Bosnian scholar Matrakçı Nasuh (1480-1564) wrote extensively on mathematics and history. He also created a series of maps of sixteenth century Persia.
But maps aren’t just window dressing, they’re fundamentally a part of fantasy as a genre. Before it’s about anything else, fantasy is about landscape: green fields, green hills, a place to which the characters and the reader feel connected in a way that’s no longer possible in our alienated postindustrial age. Fantasy is about longing, about the yearning to be not here but elsewhere. Maps are about the same thing. A map is not an idle exercise: It’s a plan to go somewhere.
Though it’s not always easy for fantasy novelists to live up to their maps. One reason George R. R. Martin took so long to deliver A Dance with Dragons was the difficulty he had calculating and reconciling all the distances and travel times—it was, he wrote on his blog, “a bitch and a half.” It was something Tolkien himself struggled with: “If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map,” he wrote, “otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”
It’s a problem new to the cartographic age of fantasy: The map now actually precedes the territory. If you’ve ever wondered why the Beor Mountains in Alagaësia are ten miles high, it’s because when he was making the map Christopher Paolini accidentally drew them out of scale. He was going to fix it—but then he decided he liked them better that way. *
Steven Wilson is founder of the alternative rock band Porcupine Tree, discussed in more detail on this page. An extraordinarily versatile and talented musician, Wilson’s most recent project is a solo album titled To The Bone (2017). Photo credit: Lasse Hoile.
MUSIC
Behind the scenes, music is more often than not the storyteller’s fuel. Consider Stephen King’s affection for heavy metal—and the way he’s woven some of his favorite lyrics and images into his classic works.
On the other hand, musicians have equally been inspired by SFF storytelling of a more textual—or visual—nature, and often sought to tell science fiction stories of their own. This chapter explores landmark concept albums that from the 1960s onward, turned music into a bona fide genre of SFF storytelling . . . as well as some of the ambitious (maybe too ambitious) science fiction and fantasy albums that never made it to shelves.
Science-Fiction Storytelling in the 1960s and ’70s, Set to Music
Just as the 1960s welcomed a New Wave in science fiction literature (see this page), it also marked the beginning of an SFF musical renaissance that lasted well into the 1970s. Pop culture was alight with the excitement of the Space Age. The generation’s brilliant minds were reading Tolkien and T. H. White, Asimov and Heinlein, and the iconography of both ancient epics and futuristic galaxies filtered into their own creative efforts. The free-flowing LSD inspired plenty of weird and trippy work as well.
Writing for the Guardian on the 2009 release of a 40th anniversary re-mastered version (with surround sound mixed by Steven Wilson), Graham Fuller called In the Court of the Crimson King “the masterpiece that essentially launched progressive rock.” The band, and the album, have inspired other groups discussed in these pages, such as the Mars Volta. In 2019, the hyper-influential album will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
One of the era’s most ambitious concept albums was In The Court of the Crimson King (1969), the debut album from British prog-rock band King Crimson. This highly influential album is an anti-war polemic that cloaked its criticisms in the allegory of good and evil, blending soaring drama and psychedelic sound. It also inspired Stephen King, who took the name “the Crimson King” for his epic fantasy series The Dark Tower.
In 1972, David Bowie delivered what is possibly the greatest SF concept album of all time: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. This ambitious glam-rock opera tells the story of Ziggy Stardust, a supernatural bisexual rockstar with a magnetic charisma and an alien connection. Ziggy Stardust is the messiah sent by aliens to deliver the human race from selfishness, violence, and greed. Bowie was a fan of William Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, both inventive and experimental science fiction storytellers in their own medium, and was inspired by their work. In his book Strange Stars, Jason Heller describes how Burroughs’s use of collage and deconstruction techniques inspired Bowie’s work: “A pioneer of post-modern sci-fi pastiche as well as the literary cut-up technique, in which snippets of text were randomly rearranged to form a new syntax, Burroughs straddled both pulp sci-fi and the avant-garde, exactly the same liminal space Bowie now occupied.”
David Bowie’s tragic passing from cancer in January 2016 prompted a global outpouring of mourning and commemoration, leading many to revisit the artist’s greatest works from over the decades. Many of his albums re-entered the Billboard 200 chart, including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which peaked at No. 21, forty-four years after its initial release. Blackstar, his final album, released just two days before his death, debuted at No. 1.
Burroughs and Bowie met for a discussion published in Rolling Stone—a sort of mutual interview between two great minds. During this conversation, Bowie sketched out his own interpretation of Ziggy Stardust: “The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of a lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have all lost touch with reality, and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock ’n’ roll band, and the kids no longer wanted to play rock ’n’ roll. There’s no electricity to play it.”
It’s an incredibly influential album, no less because as he took on the persona of Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie inspired a generation of queer and questioning kids who fell in love with his unapologetically androgynous, flamboyant, bisexual persona. He didn’t just invent Ziggy through music—he lived him through fashion and style.
