Researching

Back to the Sydney Jones Library for the first time in a decade and of course the mind goes blank having not yet done a research reading list. I have complete runs – more or less – of SFS and Foundation, and most Extrapolations back to 1969, so the usual sources are covered at home. I spent two days going through F&SF, skimming the book and film reviews, gleaning comments about key works and the times.

One for the Must Be Kicking Themselves Award:

“Women who cry out that modern sf does not recognze their sex as anything but bicthes and/or love objects will have to shut up where this story is concerned, properly chastised by the fact that few (if any) female sf authors have ever given women the prominence or depthful characterization that Tiptree gives here with little fuss and seeming ease. … the intricate play should make someof the readers if the Lib movement curl up in shame when they see that a man recognizes their ambitions better than they do themselves.”

I haven’t necessarily been noting first and last pages of reviews, and some of the film reviews have titles so no doubt I will be back at some point.

Recently read:
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Angela Carter, Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

All good – and most of the way into The Passion of New Eve

Douglas Trumbull, Silent Running (1972)

Douglas Trumbull had been the special effects guy on 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), and focused in particular on the stargate sequence. He had also worked on filming Saturn – although sense or timing meant that Jupiter remained the planet used in the finished film. The technique left Trumbull with a setting for his film, in which a series of spaceships are sent out from a polluted Earth with ecosystems on board.

Trumbull had worked, meanwhile, on The Andromeda Strain, and was to work with Wise again on Star Trek, with Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1997) and with Scott on Blade Runner his only other film was Brainstorm (1983).

Silent Running is somewhat sedate, if only because the main character is alone for much of the time. Earth decides to scrap the mission and destroys the ecosystems, but Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) kills his crew mates and tries to drop off radar. His only companions on screen are a number of cute robots – and it is tempting to blame him for the genre requirement for such in sf from then on. It is only a matter of time before Earth catches up with him and it can’t end well.

There is a distinct ecological message to the film – heavily underlined by a conservationist manifesto on Dern’s bunk wall and repeated songs on the soundtrack from Joan Baez. The emotions are a little broad brush.

Robert A Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil (1970)

Note: I didn’t mean to fall off the map – but I’ve done a conference, a keynote at a conference, an MA validation in Liverpool and a local validation, plus exam and essay marking. I’ve been reading and watching, but not as much as I’d have liked.

This is perhaps the first of Heinlein’s late novels, focusing in more and more on a pattern of patter and sex among a small cast across a page count of 400+ – this had been seen in Stranger in a Strange Land but now became the norm.

The billionaire and dirty old man Johann Sebastian Smith is aging and decides to try a brain transplant as soon as he can find a suitable body. He does – in the coincidental shape of his secretary Eunice Branca. Some of her soul or personality survives, as Johann has conversations with her as she teaches him to become a woman. At first his time is taken up with court cases proving he is Smith – although he keeps insisting he could start again – and then increasingly with sex: with his nurse, his doctor, his lawyer, his bodyguards, Eunice’s widower and his new wife. This runs a sexual spectrum, being by terms heterosexual, lesbian and gay – and everyone seems compatible and hardly weirded out at all. A fifty year age gap is no difference at all.

Written in the context of the explosion of women’s liberation – how well does Heinlein write women? It’s interesting that femininity is a performance – a masquerade to use Joan Riviere’s term from the thirties. Smith becomes a woman by putting on clothes and make up, she gets her way by letting others think they lead and plays endless games. Whilst Smith always stays in control – more or less – it always comes back to keeping men happy (even if that’s her being happy). Heinlein hardly plays fair, giving Smith the trump card more often than not. Far from giving women agency, the novel ends up with a sense of women having pleasure in men (apparently) having power.

The taboo-breaking incest of later novels is not here – although Smith gets Branca’s body impregnated with his own sperm, in a variation on “;All You Zombies’”. I don’t think this has aged well.

THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971)

Lucas’s first feature, based on an idea by Matthew Robbins which became a story by Lucas and then a script by Lucas and sound editor Walter Murch – it remakes and extends his student film THX 1138 4EB (1967). It was produced under the umbrella of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope and Warner Bros.

