by Neil Clarke
As if returning the favor, the campy SF novel Time of the Hawklords—billed as co-written by Moorcock and Michael Butterworth—starred thinly veiled members of Hawkwind. Lemmy, for instance, appeared as Count Motorhead, while Nik Turner became The Thunder Rider. Moorcock even pops up as the tongue-in-cheek surrogate Moorlock the Acid Sorcerer.
Moorcock, however, disowned the book and denied having anything to do with its authorship, although it’s based on many of Moorcock’s concepts. (Two sequels, the prose novel Queens of Deliria and the graphic novel Ledge of Darkness, dispensed entirely with the notion of Moorcock’s involvement.) Still, Time of the Hawklords—not to mention Hawkwind’s cameo in the Jerry Cornelius novel A Cure for Cancer—completed a profound circuit: Inspired by Moorcock’s sprawling mythology, Hawkwind became characters in that mythology.
Moorcock isn’t the only SFF legend Hawkwind has relied on for inspiration. Roger Zelazny, among the handful of American authors who wrote for Moorcock’s New Worlds, became another of the band’s literary muses. Three of their songs—1972’s “Lord of Light,” 1977’s “Damnation Alley,” and 1979’s “Jack of Shadows,” all either written or co-written by Calvert—were based on Zelazny novels of the same names, reiterating such themes as post-apocalyptic horror, magic meets computers, and how posthumanity dovetails with theology.
“Time We Left This World Today” from 1972 references the brain police from George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four; “D-Rider” from 1974 mentions dragons and recalls Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern; 1979’s “High Rise” adapts J. G. Ballard’s horrific urban dystopia of the same name; “The War I Survived” from 1988 contains a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; “3 or 4 Erections in the Course of a Night” from 1993 takes its title from a line in the SF movie Dreamscape; and “Alien (I Am)” from 1995 boasts a sample of dialogue from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Mind’s Eye.” Another song from the same album (Alien 4) is more blatantly named “Beam Me Up.”
Hawkwind’s love for Star Trek is reciprocal. William Shatner covered “Silver Machine” on his 2011 album Seeking Major Tom, lending his authoritative bombast to the astro-psychedelic masterpiece; two years later, former Hawkwind member Nik Turner made a guest appearance on Shatner’s tribute to progressive rock, Ponder the Mystery. In an interview in 2013, Brock enthused about Shatner’s vocals on a new version of “Sonic Attack,” which was supposed to appear on Hawkwind’s 2013 album Spacehawks. The remake of the song that wound up on Spacehawks, however, did not feature Shatner, and his version of “Sonic Attack” has yet to be released. One can only hope.
Not that Hawkwind draws only on other creators’ work for their SFF music—they’ve always had a healthy speculative imagination of their own. The ominous countdown of 1973’s apocalyptic “Ten Seconds Forever” has, according to Abrahams in Sonic Assassins, “the unlikely accolade of being the science fiction ‘Twelve Days of Christmas.’” The 1979 song “Uncle Sam’s on Mars” indulges two of Hawkwind’s other passions—radical politics and dark humor.
The unsettlingly mechanical “Automaton,” released in 1978 under the pseudonym The Hawklords, is answered by Hawkwind’s 1979 song “Robot,” which cites Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The elaborate scenario of “The Age of the Micro Man,” also from ’79, involves a nightmare future where millions of workers are enslaved to an industrial elite who believe that the aliens who guide them are angels. Instead of being inspired by a science fiction story, the 1988 song “Heads”—about a group of disembodied heads preserved “in glass booths” and wired together to generate enormous powers—actually predates Greg Bear’s similarly themed novella Heads by three years.
One of Hawkwind’s most ambitious original concepts played out on their 1976 album Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music. The title and cover art pay homage to the magazines of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, specifically John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction and Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories; each track was intended to stand as its own short story, like an anthology in song.
On the eve of the new millennium, Hawkwind brought their career in SFF full circle with In Your Area’s live version of “Aerospace Age Inferno” a song that originally appeared on Calvert’s 1974 solo debut, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. A fever dream of intergalactic travel, it calls back to “Silver Machine” with the line “The silver machine is worth more than you’re worth.” It also winks at one of Hawkwind’s early inspirations, Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” with the gleefully sinister rejoinder “Set the controls for the heart of the Earth.”
For all of Hawkwind’s heady cosmic mysticism—their “decades-long interstellar mission to explore the occult mysteries of the cosmos,” says Peter Bebergal in Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll—they remain rooted in the SFF community. They’ve played at SFF cons—most notably Seacon ’84 in Brighton, England, at which the band’s beloved Roger Zelazny served as a guest of honor, and Worldcon 45 in 1987 at the same location. Said drummer Richard Chadwick in 1989, a year after he’d joined the group, “Every gig we did was like a science fiction convention.” Weathering numerous lineup changes, schisms, deaths, and even an internal lawsuit over ownership of the name, Hawkwind long ago solidified its position as one of the most reliable—yet thankfully unpredictable—practitioners of SFF music.