Soon after came Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), the height of prog rock, a hippie classic, and one of the bestselling albums of all time. It explores the cosmic concerns of space, time, and the human experience. If you were born in the seventies or eighties (or, let’s face it, the nineties), there’s a good chance this is the album your dad jammed to while getting high in the garage. It’s not Pink Floyd’s only sci-fi influenced work by any means—some of their other great songs include “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “Interstellar Overdrive.”
In 1975, the universe welcomed Parliament’s Mothership Connection. Beyond the long shadow it cast on the funk music genre, Mothership Connection marked a major milestone in science fiction storytelling by bringing Afrofuturism to a popular audience (as Nisi Shawl explores on this page). This mythology laid groundwork for new threads of Afrofuturist storytelling across genres—not just the music of twenty-first century innovators like Deltron 3030 and Janelle Monáe (see this page and this page), but also some of the best speculative work emerging today in fiction, film, and comics.
With lyrics like “light years in time, ahead of our time, free your mind and come fly with me,” Mothership Connection invited its listeners to embark on a journey toward a different future. It presented a mythology in which funk music is the key to building a better world, casting Black people as the heroes and heroines of an epic science fiction story.
In 1976, Rush released one of the final big concept albums of the era: 2112. The story is told via the twenty-minute title track, which occupied one entire side of the band’s breakthrough album. The grandiose sci-fi storytelling is underlined by deep cuts and conveyed via a high-charged wall of sound that’s both dynamic and volatile, frequently changing pace to match the emotional highs and lows of the narrative.
Naturally, the story takes place in the year 2112, when the world is ruled by the oppressive Solar Federation. Art and music are regulated by priests—until a guy finds an old-ass guitar and discovers the pleasures of the forbidden. The priests of the Temples of Syrinx
can’t let that stand; they destroy it. This young martyr to the music kills himself in protest, provoking chaos . . . and the beginning of a new era. Consequence of Sound calls the story a “classic tale of the individual versus an oppressive, collectivist entity,” comparing the world of 2112 to “Winston Smith’s world in 1984 or that of John the Savage in Brave New World.”
2112 is right up there with Ziggy Stardust and the Crimson King for greatest concept album in the universe. In future albums, Rush continued to explore science fiction themes, depicting an interstellar voyage through a black hole in the lengthy tracks “Cygnus X-1” and “Cygnus X-1 Book II,” respectively found on A Farewell to Kings (1977) and Hemispheres (1978).
Just as the musicians who created these works were inspired by their favorite SF novels—often the tales they’d treasured as children—the vast mythologies hinted at in these albums went on to inspire a new generation of writers, who found in fragments of lyrics, and the feelings they evoked, the genesis of their own speculative stories. And the interchange and interplay between musicians and writers continues. *
NISI SHAWL
Astro Black
The future looked black. More to the point, it sounded black. Back in the mid-1970s, pre–President Reagan, post-MLK, Parliament/Funkadelic gave up the intergalactic funk in honor of an awakened community of musically oriented science fiction fans. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to describe them as SF-oriented music fans? At any rate, their semi-cargo-cultish audience eagerly absorbed the group’s outlandish, nay, offearthish stylings. The 1976 Mothership Connection tour featured a smoke-shrouded pyramidal spaceship cajoled into landing onstage by a song; the show’s star Afronauts wore silver lamé platform boots and swooping capes and collars, while the rest of the crew sported dangling furs, bobbing feathers, and bug eyes. Lyrics exhorting listeners to bathe in the healing energies broadcast by their radios and promising to expand their molecules, personae with names like Starchild and Dr. Funkenstein—all these deliberately chosen images and elements and a myriad more underscored P-Funk’s science-fictional bent. Those predilections had their predecessors.
One of the most frequently cited of Parliament/Funkadelic’s predecessors is Sun Ra (1914–1993), the highly theatrical jazz composer and perfomer, who many claim was Afrofuturism’s Ur-musician. Long, long ago—In the thirties? Forties? Fifties? Accounts vary.—following a non-corporeal journey to a planet he believed was Saturn, Sun Ra began spreading the news that space was the place. From the fifties through the early nineties he played avant-garde jazz alongside an ever-changing lineup that at times included thirty musicians, singers, dancers, and fire-eaters. “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” he asked on the 1970 live album It’s After the End of the World, making it clear that his forays into the speculative encompassed not just space but time.
Another influence, and a near contemporary: Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970). Guitarist Eddie Hazel was an obvious Hendrixite, and the psychedelic component of P-Funk’s shows and recordings has often been linked to Hendrix. But what about that SF content I mentioned? Plenty of Hendrix songs—“Third Stone from the Sun” and “1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” to name a couple—are solidly genre. His love of Flash Gordon movies and postapocalyptic novels is documented in books and articles. Did Messrs. Clinton and Hazel (as well as P-Funk mainstays Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins) neglect that aspect of Hendrix’s pioneering work when taking inspiration from it? Doubtful.
