So I was feeling like it was time to read a Margaret Atwood and I fancied Oryx and Crake, having been intrigued by a chapter on it in Mark Fisher’s The Weird and The Eerie.
And then it just turned up in one of our local Little Free Libraries (a phenomenon of suburban America…. I’ve never seen them in the U.K.).
I’m reading it and thinking, “well, okay, this is a bit eerie”.
And then suddenly on Page 175, I read this sentence:
“Not that his real mother would have given a wombat’s anus, thought Jimmy”.
Now that had really blown it, I felt, in terms of an atmosphere of eerie. That’s like something you’d expect to read in, I dunno, a Bruce Dickinson novel.
Actually what it resembles is the colourful invective from the Australian female cop in Deadloch.
Actually what it is really like is the Australian Professors sketch on Monty Python. "S' 'ot enough in here to boil a monkey's bum, your Majesty" etc.
I read on and then I started to notice how there’s an awful lot of near-future brand names and corporations and such like. Snacks like AnooYoo bars. Walk-in cosmetic surgery SnipNFix and NooSkins. Ersatz beverages like Happicuppa. Big pharma corporations like HelthWyzer. Takeaway treats like SoyOBoy Burgers. GMO fast foods like ChickiNobs Bucket O’Nubbins.
This is all very much reminding me of the s.f. I read as a kid, things like Frederick Pohl + CM Kornbluth’s novels Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Anti-capitalist satires set in the near-future, written together by two members of a group of Socialist and Communist science fiction writers who called themselves The Futurians. I read those books in the mid-1970s but they were actually written in the 1950s. I loved them, have reread them many times over the years, and still reckon they are among the best s.f. ever written. But there’s absolutely nothing “weird or eerie” about either book. It’s a form of speculative but realistic fiction that K-Punk didn’t have much interest in - not uncanny enough.
ChickiNobs is actually rather close – as a genetic-engineered form of industrialized agriculture – to Chicken Little in The Space Merchants. Here the protagonist, a high-flying copywriter in one of the ad agencies that rules the world, is plunged down the class ladder and finds himself toiling as a prole, slicing off filets of flesh from a giant ever-growing and insensate chicken-monster.
Then there are the pleebands: in Atwood’s novel, this is where the ordinary people live, the ones who don’t have cushy jobs and deluxe accommodation in the corporate compounds like HelthWyzer, which are like future-fortress versions of the gated community crossed with the tech-bro Freedom City fantasy. These pleeblands (pleb lands, get it?) quite resemble where the proles of Gladiator-At-Law live, which are suburban precincts once advertised as dream homes but which have degenerated into ghettos through neglect. In Gladiator-At-Law, the executive class live in the new dream homes: hi-tech houses that anticipate your every need.
So I’m reading on, my doubts growing. Enjoying the novel - the world of Oryx and Crake is cleverly imagined, the book’s structure is narratively inventive, the plot pacy and gripping - but I’m also like, “when is the promised eeriness going to show up?”.
Well, after a bit, despite my fear of spoilers, I sneak a peek at the relevant chapter in The Weird and The Eerie. Turns out it was a completely different Atwood novel that Mark wrote about: Surfacing. Which does sound pretty fucking eerie. Oryx and Crake is mentioned, but only in passing. The title of the book is so odd that it must have stuck in my head, where Surfacing didn’t.
I finished Oryx and Crake and despite the slight lingering feeling of being jipped (the byproduct of my own misconception of course) I consider it to be time well spent.
However, I then realized it’s just part one of a trilogy – the MaddAddam trilogy. I don’t think I have the heart for it, honestly.
One thing about Oryx and Crake – which was written in the early 2000s – is that it does correctly predict certain trends to do with the development of videogames, the internet and mass media. There is for instance a channel called Noodie News where you can watch the news read out by naked newsreaders. Something called Naked Newsactually exists in our present reality. Although they seem to be wearing bikinis in the episodes on YouTube. I feel like there is a completely starkers show out there, having seen the people who do it as charter guests on Below Deck.
A rock book I have never ever heard of before, by a writer I never heard of before - until this moment.
Published 1976.
After this book, David Downingswitched to fiction, writing s.f., alternative history, spy fiction, etc
I wonder if Future Rock's any cop? Hard to say from this review by CSM.
CSM is one of the NME writers (see also Mick Farren) who often wrote about s.f. writers in the paper (e.g. Ballard) and could have made a fair stab at a tome about the science fiction and rock nexus. (Farren of course wrote s.f. pulp novels by the dozen).
