#127 = Volume 42, Part 3 =November 2015
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Sawyer Seminar Year Begins at UCR. The Science Fiction and Techno-culture Studies program at the University of California, Riverside, begins its year-long series of events on Alternative Futurisms this fall. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sawyer Seminars provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This grant aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work
The UCR Alternative Futurisms seminar will create a dialogue about diverse ethnic futures and explore the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change. Afrofuturism, Latino futurism, Indigenous futurism, and Asian-American futurism share a similar status of marginalization compared to hegemonic science fiction (sf), which has historically been dominated by white writers and thus has tended to elide questions of ethnic diversity through visions of a color-blind, post-racial future; this hegemonic sf at times rests on colonialist and imperialist ideologies that have been central to the genre’s history. The various traditions of ethnic futurism have emerged from and been shaped by their cultural specificity and historical relationship to technology, yet to date there has been comparatively little communication among them and almost no effort to articulate their areas of shared focus or ongoing opportunities for collaboration. This is precisely the scholarly and cultural gap that “Alternative Futurisms” seeks to fill, by enabling these various sites of speculative intervention to exchange ideas and perspectives, to investigate commonalities and differences in their experiences of technologized modernity, and to deepen the knowledge within each tradition about these other sites of engagement and about the core of mainstream, Western, sf that provides a common starting point for their shared goals of cultural resistance and ideological transformation.
The Seminar supports the research of a postdoctoral fellow, Brian Hudson, and two graduate students, Stina Attebery and Taylor Evans. It will be launched with a conference on the theme of Revising the Past, Remaking the Future, which brings together scholars from Canada, Mexico, the US, and the UK to discuss the ways that speculative fiction engages with the legacies of colonialism and with radical visions of transformed futures, particularly those produced from communities that have previously been marginalized. The keynote speaker for the conference is SFS consultant and film scholar Barry Keith Grant.
Over the course of this academic year, we will continue our conversations with guest scholars, panels, readings by sf authors, and film screenings. Highlights of the Fall Quarter events include John Rieder visiting UCR as a scholar-in-residence, a reading by First Nations author Stephen Graham Jones, and film screenings by Mexican filmmaker Isaac Ezban, who will be in attendance. We look forward to a productive year of intellectual exchange.—Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
The Science Fiction Music of Steve Reich: Three Tales (Science Museum, London, 22 Apr. 2015). “SF music” has always been a problematic category for scholars in the field, and music has received nothing like the critical attention given to sf literature, film, television, comics, and other narrative and visual forms. Rarely discussed in sf journals, and somewhat awkwardly categorized (if at all) in the major companions, histories, and handbooks, sf music is nevertheless readily recognizable: soundtracks to film and television; music based on, or inspired by, specific texts or tropes of the genre; or pop songs that simply draw on sf visuals for their accompanying music videos. Far more problematic, however, is attempting to categorize a type of music that is itself science-fictional—not, as is obvious in the examples above, music that accompanies or refers to something that has been externally designated as sf, but music in which the melody, rhythm, or instrumentation can somehow be seen as science-fictional. Music can, perhaps, inspire the speculative imagining and questioning as does the best sf.
Critics who have examined this area have rightly focused on instrumen-tation in particular as a distinguishing feature of sf music, tying the emergence of synthesizers and electronically produced sounds in the 1950s and 1960s to the sf of the future-oriented, technology-driven space age. Examples include Ken McLeod’s chapter on music in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) and the discussion of music in Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (2006). Nicholas C. Laudadio discusses the role of the synthesizer in his article on music in SFS 38.2 (July 2011)
John Cline, in his chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014: 252-62), points out that until recently, newly-developed instruments have always been the result of changes in type rather than kind: a more sophisticated saxophone is still fundamentally a reed instrument. Therefore, “tones generated through purely electronic means were thus the first totally unique form of music to emerge in human culture in several thousand years” (252). The sound of electronic instruments has, since this period, been a major aural component of sf, heard in everything from film soundtracks, to the hugely popular music of Kraftwerk, to the more obscure compositions of a composer such as Sten Hanson. Researching Edgar Rice Burroughs over the last number of years led me to an assortment of multimedia offshoots, yet certainly one of the more unusual and unexpected pleasures was Hanson’s John Carter Song Book (1988). If one of the central motifs of sf is the instability and self-awareness gained from a consciously doomed attempt to depict and comprehend the alien Other, then the atonal melodies, unintelligible vocals, and distorted electronic sampling of Hanson’s Song Book certainly aid in imagining what a Martian “Love Song of the Red Princess” or the “Battle Song of Tars Tarkas” might actually sound like.