Why, though, does Afrofuturism resonate so strongly in the echoing halls of musical knowledge? Perhaps, partly, for the same reason it’s a force to be reckoned with on any curve of the Afrodiasporic sphere: alienation and cognitive dissonance, the mainstays of the SF experience, science fiction’s hardcore jollies, are, for us, the default. As a child I tried to explain this to a white neighbor by sharing my theory that I came from Mars. Outsiders make myths of our exclusion. And then we play those myths, and sing them, and dance them, because we recognize that artistic expression of a truth makes it even more valid. Science fiction, as author Greg Bear says, is the modern mythos.
Saxophonist John Gilmore, a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, in 1990. The Arkestra was a flexible, ever-evolving ensemble of dozens of musicians that Ra led for decades. The Arkestra often performed in fantastic costumes that blended influences from Egyptian myth and iconography and Space Age science fiction, creating an early aesthetic for Afrofuturism. Photo credit: Sefton Samuels / Shutterstock.
So the intersection of music and Afrofuturism is a regularly visited spot. Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, Parliament/Funkadelic to be sure—and P-Funk’s contemporaries, too: Sly & the Family Stone, who accompanied the band on the Mothership Connection tour; Gil Scott-Heron, who predicted worldwide transformation in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”; Earth, Wind & Fire, whose neo-Egyptian symbolism and proselytizing for Cosmic Consciousness fit right in with the Afrofuturist tradition.
It’s a living tradition. It can be found anywhere you look. Punk rock embodied Afrofuturism, if only briefly, in Poly Styrene, lead singer of X-Ray Spex. (Her songs “Germ Free Adolescents” and “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” come particularly to mind.) Disco and New Wave diva Grace Jones has always been presented as beautifully inhuman, erotically robotic, and shockingly unearthly through her hair, clothes, makeup, and mannerisms. Yet another quondam disco star, Michael Jackson, was known for “moonwalking,” a dance move that seems to defy mundane causality. Jackson performed several Afrofuturistic numbers in the years following that early part of his solo career. His hit dance tune “Another Part of Me” first appeared in 1987 in the indubitably science-fictional short film Captain EO. “Remember the Time,” released in 1992, foregrounds the familiar Afrofuturist Egyptian aesthetic; “Scream,” released in 1995, originally accompanied a video in which MJ and his sister Janet sang and danced aboard an orbiting spacecraft.
Throughout the eighties and nineties, electronica and house—originally black musical forms—helped Afrofuturism keep on keepin’ on. Some SF authors had begun by then to lament the growing difficulty of writing about a future that got closer and closer every day. They complained that fast-paced innovation overtook their storylines, but electronica started off inviting listeners to discover the future by living in it, and went on to celebrate what could be found there.
Something experiential and empirical in the nature of music blends nicely with African-based attitudes toward science, time, and technology. This may be why the flow goes both ways, into the aural realm and out of it. Not only does genre fiction inspire Afrofuturist music, the music’s figures and numbers and other components inspire genre fiction—as when, for example, an avatar of P-Funk’s Starchild appears in my 2008 story “Good Boy.” Or when an anthology collecting that story is titled Mothership. Or sometimes when an Afrofuturist composer and performer such as DJ Gabriel Teodros writes the stuff himself. His 2015 story “Lalibela” appears in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and is reprinted in Volume 1 of the Sunspot Jungle anthology.
Because of this ongoing back-and-forth, and with Beyoncé (“Single Ladies”), Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”), and Janelle Monáe (The ArchAndroid) constantly updating Afrofuturism’s sound, scholars like Kinitra Jallow, Erik Steinskog, and DJ Lynnée Denise have endless sources of new material to examine in their studies of the subject. And those of us less studious have endless sources of material to which we can shake our multidimensional booties. *
The Who’s Lifelong Search for the “One Note”
After the massive critical and commercial success of Tommy (1969), a rock opera about an abused boy, the Who found themselves in search of an equally ambitious concept for their next album. For lead guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, that concept was Lifehouse—a science-fiction rock opera that would expand the potential of audience participation to dizzying new heights. The album would be supplemented with film and live performances, making it a full multimedia experience.
The Lifehouse storyline went through several iterations, but here’s the general thrust of it: In the not-too-distant future, environmental degradation means most people are locked up inside their houses 24/7, where they encounter the world solely through their connection to an experience/entertainment network called “The Grid.” (If you’re thinking that sounds a little like the Internet, you’re not alone.) Basically, the populace spends their lifetimes jacked into virtual reality, wearing haptic feedback suits to enhance the experience.
Of course, in 1970 there wasn’t much popular terminology for virtual reality or haptic feedback suits; no one had even seen The Matrix. Perhaps this was Lifehouse’s downfall; as Pete Townshend tried to explain his brain-busting concept to his bandmates and manager, they were just like “. . . We don’t get it.”
Anyway, in this world governed by virtual reality, a hacker named Bobby discovers rock ’n’ roll, which is outlawed by the Grid. Bobby lives outside the virtual reality network—you could say he’s taken the red pill—and so from his position in a commune of fringe-people and farmers, he begins broadcasting classic rock to the helpless denizens of the Grid. The music will happen live in a concert hall called Lifehouse, played by none other than the Who. Like Mothership and Rush, this story would lean into its own medium by casting music as a powerful and mystical force and the key to freedom from oppression.
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