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

II. The Concept Album

The ambitious scope of Rock – as opposed to disposable, chart-friendly Pop – grew in the later sixties from its commercially-driven origins and gradually became the province of Serious Artists, many of whom turned to works inspired by, or adapted, from the rich field of science fiction literature. Accordingly by the early seventies, the album, rather than the single, was firmly established as the ideal vehicle for such explorations. These musicians were often keen to promote the source of their conceptual material, drawing on classic pioneering works by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and the later speculations of Isaac Asimov amongst others, whilst George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remained a staple across musical genres. Thus was born the science fiction Concept Album.

A notable example of literary inspiration is found in Rush’s 2112 – one side of this 1976 album details an anonymous protagonist’s struggle against the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, guardians of a totalitarian regime suppressing individual thought in the interests of a “Brotherhood of Man” with the aid of their “great computers.” Located in “the bleakness of Megadon,” one of the planets of the Solar Federation, this epic is by the band’s own admission indebted to Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, and continues to excite debate about its true meaning.

Of the direct adaptations and interpretations of science fiction works, Rick Wakeman’s undertaking of a musical rendering of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; was one of the more ambitious. No stranger to the grandiose gesture (this 1974 album was sandwiched by his historical epics The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Round Table), Wakeman partly self-financed the project, enlisting cult actor David Hemmings (star of Blow-up and Profondo Rosso) as narrator. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Choir, in its combination of what Rolling Stone described as “pageantry and pretentiousness,” it epitomises a strand of seventies progressive rock which teetered on the edge of bombast and lays itself open to ridicule. Wakeman later revisited the project on its twenty-fifth anniversary in Return to the Centre of the Earth, this time narrated by Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame. The latter effort followed his own idiosyncratic take on Nineteen Eighty-Four as concept album, with lyrics contributed by Tim Rice.

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as one of modern science fiction’s seminal texts, had already proven influential in a series of re-interpretations, notably the 1938 radio play adapted by Orson Welles, which reputedly convinced a substantial number of American listeners that the Martians really had landed. Composer Jeff Wayne went one better than Rick Wakeman, though, by securing the services of Richard Burton as Narrator, and then-popular artists Julie Covington, David Essex, Justin Hayward and Phil Lynott to record individual songs for his double-album musical interpretation. Its success was immediate, and enduring. Prescient as he was, even Wells surely couldn’t have envisaged The War of the Worlds continuing to be staged in the twenty-first century, in an extravagant theatrical production with a hologram of Burton narrating from beyond the grave...

Following a debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, re-telling selected works of Edgar Allen Poe, in 1977 the Alan Parsons Project chose to tackle Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Song-writer Eric Woolfson spoke to Asimov, and found him to be “extremely friendly and enthusiastic about the idea.” Intending to explore the inter-woven narrative of the nine stories in detail, the band discovered that the rights had already been sold for film/television production (although nothing materialised until a 2004 film only loosely connected to Asimov’s originals). With the title’s comma also removed for legal reasons, I Robot the album instead covered more generic themes of man’s tendency to act in robotic fashion “as well as the dangers of uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence.” Its cover depicts the band at Charles De Gaulle Airport, then representing the cutting-edge of futuristic architecture, overlaid with a painted ‘robotic brain.’ Their 1982 album, Eye in the Sky, whilst a title shared with an early Philip K. Dick novel, was another in the long line of albums inspired by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The seventies saw the heyday of the Concept Album; by the end of the decade, changing tastes and ever-fickle fashion decreed that the lofty ambition to marry art forms via the long-playing record was not only folly, but terminally uncool (perhaps especially so if it incorporated science fiction). The idea of literary inspiration was condemned as pretentious in an era when virtuouso musicianship could be safely scorned. Names such as Rick Wakeman and the Alan Parsons Project became bywords for the outmoded pomposity of progressive rock (while Jeff Wayne simply slipped into obscurity). Many years would pass before the first signs of cautious critical re-appraisal - if not yet full rehabilitation - of the Concept Album could be detected.

500th Anniversary of More's Utopia - Connected Communities Festival

I've written on the blog before about Utopia and the early printed and Kelsmcott Press editions of Thomas More's work in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections. The name Utopia refers to the island counter-world to which the characters of the story travel, and can be read as both the good place (eutopia) and no place (outopia). While More's island reflected the expanding geographical knowledge of sixteenth century Europe, during the eighteenth century the spatial utopia gradually gave way to a temporal model and utopian narratives became aligned with the idea of a better or alternative future.