Steve Reich, unlike Hanson, is not generally connected with sf music, yet there are some important overlaps between the types of music discussed above and his video opera, Three Tales, performed recently in London’s Science Museum. The three-act work for live musicians and sampled audio, with video accompaniment by Beryl Korot, was performed by Ensemble BPM in conjunction with Synergy Vocals, and under the directorship of Nick Sutcliffe. It was, according to the program, “the first-ever staging of an opera in an IMAX theatre,” although unfortunately it became clear that there is probably a reason for this: cinemas are not designed with opera acoustics in mind, and the sound, particularly the vocals, was somewhat lost in the cavernous IMAX theater. Similarly, the visual display, itself looking rather dated, was not helped by its reproduction on such a large screen. Yet if the IMAX was not the ideal music venue, the setting itself was wonderful, with the audience channeled through the museum’s numerous displays of scientific and technical innovation as a prelude to the event itself (fittingly, a nearby display consisted of a jumper knitted from Dolly the sheep’s wool). Furthermore, the musical performance on the night was excellent, with video, pre-recorded sound, and live music outstandingly well-synchronized.
Three Tales focuses on three moments of twentieth-century technological development: the Hindenburg disaster, US atomic testing on Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. This is an unusual trio of events, perhaps, to encapsulate twentieth-century science, yet the choices become increasingly meaningful as the opera progresses. Looping and distorting pre-recorded interviews in the work examine scientific hubris, technological progress, and the future of humanity. Indeed, the questions the work poses and the themes it explores—technological and biological evolution, militarism and colonialism, apocalypse, cloning, and artificial intelligence—are precisely those at the heart of sf. The opening act, “Hindenburg,” sets up the questions of morality and technology that will run throughout the piece as a newsreel announcer asserts that “The Hindenburg has gone” but “her tragedy will not halt the march of progress.”
“Small and remote, it’s just the place, they say, for the next atom bomb,” declares a British radio announcer in the second act, “Bikini.” The colonial context of US nuclear testing during this period is very clear, and the benefits of technological progress are never evenly distributed. The Bikini locals are silenced; the “Bikini monarch has little to say” as he watches the “atomic bombing of his one-time home lagoon.” A navy officer explains that the US government wants to “turn this great destructive power into something for the benefit of all mankind,” as two contrasting Biblical quotations are presented on screen. In the first, man is instructed to “fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing.” In the second, God has created man “and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to serve it and to keep it.”
This final quotation, highlighting the crucial difference between serving and subduing the earth and its inhabitants, is repeated as the piece moves to the final act. This time, however, it is stated by Kismet, a robot. “Dolly” is both the most musically accomplished and captivating section of the work, as well as the most explicitly engaged with sf. “We are machines, created by our genes,” states the disconcertingly large and infinitely reproduced head of Richard Dawkins throughout, providing a central question around which the views of several leading scientists are looped and interspersed. Stephen J Gould, Steven Pinker, Kevin Warwick, and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, among others, discuss cloning, artificial intelligence, and the future of human evolution. There is no consensus, and the juxtaposition of quite differing views—voices dismantled, distorted, and reformed—simply underscores the dangers of unquestioned technological progress, especially as it relates to the issue of humanity’s future.
Three Tales is not based on an sf text; it does not contain, for example, the “bleepy, throbbing, soaring soundscapes [...] of aural SF” (336) that Adam Roberts hears in the music of Jean-Michel Jarre; nor do its visuals reference the sf of film or television. Yet it is, I would argue, a work of sf music. The issues it explores, and the ways in which these questions are presented, echo and draw upon sf. The time frames oscillate from past experiments to future technological possibilities and back to our own present. The voices are disembodied and fractured, disorientating the listener and complicating any definite sense of what constitutes progress, and how we engage with technology—whether from a scientific, democratic, religious, or ethical standpoint. “This gives me pause” states Cynthia Breazeal, creator of Kismet, in one of the most looped and repeated statements of the work. This, one imagines, is the very least Reich asks of us in this work.—Conor Reid, Trinity College Dublin
Tracing the New Wave. I want to thank Andrew M. Butler for his review of David Brittain’s Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties in SFS #125 (March 2014), though he appears to imagine that the volume was intended as a treatise on Paolozzi. In fact, I commissioned David to write a book about the visual side of New Worlds and the New Wave. The book was also meant as a sequel to David’s The Jet-Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit (Four Corners P, 2009), which tracked Paolozzi’s relationship with Ballard. I asked David to expand on this work, tracing the New Wave’s ideological source in Moorcock’s magazine, since I felt that the UK New Wave was only partly understood, especially in America, where New Worlds had very limited distribution, if any at all.
