard

Introduction

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.

Ambit #29, Autumn 1966

Museums of the Future

Museums make fairly frequent appearances in SF novels, as discussed in the 2012 post, 'The Museum in Science Fiction'. Often, the encounter with the museum in SF is a metaphor for the past (former societies, wars, lost civilisations etc.) and a counterpoint to the future or parallel world of the story. This association is perhaps related to the management of time such institutions are implicated in. Debates in the museum profession are revealing of a similar impulse but from the perspective of the future as well as the past. However, beyond the perennial concern about the future of museums, there seems to have been an intensification of future-gazing type surveys and opinion pieces during the last few years, in a distinctly science fictional vein. The influence of scientific and technological developments, particularly involving the Internet, is clearly part of the reason for this trend. Therefore, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of commentaries on what the 'future museum' might look like.

One of the most interesting things I noticed was that the word 'platform' came up a number of times. This term is increasingly associated with digital media platforms but used in different ways here in relation to museums. For example, in a Tate blog post, Chris Dercon (Director, Tate Modern, London) draws attention to the ever expanding space of the museum, both physical and virtual, writing that 'it is becoming a unique platform for human encounters'. Several contributors to a Museum ID piece also make the connection between the museum and social technologies; Peter Gorgels, (Internet Manager, Rijksmuseum) says: 'Modern museum visitors want to follow their own interests and form their own opinions. The museum of the future will therefore function more as a "meaning platform" where users are inspired to chart their own course and to become, as it were, designers and artists themselves. The digital domain has a logical role to play in this development'.

Others emphasised the social over the technological aspects of the platform model; Clare Brown (Program Head, Master of Arts in Exhibition Design, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University) commented that exhibit designers are becoming inspired to 'consider exhibitions as nimble platforms for information exchange and social engagement' and Andrew McClellan echoes these thoughts in the Frieze article, 'What is the future of the museum?' He also points out, 'museums can be palliative as well as acting as platforms for global dialogue, and will thrive to the extent they successfully manage their dual identities as zones of engagement and escape'. Finally, in response to the Guardian's question, What should our museums look like in 2020?, Robert Hewison stressed the need for museums to be flexible, suggesting, 'they are meeting places for people and ideas. Their future depends on remaining a dynamic part of the public realm'.

It's difficult to tell how far these ideas constitute prophecies about the museum of the future. Nevertheless, it's a useful insight into the history of the present and the way in which digital technologies are having a growing impact on how people conceptualise their interactions with culture and each other. And if museums in the future do end up becoming increasingly digital, let's just hope the oft-predicted digital dark age doesn't catch up with them...

Thanks to Bethany Rex for the links and for drawing my attention to this topic.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: A Brief Survey of the Seventies

I. Following on from the 1960s, with its space race themes and craze for all that was cosmic and mind-expanding, both David Bowie and Pink Floyd carried their pioneering work into the next decade, to great acclaim. The 1970s also saw the totalitarian state-surveillance vision of George Orwell’s 1949 novel of the nightmare near future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, provide a topical musical theme for a number of artists.

In any discussion of science fiction-related popular music of the 1970s, David Bowie looms large; on the fringes of the ‘Sixties Scene’, it was 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’ which first brought him widespread attention. That song proved to be the first of several successful forays into the field of science fiction – notably Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, as an album and concept (but not a Concept Album) – encompassing themes which run through the decade. Prime examples include his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, an acting role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, his incarnation as Aladdin Sane and the dystopian Diamond Dogs album. The latter grew from Bowie’s original intention to produce a theatrical version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was stymied when the author’s estate refused to grant permission; the songs ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ were incorporated as part of the album. Whilst his musical and thematic content evolved over the decade, echoes of this interest in science fiction surfaced in the later, experimental albums Low (whose cover is a still of Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth and which contains material originally composed for the film’s soundtrack) and 1978’s ‘Heroes’ – specifically in lyrics to songs such as ‘Sons of the Silent Age.’ Bowie even revisited ‘Space Oddity’ and the saga of Major Tom at the dawn of the 1980s, in ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ complete with its ground-breaking promotional video.


