I created Monster Brains fifteen years ago today, January 23 2006. I started the site by sharing the art of Mat Brinkman, Wayne Barlowe, Ernst Fuchs and Zdzislaw Beksinski. Monster Brains has grown from a link sharing blog to more of a dedicated gallery onto itself. One of the highlights from consistently posting over the past decade and a half was having film director Guillermo del Toro proclaim the site "One of the greatest websites in the world: MONSTER BRAINS!!" 
I'm a working artist and keeping the site updated over the years while making a living as an artist has grown more difficult. That said, I'm still devoted to keeping it updated with an ever growing collection of obscure and interesting monster related art. 
 It takes many hours tracking down artwork, scanning, editing, cleaning up and formatting much of the content shared on the site. You can show your support by donating any amount.  The donation link can be found in the top right, thank you!

Woman Of The Apocalypse  Saint Michael Fighting The Dragon  The Four Horsemen  Angel With The Key Of The Bottomless Pit  Saint John Devouring The Book  Seven Angels With The Trumpets  Beast With Two Horns Like A Lamb  Adoration Of The Lamb  Martydom Of Saint John  Opening Of The Fifth And Sixth Seals  Saint John Before God And The Elders  Whore of Babylon  Four Avenging Angels  Four Angels Holding The Winds 
"The Apocalypse, properly Apocalypse with Pictures (Latin: Apocalipsis cum figuris) is a series of fifteen woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer published in 1498 depicting various scenes from the Book of Revelation, which rapidly brought him fame across Europe. These woodcuts likely drew on theological advice, particularly from Johannes Pirckheimer, the father of Dürer's friend Willibald Pirckheimer. Work on the series started during Dürer's first trip to Italy (1494–95), and the set was published simultaneously as a 15-page book in Latin and German at Nuremberg in 1498, at a time when much of secular Europe feared an invasion of the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe anticipated a possible Last Judgment in the year 1500. Dürer was the publisher and seller of this series, and became the first artist to publish a book and create a copyright." - quote source

Harrowing of Hell, from the Engraved Passion series (1512), Hand-coloured by Hans Mack, 1585  Harrowing of Hell, from the Engraved Passion series, 1512 

 Artworks found at The Chester Beatty's Digital Collections and The Harvard Library.

mossworm:

Cloud beast

Ty Matejowsky / January 14, 2021

As far as innovative 1980s music videos go, probably none is more immediately visceral and less popularly remembered than Belfegore’s “All That I Wanted.” Like a repressed memory from the dark recesses of Generation X’s collective unconscious, the promotional clip of this 1984 near-hit single from a short-lived German industrial/goth/post-punk/new wave trio warrants reappraisal—if not for how it showcases the propulsive strains of a song that blends the best of Killing Joke, Billy Idol, and Joy Division (while prefiguring Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails along the way) into an unholy alchemy of snarling guitarwork and abrasive electronica, then certainly for its reification of late-phase Cold War anxieties running amok along a Hudson River pier under the looming presence of the World Trade Center, still some 17 years away from its abrupt deletion from the Manhattan skyline.

By this point in their all too brief career, Belfegore seemed on the cusp of some mainstream breakthrough recognition. Having already released a long-player in their native Germany in 1982 alongside a pair of singles the following year, the band got signed to Elektra Records, home of CBGB-bred pioneers Television and new wave perennials The Cars. Belfegore’s self-titled English language debut built off the band’s more rudimentary predecessor thanks in no small part to the expanded sonic palette made possible by trailblazing krautrock/kosmische producer Conny Plank. Known for overseeing the recordings of both Neu!’s first album (1972) and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn (1974), Plank’s trademark electronic stylings and harsh guitar and drum sound find expression in Belfegore’s ferocious opener and lead single “All That I Wanted.”  

The video’s aesthetic genius lies both in its conceptual simplicity and unbridled kineticism. An ominous sense of foreboding prevails as leather-clad lead singer Meikel Clauss trots across the asphalt desolation of a New York City dock looking like a gothed-up version of “Mad” Max Rockatansky. Amid a scattering of overturned musical equipment, road cases, crash cymbals, amplifier stacks, and rubbish blowing about, Clauss speeds up slightly when a man carrying a fine art painting and easel closes in from behind, both of them increasing their stride as if fleeing some unseen menace. Next, Clauss appears back where he started, this time sprinting and singing manically to the camera, presumably one step ahead of imminent death and destruction. The man with the artwork is there also, picking up the pace, rapidly moving forward without so much as a backwards glance. Abruptly, a wide-angle shot reveals Clauss racing down the concourse from a similar starting point, this time running ahead and alongside a motley mix of costumed music video extras, some gripping luggage, one or two clutching firearms. 

Over the next four minutes or so, Clauss—occasionally with his electric guitar or microphone stand—zigzags among this improbable throng of central casting rejects, bumping shoulders and throwing body blocks as they all dash headlong towards some unreachable destination. That or the crowd races past a now-stationary Clauss who, along with Belfegore bass player Raoul Walton and drummer Manfred Terstappen, performs “All That I Wanted” as if his very life depended on it. A series of fluid tracking shots sweeping past the band while these stock characters randomly hustle by adds dizzying intensity to an already chaotic scene. Among those unfortunate souls damned to repeatedly traverse this narrow tongue of industrial bleakness are a construction worker, nurse, showgirl, briefcase-toting businessman, Olympic torch runner (the 1984 Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles), nun, sheik, uniformed schoolgirl, pram-pushing mother, restaurant waiter, cowboy, man with a leashed German Shepard, policeman, bellhop, assorted punk rockers, and a man inexplicably carrying a porcelain toilet. Many of these background actors end up taking a spill, some pitching forward while moving in and out of frame; others fall while dodging or leaping over random obstacles. As the music builds to a crescendo, the video does not so much end as peter out, left exhausted by a vicious onslaught of sonic and visual chaos.

As much a product of its time as a prescient foreshadowing of the mayhem that would one day envelop Lower Manhattan, sending ripples of dread across the global psyche, the video is not without its flaws. Amid shifts in camera direction, abrupt edits, and no discernable consideration for daylight continuity, the clip allows sharp-eyed viewers to pinpoint what happens when artistic vision bumps up against the time constraints, budgetary concerns, and other realities of on-location shoots. Beyond eyeblink instances of extras visibly hesitating before slamming to the ground (or more likely onto off-camera crash pads), the most obvious imperfection is the noticeable breathlessness and decreasing speed exhibited by some of the background talent in scenes ostensibly shot late in the day after take after take of running back and forth on an exposed pier while lugging cumbersome props. From the looks of it, only Belfegore’s rhythm section got off easy in this regard, as neither drummer Terstappen nor bassist Walton had to move much beyond their stage marks.

Minor quibbles aside, the video readily captures the prevailing sense of angst and helplessness characterizing Cold War antagonisms in the years immediately preceding thawed US and Soviet relations before the Berlin Wall came down. Ronald Reagan’s real and rhetorical efforts at pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) known colloquially as “Star Wars,” his scuttling of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty, and the escalation by the Soviets of the Soviet-Afghan War threatened to upend the geopolitical equilibrium previously maintained through the military/foreign policy stalemate of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Against this backdrop, the first half of the 1980s was a time suffused with varying levels of unease and uncertainty. Belfegore’s video for “All That I Wanted” viscerally distills the existential dread surging through the global body politic. Not only does it elicit the social breakdown that occurs with the panicked realization that the normality of everyday life is suddenly and irrevocably overtaken by events, it also visually encapsulates the powerlessness of ordinary people scrambling for a nonexistent offramp from a crisis neither of their making nor compliant to the political sway of their so-called leaders. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide as prospects for survival rapidly dim, might our final moments—the mushroom cloud already on the horizon—somehow resemble this?

Directed by experimental filmmaker and 1986 MTV Video Vanguard Award honoree Zbigniew Rybczyński, the heart-racing propulsion of this lost classic captures all that was possible for a short-form entertainment genre finally coming into its own as a veritable artform. Rybczyński—a Polish émigré and likely the only Oscar winner ever arrested and jailed mere minutes after receiving an Academy Award—cultivates a singular style easily recognizable across his decades-long filmography (he went on to work with Art of Noise, Lou Reed, Simple Minds, Rush, Fat Boys, Mr. Mister, Supertramp, Pet Shop Boys, and the Alan Parsons Project, among others). The eccentric visual language he employs in his music video work pairs rapid edits, repetitions, and sweeping Steadicam pans with the detached sensibilities, nonlinear narratives, and quirky aesthetics of an ascendant 1980s postmodernity not yet reduced to an exhausted caricature of itself. 

Despite an eye-popping video, some initial college radio buzz, and prized opening slot on the 1985 European leg of U2’s Unforgettable Fire tour, Belfegore never connected with a wider audience, quickly slipping into obscurity. In 2011, after some 25 years of radio silence, flickers of life emerged when the band unexpectedly resurfaced for a one-off German reunion show. That same year acclaimed director David Fincher used “All That I Wanted” in a pivotal scene of his screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Such faint hints of a career resurrection notwithstanding, Belfegore’s legacy remains all but negligible.

Seemingly resistant to the YouTube algorithms working nowadays to define so much of our recollected MTV-era tastes and preferences—sorting formulas that work to winnow out all but the most obvious one-hit wonders and essentialized mainstays of a Stranger Things-like nostalgia trip—the conceptual novelty and thrilling imagery of “All That I Wanted” evokes an adrenalized urgency that belies its unsung status within a collective headspace prone to blind spots, if not outright bouts of generational amnesia. Despite such popular and critical indifference, the howling catharsis and uncompromising frenzy of Belfegore’s only major label video resonates today not just as a hidden gem of 1980s college radio ephemera awaiting rediscovery, but also as a pure embodiment of the pre-détente fears gripping the wider world when the specter of nuclear annihilation remained ever-present.

Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.  He is a Libra who enjoys sunsets and long walks on the beach.

Recollections / December 31, 2020

2020 in action

MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, it has been a year. Who would have imagined back when we started 2020 with a frivolous piece on little plastic spacemen the grim turn things were about to take? And to think, back in a previous end-of-year mutants communiqué, we were hubristic enough to say that 2018 had been punishing, jejune fools that we were! 2020 didn’t like that and decided to show us what punishing really meant: an appalling bastard physically, mentally, and financially that has put immense numbers of people through nightmarish shit. So what better way to indulge in a bit of propitiatory magic in the hope of a better 2021 than by quickly listing a few of the gems your faithful muties have been fortunate enough to find embedded in the continent-sized turd that has been the year? So Mike, Kelly—what have you two stumbled across in the last twelve months that’s given you a glimmer of optimism?

GRASSO: Richard, first things first: when Jenny and I were going through our own presumed COVID infection back in the spring, one of the things that kept me going was chatting with you early in the mornings, whinging about symptoms, lamenting my suddenly swiss-cheesed brain, worrying about… well, nearly everything. So friends have absolutely kept me going this year, and having you and Kelly as comrades and creative partners for a fifth year has been the lifeline that’s largely kept me going.

Like I may have mentioned, much of everything before our recovery in about June is a bit of a blur, sadly. I did stay sane like many people during the first months of the pandemic by watching, yes, Tiger King, which, by the time it was over, got me wanting to watch an earlier, much better Netflix documentary on the tension created by the collision of cultic belief with American capitalist culture, Wild Wild Country. Both of these, though, paled in comparison to the recent release of Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults on HBO Max, a terrific and nuanced look at the individuals who found themselves so damaged by a society that denied them wonder and companionship that they marched off to their deaths for beliefs that seemed insane to everyone outside the group. People were talking about it around the election for precisely the wrong reasons, I found.

Honestly, though, I haven’t had the attention span for much visual media this year. I’ve been doing far more reading and listening. I’ll start with Carl Neville’s fascinating novel of a sideways Earth where an out of control right-accelerationist America faces off against a mostly-Communist rest of the world (including the UK), Eminent Domain. Its deep, detail-packed examination of a “utopia with dystopian characteristics”—a largely post-scarcity “People’s Republic of Britain” where a 1990s revolution against the CEOs and toffs has allowed an ostensibly classless technologically-driven society to flourish—is a political thriller, a spy novel, an exploration of alternate-history culture and art, and in the character that I identified with most—a young American college student who falls in love with the PRB thanks to its cultural products, art, and music—a simultaneous celebration and warning about falling in love with a place you’ve never been. It changed my life in a lot of ways and I’m unimaginably proud I got together with Carl to talk about it back during the summer.

ROBERTS: A blur is right. It’s almost like I’m existing in somebody’s demented time-lapse photography experiment. These (so far) nine months have been hard and they have certainly changed my life—the extent of that change won’t be clear to me until some sense of normality (what does that word mean anymore?) reasserts itself (or my mind inserts it). With a full-time-plus job in a public university health system and two kids at home who are deeply bored and sometimes furious at the inadequacies of Zoom, I haven’t had a hell of a lot of time or energy for discoveries. But I did re-watch a lot of disaster movies, a genre we subsequently (and rather angrily, on my part) wrote about here.

And we did get some great news in 2020: we signed a contract with Repeater to do a book exploring the themes of reaction and resistance in American film from about 1967 through 1987, and it’s been a lot of fun, as well as a welcome distraction, watching so many films from the era and finalizing the chapter list with you guys. It’s also been really hard, because we have no choice but to leave out so many movies we love and admire. I’m really excited about the final list, though, a mix that’s heavy on genre but also includes a few blockbusters, a couple of documentaries, some exploitation classics, and some absolute gems that have all but disappeared from the public eye. The idea is that each chapter will pair two films that may not have much in common on the surface, but connect profoundly on a deeper level.

This project, as well as the videocasts we’ve done, has gone a long way in keeping me sane.

MCKENNA: Yes, having you two to shoot the breeze with has been good—well, those of you two that aren’t a grumpy, monosyllabic Californian. Naming no names. But this year’s definitely brought home how fortunate I am. Work’s been tough but at least there’s been some, which is more than a lot of people have had. I was sick in March—fuck knows what it was but I’ve never had such weird symptoms (annotated list available on request—really). It only lasted a week, but I was still in a weird state when it finished, because work was at a complete standstill, I spent it in bed, and for some reason it seemed to make sense to devote the time to watching or re-watching a lot of Bela Tarr films. At the risk of sounding a bit precious, it was an oddly therapeutic experience that I’d recommend, if you’re lucky enough to have the time. And even though I’m sick to the back teeth of Lovecraft, have had enough Nic Cage to do me for the next few decades and never had much time for Richard Stanley in the first place, I actually found myself quite enjoying 2019’s The Color out of Space.

Despite the numbing effect of events, one thing that did make a big impact on me was James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art. There’s so much beautifully rendered art around nowadays, but (and it may just be because I’m getting older) it often seems a bit too perfect—so intimidatingly slick that it can come off as strangely impersonal and unaffecting. That’s not the case with Cawthorn’s stuff—it’s like getting zapped with a cattleprod. I read John Varley’s Gaea trilogy, which I started off thinking was everything I dislike about SF but which turned out to be a lot that I love about it, and, prompted by the website Science Fiction Ruminations, I also read Nancy Kress’s brilliant Alien Light, Suzy McKee Charnas’s brilliant Walk to the End of the World, and finally read some Tanith Lee, which was even better than I’d been hoping since I first meant to read her in 1984.