The film is a dystopia where peoeple have letters and numbers as names, little more than registration numbers. THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) works with radioactive materials, but his mandatory drugs are being replaced by placebos by his mate, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie). This allows his sexual desire to return and they have sex. Drug evasion and copulation are both illegal, and they are arrested. THX faces brain washing, and ends up in an all-white cell limbo with SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence) – who ironically enough had been trying to become THX’s roommate (why, I’m not sure). The two escape and go on the run – SEN is recaptured, but THX reaches ground level and watches the sunset.

This is perhaps the most depressing Lucas material – the most deliberately depressing Lucas material, and the film was initially rejigged by the studio. The limited release saw a small but not significant profit, and a restored late-1970s re-release did little better. Naturally the DVD is a director’s cut, with added CGI crowd and world building, and the odd extra shot. Some of these make more links between THX and SEN. THX does escape, but SEN does not, and the pregnant LUH seems to be dead. There is a bird or two in shot at the end, but the sun is setting, suggesting the end of times.

The banning of sex and the imposition of sedatives are dystopian stand-bys, but the item that doesn’t convince is the insistence on consumption – aside from the consumption or ingestion of drugs. No one seems to own anything – the apartments are virtually bare aside from masturbation machines and holograms. But the satire of the cost of policing – which allows THX eventual escape – is still relevant today.

Blakes 7 (Series 2)

This appears to have destroyed my DVD player.

Here the initial fellowship begins to breakdown – the Liberator faces its original owners, and then Blake starts a rather desultory story arc. He hears of a central Federation computers which would cripple the evil government if it were destroyed. However, the Earth-based computer is a trap for the freedom fighters and they face being killed. Shiney Happy Person, Gan, is killed by Travis (now wearing a new face) and Blake begins soul searching. This begins a new series of cats and mouse games – more attempts by Travis to entrap them, and moments where Avon can abandon Blake (like Jayne and Mal thirty years on). Travis has been put on trial by the Federation for genocide, and they aim to execute him, so for part of the time he appears to be against the Federation and out on his own. But Blake still has scruples. Toward the end of the series they find the location of the central computer, and risk their lives to destroy it.

Cally is still there largely as a counsellor, sometimes not saying what she knows, and Jen only gets off the ship when guest characters want to try to seduce someone. Vila, meanwhile, does very little lock picking, and much comic relief. I confess that the best bits are Avon bitching about Blake or Vila or being bitched at.

Moonbase 3 (1973)

A curious realist sf series from Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks – produced as far as I can tell in the gap between the Doctor Who serials “The Green Death” and “The Time Warrior”. It’s partly curious in that it comes at the end of a season in which Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is released from exile on Earth and can travel the universe again – and this is set in one place: the European moonbase and its immediate surroundings, with the occasional near orbit travel. The initial idea had been to set it on a ship or sub; the isolation is striking.

The six episodes were produced by five writers:

1. “Departures and Arrivals” (dir. Ken Hannam; w. Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts; tx 9 September 1973)
2. “Behemoth” (dir. Ken Hannam; w. John Brason; tx 16 September 1973)
3. “Achilles Heal” [Heel?] (dir. Christopher Barry; w. John Lucarotti; tx 23 September 1973)
4. “Outsiders” (dir. Ken Hannam; w. John Brason; tx 30 September 1973)
5. “Castor and Pollux” (dir. Christopher Barry; John Lucarotti, 7 October 1973)
6. Views of a Dead Planet (dir: Christopher Barry; w. Arden Winch; tx 14 October 1973)

Note the lack of regular Doctor Who writers aside from the creators who acted as producer and script editor as usual; Lucarotti had written for the series in the 1960s, but only historical stories such as “Marco Polo” and “The Massacre”. Barry directed episodes from “The Dead Planet” to “The Creature from the Pit”, but at that point only “The Dæmons” and “The Mutants” for Letts and Dicks (he went on to direct their swansong, “Robot”).

The set up is a base, one of several run by the US, the USSR, Europe and China. Typically the European one is run on a shoestring and knee deep in bureaucracy, so when the base director is killed in a shuttle accident, the troubleshooting David Caulder (Donald Houston) is brought in to turn the venture around. In the context of the daily dangers of staying alive, Caulder has to start showing a profit. He is rivalled by Michel Lebrun (Ralph Bates), a French by-the-book jobsworth and his second in command, and helped by former astronaut turned sort-of chief engineer and dogsbody Tom Hill (Barry Lowe) and psychiatrist Helen Smith (Fiona Gaunt) whose job is to monitor the rather flowing staff morale.

