Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

by Jonathan Wright

  These were conscious choices on the part of the genre’s gatekeepers. This was deliberate, ahistorical, scientifically nonsensical exclusion. Worse, the fans supported the gatekeepers in this. A published story containing a single error of theoretical physics might elicit pages-long, rage-filled letters to the editor, but if a story by the same author depicted black men as white-woman-raping cannibals incapable of sophisticated thought, the response was resounding silence.

  These were the people who made the speculative fiction that I loved. They could not empathise with people like me, and they didn’t want to try. They weren’t comfortable letting us into their archetypal playgrounds at all, let alone in any number. When we did appear, the roles we took were limited, non-threatening to the writer’s sense of superiority: the thug, the slave, the exotic sex toy.

  If I wanted to see people like me, doing things I could relate to, I had to look to my own. Most of what I found from creators of colour went to the opposite extreme, probably in an attempt to counter the extreme whiteness everywhere else. But I wasn’t any more interested in all-black futures than I was in all-white futures. I just wanted fantasies of exploration and enchantment that didn’t slap me in the face with you don’t belong here messages. I just wanted to be able to relax and dream.

  Enter my psychological lifelines: writers such as Octavia Butler, in science fiction. And in music, artists such as Janelle Monáe.

  Scene: I’m reading some fat fantasy book set in Yet Another Faux Medieval Europe. Nothing in this story jibes with my understanding of actual medieval Europe. There’s no fantasy version of the Silk Road bringing spices and agricultural techniques and ideas from China and India and Persia. There’s been no Moorish conquest. There aren’t even Jewish merchants or bankers, stereotypical as that would be. Everyone in this ‘Europe’ looks the same but for minor variations. They speak the same language, worship the same gods; everyone, even the very poor people, seems inordinately concerned with the affairs of the nobility, as if there’s nothing else going on that matters. There are dragons and magic in the story, but it’s the human fantasy that I’m having trouble swallowing.

  It doesn’t matter which book I’m reading. I could name you a dozen others just like it. This isn’t magical medieval Europe; it’s some white supremacist, neo-feudalist fantasy of same, I’m so sick of it that I put the book down and open my laptop and start writing. Later people read what I’ve written and remark on how angry the story is. Gosh, I wonder why.

  Counterscene: It’s the middle of the American presidential election, and my television is full of hate. Republican candidates are doing everything short of saying, “Vote for us if you don’t want women and brown people to take over!” Except some of them are saying that, too. Mitt Romney’s just been endorsed by some frothing bigoted rage-monster of a rock star. He’s not much of an artist but a hell of an attention-getter, so who’s Obama got to counter that?

  I see it first on Twitter: Janelle Monáe says that her song Tightrope is dedicated to Obama. It makes a wonderfully subversive kind of sense. In the Tightrope video, people interned in a stereotypical insane asylum defy authority by dancing – something that leads to, according to the video’s text, “illegal magical practices.” And what could be more magical than the idea that a black man might be elected president twice in this ridiculously racist nation?

  In the video, the asylum patients are all black, though their specific skin colours range across the spectrum of the diaspora. The bad guys aren’t white; Monáe isn’t interested in clichés. Instead, they have mirrors for faces. They are us. The whole thing culminates in a crowd dance scene that’s pure Congo Square, or any place where historically the oppressed have found joy in defiance of their oppressors.

  I can’t listen to this song without dancing. I’m a terrible dancer but I don’t care. I lose myself in it because Monáe’s magic is for everybody.

  Oh, and also: Obama wins.

  Monáeism: As I write this, it’s February, Black History Month in the USA. Everyone jokes that of course black history gets celebrated only during the shortest month of the year. No one seems puzzled by the fact that there is no time correspondingly devoted to examining, celebrating or imagining the black future.