Pink Floyd had emerged as a major attraction of London’s UFO Club with their live performances in the late 1960s and, as befitted the times, their early albums showcased a cosmic preoccupation in titles such as ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ A Saucerful of Secrets and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ alongside the fairy-tale whimsy of wayward song-writer Syd Barrett. After Barrett’s untimely departure from the group, their albums became arguably more serious, and indeed better-selling, tracing a trajectory to perhaps their signature work, 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, credited with transforming Pink Floyd “from ambitious art-house hipsters to international superstars, while influencing virtually every rock band of the past forty years.” Differing theories have been attached to the iconic prism cover art, and the various poster and sticker inserts contained within the album’s gatefold sleeve; however its designer Storm Thorgerson stated simply that “it related mostly to a light show. They hadn’t really celebrated their light show.”


UFO Club Poster featuring Pink Floyd, 1967; The Dark Side of the Moon album cover, 1973

Before and after Bowie’s abortive stage musical, Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved to exert a persistent influence on musicians. The omnipresent “plexi-plastic eyeballs of your special friends” in the California-based band Spirit’s somewhat hazy 1970 homage to Orwell, ‘1984’ crudely conveys the notion of police-state surveillance with the ominous reminder that “you’re never out of their sight.” It was a fruitful theme for well-established artists in the following years; Stevie Wonder included ‘Big Brother’ on his 1972 album Talking Book, which opens “your name is Big Brother; you say that you're watching me on the telly.” Himself being watched by the FBI, John Lennon’s 1973 song ‘Only People’ features the line “we don’t want no Big Brother scene...” The Jam and the Dead Kennedys both incorporated allusions to Nineteen Eighty-Four into their own ‘protest songs’ of the later 1970s. The references have only proliferated in the decades since; despite the passing of the date itself, bands have continued to draw musical inspiration from the novel.

Mysterious Star Discovered in our Solar System

The recent hype over galaxies far, far away in the wake of the new Star Wars film reminded me of this story from back in October. Scientists announced the discovery of a mysterious star in the Milky Way amid a swirling constellation of objects that could be a swarm of alien megastructures. Catchily dubbed KIC 8462852, it has also been called Tabby’s Star after Tabetha Boyajian, one of the researchers who discovered it.

The Kepler Space Telescope first picked up the star in 2009 and the swirling mass was initially thought to be bad data movement. However, over time, it became clearer that a cluster of objects was orbiting KIC 8462852, because of the light pattern emitted by it. In fact, further investigation of the star was partly thanks to several citizen scientists on the Planet Hunters project, who flagged up its strange and interesting formation. Boyajian and her colleagues published a paper on KIC 8462852 that models natural scenarios to try and explain this, for example a giant ring system or fragments due to the break-up of a large comet. Yet other hypotheses remain, one being that it is a set of alien megastructures for harvesting light from the star. Of course, such theories are part of the reason KIC 8462852 attracted so much press attention. Nevertheless, significant funding goes into maintaining the search for alien life. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has focused on looking for potential intelligent signals for over half a century, and astronomer Jason Wright was quoted as saying that KIC 8462852 is ‘the best SETI target I've ever seen or heard of’. Wright is publishing a paper with an alternative interpretation of the star’s light pattern, which also considers how to distinguish possible artificial megastructures from other anomalous objects. The paper is available to view here.