The band itself hasn’t always seen it that way. Soon after the release of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music in 1976, Turner told the New Musical Express, “You can’t say there is a stereotype of what Hawkwind music should be, that it should be space rock or it should be all about science fiction or magic and sorcery.” Only seven years into its existence, the group was already feeling the squeeze of being pigeonholed. Calvert even went so far as to say in a 1978 interview with the same magazine, “I don’t like SF that much. Nobody in this band is particularly an SF fanatic,” adding, “Most SF is trash, actually.”
Bearing in mind Calvert’s mental issues at the time—later that year, his clinical depression resulted in the cancellation of a Hawkwind tour and his subsequent exit from the group—he may have simply been bucking against the space-rock stereotype that he’d wholeheartedly helped cultivate. Just one year earlier, he proudly told the fanzine Sniffin’ Flowers that he considered Hawkwind to be “a science fiction band [ . . . ] in actual fact we are the only band that is doing that sort of thing”—an exaggerated claim, but the point stands; the same year he boasted in another fanzine, Album Tracking, “We even get letters from University people, in the States in particular, who have found parallels between science fiction and the literature of the past and who can fit Hawkwind into that scheme. I still think we’re closely aligned with that.”
Calvert died in 1988 of a heart attack, just shy of Hawkwind’s twentieth anniversary. This year the band turns forty-seven, and The Machine Stops is their thirtieth studio album, not counting scores of live albums, archival collections, EPs, singles, bootlegs, and releases by their many offshoot groups and solo projects—almost all of them with a finger in SFF. And with The Machine Stops, Hawkwind shows no signs of letting that association lapse—instead, they’re doubling down on it, releasing one of the most extravagantly faithful SFF albums in their long, storied career. Or as Moorcock so speculatively put it in Sonic Assassins, Hawkwind is “like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten their mission, which had turned to art during the passage of time.”
About the Author
Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Trav
eler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.
Transparency and Transformation:
A Conversation with David Brin
Chris Urie
If there ever was an argument in favor of sci-fi influencing scientific advancement, the work of David Brin would surely be a cornerstone. From his novels and ambitious short fiction to his research into cometary studies, optics, and spacecraft design, David Brin is not only dreaming about the future, but, in some ways, helping to make it a reality.
His newest collection of short fiction, and a couple of essays, highlights a singular author’s acute talent at peering just over time’s horizon to pick out what is coming next. Insistence of Vision features some of Brin’s finest short stories. People fly like gods, have their DNA completely transformed, or send varying waves of ever faster satellites to explore the deepest parts of space, each probe moving faster than the last. It’s a collection that highlights the many facets of one of science fiction’s sharpest minds.
David Brin is a scientist and New York Times bestselling author. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell awards. He helped to create the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, serves on the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, and has consulted with groups ranging from the CIA to Google. David Brin’s third collection, Insistence of Vision, was released in March by Story Plant.
You’ve published numerous novels and continue to work in the short fiction realm. What is it about short fiction that keeps you writing in that form?
The shorter the story, the more it resembles poetry, in that your aim is to achieve emotional power. The words in a short work are sonic, they combine as musical notes do. Whether the seed is a character, a problem-to-solve or an idea, there’s no room to spare for fluff or elaboration. The seed must crystallize into something with its own beauty. In contrast, a novel is worldbuilding, a future, a territory, a vast network of ripples spreading and overlapping from initial cause. You may write beautiful passages, but the words are less sounds than atoms in a much greater whole.
Transformation is a theme I’ve noticed running through some of the stories in this collection, particularly “Chrysalis,” with the reawakening of dormant human DNA. Do you think humans have evolved to a point where the next step in the process may be caused by science and technology rather than the way natural selection has proceeded in the past?
A theme that has long entranced me is adolescence, and how we individually—or as a species—wrestle with the dilemmas of growing up. Of deciding to be responsible, even if barely in the nick of time. (Which is how nearly all teenagers finally do it.) We are picking up the Tools of Creation now, in real time. And the possibilities for blowing it—for burning our fingers or maybe burning down the lab—are all around us. The universe may not care if we make it. Or else, perhaps it is holding its breath, waiting for us to decide whether we truly want to be apprentice gods.
When working on your novels or short stories, do you have a specific process in place when extrapolating forward into the future? Do you look through any particular forums or publications?
I accept that I am many. The mad poet has his uses. As does the scientist. They listen—to the rhythms or words and music that fill this brash civilization as well as to the summit discoveries of our leading minds. Learn to listen, to read and explore and knock on doors. If I tell students anything, it is to knock on lots of doors and ask: “Excuse me but what do you do here?”
Transparency has figured in a number of your stories. In particular, information about individuals is readily available at the twitch of an eyelid. What are your thoughts on the push and pull of privacy and transparency going on today?