  It’s easy to look at something like Monáe’s mythos and see only the obvious metaphors. Her androids’ struggle for the freedom to love after all parallels the struggle of American slave women to marry legally, to keep their children, to control their very bodies, in a system that cruelly commodified these activities. But it’s wrong only to apply an historical, and racial, lens to the work of any modern black woman. We have spent generations sharing the struggles of other oppressed groups, collaborating with and occasionally being betrayed by them, and progressing nonetheless. We’re the ones who (literally) wrote the book on intersectionality. And it’s clear that Janelle Monáe feels no sense of threat from the others with whom our future will be shared. She welcomes all, with love and dancing.

  And yet. When I watch her videos and listen to her lyrics I’m shocked to see so much of myself in this ultra-technological future – despite my own writings, despite my own knowledge that black history and myth abounds with techies and innovators, despite my life and my long-held desire to see this very thing. It’s not Monáe’s ability to imagine an inclusive future that’s remarkable, but my subconscious resistance. What the hell is wrong with me, that her vision feels so strange?

  Too many years of The Jetsons, maybe. Too many white-supremacist medieval Europes. I’ve spent years swallowing these bizarro-world versions of humanity, and they have become a toxin poisoning my imagination. But Janelle Monáe is a tiny, fast-footed, pompadour’d antidote to all of that.

  Scene: I’m watching Tron: Legacy. It’s a scene of glitzy decadence: a posh nightclub in a cybernetic dystopia, whose denizens are not human but certainly look the part. They’re beautiful people, with perfect faces and languid bodies and apparently nothing better to do with their time than lounge about flirting or whatever beautiful people do. Everyone wears white or black. Everyone I see has white skin, at first.

  Then I see some black characters. They stand clustered together amid all this elegance, one obviously on guard, the rest tense and martial and definitely not comfortable in this environment. Stiffly they petition the club’s proprietor for an audience. This group’s leader is the only person in the whole movie who seems to have a scar, located prominently on his face. He’s not meant to be one of the beautiful people, plainly.

  Five minutes later there’s an action scene, and all the black characters die.

  Counterscene: I’m watching Janelle Monáe’s Many Moons short film, which a friend has emailed to me with a cryptic “HOLY SHIT WATCH THIS!” note. It’s a scene of dystopian decadence supported by android labour: there’s a slave auction going on, but it looks more like a fashion show. While her fellow commodities prance about on display, Janelle Monáe’s character is blowing up the stage. An audience of hoi polloi screams and jiggles all around her. It’s completely nonsensical, and completely entrancing.

  People like me are everywhere. The slaves and cops, okay, that’s normal. That’s what I’m used to. But we’re also present among the decadent elite. Monáe’s screaming fans display all the colours of humanity: white and brown and yellow and black and red. All of the video’s imagery fits this colour palette. It’s not just racial differentiation I see, either. In the mostly female audience there’s a pretty, big-breasted white woman about to pop out of her shirt over Monáe, and Monáe herself is about as genderqueer as you can get while still being named Janelle.

  It gets weirder. An army of androids dressed like Amelia Earhart marches across the stage. The auction’s prices are rendered in Sterling, not dollars; guess the Commonwealth’s doing okay in this future. The auction’s glamorous announcer speaks in almost incomprehensible accented English, so apparently immigrants can make out big in this world too. There’s a middle-aged Chinese vampire dandy in the audience
– yeah, I don’t know either, but it doesn’t jar my suspension of disbelief, because there’s just so much else to look at that I do believe. I can swallow the batshittery because everywhere else there is comforting, delightful normalcy.

  I’m not sure this future is the kind of place I’d want to live in, but I definitely wouldn’t mind visiting. And for as long as Janelle Monáe is willing to offer my imagination this kind of gleeful romp, I’ll keep coming back.

  Phonogram: Sublimated Emotion

  - Jared Shurin -

  I refuse to admit there is no meaning here. I will find meaning. I will force it.