Most of the stories derive out of the every day stresses of their mission – when thing get done on autopilot, when people’s weaknesses are played upon, when outsiders have to show solidarity. In the second episode there’s the suspicion of life of the Moon – but the explanation turns out to be selenological. The rationalism presumably derives from the input of science journalist James Burke (pre-Connections) as scientific advisor. The end result was this BBC-Twentieth Century Fox-ABC co-production stopped after six episodes; it was insufficiently fantastical, and I suspect they’d run out of story ideas.

The one foot wrong I felt was the final episode, in which a nuclear detonation above the pole was meant to melt ice caps to free up more farming land, and it is assumed that a chain reaction predicted by a maverick scientist (Michael Gough, playing 90-something) has destroyed life on Earth. As it is the north pole, I’m not sure how much arctic land would be freed – and the sea level rise is hand waved away.

The special effects have dated badly, and the acting, especially from the non-regulars, is a little wooden. It is stuffed full with casual racism – Helen is frequently disbelieved and sidelined, and her role is to be empathetic, without a story line of her one. Her superiors and equals are rather too tactile – although when she stands up to the scientist she is respected.

A fascinating experiment – but space opera comes back to dominate British sf on tv.

Barry N. Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972)

One thing that is constantly striking me is how neglected many of the writers are that I’m looking at. I confess I’m a little behind on writing up my reading, and it may well stay that way – and in a sense writers such as Ballard and Delany don’t need the attention. Malzberg, on the other hand, what at his most active through the 1970s in sf terms, and there seems to be little written on him. Previously I’d only read The Sodom and Gomorrah Business – I shall reread this – and now I have three more of these short novels to go through.

First up, for little more reason than being the first out of a rucksack of secondhand books, is Beyond Apollo.

In essence it is the story of a 1981 two-man mission to Venus, during which the captain was killed and the other man – Harry Evans – has lost his mind. The story is narrated by Evans, as he writes a novel about his experiences, the viewpoint shifting at the end to that of his publishing. Even that is misleading – Evans talks about himself in both the first and third person, and nothing he says can be taken as stable. We don’t even know whether his captain was Jack Josephson or Joseph Jackson. It might be that Evans killed him – but it is not at all clear. Even the descriptions of the post-mission debriefings are inconsistent.

Bob Shaw reviewed the book in Foundation 7/8 and sees it as an example of all that’s wrong with the New Wave, in particular the assertion that travelling through space drives you mad. Something else to look out for.

Alternative 3 (Chris Miles, 1977)

Spoof documentary fronted by former newscaster Tim Brinton (who died last week), which investigates a number of missing scientists. Initially it had been assumed to be part of the brain drain to America, but no trace is found of some of them, and others have died in accidents. The evidence points to something to do with global warming, and may be answered by a mysterious magnetic tape.

The third alternative to dealing with global warming – this at a point when the theory was clearly in its infancy – was to get a group of experts and the intelligentsia together and send them to Mars, a Mars not thought not only to be inhabitable, but inhabited. The documentary concludes with footage shot on Mars, supposedly in 1962.

The programme began as a commissioned play on a topic of his choice for David Ambrose, and he had an idea about missing scientists. It was Chris Miles who provided the notion of Mars, from his spouse’s copy of Paris Match which featured Viking lander pictures on the cover. The rest wrote itself – although Anglia tv were reluctant to let it be made. Initially it was to be shown on April 1 1977, but it was put bag to June 20. Some of the press let the cat out of the bag, the other played ball and then cranked up the outrage as people rang to complain.

This is in a direct line with Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds and the Panorama segment on growing spaghetti. Ambrose clearly wanted to make a serious point about global warming, and the programme was shown around the world. It cleverly puts together acted and stock footage, doctoring documentary and degrading film stock.

A book followed, and apparently thirty years of speculation that they were onto the truth, which Anglia were covering up by printing a cast list at the end.

Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976)

According to the trailer, this film begins where imaginations ends. That doesn’t sell it, does it?