KIC 8462852

The news of KIC 8462852 coincided with a similarly exciting October event I attended, Andrew Rushby’s talk, ‘Exoplanets and the Apocalypse’, as part of the Café Scientifique public lecture series. Rushby, who is set to take up a post at NASA in 2016, gave an overview of his research on exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars beyond our solar system. His research investigated Earth-like (or habitable) exoplanets and their lifespans, in order to model what might happen when the world ends (about 22 billion years from now). One of the most interesting asides to the talk was about the possibility that some of these Earth-like planets might support life as we know it, i.e. carbon-based life. Rushby suggested that the development of an instrument sensitive enough to reliably analyse planets’ atmospheres could lead to the detection of chemicals such as cfcs. This would constitute evidence of artificially generated gases and hence intelligent, industrialised life. Personally, I find the idea of aliens burning non-renewable energy sources a bit disheartening; on the other hand, the thought of a giant light harvester perhaps offers a glimmer of extra-terrestrial hope.

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.8 Early Films of Leeds

This post was influenced more by technologies than events of futures past, after watching an early film of Leeds bridge and the city centre around the turn of the century. These sorts of films, showing local people and places, were often commissioned by companies in the working class entertainment industry, to be screened in music halls, fairgrounds and public halls - either on their own or as part of a programme of other entertainment.

One such film, Leeds Street Scenes, is featured on the Yorkshire Film Archive’s website. It is made up of portions from three different films: Street Scenes near Bridge (1903); Street Scene in Boar Lane (Leeds) (1898); and Leeds - Views From Moving Tram (1903). The third of these has been identified with the Riley Brothers, a Bradford based manufacturing firm, who also produced some of the lanterns and slides in the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine's collection (University of Leeds). Optical lanterns were the topic of a former SF Forward post from 2013, in which the magical effects of this early technology were discussed.

Views From Moving Tram is a ‘phantom ride’ film, which begins on Boar Lane, so called because the position of the camera on the front of a moving vehicle meant that the movement appeared to come from an invisible force. Patrick Keiller notes that this type of film doesn't direct the viewer’s attention to any particular part of the scene, in the way that more recent films usually do, and featured Views From Moving Tram in his own moving image project, City of the Future (2007). Compiled from about 60 films made between 1896 and 1903, it has been described as a ‘virtual landscape’ and is arranged both spatially, on a hierarchy of maps, and as a silent narrative, so viewers can switch between the two.

The idea of the city of the future brings me to the SF connection in the film, in the way it sheds light on the development of the modern city, and the use of cinema in capturing the future as it seemed to be unfolding at the turn of the century. From the other end of time, it opens a window onto the past and evokes the perennial SF theme of time travel. Is it a coincidence that The Time Machine and numerous other time travelling stories flourished around this time (see, e.g., Leeds Beatified)? Certainly, there was something about the dawn of the 1900s that must have inspired these imaginative temporal reflections and speculations. Watching Leeds Street Scenes, and its journey through the city, is an immersive experience and draws attention to the sense in which cinema is also a time machine, in its intermingling of forward moving and backward looking momentum.

Still from Leeds Street Scenes, Yorkshire Film Archive

Blake's 7 Fanzines

A long time ago (2012) in a library far, far away, this blog delved into the SF history of the University of Leeds architecture, debunking rumours that buildings such as the Roger Stevens had been used as locations for classic dystopian films like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Another SF series sometimes associated with the Leeds campus is Blake's 7, although it was in fact Leeds Beckett University where part of the programme was filmed, featuring in the 'Children of Auron' episode from 1980.

Now, following on from last year's announcement about the University of Iowa Libraries' project to digitise 10,000 SF zines, Blake's 7 is back in our orbit with a recent post on the Hevelin Collection's tumblr revealing more about the fanzines and the fan wars connected to the British TV show. The Blake's 7 Wars were a series of disputes in the 1980s between fans and some of the creators and actors over for-profit US conventions, which, fans feared, would restrict and compete with fan-run events.

In keeping with this fanlore was the tone of the zines themselves. The inside cover of the first issue of The Forbidden Zone, seen here, testifies to the themes of resistance and struggle with which the character Blake was identified, reading: 'Forbidden Zone Issue One is dedicated to the liberation of fantasies and resistance to those who would suppress our dreams'. More details of the fan wars and the Hevelin collection can be found here.