Music-wise, I fell in love with Fushigi, a 1986 album by Akina Nakamori, Caterina Barbieri’s latest, 2019 Ecstatic Computation, which is just as great as its predecessors, and Yasmine Hamdan’s Arabology (after a tip off by fellow mutant Daniele Cassandro). And of course, a shitload of Hawkwind, after a review copy of Joe Banks’s brilliant Hawkwind: Days of the Underground (review on its way, but in the meantime Joe has written us a great article on the band) spurred me to pull out all my old Hawkwind records and blast myself into the cosmos.

GRASSO: I remember finding myself, immediately after recovering from COVID, really needing music on a near visceral level, spending hours listening to NTS Radio and ordering countless vinyl and DVD compilations from Numero Group, getting into micro-genres and musical scenes I’d never really delved into before. That died off somewhere in the autumn, as I began to mourn what really always attracted me to music, and that is the communal experience of listening and talking about it, which didn’t translate into my isolated life all that well. (One of the exceptions was listening to mixes made by friends and artists I love, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.)

But there was one musical experience in that very difficult autumn that did evoke a sense of community, and that was the release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s semi-eponymous masterpiece LP Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. Given the fact that I was already acquaintances with quite a few fans of Daniel Lopatin’s work, getting to share the experience of listening to and diving deep into the themes and symbolism around this intensely personal album was a delight. Lopatin has always acted as a theorist of nostalgia and media history, and on this album, he uses the conceit of a single day on old-school terrestrial radio, replete with “dayparts” aimed at distinct audiences and demographics, to explore his own career obsessions with the bits of our lives that fall through the cracks of a lifetime bombarded by media. Lopatin’s obsessions around our once-mighty collective pop culture monoculture, its historical fragmentation, and its digital afterlife spoke to me in a year where our collective isolation grew more grim:

“There’s a kind of thesis in [album closer “Nothing’s Special”]. It was a really rough fucking year and it’s been hard for everybody. Something that’s always given me a lot of solace when I’m in a funk is that I notice that I’ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise.

Honestly I did find myself revisiting what you might call media “comfort food” at various points in 2020; I did a complete re-read of James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy and did (er, multiple) rewatches of my favorite Scorsese films—Goodfellas, Casino, and new entrant to the Scorsese pantheon The Irishman—all those tales of white men behind the scenes in the shadows acting badly, those paeans to what Mark Fisher called a “desensitization [to] capitalist realism.” Somehow those old-fashioned, bloody, up-close-and-personal brutalities and cruelties seemed easier to take than the impersonal mass slaughter going on outside our quarantined walls. At least in a Scorsese film or an Ellroy novel you (might) get to look in the eyes of the guy who kills you.

One other old favorite author who surprised this year was Don DeLillo, whose efforts in the ’10s have become almost like prose-poetry: spare, evocative, sketching the edges of our collective collapse. In his slim but powerful 2020 release The Silence, he imagines the loss of our digital commons on possibly the most media-laden holy day of our American calendar: Super Bowl Sunday. Given the dislocations that coronavirus has wrought on all our senses of time and place (especially in relation to using professional sports to orient ourselves in our yearly cycles and how badly COVID scrambled these collective rituals), I found DeLillo’s haunting novella to be both a valedictory for his own career and for an older world of media and parapolitical action that he has helped explain and explore.

But mostly what got me through 2020 were my friends. As acutely painful as it was for me to be physically separated from those friends for a full year, they invariably kept me sane, safe, solvent, and prevented the worst of the demons from knocking at my door. Whether it was gathering online to play Among Us (I have lots of thoughts on why a video game based around betrayal and suspicion became the year’s biggest hit) or just hanging out in those cursed Zoom boxes, without this minimal level of contact I would have surely lost my mind completely. I started a new tabletop RPG campaign online this year, set in the Weird Seventies, and my players have knocked me out time and time again with their own worldbuilding, character development, and exploration of the game’s themes that have been for me much like a magickal Working. This includes, yes, a mix of psychedelic rock, funk, folk, soul, and Motorik music from ’69 to ’73 contributed by player and comrade Leonard Pierce that was a delight to discover and listen to over and over this year. So thanks to the URIEL team. And yes, the planning and writing of the Mutants book (in addition to the Repeater media channel I’ve been working on) has me excited to throw myself into new projects in 2021. So to everyone who’s stuck with us through a once-in-a-century calamity, who’s submitted their own thoughts to our pages, who has shared or commented on our pieces during this difficult time—thank you, yet again. You’re the reason why we keep at it, why we keep plugging away.

ROBERTS: When I have had a couple of hours to myself, I’ve been rewatching a lot of stuff from the late ’80s and early ’90s, starting with Predator and Predator 2, inspired by Alex Evans’s great piece on the first one. And you know what? I really like 2010’s Predators too. Everybody says Adrien Brody was miscast, but that’s bullshit. He’s great in it. He’s great in everything and people are always saying he’s miscast because he doesn’t look like Brad fucking Pitt. I also love 2004’s Alien vs. Predator—no, I will not be taking comments at this time. From there I revisited a really enjoyable Predator/Terminator rip-off called I Come in Peace (1990), starring my man Dolph Lundgren and, ahem, Brian Benben, who many of you will remember from HBO’s long-running series Dream On. It’s certainly nothing you haven’t seen before, but the chemistry between Dolph, the renegade cop, and Benben, the by-the-book FBI geek, is great, and the evil alien (Matthias Hues) shooting tubes into his victims’ brains to suck out the endorphins (an addictive drug on his home planet) is a nice touch.

Another buried treasure from that high-’80s period is Cherry 2000. I saw it when it came out on video (it did not receive a theatrical release in the US) and didn’t remember much, but it’s got a lot of spirit, and the plot is, er, unique: in 2017(!), a businessman’s sex robot shorts out, and he is so in love with it/her (a Cherry 2000 model) that he hires a tracker (human tough gal Melanie Griffith) to take him into Zone 7 (which turns out to be a destroyed Las Vegas) to find and bring home a replacement. I am in no shape to take on the sexual politics right now, but the film is really colorful and uses a lot of kitschy design elements from the ’50s and ’60s to describe its post-apocalyptic setting, there are some excellent action sequences, and supporting turns from Tim Thomerson (the bad guy, who ends up crucified on a Las Vegas casino sign) and legend Ben Johnson (Shane, The Last Picture Show) make up for the stilted performances of the leads. Director Steve De Jarnatt also directed Miracle Mile (1988), another low-budget cult classic that I watched again and still love.

Aside from research on the book, I’ve read literally jack shit this whole year. My mind can’t do it. Music is an endless loop of the Charlie XCX channel (apparently there is something called hyperpop, and I dig it), New Age ’80s ambient, and anything that resembles the ’80s output of Toto, Rick Springfield, and The Cars.

MCKENNA: I Come in Peace is a fucking rocker, on that we can all agree. And I also agree that Adrien Brody deserves more credit, not least for being one of the few credibly punk faces in a film (Spike Lee’s 1999 Summer of Sam). Anyway, as Mike has so eloquently put it, thank you on behalf of all of us to all of you who have taken the time to read We Are the Mutants this year and anyone who’s supported us in any way, whether by contributing or by commenting, or retweeting, or forking out cash, or whatever—it really is much appreciated. And while I’m at it, thank you two for putting up with me too! With so many going through so much shit, wishing anyone “Happy New Year” sounds a bit empty, but fuck it, Happy New Year anyway!

Here's a selection of drawings by one of my favorite French artists, TANX. 

See more here. 

The artist is also on instagram.

Joe Banks / December 23, 2020

Hawkwind live in 1973. Photo from the Japanese single for “Urban Guerilla”

Hawkwind are an indelible part of the UK’s underground culture. It’s been over 50 years since they formed in the seedy cradle of London’s Ladbroke Grove, but they still enjoy a fanatical cult following both in Britain and around the world. They may never have scaled the commercial heights of Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, but the influence they’ve exerted on modern music is profound. You can break down the components of their sound—barbarian psychedelia, propulsive rhythms, raw electronics—but what’s far harder to quantify is Hawkwind’s distinctive persona, their essential otherness within the story of rock.

In many ways, they’re a sub-genre to themselves, the house band of the British counterculture during the 1970s and beyond. There’s a parallel often made with the Grateful Dead in the US, and certainly from that period they share a similar sense of communal self-sufficiency (plus a propensity for extended jamming, though of a very different stripe to the blues ragas of Jerry Garcia’s crew). But whereas the Dead evoked a mystic vision of Americana, Hawkwind channelled the apocalyptic spirit of the age, fuelled by a combination of Cold War paranoia and pulp science fiction.

Along with the fearsome, if sometimes surprisingly complex, noise they made, it’s the SF-derived image and mythology that built up around Hawkwind that makes them truly unique in the annals of popular music, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this article. My book Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia is an analysis of the band’s music and cultural impact during their “classic years” of the 1970s, and it looks at some depth into their sci-fi connections—but Hawkwind were still a potent force and SF nexus point in the early ‘80s, which was when I first seriously began to get into them.

Actually, I’d already had a head start; my older brother had a copy of their 1975 album Warrior On The Edge Of Time, which I would hear blasting out of his bedroom—its crashing riffs, rampaging Mellotron, and thunderous drumming loudly announcing a band that seemed to exist outside of the ‘70s rock continuum of Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, and Queen. But there were two features in particular that both fascinated and slightly unnerved my pre-teen self. Warrior’s sleeve depicted a silhouetted knight on horseback dwarfed by a garishly colored vision of the edge of time, with a mirror image of the same scene (minus the knight) on the back cover. The sleeve folded out and down to reveal a plunging panorama of the abyss below—but flip it over, and an impressive Shield of Chaos is revealed, giving a clue to the presence of a special guest within…

However, if the unusual sleeve created a frisson, the album’s spoken word interludes positively freaked me out. The bleak, pulsating chill of “Standing At The Edge” evokes a purgatorial nether zone of lost souls condemned to live forever, a voice full of petulant affront declaiming, “We’re tired of making love.” It’s like the final nail in the coffin of the hippie dream, calling time on the long ‘60s as the cold grip of the ‘70s takes hold. Elsewhere, the gentleman delivering “The Wizard Blew His Horn” and “Warriors” sounds alternately in the grip of mild hysteria and robotic possession.

Taking a closer look at the credits a few years later, I discovered that the voice behind those last two pieces belonged to none other than Michael Moorcock, whose Eternal Champion books the album is very roughly based around. Moorcock had first drifted into Hawkwind’s orbit in 1971, being also based in Ladbroke Grove. From here, he edited and published New Worlds magazine, the key journal of the so-called science fiction New Wave, as epitomized by the writings of J.G. Ballard. Moorcock could often be found of a weekend manning a second-hand book stall in the local market (as part of the constant effort to keep New Worlds afloat) or helping to organize open-air gigs under the Westway, the concrete overpass that looms above the area. Hawkwind too would play for free in the same location, and when Moorcock asked if he could do some readings with them, the band jumped at the opportunity to get a bona fide sci-fi author on board.

Moorcock’s first impressions of the band are telling, describing them as “barbarians with electronics” and “like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten their mission.” And when I interviewed him for the book, he admitted that Hawkwind felt like a band he’d conjured into existence, so perfectly did they fit into his entropic universe. The first piece he wrote and performed with them has become Hawkwind’s most iconic spoken word track: “Sonic Attack.” While its title is often used as short-hand for the brain-blasting shock and awe of Hawkwind in full flight, the track itself is all creeping dread and terror, a blackly comic parody of WW2 propaganda broadcasts distorted by the chilly logic of the Cold War, and very much a piece of New Wave SF.

Of course, discovering Moorcock’s connection with Hawkwind further piqued my interest in the band. As a young teen, I had moved seamlessly from reading Target’s Doctor Who novelizations to greedily consuming Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. At the same time, it was becoming apparent that the one thing I was really interested in was music, and coming from a market town in the East Midlands, this almost inevitably meant heavy metal. If you combine those elements together, then it almost inevitably leads you to Hawkwind, particularly their early ‘80s incarnation. Yet even if you weren’t a big music fan, but were the type of young person who dug SF, Hawkwind would still find you one way or another, so embedded were they in British sci-fi and fantasy culture.

Working my way through Moorcock’s dizzying output—how had this man managed to produce so many books?—meant regular visits to the local library, which also had an eclectically stocked record section, and it was here that I had my next close encounter with Hawkwind. Flicking through the racks, I was literally stopped in my tracks by the front cover of their 1973 live album Space Ritual. Etched in retina-sizzling technicolor, and featuring a stylized cosmic messiah flanked by gape-mouthed star cats, it was as though I’d stumbled across some bizarre alien artifact. Like a portal to another world, it was illustrated and designed by Colin Fulcher, aka Barney Bubbles, the man responsible for creating Hawkwind’s striking visual identity, from record sleeves, posters, and adverts. He even painted their equipment. As both a skilled professional designer and mystically-inclined freak, Bubbles was instrumental in creating an image for the band as sci-fi warriors and sages waging a sonic assault on the staid conventions of the straight world.

Hearing Space Ritual for the first time is an unforgettable experience. Lemmy—perhaps the band’s most famous ex-member—memorably described Hawkwind as being “a black fucking nightmare – a post-apocalypse horror soundtrack,” and this was surely the album he had in mind when he made that comment. It begins with what sounds like some deep space transmission, a massive interstellar hulk slowly heaving into view, before the ship’s grimy engines fire and you’re pushed back into your seat by the inertial intensity of opening track “Born To Go.” It’s dark, dense, and blurry, a nuclear-powered battering ram smashing through the cosmos, threatening to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time.

I can’t say it was love at first hearing, because it felt so outside my normal listening experience then, which was the relatively polite hard rock pyrotechnics of bands such as Rainbow and Judas Priest. But as I was eventually to realize, Space Ritual simply doesn’t sound like anything else, certainly not any other band. Yet staring at that sleeve as the record’s strange combination of cyclical riffs, chanted vocals, and electronic bleeps, howls, and whooshes poured out of the speakers, the thing it did sound like was science fiction—futuristic and dystopian, but with a vague sense of wonder still peeking through the cosmic gloom. And that was before “The Awakening,” the first spoken word piece on the album, and my first encounter with Robert Calvert, space-age poet extraordinaire.

More so than even Moorcock and Bubbles, Calvert was the man responsible for transforming Hawkwind into a science fiction band, first building a mythos around them as star-faring freedom fighters and prophets, then using SF as a vehicle for satire and social comment in the latter half of the 1970s, when he became their full-time singer and frontman. One of the first things he did for the band was to create (alongside Bubbles) The Hawkwind Log, a booklet that came with 1971’s In Search Of Space album. It tells the discontinuous, Burroughs-esque story of Hawkwind’s mission to liberate the human race from its essential emptiness, but sees them compressed “into a disc of shining black, spinning in eternity.” This depiction of Hawkwind as space travelling saviors puts the band themselves at the heart of an SF-inspired narrative, rather than merely writing songs about flying saucers and aliens.

It was Calvert who had come up with the concept behind the Space Ritual tour—the dreams of a crew of starbound explorers held in suspended animation—but even if the idea of staging a “space opera” was ultimately abandoned, traces of its storyline are still discernible, particularly in “The Awakening.” Calvert had first appeared on stage with Hawkwind reading his poems between songs, with “The Awakening” being part of a longer piece entitled “First Landing On Medusa.” Against plaintive warbles from the electronic chorus line, Calvert contemplates the cryogenically frozen members of his crew, his voice a chilly combination of precision and dispassion, his words full of ear-catching rhymes and imagery: “The nagging choirs of memory / The tubes and wires worming from their flesh to machinery / I would have to cut.” In the concluding part of the poem, the crew set foot on Medusa, and are quickly turned to stone.