It’s based on a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, although in the source people are terminated at 21 rather than 30. There’s been some sort of war, and everyone lives in domes, devoting their lives to pleasure, but to maintain a stable population everyone is invited to join the Carrousel (Carousel?) at 29 and 364 days. Allegedly some people will be reborn, others are killed. It’s pretty clear that none are reborn.

Some people elect to run, and are pursued by Sandmen. Logan 5 (Michael York) has the bad luck to fall in love with Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter) who has something to do with a revolutionary movement, and then he is handed an assignment to track down Sanctuary, the place where surviving runners hide outside the city. With growing disillusionment with the city, he sets off, with his Sandman friend Francis 7 (Richard Jordan) in pursuit.

After facing a robot, Box, which keeps runners in cold storage as food, they find their way to a ruined and overgrown Washington DC, inhabited only by a T.S. Eliot quoting Old Man (Peter Ustinov) who they bring back to the city.

I guess this needs to be read as reactionary – it’s responding to the youth culture of the late 1960s and the summer of love, and no doubt the student risings which were confronted by the National Guard (Kent State, etc). The liberation from the dead hand of old people (as it were) is not exactly celebrated – daddy’s dead so we all get to stay up late, do drugs and have sex. Jessica’s just saying no is clearly just a ploy to play hard to get. The situating of a killer cop as the main character – shades of Rick Deckard – is not necessarily guaranteed to get the youth audience on board, although there is the generic requirement for someone to be converted from support for dystopia to become its destroyer. And the world is clearly meant to be dystopia.

Logan is on a mission (although he never seems to explain that to Francis), so his opposition to the system only seems to be stirred by meeting an old man with lots of cats. Bringing down the system is presented as a happy ending, although there is no sense of what the replacement will be. Work will have to start, but fortunately the world outside the city seems green and pleasant.

Inside the city this is the future as shopping mall – the modelling is less than convincing of the outside of the city, and the scale inside doesn’t quite come off. The Sandmen seem to be remarkably bad shots as the runners survive the cat and mouse tactics for quite a long time. Post-apocalyptic Washington is rather more convincing, even if it’s not clear how the cats survived (or indeed the old man).

A tv series followed, riffing off the concept, and a remake has been promised for over a decade. I’m not holding my breath.

The State of the Project

I see this blog as a thinking aloud space, whilst I research and complete a book on 1970s sf. as such there is always going to be a bit of a trade off – if I include everything then why read the book, but I might want feedback on a key idea or two that shapes the book. Equally, it won’t go in, simply because it’s here.

I note this because of two thoughts I had yesterday. The first is the sausage to fortune, and the role that Doctor Who: The Invisible Enemy is likely to play in the introduction – both as a text in Paul Magrs’s Strange Boy, a coming of age novel set in the north east, and as I something I watched in my grandparents’ maisonette. I think that if I acknowledge that I am uncovering my own childhood I might be able to avoid the sense that somehow I am travelling into myself as I conduct the work. Especially as it is very much a text about interior travel.

(We pause and consider how little work I conducted today on the article about queer YA sff I need to write, in which Strange Boy has a central role.)

Secondly – and Invisible Enemy could almost become a subtitle to Solar Flares right now – I was reading the start of a book yesterday that has helped the theme of the book really come into focus. The book, incidentally, is Stephen Paul Miller’s The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, and one sentence in particular leapt out and unfolded into bloom. Certainly it gives me a frame for a good half of the chapters. For now I will pass over the sentence in silence.

But I have for the first time the glimpse of the figures that Michelangelo was to free from the marble blocks.

Meanwhile, here are two things I wrote in my general blog, Mock Mocha Mocker (although it was called something different back then), which was the state of my thinking in April 2007.

http://drasecretcampus.livejournal.com/37521.html

‘SF has not been much fun of late. All forms of pop culture go through doldrums; they catch cold when society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved, and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder’ [Bruce Sterling]

And yet, and yet – I’ve been thinking about seventies sf for a number of years now, and I’ve written articles on three neglected figures of the period: Coney, Cowper and Compton. I’ve always felt that there was a book in it somewhere but whether anyone is interested enough to read it remains to be seen.

But I’m being drawn to the decade again, and I’m looking at this large block of marble, prepared to make the first chip. I’m sure there’s a statue there somewhere, but where?