  Lloyd, Phonogram: The Singles Club #6

  (December 2009)

  For much of the modern era, the use of music to describe magic has cheerfully followed the bardic tradition. As with so many things, it is easy to point the finger at JRR Tolkien. Not only did he romanticise Norse and Celtic mythology in a commercially explosive way, but he even chucked in Tom Bombadil as an example of the supernatural bard, a carefree gadabout-cum-font of mystic knowledge, combining cheerful sing-songs with supernatural power.

  It stuck. For the next 50 years, music and magic stayed rooted in the same model. For generations, wizards extemporised poetry, forced rhymes and, in the extreme case of Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels (1970 onwards), engaged in medieval rap battles. Kurtz came from the Society for Creative Anachronism and live-action role-playing, where magic was often expressed this way as a rule. Just as a facility with padded weapons makes for martial prowess, skill with improvised poetry and a good memory make a wizard. It is way of creating a functional metaphor for the otherwise inexpressible. This tradition, music as the expression of one person’s secret power, was the dominant paradigm until the 1990s and it can still be found happily chanting away in high fantasy series.

  In the 1990s, the technology and production of music changed (well, it did in the 1980s, but it took a while for fantasy fiction to catch up). Music was no longer, if you’ll pardon the pun, a one-man band – the bard, furiously racking his memory for demon-repelling doggerel. Music itself began to be made in layers: songs and studios, productions and distortion, sampling and remixing, a task that could involve dozens or hundreds of people… or one vocally challenged youth with an Amiga, a kit-bashed mixing board and an array of samples. Stage presence no longer required – nor, for that matter, a singing voice. Pop stars may swan around like kings and queens, but, as Faithless pointed out, God Is A DJ.

  In fiction, this new model – music/magic as a multi-part construct – was expressed everywhere from King Rat to Mary Gentle’s Black Opera. Music is magic because it is such an elaborate ritual – the making of a song is no less elaborate, complex or finicky than anything Aleister Crowley would ever have dictated. If the bardic tradition uses music as an expression of one person’s magical power, this modern tradition takes into account that music is made by legions.

  However, both traditions, the bardic and the ritualistic, are united in how they link music and magic through human effort: music is both an expression of magic and a means of magically expressing oneself. Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept is a wizard, he needs the music to focus his power. Similarly, Mary Gentle’s opera company works as a harmonious unit, creating something elaborate that can bring the intentions of their collective subconscious into existence.

  McKelvie and Gillen’s Phonogram takes this one step further. Phonogram consists of, to date, two limited series published by Image Comics. Both feature phonomancers, magical practitioners who gain their powers through music. The first series, Rue Britannia, ran from 2006 to 2007, with a six-issue story arc. The protagonist, David Kohl, is in pursuit of the titular goddess. His magic stems from, of all things, Britpop and, with Britannia missing, his magic (indeed his very existence) is on the wane. The second series, The Singles Club, ran from 2008 to 2010, with seven sublime issues, each providing a different perspective on a single evening at a Bristol club night. A third series, The Immaterial Girl, is planned for late 2013.

  The series is penned by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Jamie McKelvie, whose cast of hyper-perfect proto-hipsters gives the series its contemporary feel. Phonogram takes place in the perpetual summertime of young adulthood, a land where jobs, rent, school and family are both invisible and uninteresting. History is subjective and the distant past is the protagonists’ mid-teens. David Kohl and his peers face concerns no more substantial than their latest-but-one relationships, their choice of evening destination and, of course, are they listening to the right music? Even if it only accomplished this – making hipster angst empathetic – Phonogram would be a success. Fortunately, through the talents of the creators, it achieves much more.

  In Phonogram, the core theme is, as Gillen succinctly summarised it on his blog, “music = magic.” The music is, whether or not humans have anything to do with it. The so-called “creators” are merely channels. Perhaps the great triumph of Phonogram is that no musician actually appears in the series to date. They are irrelevant – the ultimate death of the author.