There are a number of other readings from Calvert on the album that firmly locate the band in the New Wave SF universe of Ladbroke Grove. There’s the aforementioned “Sonic Attack,” bleakly Darwinian instructions for surviving a future war—“Do not panic! Think only of yourself!” —delivered by Calvert with malicious intent. “The Black Corridor,” another Moorcock piece that uses the opening lines of his novel of the same name, is typical of Hawkwind’s take on space as “a remorseless, senseless, impersonal fact.” And there are two other Calvert-penned pieces: “10 Seconds Of Forever” is a countdown through the last moments of someone’s life, while “Welcome To The Future” is a concentrated hit of eco-terror—“Welcome to the oceans in a labelled can / Welcome to the dehydrated lands.” Both are indebted to the apocalyptic landscapes of Ballard’s inner space.

But it wasn’t just Calvert writing from a science fictional perspective, with Space Ritual also highlighting other members’ take on the genre. Band leader Dave Brock had been writing in a paranoid, pessimistic vein from the first album onwards, with “Time We Left This World Today” neatly encapsulating Hawkwind’s philosophy of radical escapism, decrying an oppressive society controlled by “brain police” and calling for immediate off-world evacuation. Similarly, saxophonist and singer Nik Turner expresses a desire not to “turn android” and recommends flight in “Brainstorm,” while “Master Of The Universe” finds the alien demi-god of the title sorely disappointed by the affairs of man: “If you call this living, I must be blind.”

By the time that Hawkwind played the shows that would be recorded for Space Ritual in late 1972, they were by far the biggest band in the UK’s underground scene, performing to thousands of fans every night—in fact, with the unexpected success earlier in the year of their single “Silver Machine,” which got to number three in the charts and would go on to sell a million copies worldwide, Hawkwind were in danger of becoming a mainstream rock act. But if their science fiction associations enamored them to their fanatical following, who were more than happy to buy into their mythos, it both bemused and intimidated the music press, who continually wrote them off as, at best, a “people’s band,” at worst, a joke.

While rock culture itself still liked to adopt an “outsider” stance, even as it transformed into a multi-million dollar industry, science fiction remained a proper outsider culture in the ‘70s (pre-Star Wars), and was for the most part looked down on by the critical establishment. Yet for a lot of young people, rock and SF shared similar characteristics and attractions—as well as both being escapist mediums, they were also forward moving and excited by the idea of the future, a disruptive threat to straight society’s status quo. While both could be garish and naïve, they were also capable of smuggling new ideas and perspectives into consumers’ heads. And books such as Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings (first published in paperback in 1965), Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land (1961), and Herbert’s Dune (1965) had been foundational texts of the original psychedelic counterculture, depicting battles between old and new worlds, and anticipating the coming of revolutionary messiahs.

From the late ‘60s onwards, during Britain’s progressive rock era, there were plenty of bands who included songs with science fictional themes in their repertoire: Pink Floyd’s “Let There Be More Light,” Van Der Graaf Generator’s “Pioneers Over C,” Black Sabbath’s “Into The Void,” Genesis’s “Watcher of The Skies,” etc. And some of the cover art of the time suggested an engagement with the fantastical, Roger Dean’s sleeves for Yes in particular, plus the covers to ELP’s Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery (the latter illustrated by Alien designer H.R. Giger). David Bowie was also adept at sneaking SF-related themes into his work—“Space Oddity,” “Starman,” “1984,” etc.—and took the lead role in Nic Roeg’s cerebral SF flick The Man Who Fell To Earth (Hawkwind appeared in Robert Fuest’s adaptation of Moorcock’s The Final Programme, but literally for the blink of an eye). And both avant-jazz pioneer Sun Ra and French art proggers Magma drew inspiration from the idea of leaving Earth and setting up home on a new world. 

But it was only Hawkwind who specifically defined themselves via numerous SF tropes, who sounded like the roaring of a mighty spacecraft, whose visual imagery was full of galactic heraldry and pulp magazine homages, and who actually had a series of post-apocalyptic SF novels written about them, where they effectively save the world. It’s what makes them the ultimate science fiction band, adding a cosmic spin to the turbulent “no future” culture of 1970s Britain.

Once I’d fully digested Space Ritual, and recognized it for the towering work of outsider genius that it clearly was, I needed more Hawkwind in my life. And as luck would have it, the next item I bought was a “twofer” cassette of the band’s late ‘70s albums, Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977) and PXR5 (1979). Having achieved some kind of space rock singularity on Space Ritual, Hawkwind’s music became (relatively) more nuanced through the middle part of the decade and veered into fantasy territory (see Warrior)—but when Robert Calvert re-joined them as full-time singer and conceptualist, the band’s profile as sci-fi provocateurs par excellence was boosted once more.

Quark and PXR5 are full of songs animated by Calvert’s quicksilver imagination, one which had moved on from early Hawkwind’s millenarian space chants to embrace SF as the New Wave had intended, as a way of interrogating the modern world and unravelling the technocratic, sometimes psychopathic, forces that increasingly ruled it. “Spirit Of The Age” is the band’s defining song from this era, a vision of the future where bored astronauts light years from home make love to android replicas of their long dead girlfriends, only to complain, “When she comes, she moans another’s name.” It’s also a paean to the plight of the clone, where individuality is unattainable: “Oh for the wings of any bird / Other than a battery hen.”

On saying that, “Uncle Sam’s On Mars” pushes it close, Calvert’s angry take-down of (as he saw it) America’s colonialist approach to space exploration, including pops at its fast food culture and consumerist worldview. He also presciently makes reference to global warming—“Layers of smoke in the atmosphere / Have made the earth too hot to bear”—and suggests that the money and technology involved in putting a man on Mars would be better used repairing our own planet. This was also the period of Hawkwind when the titles of classic sci-fi novels would be co-opted by Calvert as a springboard for his lyrics—in the case of “Damnation Alley” and “Jack Of Shadows” (both Roger Zelazny books), this resulted in reasonably faithful interpretations of the stories, whereas for “High Rise,” just the title of Ballard’s novel was taken. A personal favorite of mine is “Robot,” which references Asimov’s Three Laws, but riffs on the idea of the white collar suburban worker as a slave machine to capitalism.

The Atomhenge tour, 1976

Calvert left Hawkwind in 1979, and, in truth, the band would never subsequently pull off the rock + science fiction equation as inventively and authentically as when he was on board. But in the wider scheme of things, it didn’t particularly hinder the band’s progress, so strong was their brand with the people that mattered—their fans. In fact, the clutch of albums they released after Calvert’s departure all charted higher than Quark or PXR5—while both are now rightly regarded as highlights of the band’s back catalog, it’s possible that at the time they were just too literary in places, Calvert’s clever wordsmithing obstructing the flow of Hawkwind’s sonic attack. 

And that takes us now to me sitting in my bedroom with that twofer in my hand, wondering what to listen to next. So I checked out what they were currently doing, and that meant 1982’s double-headed offering of Church Of Hawkwind and Choose Your Masques. The former is more electronically-inclined, while the latter is almost cosmic industrial, but they still contained those sci-fi rock essentials of engine room rhythms, distress call synth, robot vocals, future-themed lyrics, and all recorded the day after tomorrow. And Choose Your Masques in particular had a very cool sleeve. These albums might have lacked the finesse and sophistication of the Calvert era, but Hawkwind still sounded like no other band.

And that’s surely why they’ve continued to this day. They’ve certainly stretched the space rock template along the course of their journey, absorbing techno and ambient influences, especially during the ‘90s, but they’ve consistently traded in science fictional imagery and themes without ever having to resort to trad rock subject matter or the need to be more commercial, contemporary, or “edgy.” They’ve had their wilderness years, but the last decade has seen a significant revival of their fortunes, with perhaps the stand-out release from this period being The Machine Stops (2016), a concept album based on E.M. Forster’s story of civilization living inside a vast mechanical hive—its citizens are electronically connected, but they live alone in their cells.

Michael Moorcock once said that science fiction and rock ‘n’ roll were the two great despised art forms of the 20th century. It’s no wonder then that Hawkwind, in which the combination of the two reached its apotheosis, have come in for so much grief throughout their existence. But as my teenage self would have told the haters, you’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re missing out on something really quite special.

Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia by Joe Banks is published by Strange Attractor.

Joe Banks is a London-based music writer whose work has appeared in various publications, including The Guardian, MOJO, Prog, Shindig!, Electronic Sound, and The Quietus. Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground is his first book. For endless Hawkwind trivia, follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeBanksWriter.

Stephen Canner / December 17, 2020

This is a revision of a piece that was originally published at Mediated Signals.

A curious ad appeared in the August 1955 issue of Ray Palmer’s Mystic Magazine. It announced the release of an LP that would allow readers the opportunity to hear the voice of someone called Yada Di Shi’ite. It went on to say that the record contained “a true aural picture of a typical lecture given by the teachers of the Inner Circle through Mark Probert.” As puzzling as this may sound to us today, regular readers of Mystic would have been very familiar with both Yada and Probert. What is not obvious from the information given is that this might well be the earliest example of a commercially released vinyl record related to the UFO phenomenon. Unfortunately, no copies of the record are known to exist, and to my knowledge very few collectors are even aware of it. But how this record came to be made and its relationship to early UFO culture is something of a tale.

On October 14, 1946, The Los Angeles Daily News reported that a number of people in San Diego believed that “a space ship from another planet” had attempted to make contact with Earth during the previous week’s meteor shower, an event caused by the passing of the Giacobini-Zinner comet. Although local authorities received no reports of anything out of the ordinary, at least a dozen people told the paper that on October 9 they had witnessed a “large and weird object” in the sky over the city. One witness was quoted as saying, “It was shaped like a bullet and left this vapor trail behind it.” Another observed that it had “something that looked like wings.” The article curiously went on to say that local occult publisher Meade Layne was “putting a medium to work on the supposed sighting.” That medium was Mark Probert.

According to the brief autobiography published in the 1963 edition of his book The Magic Bag, Mark Probert was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1907. As a teenager he joined the Merchant Marine. But after only two years at sea, he disembarked at San Diego and decided to stay. There he worked briefly as a jockey and a bellhop, before moving into vaudeville as a “song and dance man.” By the 1930s, vaudeville was dying, so in 1939 he took a job as a graphic artist with the Visual Education Department of the San Diego public school system. It was there he met his wife Irene.

Not long after they were married, Irene made a casual remark that would change the course of their lives. She told Mark that he often talked in his sleep. The odd thing was that when this happened, it sounded as if he were speaking a foreign language. Soon the couple met Meade Layne, a former university professor who had left academia to devote his life to the study of psychic phenomena. As Probert put it, “he had considerable interest and knowledge in the fields of metaphysical and occult laws.” It was Layne who convinced Probert that his nocturnal mumblings could be evidence that he was in fact a trance medium. 

The idea that Probert was perhaps channeling entities from beyond was put to the test during an experimental séance. Recounting his experience years later, Probert recalled that after being instructed to relax, he soon found himself in a state of euphoria so intense that he lost all awareness of the world around him. When he regained consciousness, he was told that he had been in a trance for some 45 minutes and had spoken in a voice not his own. The voice introduced itself as Martin Latamore Lingford, a New York showman who had lived earlier in the century. Lingford explained that he and a group of other entities from the “inner planes” had spent years preparing Probert for his role as channel. Soon, the voice promised, these other “controls” would also come forward and make themselves known. 

During a number of séances over the next three years, the other controls—collectively known as the Inner Circle—did indeed appear, and began to reveal their plan for Probert’s life. They explained that it was they who had chosen Irene to be not only his wife, but also “their personal guide and assistant in the work.” They emphasized that this work was to be “almost entirely of an educational nature” and not to “expect much in the way of personal matters.” On the surface this may seem a minor point. But this statement could be read as a conscious attempt by Probert to separate his work from earlier trance mediums of the spiritualist movement, who would often help the bereaved by contacting their “dear departed loved ones.” It seems that something more important was happening here.

In early 1945, Meade Layne began publishing a newsletter called The Round Robin. The first issue was sent out, somewhat experimentally, to some 15 to 20 people. Over time it grew, and after a name change to The Journal of Borderland Research, it endured into the current century. In the October 1946 issue, Layne explained that the mysterious object reported by the newspapers that month first came to his attention when he received a telephone call from Mark Probert, who told Layne that he had been watching the meteor shower from the top floor of a building when he sighted it. He described it as a luminous craft, “about the size of an extremely large plane,” with two reddish lights, moving very fast. He then added a surprising detail: “the flapping of its wings was plainly visible.”

The next day, Layne received a number of calls from other witnesses who agreed on some points of Probert’s description and disagreed on others. Why these witnesses would call Layne, and not the authorities, to report their sightings is not explained. In a footnote he adds that, “The record of such strange craft, objects, appearances in the sky has greatly increased since Charles Fort began his astonishing memo, and still grows.” This is an interesting comment given that it suggests that the era of the UFO dates to Charles Fort’s early work, the first volume of his “astonishing memo” being his Book of the Damned, published in 1919. What is more remarkable is that this statement was made a full eight months before public knowledge of UFOs was widespread, at least as any sort of organized concept. But early readers of Charles Fort were always a bit ahead of the curve in this respect.

Mark Probert soon went into a trance (he now seemed to be able to do this at will) so that his controls could be asked about the object. From them he learned that it was called “the Kareeta.” (Elsewhere its name is given as “Careeta” and even “Corrida.”) In somewhat poetic language, the controls chimed in with their opinions about the craft. One said it came from a planet “many thousands” of miles away and that it was made of “balsam wood [sic] coated with a thin layer of alloy.” Another claimed that it came from “west of the moon” and that its pilots “want you to get a group of scientists who will meet them at some isolated spot.” At this point there is no indication that what was being described was anything other than a concrete object being piloted by physical beings.

In late May 1949, responding to Walter Winchell’s claim that UFOs were actually “experimental guided missiles from Russia,” Layne told a newspaper reporter that the saucers in fact originated from a place called Etheria. This was not a place that was part of our own physical reality, but a “material world, with objects and people and a great civilization, and it lies all about us, though invisible and untouchable.” Based on what he learned from Probert’s controls, Layne had been developing this idea throughout 1947, in the pages of The Round Robin. This is a very early version of the Interdimensional Hypothesis, an idea that would become well known in UFO circles some two decades later. According to the hypothesis conceived by Layne, the saucers did not come from outer space as we know it. Neither did they come from “the astral plane,” but from what was effectively a parallel universe. He was to formalize this idea in 1950, with the publication of a mimeographed booklet called The Ether Ship Mystery and Its Solution.