Originally published in Latin in 1516, this year sees the 500th anniversary of Utopia, and a number of projects and special events to celebrate the occasion. Among these was the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Connected Communities Festival 2016; this year’s Festival theme was Community Futures and Utopia. I've been involved with the Festival as part of the project team for My Future York. Inspired by work with York Libraries and Archives and the York Past and Present Facebook group, the project explores the potential of utopian thinking for heritage in York and focuses on how these debates can be harnessed in important ways for local democracy. It encompasses a range of temporal perspectives; from thinking about housing plans that didn’t happen to inviting ideas for the future development of the city.

Utopia logo

More's island of utopia

The Festival was in partnership with The Somerset House Trust’s 'Utopia 2016: a year of Imagination and Possibility'. The designs for the 'Utopia 2016' season (see flag above) were created by Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge studio. They are inspired by Thomas More’s 22-letter Utopian alphabet, which appears in early editions of Utopia with the Latin translation underneath. You can download a copy of the Utopia alphabet here.

To read more about heritage utopias and the My Future York project, visit http://myfutureyork.org/futures-utopias/

Science Fiction in 1966 – US: Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick

Introduction

This particularly fertile year saw the publication of works by a trio of arguably the most influential science fiction authors of the second half of the twentieth century: J.G. Ballard (The Crystal World and The Impossible Man); Ray Bradbury (S is for Space); and the even more prolific Philip K. Dick (Now Wait for Last Year, The Crack in Space and The Unteleported Man). Jon Savage’s study of ‘the year that the decade exploded’ considers that among the opportunities 1966 offered was the freedom “to envision what the future might be”; with it, the scope for science fiction was growing. It is probably no coincidence that on either side of the Atlantic, both Ballard and Dick began to emerge as the definitive writers of their era – even if only acknowledged retrospectively.

To look back half a century, for this short study of science fiction in 1966, suggests the difficulty of ‘envisioning the future’ and imagining the world even a relatively short distance into the future, a skill mastered by few artists or thinkers in any field; who knows what those looking back in 2066 will make of 2016, let alone 1966?

Part Two

By 1966 Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known and most successful of American science fiction writers, a position confirmed by the release that year of Fahrenheit 451, adapted from his 1953 novel by the celebrated French director François Truffaut in a big-budget production starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. Depicting a future society in which books are banned and indeed burned – the title refers to the temperature at which they burn – the film’s success cemented Bradbury’s status. A documentary made earlier that decade captures him close to the peak of his powers, discussing his inspirations and working methods, a portrait of a confident and contented artist. Born in 1920, a man steeped in the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction magazines and pulp publishing, and a masterful exponent of the genre’s staple mid-century themes of alien contact, space exploration and time travel, Bradbury’s profile grew post-War, with numerous adaptations of his stories for radio, cinema and television helping him to reach an ever-broader audience. By the time of his death in 2012, he had amassed a large and impressive body of work, and remains a revered figure in science fiction’s gradual journey to literary acceptance.

Philip K. Dick, a close contemporary of Bradbury’s, who had also been born in Illinois before moving to California (and likewise largely self-educated), was neither acclaimed nor particularly well-known in 1966, beyond a small group of enthusiastic admirers. He was prolific however, and in that calendar year saw the publication of three novels – Now Wait for Last Year, The Crack in Space and The Unteleported Man – showcasing his wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy and religion, which he often struggled to fit within the constraints of genre publishing. In addition, he wrote the novel Ubik (not published until 1969) and the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, later very loosely adapted as the film Total Recall, in 1966. Though all of these, like the majority of his books from the 1960s onward, are concerned with artificial states of mind, communication and language, the individual’s place within society, and often raise complex questions on the nature of reality, their packaging reflects the limitations which American SF authors still worked under. Startlingly at odds with the imaginative content, their cover artwork relies on a tired formula of ray-guns and rocket-ships which bear little or no relation to Dick’s thematic preoccupations. It was not until 1982, when his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (itself begun in 1966) was filmed as Blade Runner, that the sophisticated nature of his fiction began to be recognised outside science fiction circles. Sadly, he died shortly before the film’s release (though, having been shown the opening twenty minutes of footage, he was quoted by Paul Sammon as saying, “it was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.”) The years since have seen a proliferation of further film adaptations of his work, in tandem with a steady re-appraisal of his career, to the point where he is arguably regarded as the genre’s pre-eminent writer, a status Bradbury once popularly enjoyed.

 

SF Small Ads 2: Magic, Wonder Cures and Other Fictional Sciences

The last SF Small Ads post was all about Hugo Gernsback publications and the craze for amateur radio that pervaded the pages of SF magazines such as Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. As part of the research for that topic, I took photos of other small ads, which could perhaps be broadly described as lifestyle themed. In fact, the profile of your average 1920s SF reader could probably be fairly well pieced together from the claims and products advertised. See you what you make of the following...

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.