Dunning's book reminded me a bit of this cat Lou Stathiswho wrote about music forHeavy Metal - not about heavy metal but about a continuum of sci-fi rock that includes Eno, Fripp, Bowie, Roxy, but also Chrome, Devo, Ubu, Ultravox, The Normal, Gary Numan etc. He called it "rok"
How "Future Rock" looked in the late Sixties - from Lillian Roxon's encyclopedia .
Described by someone on the internet as one of the great science fiction images of the 20th Century - wonder if Rene M thought of it that way? Somehow doubt it....
Well, he described it thus - "I caused the iron bells hanging from the necks of our admirable horses to sprout like dangerous plants at the edge of an abyss" - so no, it's not a s.f. image.
But apparently there is a science fiction anthology that used it as the front cover.
"The Voice of Space" above is just one - and the most foreboding - version of the same painting, of which there are four
Talking of space, and infinite blackness, here is this missus on Black Mirror's USS Callister micro-series.... techbro incels, the virtual nerdiverse of Space Fleet as a kind of off-world detention centre....
An interesting post from John Coulthart at feuilleton about Hawkwind, whose whole thing exists at that intersection of science fiction and music at Futuromania 's core.
"Hawkwind didn’t arrive as fully-fledged cosmic voyagers on their self-titled debut in 1970, it’s... on their second album that the group myth takes flight, presenting the band as travellers through time and space, or “Sonic Assassins” as they were depicted shortly before the album’s release in Codename: “Hawkwind”, a two-page promotional comic strip created by Michael Moorcock and Jim Cawthorn. Many British bands were playing with space themes in 1971 but Hawkwind were the only group to adopt the trappings of science fiction as essential elements of their persona, elements that persisted from one album to the next. In Search Of Space is loosely spacey on the musical side—You Shouldn’t Do That is the earliest example of a future Hawkwind staple, the extended mantra-like groove over which synthesizers swoop and burble—but it’s the album package created by Barney Bubbles and (in the logbook) Robert Calvert that dispels the ambiguity of songs like Master Of The Universe and Adjust Me in a science-fiction scenario where the “space” referred to by the title is dimensional as well as cosmological, with the group’s flattened spacecraft embodied by the physical album. None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well, but the book and the die-cut record sleeve help to frame what would otherwise be a collection of disparate rock songs into a complex artistic statement."
The idea of Hawkwind is so exciting, isn't it? Underground band idealistically playing the free festivals all through the 1970s and beyond.... yet somehow also getting to #3 in the pop charts with "Silver Machine", Chuck Berry boogie blasted into the cosmic beyond... families all across the nation seeing the (slightly toned-down for public consumption - Stacia with clothes on!) film of them live onstage in a hall full of longhairs and Afghan coats *
Even the carrying on, and on, and on - like a British Grateful Dead, essentially unchanged in intent and philosophical outlook - seems more impressive from this vantage point (more appealing than it would have seemed, say, in the 1980s - more on this in a minute).
I suppose, though, I've always wanted to like Hawkwind more than I actually do. They are one of those groups about which it could be said, "they are ever off my turntable". I am not actually entirely sure I've listened to Space Ritual all the way through.... if I did (must have done surely?) I glazed out at some point in its live dubblenesss. And I even have Ritual as a vinyl elpee gatefold reproduction-antique job blagged as a reward for participation... in theory making the listening experience so much more time-travel-to-1973 than just clicking 'play' at Tidal.
What has been constantly (well, very often) on my "turntable" - or rather, computer screen - for years and years now is said film for "Silver Machine". It towers over everything else and the fact that it penetrated the mainstream makes it all the more monumental. **
Part of the problem is exactly the thing that Coulthart mentions: "None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well". He adds later in the post: "The foundation of the Hawk-myth is to be found in the logbook, and in the Space Ritual tour two years later whose concert staging was planned by Barney Bubbles, and whose Bubbles-designed tour programme was a short SF story by Robert Calvert which elaborated upon Moorcock and Cawthorn’s comic-strip scenario."
But the music in itself and by itself doesn't quite transport you up into the cosmic ether in the way that say, the German groups of the same time do.
Too much of it is as near to Status Quo as it is to Can.
The relationship of the record artwork to the music is similar to Parliament-Funkadelic with their Pedro Bell comic strips and Overton Lloyd illustrations - the similarity pertains also to each band's s.f. intergalactic fantasy mythos (groovy liberated guerrillas of space-time versus the repressed and repressive Blue Meanie overlords).... but the comparison also unfortunately stands in terms of the ratio of great tunes to formless blather (with Parliament-Funkadelic, averaging around 1-and-a-half to 2 per album). ***
(That Mythos is also similar to Gong's. And Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire too I think. Post-1960s dreams of Revolution facing blockage from '70s reality and sliding sideways into fantasy - evasive inaction, you might call it).