In late 1953, Ray Palmer, already well known for his success with Amazing Stories and Fate, launched a new magazine called Mystic. In his chatty editorials, Palmer expressed a vision for the new publication that sounded almost as if he were attempting to create a new genre of literature, one that was somehow simultaneously both fact and fiction. This new enterprise served as something of a bridge between the fantastic fiction of Amazing Stories and the fantastic “fact” of Fate. In the third issue in March 1954, Palmer printed Roger Graham’s detailed account of how Probert, through his controls, successfully identified and diagnosed a number of Graham’s medical problems, diagnoses that were later confirmed by medical professionals. (This intersection of spiritualism and healing already had a long history by the early 1950s. In the US, Edgar Cayce was providing clairvoyant diagnoses as early as the turn of the century. Harry Edwards, Britain’s most famous spiritual healer, began his career in the 1930s.) This article signaled the beginning of what would become something of a fascination with Probert on Ray Palmer’s part. This may have been partly due to the number of letters the magazine received about Probert’s alleged abilities, both supportive and scoffing. Palmer was never one to let a good controversy go unexploited.

The cover of the August 1954 issue of Mystic featured paintings by Probert of three of his more talkative controls. These were Ramon Natalli, an astronomer who lived at the time of Galileo; Doctor Alfred Luntz, a 19th-century Anglo-German “clergyman for the High Episcopal Church of England”; and Yada Di Shi’ite, a 500,000 year old priest from a lost Himalayan city. Elsewhere Probert wrote that these controls, along with two others, appeared to him in visible form one night in 1947, insisting that he paint their portraits. He did not explain why disembodied entities from the inner planes who had lived in a number of different physical bodies over the millennia would want portraits of themselves, but some of these paintings were later used as illustrations in Probert’s book The Magic Bag. 

Mark Probert, 1950s

The feature article in the August issue of Mystic was the transcription of a séance held by Probert, attended by Irene and a man identified only as “RGM.” The two were to present a set of questions to the controls that had been provided to them by Ray Palmer. The first of the Inner Circle to emerge was Dr. Luntz. The question posed to him concerned the extent of the U.S. government’s knowledge of the true nature of flying saucers. For a Victorian vicar, Luntz seemed to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. His answer was that the government did indeed know more about the phenomenon than was publicly admitted, but that there was no sinister motive behind it. The intent was simply to shield the public from the panic that would surely result from any revelation. He then went on to suggest, somewhat incongruously, that arch-debunker Donald Menzel’s recent book—Flying Saucers, published by Harvard University Press in 1953—was the result of an intentional conspiracy to suppress the reality of the saucers.

Renaissance astronomer Ramon Natalli then made a brief appearance, presenting his theory that all reality is driven by consciousness. With the opening acts out of the way, it was time for Probert’s star turn. Yada Di Shi’ite manifested, speaking his own impenetrable ancient language of Yuga: introducing Yada’s arrival with a barrage of gibberish would soon become something of a set piece for Probert. Undoubtedly this was a device intended to add drama to Yada’s arrival and to increase audience anticipation. Switching to English, Yada provided the basic outline of his autobiography. He said he had lived a half million years ago in the city of Kaoti, in a civilization called Yu. There he was a Ka-Ta, or priest. Once he completed the “33rd degree in the order called Shi’ite,” he was given the title Yada. Since that first life in the Himalayas, he had been reincarnated many times, the last being in China 500 years ago. In this description, Yada presented himself as something between a bodhisattva and a Scottish Rite Mason. He said that he had not experienced any “breaks in consciousness” since his original incarnation on Earth, and that anyone could achieve this. He then explained that reality is illusory but that mankind can rise out of this illusion by degrees. He closed with the revelation that no single path leads to enlightenment, but that “all of man’s experiences are to be classified as initiations into higher and to more complete states of awareness.”

Over the next year it was a rare copy of Mystic that did not feature Probert somewhere in its pages. An interesting letter from an anonymous correspondent who claimed to work in the mental health industry appeared in the August 1955 issue. He wrote that after seeing Probert in person he was “very disillusioned.” Among his complaints was that the messages the controls delivered were unoriginal, and seemed to have been gleaned from the library. Also unconvincing was the fact that the various voices that emerged from Probert—whether early modern Italian, Victorian English, or ancient Himalayan—always spoke in the same accent. “I think these trance states would not have become necessary had he not found himself a teacher with no students, a philosopher with no audience,” anonymous wrote, “consciously or unconsciously I believe that he is using the occult to put his own ideas across.”

The August 1955 issue also featured an advertisement for a long playing album, announcing that the public could now hear the voice of Yada Di Shi’ite at home. The ad copy was written in a tone that assumed the reader knew full well who both Probert and Yada were. It explained that the record had been made from an unedited, hour-long tape of a séance held before a live audience. Yada would begin the session by speaking in his ancient native tongue, before switching to English. The Himalayan priest would then give his opinions on such topics as reincarnation and the purpose of life, before taking questions from the audience. All this could be in the reader’s mailbox by sending only $4.98 to Inner Circle Records in Ojai, California.

As mentioned, to my knowledge, no copy of this record has ever turned up. Why? The first and most likely answer is that it was only ever pressed in an extremely limited quantity, never sold well, and any remaining stock was eventually disposed of. This has been the unfortunate fate of so many ephemeral recordings over the years. Another possibility is that it never existed. If that is the case, then the ad for the record was likely an attempt to secure orders before actually pressing and shipping the disc. This model was definitely in use at the time for self-published saucer and occult books, although in those cases buyers were usually told that they were placing an advance order.

The offices of Mystic were in Evanston, Illinois, and Mark Probert was based in San Diego. Why then is the address given in the ad in Ojai, California, a tiny town more than 200 miles away from Probert’s home? The obvious answer is that the company producing the record was located there—which would make sense, given’s Ojai’s historical connection to Theosophy and the esoteric tradition. It does not appear that Inner Circle Records actually existed outside of this release, however. In all likelihood, it is simply the label name Probert chose to use when arranging its manufacture with a custom pressing outfit. And in a town as small as Ojai, it would seem that the company should be fairly easy to identify.

At first sight, a tantalizing possibility is that the record may be a very early release by the legendary Two: Dot Records. This label was run by husband-and-wife team Dean and JoAnne Thompson from their home on the outskirts of town. They began doing run-of-the-mill custom work in the 1950s before tapping into the regional rock scene in the late 1960s. Examples of the label’s 1970s output by bands like Hendrickson Road House or The Mystic Zephyrs 4 sometimes sell for as high as four figures. 

However, there was also another label operating out of Ojai in the 1950s. Educo Records was founded in 1953, releasing classical recordings to be used for music appreciation classes in schools and colleges. The company operated out of Ojai during its first few years of existence, and later relocated to nearby Ventura. Given that the PO Box address in the Mystic ad was that used by Educo while in Ojai, it is reasonable to conclude that this was the company contracted by Probert to manufacture the LP. So far, no other custom releases by Educo have been identified. But like other small labels of the era, it is likely that Educo accepted custom contracts to increase revenue, the finished product bearing no evidence of the manufacturer so as not to confuse private releases with the company’s main brand in the minds of consumers.

It is not known whether Probert’s LP contained any references to the flying saucer phenomenon. By 1956, however, Yada was giving audiences his opinion on the reality and nature of UFOs, still promoting the idea that they were not from other planets but from another dimension. In early 1957, Probert was a guest on Long John Nebel’s radio show in New York, a regular stop for saucer celebrities. In 1960, he appeared at the Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention—the most famous and one of the largest of the early UFO conventions—where he channeled Yada for an audience, with Irene acting as master of ceremonies. Here, as usual, Yada first emerged speaking Yuga before switching to English. 

A cynical observer might point out that Probert, by his own admission, was an ex-vaudevillian, and that this standard performance—repeated ad infinitum—was beginning to have something of the feel of a tired old vaudeville turn. The couple continued touring the country performing séances throughout the 1960s, and after Irene’s death in 1966, Probert continued his work alone.

Probert’s last known major public appearance was at the Northern California Space Convention in October 1968. At this point he was telling audiences that he was not a medium, but a “telegnostic.” This term not only served to further distance him from the stereotype of the medium left over from the days of spiritualism, but implied something deeper. The term suggested that he was not just contacting spirits, but was somehow transmitting gnosis from some distant location. It also served to position him not simply as a fortune teller or mentalist, but as something much more serious: a gnostic. Mark Probert died a few months later, in early 1969.

It is easy in our rationalist era to cast Mark Probert as one in a long line of spiritualists who were either delusional or blatantly fraudulent. But this point of view ignores the content of his message. What is remarkable about the séance published in the August 1954 issue of Mystic, is that in a single, short session Probert—or, if you prefer, his controls—was able to seamlessly guide the conversation from possible conspiracies around the existence of UFOs, to ideas about reality being a by-product of consciousness, ending with hints of a grand Buddho-Masonic theory of release from the cycle of reincarnation, resulting in something resembling Buddhahood. In doing so, he provided a tantalizing suggestion that these things might somehow all be related. It is also striking that the questions raised by Natalli and Yada during the séance are still those that concern serious modern students of anomalous phenomena, mysticism, and even physics. In effect, Probert seemed to be telling audiences to move away from the obvious conclusions they were making not only about saucers, but about existence itself. 

As far back as 1947, when most people were just hearing the term “flying saucers” for the first time, Mark Probert had already rejected myopic materialism, and was telling the world that perhaps the very fabric of reality was quite different than our model of it. And though wrapped in a presentation that borrowed heavily from theosophy, spiritualism, and the vaudeville stage, Probert’s ideas foreshadowed an important direction that one school of thought was to take in the future. This move away from the idea of UFOs as a nuts and bolts phenomenon, and towards a more blended view involving theories of consciousness, human cognition, and quantum theories of time and space is one that is fast gaining momentum today. 

Many myths and legends center around something lost, an object or a bit of knowledge; its very absence imbues the missing thing with meaning, even importance. It is likely, however, that the idea of a lost recording of the voice of Yada Di Shi’ite is much more interesting than the actual reality, were a copy ever to surface. But puzzles like the one surrounding this album are what keep researchers moving forward, and in the process uncovering the next riddle to be solved. The UFO phenomenon itself is more koan than puzzle. It is also both an ontological and an epistemological mystery, so it should come as no surprise that a study of recordings related to it would begin with its own discographical mystery.

Stephen Canner is an archivist, musician (The Victor Mourning), and historian of artifacts that emerge from the margins of culture. He blogs at Mediated Signals.

Michael Grasso / December 15, 2020

The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech
By Grafton Tanner
Zero Books, 2020

I’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth. Ultimately, this is nothing new. I remember when every pop culture moment, from sitcoms to TV commercials, seemed to be using the Baby Boomers’ favorite songs to sell them cars and sneakers. But in 2020, the dominance of these re-treaded properties is even more nakedly cynical, whether its the endless sequels of the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes, or the easy-to-consume, signifier-filled pastiches of the worlds of Stranger Things and Ready Player One. The cultural marketplace, as dominated by bloated media and tech empires, no longer sees any need to admit the novel, the fresh, the unusual.

Both the “why” and the “how” of this cultural and technological tendency are explored by author Grafton Tanner in his new book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. (Disclosure: Tanner is an occasional contributor to We Are The Mutants.) Tanner explores not only the pop culture properties that utilize nostalgia in an effort to assuage the anxieties of contemporary life in the aftermath of the 2008 financial rupture; he also explains how tech companies use the feedback from algorithmic analysis to keep consumers locked into a never-ending cycle—an ouroboros—of digital satisfaction of their subconscious desires for an older, more secure time. This nostalgic digital utopia, in turn, keeps consumers constantly “on,” working through endless “quests” that approximate proactivity but in the end keep people locked into pointless and unproductive cycles of feedback, emotional satisfaction, and control. “Recommender systems and predictive analytics—the very tools that allow our contemporary media to function—zero in on quick reactions, such as a flash of anger or a swell of nostalgia,” says Tanner in his Introduction. “These reactions are noted by algorithms, which then make recommendations based on them… The result is a nostalgic feedback loop wherein old ideas travel round.”

Tanner examines how the Big Tech tendency towards technolibertarianism and monopoly over the past 20 years has created the material conditions for this self-reinforcing system of psychic feedback. With an increasing belief in culture as disposable and “just for fun,” the material and political implications of this system of control are obfuscated. The way that these cultural narratives award Big Tech further and deeper power over all of us is merely part of the game. And we are enlisted as active players, not merely passive viewers, as in the era of television’s height. The online world, Tanner notes, demands a keen eye for analysis and a deep capacity for paying attention. The technolibertarian and neoliberal alike view our tech-suffused world—everyone is plugged in, 24/7—as a kind of utopia-in-waiting, or indeed a permanent utopia, where the idealized past can be endlessly revisited and basked in, while the present never changes from its current state of cultural and political stasis. This virtual plaza of commerce, emotional satisfaction, the illusion of proactivity, and control and surveillance describe the boundaries of Big Tech’s dominance of both our material and psychic space at the beginning of the 2020s.

The interview below was conducted in November and December 2020 via email and has been lightly edited for clarity.

***

GRASSO: Given the topic of your first book for Zero, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the topic for The Circle of the Snake seems like a natural outgrowth. But from reading the book it also seems like there were a lot of specific events and observations about the world of Online and Big Tech over the past few years that led to the book’s development. What are the origins of The Circle of the Snake, and what kinds of specific cultural developments led you to propose and write the book?

TANNER: I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I was going to write a book on Big Tech. I was living in a kind of exile in 2016, in this small town in Georgia, trying to piece my life back together after a series of false starts after college. I was sitting in a Barnes & Noble reading the 2016 Tech Issue of The Atlantic, and there was a story by Bianca Bosker about former Google employee Tristan Harris, who left the Valley and started an advocacy group called Time Well Spent because he thought Big Tech was eroding mental health. He was on a mission to fix Big Tech by making it work for us, not against us. But the piece didn’t make me feel better about tech. In fact, it was terrifying: here is an ex-Valley technocrat, mournful that he had invented habit-forming technology with severe public side effects, asking us to not only forgive him, but believe in him to create newer, better tech. I was incensed.

Shortly thereafter, we learned that Cambridge Analytica sharpened their psychographic modeling techniques by harvesting Facebook data from millions of users without their permission, all to aid in the election of Donald Trump. There was suddenly this huge backlash against Big Tech. I was supportive of it, but I also understood it came a little too late. Tech critics had been sounding the alarm for years and years. It took the election of a fascist for the left to wake up to the tech nightmare, only to realize the ones promising to end the nightmare were former technocrats themselves.

And yet, as many were loudly critiquing Big Tech for its role in throwing elections, spreading fascism, and worsening mental health, the culture industry was churning out politically retrograde nostalgia-bait. Was it really that the techlash had made everyone even more nostalgic for the pre-digital past? Or was there some kind of connection between nostalgia and Big Tech? These were the questions I had in mind when I started writing.

GRASSO: I think one of the things I like best about the book is your fusion of theory, philosophy, and epistemology with the material and economic realities of 21st century Big Tech and Big Media. Throughout the book you explore concepts such as surveillance, sublimity, nostalgia (of course), and virtuality with concrete examples from the online plaza. Essentially, if I’m not mistaken, you’re saying that the people who created the feedback loops that keep us hooked on technology and the internet and mine our data for still more ways to sell to us have themselves studied their philosophy, economic history, and techniques of mass psychology and persuasion with great attention?

TANNER: Persuasion techniques, yes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say the technocrats have studied much else beyond their limited worldview, which is scientistic. Yes, technocrats like James Williams and Tristan Harris like to cite philosophers, but they usually do it to support their self-help solutions to the attention economy. Wake up with a little philosophy, they say, because reading Socrates is better for the mind than scrolling through Twitter. It’s a very neckbeard way of thinking about cultural consumption.

