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.

Interconnections: From William Burroughs to Steely Dan to William Gibson (Part Two)

Two

Burroughs had his own career as a recording artist, releasing a series of spoken-word albums; his first official LP, in 1965, produced at and issued by the English Bookshop in Paris (42, rue de Seine on the Left Bank), was Call Me Burroughs. The Beatles apparently all had copies of the record, as well as art dealer Robert Fraser and members of the Rolling Stones. He also experimented with tape ‘cut-ups’ in much the same way as his writing – the recordings he made with Ian Sommerville in London were eventually released as Break through in Grey Room in 1986. 1990 saw the acclaimed release of Dead City Radio, an album which served as a musical vehicle for Burroughs’ spoken words; the following year, the film version of Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, helped to consolidate his relevance to a new generation. Throughout his career, he regarded collaboration as an essential part of the creative process; he later worked with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Tom Waits and also, appropriately, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. Sonic Youth paid overt homage in a series of albums, and were among those to visit Burroughs at his home in Lawrence, Kansas (in 1993). 

An American writer based in Canada, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer popularised the science fiction ‘Cyberpunk’ sub-genre [1], marked by a fascination with technology. Gibson has confessed that “I had to teach myself not to write too much like Burroughs”, though his own work remains highly acclaimed and influential. His novels are also known for their frequent allusions to Steely Dan, a band whose name was itself taken from Naked Lunch. While suggesting the use of the name shouldn’t be taken too literally, Donald Fagen conceded that “we have certainly picked up on some of his world view. I admire Burroughs a lot.” 

Gibson has described Steely Dan’s music as “among the most genuinely subversive oeuvres in late 20th-century pop”. Direct references to their songs in his work include Barrytown (a location), The Gentleman Loser (a bar), Here at the Western World (another bar), and Klaus and the Rooster (characters). Steely Dan, formed in New York, were ostensibly a conventional seventies soft-rock act. They were nonetheless labelled “the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies” by Rolling Stone magazine – possibly owing to the sometimes sinister effect of their cryptic, often obscure lyrics hidden within smooth jazz-rock arrangements, suggesting subversive intent; according to Danny Weizmann (in Too Cool), they “pushed the most potent lyric pills since mid-Dyl[an].” 

Gibson is an outwardly conventional figure in appearance (as Burroughs was); he is an innovator in terms of ideas, if not language. The last twenty years particularly have seen him moving beyond traditional sci-fi in a series of novels exploring what happens to humanity in an increasingly technologically-dominated society, tackling the nature of ‘virtual reality’ and the role of the Internet in shaping the modern world, addressing the insidious nature of corporate advertising and branding. Gibson investigates the implications for the very near future, in effect commenting on contemporary life; in this respect he shares an affinity with English author J.G. Ballard, another admirer of Burroughs, who also moved beyond the conventions of science fiction. Gibson’s work has been characterised by critic John Clute as “SF for the new century.” Whilst the Steely Dan references have lessened in recent years, he still titled his 1999 novel All Tomorrow’s Parties, a nod to Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and their counter-cultural legacy. That book also featured a mysterious character known as the ‘Tao man’, who Gibson has explained as “some sort of avatar connected to the late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of Burroughsness.”

However, there is always a flip-side to these rich interconnections: Billy Idol paid a dubious homage to Gibson with his 1993 Cyberpunk album, featuring a track entitled ‘Neuromancer’; an enterprise mildly described by Gibson as “very silly.” Also preferably ignored are the subsequent adoption of Deacon Blues (a dire 1980s band appropriating a Steely Dan song title), and The Wild Boys (another Burroughs title and, extending the connection, dismal Duran Duran hit; a group whose own name derived from the 1968 science fiction film Barbarella). In his later years, all manner of unlikely musicians, without any obvious connection to him or signs of influence, began to see a Burroughs photo-opportunity as an ideal means of establishing their own counter-cultural credentials – chief among them Sting and the ubiquitous Bono. While the music of Steely Dan and the novels of William Gibson have a devoted following, they are essentially cult interests. Despite the avant-garde origins and often challenging nature of his work, it is Burroughs who has permeated popular culture, for better or worse.

The influences and the influenced: Call Me Burroughs (Original Cover Design: Tientje Louw, Cover Photo: Harriet Crowther); Neuromancer (Front Cover Illustration by Steve Crisp); Cyberpunk (Cover Art by Mark Frauenfelder)

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[1] OED definition: A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology; it has been said that “without Naked Lunch there would probably be no cyberpunk” (Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, 1991)