Not sure when I first heard "Silver Machine" - I doubt it was at the original time of it being a hit, when I was 9 - but I remembered that I had been intrigued enough by the idea of Hawkwind to review a CD 'best of' that EMI put out in 1990: Stasis: The UA Years 1971-1975. ****
The reference to Loop is me trying to tie Hawkwind into the current musical conversation, obviously... but one thing I remember is that Robert Hampson, in interviews, was absolutely adamant that Loop had nothing - nothing at all - to do with Hawkwind.
Spacemen 3 said similar sort of things too.
The reason for that is easy to understand: unlike arcane Germans (or even better Swedish and Danish and Japanese longhairs) who were long gone and hard-to-find (some of this stuff you could only get as import compact discs from Japan, or as the original vinyl), unlike these oozing-cool obscurities... Hawkwind had never split up. They were very much still around, you would see their name in the concert advert section of the music papers, alongside names like Inner City Unit... Hawkwind never stopped putting out records, never stopped gigging.... they could draw an increasingly bedraggled but diehard core audience deep into the 1980s. So they were embarrassing. Unlike the Stooges or MC5, all the hippie associations wafted ripely off them.
Hawkwind touring extensively in 1982. Mind you, I can remember Tangerine Dream playing the Oxford Apollo - which is huge - that same year. I did not attend, of course.
Hawkwind, touring the regions - Town Halls and Corn Halls a-go-go - extensively in 1988. Now I wish I had gone but it would never have occurred to me.
(Funny thing is, though, if you take away the flute and the synth-bibbles, it really does sound quite close to Loop )
(The first - and possibly still only - group I can remember citing Hawkwind as an influence was World of Twist. And somehow that made WoT seem even cooler - all part of their retro-delic, plastique-fantastique, "camp sublime")
Then in time that Kind of Thing became amenable to cool taste. (Julian Cope played his part, moving from the Krautrock and Japrock idolatry to rehabilitating the Groundhogs and others in the U.K.'s hairy-beardy Underground)
Over the years, I've heard Hawkwind's early classic run of studio albums... got some as CD-Rs in those days when you traded burns with fellow fiends, downloaded others... and then maybe ten years ago or so, I bought this 3-CD Hawkwind thing, Parallel Universe, all stuff from the glory years, the UA / Liberty years... this was around the same time I bought a similar 3-CD job for The Groundhogs and various other turned-on Ladbroke Grovers / hairy pink-fairy ish kind of things. 3-CD expansions of the original samplers put out back in the day by labels like United Artists and Vertigo and Charisma and Island, with outfits like Edgar Broughton Band and Man and Quintessence and Jade Warrior on them.
But as regards that Parallel Universe 3-CD, not a lot of it has stuck with me. "You Shouldn't Do That". A few others.
It all kind of blurs.
Rather like the ugly murky cover.
For Carducci, that brown mushy murkiness - the cosmic mulligatawny swirl of it all - this is precisely what gives Hawkwind pride of place in his Rock and the Pop Narcotic pantheon of '70s Innovators.
But I think that "organic" laxness is what's lacking with Hawkwind - the stark articulation of the sound space so characteristic of English rock as it develops as studio artform as much as live praxis. ****
There's a line you can trace from The Sorrows "Take A Heart" and The Eyes's "When The Night Falls".., through Free, Sabbath, Led Zep... to The Groundhogs of "Cherry Red" and "You Had A Lesson".
Riffs you can see as much as physically feel.
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* Filmed at Dunstable Civic Hall, I learn. Same town - and same venue, albeit renamed Queensway Hall - where I saw Killing Joke, for the second time, in 1983. Another example of Hertfordshire / Buckinghamshire long-hair culture.
** To borrow a formulation from Carducci, in reference to Steppenwolf. Like "Born To Be Wild", "Silver Machine" is so quintessential, so (in his words) "idiomorphic," as to throw the rest of the corpus severely into its shadow. It takes on a "all you need" stature.
*** “… Doremi Fasol Latido, an altogether heavier set than previous albums. Conceptually “a collection of ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise as used by the family clan of Hawkwind on their epic journey to the fabled land of Thorasin” setting the band members as the heroes of a space fantasy saga wherein the Lords of the Hawk, having fought a losing battle for several years against the Bad Vibe squads in the age of the machine logic god Eye See Eye, departed from the planet, swearing to one day return to rid the world of evil, intending to seek help from the Great Mother and the Galactic Union.”--from the sleevenotes to Hawkwind’s Stasis: the UA Years 1971-75.