Make no mistake: these technocrats are uninterested in anything other than making a lot of money. If that means learning psychological techniques of persuasion with Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, then so be it. They weren’t and aren’t trying to make the world a better place or something. Like the banks before the Great Recession, the technocrats are out to make a quick buck by any means necessary, and they would have kept on doing what they were doing if the bubble hadn’t burst. People were disgruntled with Facebook for years before Cambridge Analytica, and tech critique was already a robust genre by 2016. But it took a kind of implosion, a Great Recession-style reckoning with Big Tech, to change the public opinion. Honestly, the technocrats would probably benefit from studying a little history and philosophy, instead of cloistering themselves in the ideological fortress of STEM.

GRASSO: I think one of the “oh shit” moments in the text for me was finding out that the Black Mirror special choose-your-own-adventure episode “Bandersnatch,” which I quite liked mostly for its material and inspirational signifiers (early ’80s computing, references to Philip K. Dick) was also used to mine viewers’ data in a delightfully dark real-life Dickean stroke. It’s not merely that nostalgia offers us a safe place from the dangerous present, but that those who create these nostalgic visions are working hand-in-hand with the very media empires that make us crave the past: another ouroboros.

TANNER: “Bandersnatch” not only exploits viewers’ nostalgia for its own gain, but it further normalizes the feeling of being controlled. Everyone today knows we’re being controlled from afar: by Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, insurance companies, think tanks, banks, and so forth. We are part of this giant social experiment called consumer capitalism. The purpose is to find out what we’ll buy. But we aren’t being controlled by future gamers or, as much as Elon Musk would like to believe, programmers in this computer simulation we call life. “Bandersnatch” is a work of fiction masquerading a horrible fact—that Netflix is the one controlling us, that we are not as in control as we think. The irony, of course, is that we relinquish our control via the technology we use every day, but we ultimately have very little choice in the matter. Students use devices at school, and jobs often require employees to have smartphones. We aren’t puppets, but we’re by no means totally free either.

Scene from “Bandersnatch,” in front of the No. 1 Croydon Building, South London.

GRASSO: So that leads me to asking you about your critique of specific media franchises: Stranger Things and the endless array of sequels and especially reboots we’ve seen since the end of the aughts. You very cannily explore Stranger Things‘ reliance on physical signifiers of commodities and objects that are no longer extant but remind us of the shackles of our technology-laden present (the old landline telephone, the shopping mall) as a key to its appeal to both Gen-Xers who were there and Zoomers who weren’t. Likewise the cinematic reboot is a way to cheaply create product and content that will connect with multiple generations. This element of “spot the Easter egg, aren’t you smart?” for older generations melds with the offer of a trip to a now-alien time for younger generations. These franchises seem to simultaneously reward passive immersion in nostalgia with an illusion of proactivity.

TANNER: Well, the spot-the-Easter-egg activities are very often nostalgic exercises themselves. Viewers are invited to find the nostalgic signifiers, even if they don’t know what they are. That’s the brilliance of Easter egg marketing for advertisers: you might not know what the hidden clue means, but you know it’s a clue and so you make note of it. Of course, the “real” fans will be able to cite all the references, but regular viewers can sometimes recognize a clue, like a corded phone or a VCR or a reference to an older movie, when they see it.

Easter egg marketing is the advertising tactic of choice in the prosumer age. It turns watching into a game. And it’s very heuristic. The films with the most Easter eggs inspire the most “count them all” YouTube videos or Buzzfeed listicles. The problem here isn’t that movies and series reference a bunch of older media; the problem is that Easter eggs reference certain things and leave others out, thus establishing these unnecessary pop culture canons. I don’t care that the Halloween franchise makes reference to itself. It’s an extended universe at this point—of course it’s going to do that. What I find questionable is its constant updating in an attempt to recapture the magic of the original film. I’m always signaling my love of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but that film is too wacky to be included in the Halloween universe, because the franchise is desperately trying to give us the original again, as if it were the first time, without all the messy parts of the sequels. The Halloween filmmakers want to keep the bloodline of the first film pure, which means anything standing in the way must be excised.

GRASSO: You mark the period between 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008 (and its aftermath) as the final foreclosure of any alternative to our current future and one of the dividing lines between an idealized past depicted in our nostalgic media and the forever Now. Unsurprisingly, so many of the elements of online life we now recognize as irredeemably toxic (social media, ranking and rating apps, tentpole cinematic universes full of identical sequels) began around the end of the Bush years as well.

TANNER: One of these days, I’m going to write a history-critique of the 2000s. I find the decade fascinating. It was probably the nadir of contemporary culture. Mark Fisher called it “the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.”

It’s true: there was no breaking point at which contemporary nostalgia ramped up. It was a gradual shift between 9/11 and the Great Recession. Directly after 9/11, the U.S. was reeling from shock. Before nostalgia set in later in the decade, there was a feeling of futurelessness, as Robert Jay Lifton wrote—a feeling that there can be no future after 9/11, that the fear of another terrorist attack foreclosed the future altogether, that if people could fly planes into buildings on a regular weekday morning, then anything horrific is possible. During these years, we saw the birth of cinematic universes with the Star Wars prequels and the first megabudget superhero films. Of course, there were Batman, Superman, and Star Wars films before the twenty-first century, but it was after 9/11 that we saw the avalanche of these movies, several of which could not have been made without post-9/11 Pentagon support, with its bloated influence and near-endless supply of capital. You cannot downplay the reach these films have. They’re seen all over the world. And they aren’t just pro-military propaganda, they are engines of nostalgia.

After the Great Recession, nostalgia calcified. People were moving back in with their parents, revisiting old memories to soothe the anxiety of joblessness. Financial recessions are progressive only for the bankers, if they’re bailed out. For workers, they’re regressive. They set people back and invite the sufferers to hide away from it all. There is nothing wrong with this reaction. We cannot blame people who were hit by the Recession for their nostalgia. But we can blame the ones who caused it. And austerity measures only increase the desire to escape into nostalgic feelings. In short, financial meltdowns are crises that affect the future because they erase the plausibility of surviving the present.

GRASSO: You state that nostalgia is not only an emotion used to track us and to trigger specific emotional responses (which themselves are often assuaged by consumption), but also, possibly most importantly, to control us. And that control is not only physical/material but also social/aesthetic, limiting our options to wander away from the digital plaza. How do nostalgia and nostalgic media help this attempt by the market to quantify, objectify, and commodify us, the consumer?

TANNER: Content creators—a sickening term that reduces art and culture to commodities—understand the value of nostalgia. Consumer scientists have known for years that nostalgia sells. If anger draws your attention to the screen, then nostalgia triggers you to buy what will soothe the anger. That’s the cycle we’re dealing with in the present century.

And the worse things get, the more that nostalgia will naturally rise to the surface for many people. It’s not that media companies force-feed nostalgia to us. Many people are already feeling the emotion. It’s inescapable because nostalgia is a modern condition. Corporations merely go the extra mile by locking nostalgia into these feedback loops. The more you feed nostalgia into the cultural industry, the more of it you will consume because entire companies depend on you to want it. We live in a world of disruption, and every modern displacement is accompanied by nostalgia. Corporate capital knows this and depends on it.

GRASSO: Two of the specific technologies you talk about, Instagram and virtual reality, have undergone mutations in their appeals to our desire to escape the modern world. Instagram started off as a fairly disposable nostalgic evocation of the Polaroid camera aesthetic and has become a playground for big-money influencers and exhibitionists; virtual reality has evolved into just another facet of the internet’s control apparatus, despite its conceptual origins in early ’80s cyberpunk and its promised potential to give people the ability to create their own worlds. Why do these technologies seem to always mutate in the direction of greater commercialization and/or control, despite their initial apparent harmlessness or revolutionary promise?

TANNER: In the case of Instagram, its nostalgia factor was mainly due to the horrible photo quality of early smartphone cameras. With some Wi-Fi, a phone, and an app, you could take photos anywhere and upload them on the spot, which was enticing enough for many people to do just that, but you couldn’t deny the photo quality was very poor. So one way to deal with this poor quality was to saturate photos in a kind of analog haze, which could be done by applying one of several different stock filters. I can’t emphasize this enough: so much of our nostalgic appetite in the early 2010s was whetted by the inability to take and post a decent looking digital photo.

Whether it’s Instagram or virtual reality, digital technology is never totally harmless. It’s like when Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys tell us we can have our digital cake and eat it too. You can’t have “humane tech” because tech is driven by the profit motive, which itself is often powered by another force: the military. Have you seen this new recruiting ad for the Marine Corps? It’s basically telling young people that joining the military will be an escape from the overwhelming anxieties of the digital age. The scariest thing about the ad is that it conceals the long relationship between tech and the military. Which is to say, the “tech” presented in the ad couldn’t exist without the military-industrial complex. At this point, any new, possibly revolutionary digital technology will either be bought out by a Big Tech monopoly or put to use on the battlefield.

GRASSO: As far as solutions and escapes from this predicament go, you talk a little bit about the ineffectual attempts of former technocrats to try to ameliorate our enslavement to the internet and social media with apps that limit time on websites or “safety labels,” and find them all wholly wanting. Likewise, you mention attempts to make nostalgia something constructive, playful, reflective (in the schema of Svetlana Boym). And yet the very structure of the internet and Big Media as it stands now denies all alternatives to the current control stasis. What does a constructivist nostalgia look like? Where could it exist in the cracks of the current marketplace? Is there a place for nostalgia as a political instrument of the left outside of the usual avenue of Left Melancholy?

TANNER: I’m currently writing a history of nostalgia, out fall 2021 with Repeater Books, called The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: A Recent History of Nostalgia. In it, I put forth a theory of radical nostalgia, drawing on the work of Alastair Bonnett and Svetlana Boym. Radical nostalgia is the third “R” beyond reflective and restorative nostalgia, which Boym coined. She was right about nostalgia, but over the first two decades of the present century, restorative nostalgia ballooned while the reflective strains were edged to the margins. But there needs to be this third form, radical nostalgia, because the melancholic disposition of reflective nostalgia just hasn’t been working for the left and the restorative tint has proven to be destructive.

Radical nostalgia is the act of looking back to those moments when collective action stood up to capital. It yearns for the social movements of the past. It aches for them. It isn’t interested in “getting back there,” in restoring what’s been lost, but in learning from those who came before: the struggle for indigenous rights, the staunch anti-capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr., Stonewall, the Battle of Seattle. When Richard Branson signals his support for LGBTQ+ communities, that isn’t radical nostalgia. There’s nothing radical about it; it’s mere nostalgia. Radical nostalgia looks to these and other movements to continue the fight for a more egalitarian future. It is inherently anti-fascist.

Radical nostalgia takes the action step of restorative and the aching heart of reflective nostalgia and fuses them together. It knows that the past isn’t perfect, which means what we yearn for shouldn’t be either. Restorative nostalgia is too clean, too high-definition. Reflective nostalgia kicks the can around, although reflectors might recognize the problems of the past long before the restorers do. But radical nostalgia knows that everything is imbued with horror, the past especially. Many revolutionary movements of the past suffered from machismo and intolerance, even in their own collectives. Radical nostalgia knows this and endeavors to leave it in the past. Some things must remain buried.

And radical nostalgia is one perspective we can take to resist the utopian thinking of tech. At this point, Big Tech is about the only entity that circulates visions of the future, but those visions are falling out of favor thanks to the techlash. Get ready, because they will absolutely be replaced with a different utopian vision: the humane tech movement. We’re going to be dealing with the technocrats for years. It’s going to seem like we should trust Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys. They’re going to be pushing their vision of the future for years to come. But they are the new boss, same as the old. Only collective action, informed by the decolonial and anti-fascist movements of history, can resist what’s coming in the next decade and beyond.

Noah Berlatsky / December 9, 2020

Ursula K. Le Guin is generally thought of as a progressive, even as a radical, on the strength of her utopian novels. Her 1974 classic The Dispossessed imagines a functioning anarchist society; 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet where everyone is a hermaphrodite, which means it is a world without patriarchy. Yet Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence. 

The clearest statement of her counter-revolutionary side is the 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. It’s a book that is generally discussed primarily as a tribute to Philip K. Dick, and it certainly picks up that author’s obsession with the construction and breakdown of reality, and with the distinction between sanity and insanity. But less discussed, and just as important, is Le Guin’s debt to anticommunist dystopian imaginings—books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, in which the utopian strivings lead to regimented, life-crushing dystopias. Like those novels, The Lathe of Heaven warns that even dreaming of a better future can result in nightmare. In doing so, it shows how Le Guin’s most famous fictions were inspired by the Cold War, and how they were constrained by it.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in Portland, Oregon in a future dystopia of 2002. The world is overpopulated and impoverished; life is grimy, run-down, and hemmed in. The protagonist, George Orr, is an inconsequential draftsman. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested for borrowing another’s rations of drugs in an effort to keep himself from dreaming. He is assigned to mandatory therapy with psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber.

George explains to Haber that he wants to stop dreaming because his dreams can alter reality; when he dreams an “effective” dream, George alleges, he remakes the world. Haber doesn’t believe him at first, but after hypnotizing George he gets him to use his dreams to change a picture on Haber’s wall. Usually no one but George remembers the previous reality, but being present at the instant of dreaming allows Haber to see and retain the change. He quickly decides he can use George to transform the world for the better.

But George’s dreams are an imperfect tool, and whenever Haber hypnotically suggests a dream, that dream goes awry. When he tells George to reduce overpopulation, George dreams a plague that kills billions. A request for peace between humans results in a devastating alien attack, which unites the world against the invaders. A command for racial harmony leads to a world of grey people, who unleash their aggression in ritualized, bloody sports events, rather than through prejudice.

Even so, Haber is unconvinced. He is a determined, remorseless do-gooder, asking Orr: “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” His gusty, bearish good humor metastasizes into a kind of ominous mechanical benevolence. At first he really wants to help George overcome his fear of dreams. But as he gains power to do good, means and ends become tangled until it’s impossible to separate the quest for power to do good from the quest for power. Each time Haber changes reality he gives himself more status and influence—a bigger office, more influence with the government—until he is one of the most important men in the world. And in his relationship with George, he becomes increasingly aggressive and sadistic. “To dominate [George], to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible,” Haber thinks.

Haber’s research eventually allows him to simulate George’s effective dreaming so that he can do it himself. “There will be none of this tension between your will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful planning for the good of all,” he exults. But when he tries to dream a better world, the result is nightmarish chaos. Existence melts and changes; buildings turn to jelly. The revolution undoes organic connections, and everything loses form and meaning. “It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing. It was the wrong way,” Le Guin writes. Or, to quote another reactionary vision of a hollowed-out modernity that has discarded the past: 

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

If changing the world inevitably unmakes and destroys the world, the only alternative is quietism—and George is in fact a kind of inaction hero. “I don’t want to change things!” he tells Haber early on. “Who am I to meddle with the way things go?” Haber views George’s refusal of responsibility and action as a flaw; in his eyes George is a “meek, characterless man.” But Heather, a lawyer who becomes George’s wife in some realities, sees him differently: “he was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.” The dreamer who can change the world is strong because of his Buddhist-like commitment to not change the world. George won’t meddle with karma. 

