From around the age of ten I wanted to be an artist so I applied for a correspondence course but didn't meet the minimum age requirement. A year or two later I could officially enrol and having taken the tests they sent me the info but more importantly, the price, which my dad didn't want to pay. That was that.
Apart from drawing, writing was my other passion. I'd write sci-fi stories in a lined pad in the living-room, with my family watching the telly. What powers of concentration I must have had in those days! No correspondence school attempt in that regard though.
I wonder how I'd have fared with the Famous Writers School. The only member who's name I recognise is Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. I don't think they were open to concrete poetry.
'We all have basic needs like food, sex, clothing and shelter. Almost everything else (including the book you are now reading) is wants, often artificially created by the culture in which we live.' - From the introduction to Ballard's The Subliminal Man
True, true - of course I didn't need another book! I bought it anyway, not because it was forced onto me through subliminal advertising but because I was already aware of it and whilst searching the online Oxfam shop's sci-fi section it appeared at an irresistibly reduced price of £6.
I like the theme and what a great cover (no credit given for the designer). Love that 'futuristic' font too, a variation on the one used by the BBC's Tomorrow's World (first transmitted on 7 July 1965)
Tomorrow's World looked at developments in science and technology. By the 70s it was attracting 10 million viewers per week, including my family. Science for the masses! You may find it hard to believe but trust me when I tell you that the programme's popularity did not reflect a sudden awakening to the wonders of science on behalf of the proletariat. No. It was essential escapism from the reality of industrial Britain, heavy Industrial Britain, you know, when we still had an industry, we made things, important things like steel...and we dug up tons of coal, which came in handy too...and men were men who did the dirty, dangerous work, not the wimps of today sat tapping keys in offices all day because what Tomorrow's World predicted came true in the form of computers in every home, office and hand!
Yes, real men, 70s men, such as the miners, willing to strike at the drop of a fag butt and stay on strike until they got what they wanted even when it meant the government deciding to ration the use of electricity therefore probably preventing everyone from being able to watch Tomorrow's World. The television broadcasting restrictions were introduced on 17 December 1973, suspended for the Christmas and New Year period, and lifted on 8 February 1974. I remember those candle-lit nights but I can't remember what we did as a family. It must have been hard. I'm guessing playing cards were useful. Board games? Long conversations? Not likely...
'This terminal is linked to a giant brain' says the narrator - ha-ha! I love it - very sci-fi. The warning signs were there. In the next century, giant Silicon Valley 'brains' would be manipulating information, tracking our every move online and censoring material not deemed politically acceptable (laptop? What laptop?). And there's little Nicholas, aged four, an early adopter and innocent forerunner of today's young addicts who, at a slightly later stage, laugh at their parents' attempts to monitor their online activity whilst they peruse porn, follow lifestyle influencers and watch Drill videos under the duvet.
When it comes to book-buying, as helpless consumers we addicts may as well live in an area where giant signs advertising must-have reads loom large over roads and houses (as in Ballard's story). Unlike the fictitious one though, the scenario would have to be a purely personal one. The signs would not say 'BUY NOW NEW CAR NOW' as they do in the story but 'BUY ----- (desired book) NOW BUY NEW ------ NOW'.
Now we 'drive' along the highways and byways of the internet, the not-so-subliminal signage taking the form of shopping baskets on various sites, filled with thumbnail images of what we want and so, ironically, it isn't size that counts; it doesn't need to be a massive billboard, just a small representation of our desires. No great effort required. No visits to a showroom. Just the click of a mouse! Tomorrow's world today and all the books we desire, instantly!
Nova being the feminine form of novus, meaning "new", it's appropriate that this, my favourite science-fiction anthology, travelled all the way from Nova Scotia to finally come to rest in my London home. It is, after all, very much a New Wave SF collection. The idea of such a 'new' thing (in 1968) even being in Nova Scotia seems incredulous, but then, we can't imagine how far artifacts from Swinging England travelled when they were still fresh. It could, of course, have ended up there at any time since, assuming they have a secondhand section.
Nova Publications was formed in 1949 in order to keep New Worlds magazine going and so, with Michael Moorcock transforming it into the New Wave SF mag, the nova connection, my book and it's origin in Canada is complete.
I've spent the last few days in the Space Age - nothing new in that, except to say that recently I've been focused on both interplanetary and inner space, travelling back in time to the golden (space) age optimism of the 50s, hence the collage above - and towards a future (The Future?) where my bank balance is considerably smaller thanks to Stephen E. Andrews' YouTube channel. That's a recent discovery. In a reasoned, well-informed manner, Stephen explains why books he chooses should be read.