For example, Richard Kostelanetz, as I discovered during the course of an interview for Derek Horton’s and Lisa Stansby’s soanyway e-zine (2011), knew New Worlds only through paperback reprints. When I subsequently sent him a selection of the large-format issues, he was astonished to find the missing visual dimension. (Our interview has been reprinted in The Idea of the Avant Garde—And What it Means Today, ed. Marc James Léger [Manchester UP, 2014], pp. 46-50.) In an early issue of Corridor magazine (#5, 1974), I published Richard’s “Milestones in a Life.” A year earlier he had republished a piece of mine from New Worlds in his groundbreaking anthology Breakthrough Fictioneers (Something Else P, 1973), a book with many similarities to New Worlds in its combination of literature and visual art. After that I’d simply assumed he must have been aware of the large-format editions of the magazine. It was only partway through our 2011 conversation, when he said that he thought Chip Delany and Marilyn Hacker’s Quark magazine (1970-71) was more radical than New Worlds, that it twigged with me that he hadn’t! No offence meant to Quark, but he’d only read the Panther “Best of New Worlds” anthologies, which of course stripped away all the images and Charles Platt’s experimental design.
This is why books such as David’s are so useful: they show the cross-pollination of the cutting-edge arts of the Sixties in ways that remain obscure even to some of the foremost theorists and historians of the contemporary avant-garde.—Michael Butterworth, Savoy Books
Triffid Alley. On 24 May 2015 I unveiled, before a group of well-wishers, a South End Green Association “Triffid Alley” plaque (which includes a Penguin Books drawing of a triffid) alongside a previously unnamed alley (part of Warwick Mansions) off Pond Street just above its corner with South End Road, in Hampstead, London. In 2014 I had proposed this public memorial to John Wyndham (the only such in England, Scotland, and Ireland) to the South End Green Association after realizing that an important Chapter 8 episode in The Day of the Triffids (1951) involves “a narrow alley” that is this narrow alley near my London flat and even closer to what was the Pond Street and South End Road corner bookshop, where George Orwell once worked in the 1930s (the site for some years now of a well-known George Orwell Society plaque). For further information and images, please google “Triffid Alley.” This will bring up various items including Neil Pollard’s associated Triffid Alley website, itself a further John Wyndham memorial. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the “damn dam” point of the front cover heading—“Village of the Damned”—of the July 2015 issue of the local satirical magazine, Hampstead Village Voice, depends upon knowing the John Wyndham connection. The two film versions of Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos (1957) are entitled Village of the Damned [Wolf Rilla 1960; John Carpenter 1995], but the cover story is about the “the Heath dam scandal” and what are viewed by many as the unsightly and damaging dams that are in process of being constructed for a number of Heath ponds.)—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Anticipations: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions: CFP. The H.G. Wells Society will hold a conference 8-10 July 2016 at the Conference Centre, Woking, UK. H.G. Wells was a novelist, social commentator, and utopianist, and is regarded as one of the fathers of sf. His early scientific romances featured time travel, mad scientists, alien invasion, space travel, invisibility, utopia, future war, and histories of the future: his mappings of the shape of things to come was an overture to over a century of science fiction.
We wish to mark the 150th and 70th anniversaries of Wells’s birth and death respectively by exploring his science fiction, his precursors and successors, and his lasting influence upon the genre in print, on film, on television, on radio, online, and elsewhere. This is especially appropriate because the event will be held at the H.G. Wells Conference Centre in Woking, the town where Wells wrote The War of the Worlds (1897). Many of his ideas on politics, science, sociology, and the direction in which he feared humanity was going were contained in his early sf and ran through his later influential work.
Topics might include, but are not limited to: specific individual or groups of novels/stories; the connection between Wells’s fiction and nonfiction, including his political, utopian, and scientific writings; utopia/dystopia; histories of the future; precursors to Wells’s sf; sf writers influenced by Wells; sequels by other hands; and adaptations into other media.
Please send a brief biography and an abstract of 400 words for a twenty-minute paper by 15 April 2016 to anticipations2016@gmail.com. Further details will be available on our website.—Paul Malcolm Allen, H.G. Wells Society
UCR Hires New Science Fiction Librarian. I am delighted to share the news that in mid-September Jacqueline “JJ” Jacobson will become the first Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian at UC Riverside. JJ will have responsibility for the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy in Special Collections and University Archives as well as speculative fiction in the University of California Riverside Library.
JJ earned her Masters of Science in Information from the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and a BA in philosophy from our sister campus to the north, UC Berkeley.
Her prior post was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she has served as curator and outreach librarian for the American Culinary History Collection since 2009. Other experience includes service as Librarian for Hospitality Management, Tourism, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds for the American Public University System; adjunct lecturer at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois; and cataloger and metadata librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also the Director of the Caledon Library and Founder of the Alexandria Free Library Consortium, a Second Life project described in Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All!—Alison Scott, University of California, Riverside
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