Refusing to change the world doesn’t just mean that George doesn’t want to implement grand revolutions. He balks even at minor acts of personal kindness. When Haber asks George if he would help a woman bitten by a snake by giving her antivenom, George hesitates. “If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village.” A fear of inorganic revolution slides helplessly into a reactionary taboo on lifting a finger to help a neighbor in immediate need. George might as well be a Republican official denouncing the socialism of mask mandates.

George’s weasily ethics-professor excuse for leaving a woman to die seems strikingly at odds with, say, passages in The Dispossessed about the exploitation of the poor, or the anti-slavery commitments of Le Guin’s 1995 Five Ways to Forgiveness. But it’s notable that throughout her work Le Guin very rarely puts herself or the reader in the perspective of an actual revolutionary. Even the anarchist Shevek, in The Dispossessed, who makes political speeches to mass rallies, does so only after traveling to a neighboring planet, where he is an outsider. He parachutes into a Cold War-like conflict between a capitalist and a totalitarian Communist nation to offer a third, non-binary option for peace via technological deus ex machina. Similarly, in Five Ways to Forgiveness the most vivid scenes of revolution are presented from the perspective of Le Guin’s beloved Star Trek-Federation-like Hainish interplanetary ambassadors and observers.  They are people who have a distance from the oppressions and injustice they are describing. They’re people who don’t have to take sides.

The contrast with Le Guin’s contemporary Joanna Russ is striking. Russ criticized Le Guin for mostly choosing to use male protagonists. Russ herself always wrote from the perspective of women—not least because she wanted to describe patriarchal oppression at ground level, as it is felt by those who experience it. Where Le Guin’s protagonists observe, and regret, and avoid violence, Russ’s revel in it. In novels like The Female Man (1975), We Who Are About To… (1977), and The Two of Them (1978), women turn to revolutionary violence not as a last resort or a regrettable necessity, but as a fierce joy in itself—an assertion of power, of revenge, of relief. When a wise man says, Orr-like, in Russ’s The Two of Them, “I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of remaking culture, or even people’s lives,” the female hero considers his words carefully, then shoots him and liberates her sister.

That’s not to say that Russ is right and Le Guin is wrong. The latter is hardly a mindless counter-revolutionary, even in her most counter-revolutionary novel. George returns to the story about the snakebite victim and recognizes that the analogy—and his own arguments—were “false.” “You have to help another person,” he thinks. “But it’s not right to play God with the masses.” And even there, in extremis, sometimes playing God is in fact the right thing to do. The world George grew up in ended in a nuclear holocaust. He dreamed the overpopulated world into existence at the last moment before his death, creating not a good world, but a slightly better one.

Haber also is not, notably, just a stand in for communists and radicals. Most of his political commitments—antiwar, antiracism—are recognizably left. But his motivations are rooted in good old American exceptionalism, white saviorism, and pulp. “I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero,” he tells George with gusto. “I’m saving a girl, or a fellow astronaut, or a besieged city, or a whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! They’re a hell of a lot of fun—so long as I keep ’em where they belong.” 

Those Messiah dreams really have caused harm; Hitler’s piles of corpses and Stalin’s piles of corpses and (closer to home for Le Guin) Lyndon Johnson’s smaller but still horrific piles of corpses all lay in mute testimony to the potential dangers of Haberism, and the deadly imposition of happy endings. 

Still, it’s striking to see a dreamer write a tract against dreams, and a utopian thinker write a novel warning against utopians. You could see it as a sign of Le Guin’s depth and ambiguity, her ability to see every side. George, Haber reports, is “so sane as to be an anomaly,” his psych profile in the exact middle of extroversion/introversion, dominance/submissiveness—“a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony.” Le Guin is clearly drawn to that centrist anti-extremist view from nowhere. The Cold War demanded side taking. Her writing shaped by that imperative, Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven searches for a perspective with neither sides nor violence. She could only find it in dreams.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Alex Adams / December 3, 2020

1987’s Predator pits Arnold Schwarzenegger against a fearsome extraterrestrial creature that hunts men for sport. One of the great 1980s action blockbusters, it is memorable for its muscle-flexing machismo, its tight, quotable dialogue, and its magisterial practical effects. Its enduring allure, though, comes most of all from its creative rearticulation of colonial imagery in a Cold War context. For as well as being a tremendously enjoyable sci-fi horror romp, Predator is also a novel engagement with the iconography, aesthetics, and politics associated with Cold War-era military interventions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

1980s action films are known for the bombastic ways in which they echo, amplify, and disseminate a particular Cold War militarism that served, intentionally or otherwise, as a sort of informal PR discourse for Reagan’s international interventionism. Swaggering, cigar-chomping, opportunistic movie producers like Joel Silver, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Dino De Laurentiis churned out smash after vivid smash in the Reagan years: noisy, sweaty, and uncouth adventure stories regularly chock full of beefcake bodybuilders such as Dolph Lundgren, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and, of course, the two heaviest hitters, Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Predator’s director, John McTiernan, would go on to make the iconic Die Hard—in which Bruce Willis has a towering-inferno punch-up with sneering Eurotrash terrorists—in 1988, and he adapted Tom Clancy’s debut novel The Hunt for Red October in 1990. As entertaining as they are reactionary, these movies overflow with expertly choreographed violence, sassy one-liners, and muscular anti-Soviet ideology. 

A biography of Schwarzenegger claims that Predator began life as an industry joke rooted in Cold War politics. After Stallone’s Rocky Balboa symbolically won the Cold War by defeating the coldly murderous Ivan Drago in 1985’s Rocky IV, he would have to fight an alien if they wanted to make Rocky V. The clash of terrestrial empires finally settled, there would be nowhere for him to go but space, nobody for him to punch but Martians. Writers Jim and John Thomas had been working on just such a script since 1983, an interplanetary rumble in the jungle set where the Cold War was hot: in the opaque world of proxy wars, irregular combat, and covert operations. Stallone’s shark-jumping patriotic symbolism meant that the Thomas Brothers’ script’s time had come. 

Fighting the Cold War without embracing mutual nuclear annihilation meant fighting or funding grimy counterinsurgency wars in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Congo, Laos, and elsewhere, and these wars had a profound and multifaceted influence on popular culture. Viscid rainforest undergrowth supplanted World War trenches as the default setting for combat scenes; enemies no longer stood before you on the battlefield, but picked you off with sadistic traps; a greater focus than ever was placed on the permanently deranging effects of warfare on the human psyche. The astuteness of the Thomas brothers’ jungle setting in Predator is that it fuses a hostile encounter with a technologically advanced alien civilization with pre-existing mythologies of first contact that had gained new currency in the wake of these wars, in which American troops were sent to countries on the other side of the planet to endure unimaginable conditions fighting utterly unfamiliar populations. Though 2010’s Predators would retroactively specify that the first film was set in Guatemala, nobody in Predator names their exact location, and this vagueness allows the story to be set in a firmly imaginary “otherland” where anything can happen. A rich tapestry of colonial iconography, Predator is a fable about a near-indestructible alien that sloshily and freely synthesizes the aesthetics of colonial war movies, dark fantasies about the cannibals in the shadows, and Conradian imagery about the inscrutable danger of the uncivilized places on the map.

Invasion is the thematic and formal core of Predator, a war movie invaded by science fiction horror. Dutch (Schwarzenegger, at his absolute peak) and his team of battle-hardened troops are hoodwinked by Dillon (Carl Weathers) into doing CIA dirty work behind enemy lines, attacking an enemy encampment and preventing the Soviets from launching a coup. As they make their escape, the group still smarting from their betrayal and fraying under the stress of the heat and the ”badass bush” that “makes Cambodia look like Kansas,” the alien hunter strikes.

Sapient, sophisticated, and near-indestructible, the predator is a tremendously evocative creature, evocative enough for Predator to sire a franchise including three sequels, two Alien Vs. Predator crossover movies, and a rich gamut of print fiction, video games, comics, and graphic novels. There is some great stuff here (and if you want a controversial hot take, I will claim 2004’s Alien Vs. Predator as the only sequel really worth a watch, because it at least has a sense of fun and is ambitious in scope), but in general the sequels and spin-offs all suffer from the same problem faced by any number of sci-fi franchises: slow death by over-explanation. Over the course of the series, the increasingly elaborate lore explains the predators’ technology, their language, their species variation and, most often, the specifics of the predators’ hunter-warrior culture, examining their abductions of “elite” humans to be tracked for sport, their attempts to hybridize with humans, and, perhaps silliest of all, their history as the original ancient astronauts who colonized the Earth. In the process, the creature’s mystique is buried under a barrage of precision that only serves to make it less interesting. But the original is compelling in a way that its offspring are not because, like the best monster movies, it is built around ambiguity, mystery, and suggestion.

This generous inexactness allows the predator to reflect an abundance of meanings, slippery and overlapping, unencumbered by all that goofy backstory. He is suggestively mammalian, slimily crocodilian, part gorilla, part crustacean chameleon, with insectoid mandibles and infrared vision. Most of all, though, the predator aesthetic draws on a rich and layered archive of colonial depictions of the “uncivilizable savage”: his loincloth, dreadlocks, and his collection of skulls; his fearsome blades, exposed skin, and his symbiotic intimacy with the jungle; his incomprehensible clicking language, his animalistic posture, and his thirst for barbaric violence. The final Cold War enemy is not only an alien; he is, simultaneously, the prehuman savage of colonial nightmare. Neither the alien nor the savage, to recall the joke about how Predator the film came to be, inhabit the same planet as the Reagan-era action hero.

The horrifying allure of the predator is sustained, in part, by the Grand Guignol spectacle of the ways it kills. The creature commits forms of gruesome murder that echo the irregular combat tactics and war crimes that were attributed to the guerrilla forces the U.S.  military faced in its small dirty wars. One by one, the soldiers are picked off by the unconventional tactics of an unseen enemy who hides in the trees, like the faceless Vietminh fighters of so many American-made Vietnam movies. The predator desecrates his victims after death in chilling ways, flaying them, ripping out spines, and making trophies of skulls in ways that recall the mutilatory obscenities committed by the cannibal tribes in exploitation flicks like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Cannibal Ferox (1981).

And yet, it is not only FX maestro Stan Winston’s creature design that reinterprets colonial iconography. Thematically, the movie rearticulates ideas central to many Vietnam movies and the military fiction of writers like Robert Elford (Devil’s Guard) or Jean Lartéguy (The Centurions). War is a furnace, a state of brutal nature in which masculinity is tested; fighting against unconventional guerrilla forces is like fighting the jungle itself; the hero must “go native,” or become one with the wilderness, in order to defeat the primeval savagery of one’s adversary.

At the film’s climax, Dutch, the sole survivor, slathers himself in mud to hide from the predator’s infrared vision, becoming a primal, torch-wielding warrior, to fight his fearless enemy on something approaching an equal footing. The scene pulpily recalls the climax of Apocalypse Now (1979), in which Willard rises from the steaming swamp to murder Colonel Kurtz, the elite soldier driven mad by the jungle and transformed into an exterminationist demigod by his exposure to the myriad foulnesses of war. An essay on the meanings of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz as filtered through Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic depiction of hell on earth could go on forever; suffice it to say that Kurtz is a shady, uncertain vessel into whom has rushed the murderous soul of colonial war, slavery, and exploitation. Reading the predator as an incarnation of Kurtz allows us to read Schwarzenegger’s confrontation with the monster as yet another form of essentialism: in fighting the savage, we are fighting against the immortal, devilish soul of war itself. Such a confrontation is not only primeval; it is permanent, eternal.

And yet, Predator is also tethered very directly to its specifically nuclear context. In the film’s closing moments, the predator initiates a colossal explosion, a mushroom cloud pinpointing the site of its demise. Knowing that Dutch has defeated it, the beast detonates himself, cackling a monstrously polyvocal laugh. This is a clear invocation of the political fear that “savages” will gain nuclear weapons, and that they will be self-destructively insane—or simply spitefully reckless—enough to actually use them. This abundance of signification, in which the predator is a volatile enough image to represent at once an alien, a cannibal, a guerrilla adversary, “the demon who makes trophies of man,” and a rogue nuclear state, is what makes the antagonist such an attractive and compelling monstrosity.

Intriguingly, in an unexpected coda that attests to the elasticity of popular cultural meaning, Predator has also exerted an influence over the post-9/11 war on terror. What, after all, do we call the unmanned aircraft that can kill silently, from a distance, and that can detect human body heat in order to track and destroy its targets? It is tempting to speculate about the naming of the Predator drone. Perhaps, like the naming of the NSA’s machine-learning surveillance program SKYNET, it is more than just further evidence that popular culture and political discourse are irretrievably fused. What can it mean for the self-image of the U.S. when its own military names its technological innovations after monstrous sci-fi villains?

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

M.L. Schepps / December 1, 2020

When 30-year-old ad-man James Herbert set out to write a novel, he had a simple goal in mind: “to show you what it was really like to have your leg chewed by a mutant creature.” He succeeded admirably. 1974’s The Rats was a genuine cultural phenomenon upon release, a blockbuster that sold out its initial print run of 100,000 within three weeks and, in the words of The Observer, “irrevocably mutated British horror,” tearing it “from the grip of the bourgeoisie” by “writing about working-class characters” and squaring off against the ugliness and frank brutality of contemporary life.

Herbert would go on to become an author of global significance, his 23 novels eventually selling over 54 million copies worldwide in 34 different languages. He would develop as an author and an activist, tempering the trademark gore with more refined language and higher literary aims. But during his first decade as a professional writer, Herbert excelled at what the British called “nasties,” publishing a novel per year, including two sequels to The Rats that completed a trilogy. 

Gory, puerile, and utterly appealing, the Rats trilogy has much to offer the modern eye. In addition to the unnerving horror and gore—neatly scaffolded by clean prose and the occasional purple flourish—we are given a glimpse of a vanished London, a city of vast slums, uncleared bombsites, abandoned docklands, feral children, casual racism, and lusty English perversion—a half-tamed London, not yet leveraged and financialized and vertical, but sprawling, old, and mean.

It is this London that James Herbert was raised in, and it is the one he viscerally evokes in the pages of his first novel. The Rats is, in the words of the author himself, “packed with metaphor and subtext.” In a 1993 interview with The Observer, Herbert relays the theme quite plainly: “the subtext of ‘The Rats’ was successive governments’ neglect of the East End of my childhood.” Herbert conjures up the decaying East End, centered around the dying Thames port known as the London Docklands, with righteous indignation. For centuries, the London Docklands were the beating, sclerotic heart of Empire. The wealth and legacy of untold peoples, developed over countless millennia, were ruthlessly extracted by the ships that plied those waterways, amassing vast amounts of cultural heritage, wealth, and treasure in the name of English colonialism while sending out fleets of gunships, grave-robbers, and bankers in exchange.  

By the 1970s, however, the area was in a state of absolute collapse. The docklands that survived the transition from East Indiaman to steam to diesel, that survived the Blitz and powered the world-historic growth and exploitation of the British Empire, died as a result of the proliferation and adoption of intermodal shipping containers, which led to larger ships that required deeper ports than the Docklands could offer. Shipping moved irrevocably to provincial centers like Felixstowe or further downstream to the Port of London, leaving the great bulk of the Docklands largely abandoned, the surrounding neighborhoods subject to flight. Between 1976 and 1981, the population of the area was reduced from 55,000 to 39,000. 