I won't spoil your enjoyment by naming the books he chooses for his Top 25 in two videos, suffice to say I agree with some of the choices and haven't read a lot of them. I have an on/off love affair with sci-fi; thinking it's the greatest genre one minute, then the most stupid. It's the first genre I read as a mid-teenager, naturally choosing the big names such as Asimov, Clarke and Herbert.
Its appeal probably stems from the fact that I was always accused of just 'staring into space' as a kid - it's true, I was, but not Outer Space, no, inner space more like or, actually, that weird zone between what I could see out of the classroom window and what was between, without focus...a mental drift into another dimension, my eyes not seeing anything clearly...my mind altered to suit another dimension.
Fast forward through many decades' reading and I've always dipped into science-fiction but spent more time with writers such as Graham Green and the hard-boiled school (Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, for instance). Yet there is a connection. J.G.Ballard is on record as a big fan of Greene. In the latest collection of Ballard's writing there's an essay on G.G. It's a great book and I'll be reviewing it soon.
William Burroughs is another writer I've been into for years. The connection between hard-boiled American writers and WSB is also there in Bill's perversion of pulp fiction and the private eye (or 'private asshole'). His use of street slang ('Wising up the marks') and the exploits of the Nova Police.
It was good to see Burroughs in Andrews' Top 25. He's too radical for most sci-fi fans, I would guess. Whilst the early ideas of space travel and alien menace seems 'radical' on paper, it became a hackneyed cliche, a space trap into which all sci-fi writers seemed to fall, the end results being no more than Boys Own adventures in space. Well, as Ballard once said when explaining the appeal of sci-fi to him as a young man, at least no-one lived in Hampstead. Burroughs, meanwhile, was rewriting the book, exploiting space-age cliches to radically alter literature and our perception of time through extensive use of cut-up texts which sampled Graham Green, Conrad and a host of others. It felt to me upon discovering his universe that this was 'true' science-fiction; speculative texts for the multi-media overload age.
Stephens' Top 25 got me thinking. I'm in no position as an expert to name that many but here are 10 that would be in my chart. In no particular order:
Nova Express - William Burroughs
Hard To Be A God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Man Who Fell To Earth - Walter Tevis
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G Ballard
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philp K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
I'm bound to have forgotten some!
Here's Stephen's first 25. His channel is highly recommended.
I'm currently bouncing back and forth in time and place between a bunch of books (and one by Bunch), from Moderan to Kill The Dutchman! to Riddley Walker - the first and last being contrasting visions of the future, one a plastic-wrapped planet populated by bio-mechanical 'humans', the other a primitive, ritualistic world after science. Both Bunch (Moderan) and Hoban (Riddley Walker) exploit the potential of language as a tool to describe imaginary worlds.
As with Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and William Burroughs' cut-up 'novels', the brave new words and scrambled syntax used by Bunch and Hoban brilliantly break up common language to leave most formal sci-fi way behind. As you know, the most interesting futures in fiction were created by those who broke the genre barrier.
Whilst reading Moderan I was also revisiting one of my Eduardo Paolozzi books and his sculptures struck me as representations of Bunch's metal-machine men, despite being made decades earlier. OK, they're bronze, not metal, but despite making aluminium sculptures too (see last picture) it's the bronze mutations which seemed to be more Moderan-like since they too retain something human about them, albeit vague and suggestive.
Art and Fiction similarities aside, there's also a connection between Kill The Dutchman! and Burroughs, of course. The latter created The Last Words of Dutch Schultz as a screenplay to a film that was never made. Schultz's last words from a hospital bed were spoken whilst delirious from fever and fatally wounded (lead poisoning); being gibberish, they appealed to Burroughs, who used them as a springboard for his own interpretation. Paul Sann's telling of Shultz's life is so authentically Noo Yawk 30s reporter style you can small the cigar smoke and see the pages through his green visor as he hammers the typewriter keys. The tone is comic, hardboiled, and the book is highly recommended for a flavour of how gangster life and death was described at the time (although it was written circa 1970).
Here's a collage I made a few years ago using an image from the era described by Sann. I called it Tempted To Kill.
Remember Swinging England? Of course you don't, you probably weren't even born. Still, you have this time machine with which to read all about the decade (perhaps more accurately, the first half of the decade?) when England was the epicentre of Cool. Exactly when England was officially designated the most swinging place in the world, I'm not sure.
There was an attempt to revive the idea in the 90s when Blur and Oasis went head-to-head but they didn't have a chance in hell against the likes of The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks or The Small Faces, did they? Never mind that Cool Britannia under Tony Blair was a superficial gloss, thinly applied, easily seen through compared to the mass of talent in music, film, fashion and art that came to the fore three decades earlier.