As I once wrote on Blissblog a cosmic aeon ago:
Hawkwind = the white Parliament-Funkadelic.
Barney Bubbles = the white Pedro Bell
Bad Vibe Squads = Sir Nose D'Voidofffunk
**** Actually now I think about it - I recall one of the Monitor crew, Chris Scott, was into Hawkwind. But I seem to only remember him playing me one of the offshoot releases: Captain Lockheed and the Star Fighters
I also just remembered Chrome were big fans of Hawkwind and that COUM/ Throbbing Gristle, if not influenced, certainly imagined early on trying to penetrate that scene, describing themselves in flyers as "psychedelic trash". Oh yes and another one, unlikely as it seems, A Certain Ratio claimed to have initially been influenced by Hawkwind before they discovered Da Funk.
*****
My considered assessment of strengths and weaknesses
Great to good:
Simon King's drumming - and the sight of him drumming.
The synths
The song and album titles
Stacia
Quite-good to middling.
The guitars
The bass (bit too much root-note meander .... very quiet and small in the mix)
The flute
Fair to Poor
Those washed-out vocals - like Francis Rossi if he'd kept on taking acid for years and years after "Pictures of Matchstick Men"... brain utterly blanched by bliss.
The first Futurama reviewed in 1979 by NME's Ian Punman and Andy Gill (RIP)
F2 = the ground zero for Goth in many ways
The second Futurama festival, reviewed by NME's Paul Morley and Adrian Thrills
Both this year and the previous year's reviews have the theme of "squalor" in the headline - apparently they were rather uncomfortable events, with terrible sound... The Queens Hall in Leeds was described by Futurama promoter John Keenan as "a cavernous place where they parked buses by day and held car auctions most weekend". Wilted proto-Goths and Grey Overcoats sprawled and prone on the concrete floors... an outdoor festival indoors .... T
Different venue for the next installment
Sucker for punishment Morley comes back to review the 3
Sounds preview in which Keenan denies that Futurama has anything to do with the Futurists (aka New Romantics)
The Bay City Rollers?!
A gap, and then it flickered back for a moment in 1989
The Sweet?! Odd how there's this sporadic theme of "glam and slam" (F2 had Gary Glitter)... I guess it's the roots, or a root, of Goth. Still '70s nostalgia doesn't seem quite right for something called Futurama.
Well, having said that...
After a very long gap, it's Back to the Futurama - with the festival reincarnated as a nostalgia and "legacy act" oriented event.
Only for the Future to be cancelled the following year
There was talk of it coming back in 2023 but nothing seems to have happened, so maybe that's it.
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Bonus postpunk futurism
the Sounds review of Futurama 79
Sucker for punishment Des Moines returns for more - Sounds review of Futurama 2
"Jameson argues that our present and our future are saturated
by history and it is this increased historicity that makes the novel, all
novels, historical. At the same time, he can also assert that “all fiction
approaches science fiction,” due to the fact that all our futures “begin to
dissolve into the ever more porous actuality”. The contemporary novel is
both the historical novel and science fiction, as both past and future have
saturated the present. The present is a bloated moment, full of the past that
cannot be integrated and a future that is not being born...."
The review has some gentle jibes at the Great Man - like this backhanded compliment
"We sometimes feel Jameson has read everything"
That does capture the sensation of omniscience that seeps from the prose - the long, winding, (over-)extended sentences... the concatenation of clauses and parentheticals... allusively laden....
Also a dig at the London Review of Books style of review (most of Inventions of A Present consists of these), which Noys characterises as a
"peculiar genre in which the book is not so much assessed as re-presented in a gesture which often replaces reading the book. It is a time-saving device presented in the mode of capacious intellectual engagement"
What's striking as you read the review - mirroring the book itself - is the tangle of temporalities.
"This diagnosis and sense of impasse is surprisingly Nietzschean. The saturation of the present by historicism echoes Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in which the historical overcomes our present.
The notion that the future is dissolved into the present is also close to Nietzsche’s attempts to invent a future and his increasingly violent proclamations of a leap into the future. Jameson’s tone is more measured and, of course, he is trying to remain within Marxism. To be Marxist, we must explain why we cannot integrate history and why we cannot see the present as a dynamic path to the future.
"While obviously wrong—not all contemporary novels are historical and not all contemporary novels are science fiction, and how could all of them be both?—his statements are ones we try to puzzle out."
"Puzzle out" indeed
Something is being called for to get "us" out of this "impasse"
But....
"If the function of the master collapses, then the enigmatic statements become so much nonsense and we wonder why we ever cared. Jameson’s statements teeter in this space"
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