  Phonomancers themselves are granular things: each practitioner nibbling at one tiny portion of the greater magical whole. In The Singles Club, Laura announces she’s a phonomancer, but not in the same way as the others. Penny, for example, dances. By dancing, really dancing, she stores up a sort of magical karma she can bend others to her will (intentionally or not). Lloyd squeezes meaning, and power, out of music at a conceptual level. Kid simply feels the beat. Even the dread Retromancer from Rue Britannia, feeding off crowd nostalgia, is “a kind of phonomancer, in the same way a date rapist is a kind of lover.”

  Phonogram effectively inverts what’s gone before. Where other works of fantasy use music as a means of expressing magic, in the world of McKelvie and Gillen the reverse is true. Music is too big to exist as a metaphor for anything but itself. It is no longer a means to describe the otherwise inexpressibly supernatural. Music = magic, an unknown too vast to be summarised.

  Starmen

  - Liz Williams -

  The world’s changing and if you don’t change with it, you’ll be left behind. That’s what I think, anyway, although you’d never get my old man to agree. If I’d had a penny for every muttered, “What do you think you look like?” I’d be a rich boy by now, but he won’t say it too loudly. I’m the only thing he’s got, and I suppose he’s the only thing I’ve got too, now that my mum’s gone.

  It’s been five years now. She died when I was nine, and it’s always bothered me, why I didn’t feel it more. Dad did, I know. Used to hear him crying into a hankie, late at night when he thought no one could hear. He’s a proud man – you’re not supposed to have feelings north of the Watford Gap, for all we live in London now. But he does, and I don’t, and I don’t know why. Never have had, really. It’s always been like looking at the world through a pane of glass and dirty glass at that, as if I didn’t understand what was going on.

  I look back and I think of London in those days – South London, we lived in: Bromley and later Catford, and everything’s grey, under a grey sky. Only one thing stands out for me in memory, before the age of 10, and it was the front door of the house belonging to the street’s one and only black family. They’d come over the year before – I’m assuming, from the Caribbean – and they painted their front door purple. That was all the neighbours could talk about for weeks, not the colour of their skin, in fact, but the colour of their front door.

  Everyone wanted to know where they’d found the paint. But apart from that magnificent blazing occult door, it was all grey – grey sky, grey buildings, grey ponderous river Thames winding through the city, and when I was a little kid, I always wondered if someone had stolen all the colour out of the world, or whether there was just something wrong with my eyes. I mentioned it to my dad once – I didn’t want to worry my mum, who was ill by then – and he just gave me a funny look and said there was nowt wrong with my eyes and to stop making a fuss. So I did.

  So that was it, just the
door, until that night. It was as though someone opened that purple door in my head and I stepped through it, and never came back again. Except I did and here I still am.

  This is how it was.

  Top Of The Pops, 1972. I was 14. I didn’t watch the show much: dad said it was rubbish and anyway we’d only just got a telly. Black and white, of course, and little – we couldn’t afford anything else and it was only because dad had had a good six months on the cabs that we could afford that. But I think he felt guilty, somehow, about my mum, although I never understood why: it’d been cancer, nothing he’d done to her. He wasn’t that kind of man. But I think he felt he needed to make it up to me and I’d been going on about a television, and then one day, it appeared on a table in the living room, in front of the floral wallpaper, a device beamed in from another planet with its two little aerials sticking out on top.

  But we never watched Top Of The Pops (“bloody rubbish”), until one night when dad had an extra shift and I was left on my own, being deemed old enough by then not to burn the house down. Maybe he thought I’d nip out to my mate Brian’s house, or something, but even though it was the middle of summer, it was pouring with rain that night and I made myself beans on toast and switched on the box.

  Black and white, or it should have been. All the bands up to that point were in the expected monochrome. But then, then it changed. I heard those first chords and they snagged my attention as though I’d been caught on a hook. And when they came on, when he came on, it was colour that I saw. A blue guitar like a summer sky, like the sky should have been outside. Then a face. I thought he was a girl at first. But there was something to it, which years later I’d have described as a tough angularity, and the voice was mocking as he sang. I knew straightaway that this was something of which my dad would disapprove. And that song...