I’m thinking that the seventies was the period when sf first truly escaped from being the property of white, bourgeois boys – after civil rights, after women’s rights, after gay rights, Something Changed. Sf became a venue for new political visions. The New Wave(s) had refreshed its voice, but now it had something to talk about. After all, it could hardly be about going to the moon.

The last thing I want to write about is the death of sf. (‘It may not be the worst thing that ever happened to sf that it died.’) But certainly the dinosaurs of First Sf were sorry relics who had been out evolved. And with four or five blockbuster films (Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters, Alien) there was sf around, even if it wasn’t the kind we were looking for or (and this is just me thinking aloud here) some of it was all too much like the First SF we told ourselves we’d outgrown. Sf writers weren’t competing for our beer money any more, but for the money we spent on lunchboxes.

What would a history of seventies sf look like, if these are indeed the parts of the statue in the marble? I don’t want to just write about exceptions. The mainstream stuff needs examining too. (‘Obviously the stuff I’m interested in is the radical subversive marginal stuff, because I’m a radical subversive margin.’ And so forth. Special cases don’t make a history, they make a special pleading.)

Is this sf as a postcolonial literature before the neo cons/roms returned in the 1980s?

http://drasecretcampus.livejournal.com/39143.html

So sf is dead, right, it’s in the doldrums by the seventies – after all, we’ve put a man (two men) on the Moon. (That’s where Aldiss and Wingrove begin their account, in Trillion Year Spree, with responses to the moon landing.) Agenda sf, if you will, is dead. But there are those writers of the Gernback-Campbell Continuum who are still writing (Campbell dies in the early 1970s – 1971): Heinlein gets flabby and oversexed, Asimov returns with a singleton before lapsing into silence until the late trilogies, Herbert adds to the Dune mythos, Clarke writes about Rama, one of many Big Dumb Objects of the period, and so on. Business as usual, just less frequently. Even Dick has slowed down.

The British New Wave crowd, faced with the entropy extending even to New Worlds’s circulation, have diversified into novels, which sometimes look less and less like sf as they deal with car crashes and traffic islands, and the alien planet is Earth. Even Doctor Who is Earthbound and paralysed. Meanwhile, a bandwagon is creaking into life: as Tolkien dies so the industry takes off, fueled by the growing role playing game craze and the first of many publications of material Tolkien himself would never have published. There is a fantasy boom – the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, Thomas Covenant, a book about rabbits and another about seagulls. Sf is dead, right?

Well, hardly. It’s not showing the hard sf concerns it once did to the same extent, but instead it takes on a political edge [Okay, yes: sf dealt with McCarthyism and the Cold War in the 1950s, and was hardly ignoring politics in the 1960s, but it takes on a more vital role post-1969 I'd argue.] as a barometer of the times. So, let’s see: the fag end of the Vietnam War, which lurches into genocide in Cambodia. The fall of Nixon. The oil crisis. Carter’s single term in the White House and the hostage crisis. In the UK, growing trouble in Northern Ireland and bombing campaign in England. The three day week. The winter of discontent. The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister – which is followed by Reagan becoming president and a new twist in the Cold War. (I think I’m going to have to limit it to Anglophone sf – so Australia, Canada and New Zealand need a broadstroke history, too.)

The sf of the age will presumably have reflected these issues – somewhere along the line – and other concerns of the age, such as ecology and environmentalism. Also key to the period is the ongoing fight for equality for women, blacks and gays, with Tiptree, Butler and Delany being vital exemplars. Le Guin really comes of age, although Left Hand of Darkness is outside of the period proper, it only just is, and its ruminations on gender signal the confusions of the age. As do Heinlein’s genderbendings of I Will Fear No Evil and “The Number of the Breast”, for that matter.

At the same time, the iconography of Agenda Sf was being recycled (very green) in the imagery associated with various branches of popular music and, most visibly, the high concept, blockbuster movie of which Star Wars is the most prominent example, and The Empire Strikes Back forms a convenient bookend for the end of the decade (and a contrast with 2001: A Space Odyssey). The pessimism of the second film in the trilogy perhaps finds other echoes in Blake’s 7 and Battlestar Galactica. Meanwhile there were a whole raft of respected (and not so respected) raft of mainstream writers who were using sf tropes in their novels – Pynchon, Hoban, Burgess and so forth – leaving a sense that sf was going far beyond its fannish base.