So, the East End of this period was one of decay and transition. Herbert said that he was raised in “an old slum that had to be pulled down,” a common occurrence in an area marked by decades-old bomb sites full of dangerous debris. When compared to the anesthetized, homogenized, health-and-safety-fied, thoroughly Wetherspooned London of today, Herbert’s childhood world seems almost unimaginably distant, the rotten strata upon which all the Gherkins, Shards, and legions of Pret-a-Manger rest uneasy. 

Written over a ten-year span, the Rats trilogy is fairly formulaic plot-wise. Take a London location (the East End, Epping Forest, and the rubble of post-nuclear exchange). Stir in some mutant rats. Add a stolidly generic middle-class man-of-action as the protagonist who urges common sense, morality, and righteous violence in the face of quibbling bureaucratic toffs and effete scientists, wins over the determinedly “modern” young woman (who nevertheless yearns for marriage), and survives the ravening rodent hordes. Salt in occasional vignettes in which characters are introduced (their life histories and often their crudest perversions) in close-third perspective, before having them destroyed in gory Grand Guignol fashion by rats (and, in the third novel, nuclear explosions). The primary storyline is interrupted repeatedly by these deeply personal vignettes, and it is in these sections that Herbert is most effective as an author, demonstrating the character-driven subjectivity and mastery of visceral horror that would develop substantially over his career. 

In the first book the protagonist is Harris, a former East End resident returned to work as a school teacher of “art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls.” He is soon made aware of the presence of dog-sized predatory rodents that pursue schoolchildren and various other residents, tearing them to shreds while also carrying a deadly virus that ensures even the slightest bite is fatal. The creatures themselves are mutants, the product of breeding experiments performed by a mad scientist who used a shack in the Docklands as a lab in order to hybridize common black rats with their tropical cousins, irradiated as the result of nuclear testing in the South Pacific. This union results in a much larger, more intelligent, more aggressive species of rat, one that acts cooperatively under the mental command of psychic, two-headed albino rats who serve as overlords. 

Various bureaucrats and ministers propose various technocratic solutions to the crisis, like engineered viruses and ultrasonics. The infestation is deemed solved again and again by authorities, only for the monsters to subsequently reemerge and eat the inhabitants of tube stations, cinemas, and schools. By the end, Harris has to take matters into his own hands, dispatching the two-headed rat leader with an axe. 

In terms of Herbert’s stated theme of East End neglect, the metaphor is not a particularly subtle one. The residents know there is a problem (urban decay/radioactive rodents), while the government either ignores them or attempts the bare minimum before declaring victory. It’s a pattern painfully analogous to contemporary global catastrophes like the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. 

Deeper themes are present in the novel as well, indicative of older prejudices and contexts. The monsters are hybrids, the product of rodent miscegenation and genetic tampering. They are foreign. They operate with a communal intelligence and willing self-sacrifice. The fears of the foreign other, of a caricatured communism and of what the protagonist refers to during a visit to the Royal Shakespeare Theater as the “multi-racial accents that destroyed any hope of atmosphere,” are present throughout the initial novel. They aren’t the predominant themes, but their presence is notable—and somewhat glaring—to the modern reader.

The Rats is an ugly and propulsive book, with scenes of depravity and gore whose power is no less diminished four decades later. While I have never been consumed by rodents (mutant or otherwise), sections like the following seem to capture the flavor (as it were) of the experience:

Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me. Flesh was ripped away from the back of his neck. He couldn’t rise now for the sheer weight of writhing, furry vermin feeding from his body, drinking his blood.

 Shivers ran along his spine, to his shocked brain. The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see any more—the rats had already eaten his eyes.

Respectable reviewers were aghast. Martin Amis’s infamous and vinegary assessment in The Observer set the tone: “By page 20 the rats are slurping up the sleeping baby after the brave bow-wow has fought to the death to save its charge… enough to make a rodent retch, undeniably—and enough to make any human pitch the book aside.” When Herbert went to his local W.H. Smith’s to ask if they had a copy, he was told, “no, and nor were they likely to.” 

Despite the critical drubbing, the books were an immediate sensation. There is a raw vitality to The Rats, a kind of atavistic anger and verve. At times it has the feel of outsider art, a hint of Henry Darger in the sheer excess of gore coupled with the violations of “good taste” and narrative expectation. In his 1981 book of nonfiction cultural criticism Danse Macabre, Stephen King called it “the literary version of Anarchy in the U.K.” 

Adaptations of The Rats followed in short order and included a groundbreaking Commodore 64 game, among the first that set out to intentionally frighten the player. The survival horror game won praise for innovations that included the titular creatures eating right through the player’s screen. A 1982 film version was made in Canada as Deadly Eyes, trading the atmospheric decay of London for bland Ontario provincialism. The rats themselves are played by costumed dachshunds, and these unwitting actors were and are the subject of considerable scorn. They look like what they are: plump little pups wriggling beneath latex and fur overcoats. Still, watching these costumed dogs (and puppets in some scenes) in 2020 produces an uncanny valley discomfort, the primal recognition of distorted reality, a sensation that has almost vanished entirely within the weightless wonders of our CGI age.  

***

The first sequel to The Rats, 1979’s Lair, moves the action from the rotting labyrinth of the Docklands to the green and gentle hills of Greater London’s Epping Forest. Our new muscular protagonist (an exterminator this time) encounters the surviving vermin, while the rats encounter (and eat) various philanderers, exhibitionists, and innocents. Bureaucrats and ministers get in the way of things, problems are thought solved and then, inevitably, the ravaging rodents return. The book ends with rat revolution (reminiscent of Caesar’s ape revolution in the original Planet of the Apes series) as the grotesque two-headed albino psychic overlords are overthrown by the rank-and-file, who then make their stealthy return to London itself. 

While there is some novelty in the setting of Epping Forest, and Herbert’s depiction therein of a truly English patchwork of bucolic woodlands, raunchy public sex, earnest scouts, depraved flashers, and rotten feudal privilege abutting modern development, Lair is a bit of a letdown. Where The Rats benefits from the sheer audacity and verve of Herbert’s amateur prose, its sequel is a liminal book, in terms of both Herbert’s development as a writer and the period when it was written, the so-called “Winter of Discontent”—which would fuel the rise and electoral triumph of Margaret Thatcher. 

Written five years later, 1984’s Domain, the third book in the trilogy, drips with anger and disdain towards the seismic upheavals convulsing British society, the widening gulf between the machinations of the elite stewards of the neoliberal state and that of the socially integrated individual. Herbert terms this divide in Domain as the “Them” and the “Us.” By this point, the ancient Docklands that had so influenced both the life of James Herbert and the plot of The Rats had been transformed. A firestorm of tax breaks and development subsidies cleared away the rubble and decay (along with venerable neighborhoods and communities), and the new office blocks and skyscrapers of Canary Wharf began their long vertical climb. In Domain, multiple hydrogen bombs are responsible for the razing of the Docklands. In reality, it was Thatcher and the Tory vision of “urban regeneration.” 

Domain begins with absolute devastation, with London laid waste by a series of nuclear explosions. Amid the rubble of the city’s ancient roots, a beleaguered group of survivors huddles within a fallout shelter. Among their number is the cold-blooded representative of the government, some hot-headed working-class maintenance staff, and the requisite muscular protagonist, a pilot named Culver. There is bickering, a love-interest, and, of course, a massive horde of waiting, hungry mutants. 

Things quickly fall apart, and the best laid plans of bureaucrats (and rats) go awry. The shelter is breached and the plucky human survivors attempt to find the government’s primary underground headquarters. The bulk of the novel takes place in the ruin of the city itself, one in which the destruction of Herbert’s bombsite-riddled childhood has been spread across the entirety of London. In Domain, the action stays rooted in character, the setting is fully realized, and, like a rock band that knows to save the old hits for the encore, Herbert includes his requisite vignettes in which we meet and sympathize with several characters shortly before their gory demise. While the atavistic blood-rite horror-magic of The Rats is unimpeachable, Domain is far more successful as a novel. When James Herbert reflected on the trilogy in a 2003 interview with the Evening Standard, he agreed, saying that “each one improved on the last. ‘Domain,’ I think validates the first two.”

The key theme in Domain is that of the hubris of the government elite, the “Them” who sought to “manage” a nuclear holocaust safely ensconced within sumptuously appointed fallout shelters (which include royal apartments for “the elite among the elite”). This hubris is punished by a problem they had already declared solved and subsequently ignored: the rats. The consequence of the planner’s plan is a great pit of gnawed, headless bodies, with Thatcher’s mangled corpse assuredly among them. Herbert delights in his own machinations, writing 

A failsafe refuge had been constructed for a select few, the rest of the country’s population… left to suffer the full onslaught of the nuclear strike; but the plan had gone terribly wrong, a freak of nature—literally—destroying those escapers just as surely as the nuclear blitz itself…. If there were really a Creator somewhere out there in the blue, he would no doubt be chuckling over mankind’s folly and the retribution paid out to at least some of its leaders.

This indifference and denial of the elite contributes to the bitter humor all throughout. There are multiple scenes where people vaguely remember some nasty business with a new breed of rat having taken place “a few years ago,” the characters emphasizing that thousands of Londoners devoured in a rodent massacre failed to make much of an impression when the victims were the working class residents of the East End.

***

While it may not be “fine literature,” reading Herbert’s Rats trilogy in 2020 gives the novels a new layer of subtext that, for all his horrific (and sometimes ridiculous) imaginative powers, the author couldn’t have conceived at the time. Even a revolutionary goresmith like Herbert failed to anticipate the myriad horrors of the neoliberal consensus and the entrenchment of hard-right conservatism: the long half-century of atomization, inequality, loss of empathy, and environmental degradation. Herbert could vividly imagine rats eating London’s impoverished alive by the dozen, but the thought of 130,000 being needlessly sacrificed at the altar of the great god Austerity was too much horror, even for him. 

The theme of elite neglect and conscious denial that runs throughout the Rats trilogy has a remarkable resonance with contemporary Western society’s response to the novel coronavirus. Wishful thinking, denial, and elite arrogance have proven no substitute for painful and necessary action. Throughout Herbert’s novels, government officials declare the issue of ravening mutated rodents gnawing their way through the populace “solved”—mission accomplished—after a minimum of effort, simply because it’s easy to say. The parallels are obvious. 

Our leadership exacerbates the crises of pandemic through denial, half-measures, and simple nihilistic greed. It’s easy to make a ludicrous lie like “there is no second wave” an official government statement. It’s easy to urge the disposable “us” to “reopen” and return to our “normal life,” without having to make any of the necessary economic or political sacrifices to do so safely. When Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings boldly breaks curfew or Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows throws a lavish indoor wedding, the arrogance and disdain is palpable. “We” must sacrifice so “they” can celebrate. As the size of our current COVID-19 wave swells ever larger, with no crest in sight, the true horror lurks at the edges, ready to assert its dominion yet again. 

The rats are still here, monstrous as ever. And they’re hungry.

M.L. Schepps lives in federally occupied Portland, where he takes many photos of birds. He spent the last year developing a deep appreciation of Kate Bush while also writing a book about 19th century Chinese immigration and Arctic exploration. Find more of his work at MLSchepps.com.

Sam Moore / November 19, 2020

It’s easy to spot an exploitation film by the cover of the poster or DVD. Maybe more so than any other type of art, you can judge it by its cover: a woman, often barely dressed, holding some kind of weapon. Think Pam Grier on the cover of Coffy or Foxy Brown. Even contemporary grindhouse fare like Planet Terror embraces this tradition, with a machine-gun-legged Rose McGowan among the most immediately recognizable images from the film. That’s because exploitation films always know what they’re selling. That’s where the name comes from; there’s something in these films—normally sex and violence—that is being exploited in order to lure an audience. And that’s where Russ Meyer comes in, the filmmaker whose Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) takes everything about the exploitation genre and ramps it up to an eleven. It’s a strange film that at once knows the genre’s problems and is willing to embrace them. 

In the film’s poster, true to form, instead of one woman, there’s two, and the angle of the camera seems designed entirely to highlight Varla’s (Tura Satana) chest. She’s thrown a man to the ground, and there are two cars, engines roaring, behind her. In many ways, it’s the perfect crystallization of the film itself: women, breasts, violence, fast cars. This excess is a “come hither” moment for exploitation audiences, taking everything that they love and blowing it up to extremes. That’s what makes Pussycat so compelling, the strange combination of exploitation and the reverence with which it treats its objects, like a piece of lurid pop art, amplifying and magnifying the tastes of the seediest corners of grindhouse cinema.

One of the ways in which Pussycat challenges the nature of exploitation is by approaching these common tropes—oversexed and ultraviolent women—with a kind of self-awareness, looking at the genre with a nod and a wink. This is made clear from the very beginning of the film, and the way it uses voiceover narration—there’s no other voiceover in the film after this, which is unusual—that beckons the audience by welcoming them to “violence, the word and the act.” The voice goes on to talk about the way in which the “favorite mantle [of violence] still remains sex,” and the “voracious appetite” that the film gives to its leading ladies is something that obviously applies to the audience as well. Pussycat is explicitly designed for an audience that’s hungry for the intersection of sex and violence, for images of powerful women—as long as they’re not too powerful.

The women in Pussycat are fascinating contradictions, something that the film explores through the ways in which the gaze of the camera operates, often changing to enhance different aspects of the characters, from their sexuality to the power they possess over men. As the film begins, Varla and her soon-to-be partners in crime, Billie and Rosie (Lori Williams and Haji), are go-go dancing. The camera loves it, obsesses over and objectifies their bodies, the way that they move, embracing the male gaze at a level that almost feels like parody, even though it’s clearly played straight as can be in every possible way. But beyond just leering at the women, this sequence establishes the fact that they are powerful, with a shot straight out of Film School 101: with the camera low down, looking up at them, it makes the women seem bigger and more prominent—in more ways than one, they fill the screen. As the camera cuts between the dancing women and the borderline rabid men who watch them, bellowing “GO, GO, GO,” it becomes clear that this is, for better or worse, a film about women—about the power they can exert, about the way that they’re looked at. The opening voiceover offers a warning about the kind of women capable of violence, and it’s clearly aimed at men, with examples like “your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist, or a dancer in a go-go club.” It’s power through the lens of female characters, but clearly designed for the consumption of men, the great contradiction that defines the gaze of Pussycat, and much of the other exploitation fare of the era.

The women are placed among a landscape of things that define American masculinity, and the object most rooted in this is a fast car. Driving, racing, and time trials animate much of the drama and narrative of the film. Varla, Billie, and Rosie race through the California desert; they play high speed games of chicken with one another, and the film climaxes in a chase sequence that takes place both on foot and on four wheels. The three women are placed in a position normally associated with masculinity, which is what makes them such fetishistic objects of male wish fulfilment. The camera never lets the audience forget about the assets of these women, but they’re also shown to be “one of the guys” in the way that they drive, fight, and flirt. They can—up to a point—hold their own against the men, and there’s often a kind of role reversal in terms of gender.

In action films, with the James Bond franchise being a prime example, it’s the men who are good drivers and use women purely for sex. But in Pussycat, the women do that, with Varla’s attempted seduction of Kirk, a man she’s hoping will lead her to some money that’s been stashed away. There’s something striking about the way in which, in the moment, Pussycat engages in this role reversal without any asterisk or caveat, simply allowing the women to be powerful and sexual on their own terms. This understanding of how sexuality works on screen comes through in one of the most common exploitation tropes—the catfight, which occurs early on in the film. Billie and Rosie fight each other, their shirts get wet, and it’s all set to a strange, almost dissonant jazz score that undercuts the sexploitation angle of the scene. If the score had been different, then it would seem lifted directly out of porn.