So here is England Swings SF with a jacket design by Richard Merkin, who became friends with Peter Blake and through Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper was immortalised as one of the collaged crowd on the sleeve. Coincidentally, Merril interspersed her intro with lyrics from St. Pepper.
I bought this hardback, first edition recently, preferring it to the inferior paperback cover. You know, sometimes you have to have certain editions and although I'm not normally driven to pay more just for the cover, this time I did. Note the derogatory remarks regarding New Wave sci-fi from some big names on the back. I could be a bit derogatory by suggesting that England had stopped swinging by the time of the book's publication date, 1968. But what kind of killjoy would deny Judith her right to exploit the idea and produce a late-Pop Art/Lit masterpiece in the process?
The cover is reminiscent of the work Paolozzi was producing as prints; the juxtaposition of photography and graphic art in collage form, much like illustrations that would grace the pages of New Worlds magazine in the hands of Michael Moorcock as editor.
Three JG Ballard stories feature and as a bonus press reactions to Ballard in another hot magazine of the day, Ambit, are included. I've scanned them and stuck them together for you to read.
I haven't started to read any of the stories yet. For now it just sits facing out on the bookshelf, looking magnificent.
6.15 a.m. I gaze up up the dark-turning-deep-blue pre-dawn sky and see UFOs! UFOs, that is, until researched 'lines of white lights in the sky' and found out they were part of SpaceX's satellite internet project - whoooo! Part of me was disappointed that I hadn't seen a row of alien spacecraft flying in very tight formation and part of me was amazed by the earth-based human endeavour. By a suitably X-Files-type, spooky sci-fi coincidence I had made the image above, Space Event, just yesterday. So it came to pass, art predicted what would happen the very next day - a real space event.
Talking of outer space, inner space and sci-fi, here's my Cover of the Day, picked up this morning from a charity shop on my way to the bookshop...
...a gem, eh? Artwork by Alun Hood. I scanned my copy because those online weren't very good. The collection is promising, though, but also misleading because there are short stories by other authors too. Why they've packaged it as a Spinrad collection is a mystery. I didn't notice until I examined the credits once I was home. Turns out the first and title story is by...hold on...it says 'copyright Michael Moorcock' but research tells me it's by Spinrad - huh? So Moorcock had the copyright because it appeared in New Worlds 2? OK, what about The Weed Of Time, stated as copyright by Anne McCaffrey? Or The National Pastime copyright Harry Harrison? It seems that all the stories are by Spinrad by some other authors hold the copyright. How did that happen? You figure it out.
Whilst mentioning Moorcock, I recommend this podcast from the Bureau of Lost Culture. It's the first part of what was apparently a long discussion, the rest of which will be aired in the future. Check out other episodes too because it's an interesting show.
(...................(hold on).....did you imagine a new post today that is not this one? Or did I imagine it; the one that repeated a theme discussed earlier? If so, either you are going mad...or I am...)
I've been busy today - creating images and (far more usefully) scrubbing the tiled floor in the hallway, which I can never do without singing (in my head) a line from Stevie Wonder's Living For The City: 'to scrub the floors for many'. This is totally absurd, I know, since the song is about the struggles of black people in America and I am a white man in London scrubbing the floor only for myself and the missus.
If, as impossible as it sounds to me, you didn't know that tune, I will feel my day has not been wasted by introducing you to a track from one of the greatest albums ever made,Innervisions.
From one kind of innervisions to those of Britain's New Wave sci-fi writers in the 60s as discussed in Colin Greenland's The Entropy Exhibition, which I've just started reading. The talk then was of 'inner space', that vast psychic universe in which the master, JG Ballard and others found so much material. This in opposition to cliched pulp adventures in outer space which amounted to no more than ripping yarns with aliens. Not that all outer space sci-novels were rubbish, of course, but that this breed set out to suggest and describe new possibilities for the genre; mapping the altered mind, if I may call it that. They had their work cut out. Ultimately, they may have failed since only the more discerning cognoscenti see worlds other than strange alien planets when thinking of science fiction. No matter. We cannot concern ourselves with what Mr & Mrs People think, can we?
Talking of sci-fi novels, the one featured in the photo at the top provided the material for this...
Watched New Town Utopia recently. A superb film about the new town project that was/is Basildon. At times it's depressing but it's also a testament to the human spirit trying to survive and somehow thrive, creatively, when the post-war optimism of fresh lives for London families has long-since faded. It's most famous sons are Depeche Mode; their pilgrims still visit, apparently. But it's the efforts of the unknowns that provide the heart of this film. Highly recommended.
Featured on this page are three city-related pictures I created over the last year.