Light wants to flow, it does flow. Our new tools will spread it everywhere. If we try to restrict it, all we’ll guarantee is that only elites will become omniscient. Elites of government, commerce, wealth, technology, criminality. But we’ll have blinded us—the common citizens. There is an alternative. Accept our duty to become partial gods. Knowing and free and behooved to become at least a little wiser.
It’s all right. We’ve done this before. Remember learning to fly? Our grandparents did that thing. It still amazes me. And it was allowed. It was beautiful. So will it be, when we are people who know.
In “Waging War With Reality” you write, “The brightest physicists play with Zen riddles, and some great engineers have also been noted artists or musicians.” Do you have any other hobbies?
In earlier decades I played violin, then guitar, and sang a bit. Some drums. Now all I have left is a mean harmonica! Painted a bit. But obviously words have been my colors. Writing and speaker-ing were my pastimes as a scientist till they took over. Now? It’s the science that I treat as my part-time art. I actually enjoy it more, that way.
You have an interesting view on criticism. You’ve mentioned that it is a gift from your enemies. Can you elaborate on that?
Human beings—all of us—are inherently delusional self-deceivers, rationalizers, and cheaters. History shows that no elite group can be trusted to rule wisely. No, not even the elites you happen to admire. Not even you. Not even me. Oh, some professions use hard-won tricks to reduce the total amount of self-delusion. The law tries. Science teaches millions some methods of honesty and reality checking. But scientists are still human.
Only here’s the interesting lesson that our greatest sages gradually realized: Pericles, Ben Franklin, they noted that we are pretty good at spotting the delusions of other people. I am not in love with your mistakes, the way you are, and hence I can point them out. And my own beloved errors? I am sure you’ll be happy to explain them to me. And here’s the great deal: you are willing to point out my mistakes . . . for free!
Criticism is a gift economy. We toss it as a freebie to our biggest foes. And if we are smart, we look at it that way, when they hurl critiques at us. Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error . . . CITOKATE. Oh sure, we hate it! That’s the biggest human tragedy, that we—almost all of us—have exactly the wrong reaction to criticism, which is the one thing that enables you to find your errors and correct them.
What projects are you working on now?
Novels, stories, nonfiction . . . how I wish I had the self-copying machine from Kiln People! Oh, and answering interview questions. Dang, I was planning to cut down on that . . .
Do you still hate Yoda?
Not so much hate as just a clear-eyed recognition that the nasty little green oven mitt is—beyond all question—the most evil and destructing character ever created, in the history of human mythology. Just that. Never wise, even once, at least he fails at every ambition, and good old Luke finally learns to ignore the awful little gnome! After finishing Star Wars on Trial, I have mostly ignored him, too!
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
Technology Creates a New
Golden Age of Speculative Fiction
Margot Atwell
Typically, when readers think of technology and science fiction, they imagine spaceships, teleportation devices, and other fantastic contraptions. But technology isn’t just a great subject for sci-fi stories. Combined with new distribution methods, it has had a massive impact on genre fiction in the last decade. In that time, I’ve worked in various parts of the publishing industry: as an agent, an editor, publisher, and currently at Kickstarter, at the intersection of publishing and technology. I believe that recent intense innovation has changed what people write and read, and ushered in a new Golden Age of speculative short fiction.
For the last hundred years, trends and innovations in the publishing industry have influenced the types
of writing that have been popular. Short fiction was critical to the establishment of the sci-fi genre. Many people trace the birth of modern science fiction back to Hugo Gernsback, who began “sneaking short stories into his electronics magazine [Modern Electronics],” according to Jim Freund, host of the speculative-fiction-oriented Hour of the Wolf radio show. Gernsback later founded Amazing Stories, a cheap pulp magazine where he could publish short stories openly instead of smuggling them into a venue with a different focus. Americans devoured the stories in that publication and other pulp magazines, in spite of the dubious quality of some of the work. Over time, low-paying pulp magazines gave way to digests, and editors began to approach the genre with a more critical editorial eye.
In 1939, the paperback book was introduced to the US market. Paperbacks were a cheap alternative to hardcover books—they sold for a quarter instead of $2.75, making novels accessible to a mass audience. They were more physically accessible as well: paperbacks were sold on newsstands and many other locations in addition to bookstores.
Publishing novels became more lucrative for authors than writing short fiction, and there was more cachet associated with them. Writers such as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke were encouraged to expand their stories into novels: recognizable favorites such as Fahrenheit 451 and Childhood’s End began as works of short fiction. Over time, markets for short fiction began to dry up. Dozens of science fiction and fantasy magazines ceased publication in the 1950s.
The significant costs of developing, printing, and distributing a book meant that publishers did not find it lucrative to publish shorter works such as a stand-alone novella. So writers focused on writing novels, and short fiction typically lived in the handful of remaining magazines.