This strange combination of a kind of female empowerment (one built on having the characters embody ideas of strength that are typically associated with maleness and masculinity) and exploitation fare is what makes Pussycat a unique, more aesthetically curious film than a lot of its contemporaries. And some of these images: the cars racing across the desert, Billie and Rosie in the water after a catfight, are reminiscent of pieces of perverted pop art. Pop art as a movement was all about taking the lowbrow and mass-produced elements of American culture, from Warhol’s soup cans to Lichtenstein’s comic strips, and elevating. This relationship between commerce, mass-production, and artistic merit is something that is rooted in a uniquely American tradition; Jasper Johns even reproduced the American flag itself. All you need to turn stills from Pussycat into a Lichtenstein print are some kitschy captions and speech bubbles.  

Meyer’s relationship to exploitation film is a lot like the relationship that pop art has with capitalism. They’re both at once slyly aware of what the systems they exist in are doing, and they are either satirizing it (the dissonant jazz score over the catfight highlights the absurdity of the trope) or embracing it in all of its ugliness. The difference, sometimes, is almost impossible to distinguish. It’s easy to imagine Varla, for instance, even at her lowest point, aping Lichtenstein’s famous Drowning Girl. The original contains the thought bubble “I don’t care! I’d rather sink — than call Brad for help!”, and while the words don’t appear in Pussycat, Varla might have said exactly this, replacing Brad’s name with Kirk’s. The film is even willing to lampoon the misogyny that defines so many responses to independent and powerful women, notably when the Old Man whose family the dancers ingratiate themselves with in the hopes of finding money says: 

Women! They let ’em vote, smoke and drive—even put ’em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president! A bunch of smoke up your chimney! Russian roulette on the highways! Can’t even tell brother from sister, unless you meet ’em up close.

This line highlights the biggest problem with Pussycat’s relationship to the grindhouse: while it’s more than willing to show these women being sexual, strong, and violent, it always reins them in when the male characters get too uncomfortable, a response that typifies a kind of masculinity that both objectifies, and is afraid of, powerful women. The film makes them monstrous, in a way—they always exist in counterpoint to the sweet and innocent Linda, who they’ve kidnapped and who offers a different kind of womanhood, one more palatable to male audiences once the credits have rolled. It’s no wonder that Varla’s demise in the climactic finale—in a moment of what feels like purposeful irony, she’s run over by a truck driven by Linda—that she gets described as “nothing human” by Kirk, before he and Linda drive off into the sunset in the very truck that she used to kill Varla.

In a way, the end of Pussycat is the only way that such a distinctly American exploitation film could end: after a whirlwind tour of tropes associated with male action heroes, set against a uniquely American desert landscape, normalcy returns. The power (and gender) dynamics of the real world—where your secretary or doctor’s receptionist are unlikely to kidnap your girlfriend, or try to seduce and rob you—are reinforced by the violent end that the subversive women meet. In contrast to this, the sweet Linda and righteous Kirk ride off into the sunset together to begin a quote-unquote normal relationship. Exploitation cinema reached its heights in the early 1970s, and while the template of Pussycat is there, the films that came in its wake were less willing to embrace the larger-than-life aspects of their characters and stories. Pussycat remains unique for the ways in which it refuses to look away from the complicated relationship that its characters have with the gaze of both the camera and the audience. These women are simultaneously manipulating that gaze and being manipulated by it, something that makes Pussycat the kind of gaudy pop art that you could only ever find on 42nd Street.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Mike Apichella / November 17, 2020

The first music videos to air on MTV and broadcast television were chaotic blurts of arty nonsense defined by pastel colors, cheesy dance party theatrics, and avant-garde visual effects. Often realized by student auteurs working with little to no budget, even the weirdest of these clips didn’t aim for scares.  

Early heavy metal videos were an exception. Sans any playful abstraction, these emerged as S&M nightmares brandishing dystopian, Mario Bava-esque atmospherics, and other classic horror movie elements. Iron Maiden, W.A.S.P., Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, and the ever disturbing Ozzy Osbourne were some of the earliest metal acts to dabble in these themes, and headbangers were mega-stoked to find their favorite shredders interspersed among skinny tie New Wave bands, foppish New Romantics, Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads,” and all the other tamer acts that typically formed music video programming in the age before American Idol and reality shows.

No heavy metal chiller got more immersive or confrontational than the 1984 video Don Coscarelli directed for Dio’s “The Last In Line” (watch it here). By ‘84, Coscarelli was already well known in the genre circuit for cult classics like Phantasm (1979) and The Beastmaster (1982). The work he turned in here is a claustrophobic melange of suspense and political subtext, overflowing with scenes of torture and psychological horror.

The clip starts off with a courier (child star Meeno Peluce) bicycling in a peaceful California suburb, gliding through a squeaky clean business district. Sporting long curls, a dangling earing, and tight Levi’s, it would’ve been tough to find another actor who looked more like a young suburban rocker. Once he arrives at his office-plex destination, a beardo in an old sports car (Dio member Claude Schnell) gestures ominously with the sign of the horns, possibly an attempt to stop the kid from entering the glassy industrial space. Confused and annoyed, the teenager avoids the mysterious hairball. As he enters the building, the music chimes along with a folky lilt and forlorn vocals describing “a ship without a storm.”

The kid gets in the elevator, going up, then makes a sudden high speed plummet as the guitar distortion kicks in, crashing deep beneath the Earth’s crust. The elevator doors open to an attack of screaming riffage that ushers our hero into a murky, post-industrial Hades. Freakish processions of enslaved deformity mob the kid: shambolic zombies, doomed souls covered in infectious scars and pockmarks, and hastily assembled androids (including one that’s extremely Borg-like in appearance, years before the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters made their debut). The hapless creatures are pressed into electronic torture chambers by cyborg storm troopers armed with glow-in-the-dark cattle prods.

Several images here signify economic blight. One zombie can be seen clutching a grocery cart filled with sundry garbage (a boom box, a broken record, scraps of fabric) while dressed in a tattered trench coat. A balding middle-aged man limps along in filthy business attire wearing a cracked pair of reading glasses. Their vacant stares are fearsome, but also touched with overarching sadness and tragedy. Some of the less monstrous extras appear to be outcasts from L.A.’s Skid Row (whose hordes of homeless the LAPD was desperately trying to “clean up” on the eve of the 1984 Summer Olympics).  

Of the video’s many scenes of suffering, there are two big standouts. The first occurs as our hero finds a fenced-in arcade where kids are chained to video game machines. Their wrists are locked in manacles that shock them whenever they make a mistake. If they lose a game, they’re fried to death. An obvious interpretation here involves criticism of consumer culture and the moral panic surrounding video games. 

Another interpretation involves game theory—the belief that dog-eat-dog competition is a major building block of civilization. So Long Sucker (originally Fuck You Buddy) was a board game co-created by the infamous RAND Corporation and Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., a paranoid schizophrenic whose battles with mental health weren’t publicly known until several years after his research had concluded. In the early 1950s, Nash and RAND conducted a series of experiments in which people were monitored while playing So Long Sucker. They hoped the project would yield undeniable scientific proof of game theory’s validity. According to RAND’s own documentation, their first experiment was a failure; the others were successful, but occurred in an environment much more tightly controlled than that of the first one. Regardless, after many years of therapy and introspection, Nash later declared his belief in game theory to be nothing more than a bi-product of the paranoia brought on by his mental illness.

The deadly arcade serves as the proving ground for this cynical realm, ruled by a mutant military-industrial establishment. The players here, like the protagonist, are teens. Unlike the other haggard rogues, they’re fresh-faced and clean cut. The arcade of doom pinpoints and rewards those driven by the insane competition while rooting out and killing those who are not addicted to conquest. Presumably whoever endures gets a special place in the wretched promenade. 

The scariest torture scene unfolds when Peluce’s character wanders into a theater where another large group of teens have been fastened to metal racks, their mouths stuffed with big red ball gags, foreheads primed for lobotomizing. They all face a giant screen TV that plays footage of singer Ronnie James Dio belting out incendiary lyrics:

Two eyes from the east
It’s The Angel or The Beast
And the answer lies between the good and bad
We search for the truth
We could die upon the tooth
But the thrill of just the chase is worth the pain

In the track notes of the 2003 Dio anthology Stand Up and Shout, the singer described “The Last In Line” as an open-ended tribute to perseverance: “This song has many interpretations. You could be the last in line meaning, oh shit, all the good stuff is already gone. Or you could be the last, the strongest, and, to me, it’s always been that, the perseverance that comes from going through challenges in life. And when you get to the end and you’re the last one standing, and you ask yourself, ‘Was it worth it?’ You better say yes. That’s gonna be my answer.” The song’s revelatory chorus reinforces this sentiment:

We’ll know for the first time
If we’re evil or divine
We’re the last in line!
See how we shine!

No one goes further with over-the-top theatrics than Ronnie James Dio himself. The guttural overlord gets to do all the things that have rightfully made him a superhero to generations of heavy metal fans. In many scenes he’s shown standing on a bonafide pedestal! His greatest moments come at the end of the clip with a hilarious sequence that’d be a spoiler if given any detailed description.

The other Dio band members also get interesting cameos. They emerge as impartial overseers breaking the netherworld tension by hamming it up in one ridiculous arena rock pose after another. Along with Schnell’s cryptic allusion are the scenes where drummer Vinny Appice flails away at a zany bronto-bone drum kit, while guitarist Vivian Campbell solos atop a bashed up car before an adoring crowd of zombies all clad in skull-crunching electrodes that are actually hooked into his axe. The rapt attention that the ragged zombies give to Campbell and his guitar’s connection to their head gear combine to symbolize another great creator of iconic ‘80’s trance states: the Sony Walkman and similar portable stereo devices, distractions that could just as easily enhance or annihilate reality. The scene also refers to another great moral panic of the time: the idea that heavy rock could turn people into disciples of Satan. It was one of many irrational fears that inspired the anti-metal crusades of The PMRC and other right-wing Christian groups. 

Just like the dehumanizing repetition of factory work or the brain melt one experiences while stuck at the local post office or DMV, the prisoners keep on marching around and around, enduring the same endless cavalcade of machine-induced humiliation. In harmony with the lyrical themes, Peluce’s character stays focused on survival from start to finish, even when fear seems to control every expression. Coscarelli’s horrors only encourage the kid to resist the overwhelming bleakness. 

While videos for tracks like The Plasmatics‘ “The Damned” and Motley Crue’s “Looks That Kill” prominently featured dystopian aesthetics, “The Last In Line” is one of the few clips to serve as an unflinching commentary on defying the apocalypse. Don Coscarelli turned the Dio anthem into an ideal soundtrack for Reagan-induced nightmares of cruelty and destruction. Grotesque monsters, wayward youth, and the impoverished are all enslaved in the same excruciating hell—what lies beneath the glassy veneer of the suburban industrial park. To find a way out of this infernal world the young courier must move against the tide of pain. His will to survive—tenacious individualism is another Reagan-era requisite—provides the only path to freedom. 

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

"Downward to the Earth" by Robert Silverberg, 1981

 "The Orchid Cage" by Herbert W. Franke, 1978 

  The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, 1977 

"Brainrack" by Gerry Davis/Kit Pedler, 1976 

"Desert of Fog and Ashes" by Joan Trigo, 1978 

The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 25th Anniversary Anthology, 1976

 "The Green Brain" by Frank Herbert, 1978

 "The I. Q. Merchant" by John Boyd, 1977 

"Our Children's Children" by Clifford D. Simak, 1976 

 "Before the Golden Age" Isaac Asimov, 1976 

 

"In 1976, the year after the death of Spanish military dictator Francisco Franco, Barcelona publisher Ediciones Martínez Roca launched its Colección "Super Ficción series—an eclectic collection of science fiction novels—with Los Hijos de Nuestros Hijos, a Spanish translation of Clifford Simak’s Our Children’s Children. Los Hijos de Nuestros Hijos and the titles that initially followed it featured cover art created for UK publisher Penguin’s science fiction series. They were the work of David Pelham, who was then Penguin’s art director, as well as the artist behind many of the company’s most memorable covers (one of the best-known being Penguin’s 1972 re-release of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange). ""While in the process of commissioning German surrealist "Konrad Klapheck to provide covers for 1974 reissues of several of J.G. Ballard’s early novels, Pelham took it upon himself, at Ballard’s urging, to realize some of the ideas himself, and it was these that Penguin ended up using. 

 For the cover of its edition of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space, the ninth release in the series, Ediciones Martínez Roca turned to artist Horacio Salinas Blanch. Over the following decade, Salinas Blanch would produce dozens of covers for Colección "Super Ficción". Although his illustration for La Legión del Espacio was relatively restrained, Salinas Blanch’s work—presumably under the instructions of the publishers—took as its template the airbrushed aesthetic of "Pelham’s Ballard covers, where odd juxtapositions of forms rendered with eerie smoothness hovered in isolation against brooding backgrounds. Salinas Blanch, though, approached the concept through his own otherworldly, idiosyncratic lens: pop culture reimagined as art, reimagined once again as pop culture, a circular transformation of which it seems reasonable to presume Ballard would have approved. Salinas Blanch’s" mixture of airbrushed unreality, pop-art surrealism, and lunatic dreamscapes reads like some crazed cocktail of Pelham and the other artists of the day who were working in a similar visual idiom—names like Peter Haars, Peter Tybus, Heinz Edelmann, Peter Lloyd, Bob Pepper, and Alan Aldridge. 

 No slouch at an inspired rip-off (see his take on Pelham’s cover for Fred Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late, which Ediciones Martínez Rocahad already used for its cover of a collection of Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long stories), Salinas Blanch was not above directly cannibalizing his inspirations, as in this cover art for 1978’s Del Triunfo a la Derrota by Spanish anarchist journalist Jacinto Toryho, where he recycles "Pelham’s Big Boy from the cover of The Terminal Beach, adding a series of powerful details—the low light source, long shadows, and target on the ground. Salinas" Blanch’s other work included cover art for the Spanish translation of Mary Lee Dunn and John Maguire’s book on the Jonestown mass suicide, Hold Hands and Die!, where he offered up a compellingly dreamlike revisitation of an image as famous as it is awful. 

Cynical plagiarist, pragmatic jobbing scribbler, or a genuine visionary? It’s hard to say—practically no information about Horacio Salinas Blanch is to be found outside of his corpus of work: his covers, which inhabit the happy intersection of crowd-pleasing commercial interest and fine art inspiration passed through many hands as in a game of telephone, creating something at once known and strange, like some shared archetypal folk memory. 

It’s one of the great truisms and paradoxes that it’s occasionally imitation—especially imitation of the crassest, most commercially-driven type—that highlights the essence of what makes something engaging, either by contrasting it with an inferior copy or, as in the case of Horacio Salinas Blanch, by reiterating and mutating the source material until a perfect synthesis of what makes it strange and beautiful has been achieved—and until the imitation itself has become something strange and beautiful too." - quote taken from an excellent article on the artist with additional artworks at We Are The Mutants.

 

 See dozens more artworks by Hans Arnold, previously shared here.

There is a fantastic documentary on Hans Arnold titled "Art of the Witchmaster" released in 2019..