Archeology of the Future

Daleks as a force for good?

2006-07-10T12:14:00.000+01:00

Breaking a lengthy silence, Archeology of the Future emerges from deep cover to share this clip of alien fighting machines bringing their might to fight an earthly battle...

The originator of this clip ( stevethedalek!) describes it thus:

"[A] Compilation of my appearances on Sky, BBC and ITN News at the G8 finance ministers' meeting in London on 11th June 2005 (the day that 'Bad Wolf' aired!)"

There's something quite beguiling about the deployment of fictional characters in actual situations. Archeology of the Future finds it very difficult not to join the fictional dots and find a story to explain why the scourge of the universe are spending time on our lowly planet, hemmed in by policemen. It's like, in some way, the fictional has punched through into the real, visitors to our reality coming from a secondary, fictional, reality. I'm sure there's a fairly long history of this, take for example Reagan and his 'Star Wars' programme, the fact that Florida elected The Terminator rather than a real person, the way that the British Space Programme was held aloft on the wings of Dan Dare...

I think the Situationist maxim 'Take Your Dreams For Reality' is a double edged sword here, especially politically. Introducing the fictional into political situations leads to the carrying over of feelings attached to a fictional object into feelings about the real world... The Situationists, Debord especially, believed in creating ruptures in the flow of society with art and irrationality, small autonomous actions that call into question the suppositions that common sense is based on. It makes me think of an old EC comics story from the fifties where a cute glove puppet of a crocodile becomes president of the United States.

Imagine that the Daleks really were a political force... Where would they fit in? Who would they support?

That aside, seeing the Daleks in mundane circumstances is always terrific. Archeology of the Future remembers a Sunday morning in Lancaster as a child, glancing down an alley way near the castle and seeing a Dalek, quiet and stealthy, rattling across the cobbles. Maybe a manifestation of longing for something unearthly to happen, or a sherbet fountain induced hallucination, this event underlined that the Dalek casing is a thoroughly British design classic, as much part of the landscape of our cities as Minis, red post boxes and system built housing developments.

Thinking about it, the Dalek on the cobbles is my own version of Robby in the Suburbs, a point where Science Fiction and ordinary events meet, causing some kind of rip in time and space that causes fantasy to spill out like a modern version of Pandora's Box.

Technorati Tags: doctor who, british science fiction, daleks

Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD: "It appears to be landing in the vicinity of Sloane Square!"

2006-05-21T14:17:00.000+01:00

It’s 2150. In the ruins of a destroyed London, the last members of the human resistance plan and scheme, surviving in the shadows, living like rats in the walls of the world. All of Bedfordshire is a concentration camp, thousands dying, worked to death by the invaders and those forced into their service. Nothing remains of civilisation, the invaders rule from the air like gods, picking off any mortal they choose from high in the clouds. The survivors stay quiet, hunger ruling the fields and forests; hanging like a mist over the buildings turned to rubble. Time stopped in the 1960s, nothing new has come into being, reduced to a never-ending struggle for survival the human race survives, picking through roots and scavenging, a mere irritation to the expressionless beings remaking the world in their own image…

In an introduction to his 1971 collection of short stories ‘Vermillion Sands’, J.G. Ballard makes the statement:

“It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day. Very few attempts have been made to visualize a unique and self-contained future that offers no warnings to us.”

Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150AD is a film that is often interpreted as a science fiction treatment of British anxieties about the Second World War, with the Daleks cast as the Nazis, the Dalek mine as a forced labour camp and the resistance movement of the film modelled upon the various partisan groups that audiences were used to seeing on screen. Released in 1966, Daleks’ Invasion Earth is a film for children who weren’t even born during the Second World War, a war that finished over twenty years earlier. It strikes Archeology of the Future that it is more correct to view Daleks’ Invasion Earth as a film almost nostalgic for the war and the strange certainty of terror it conferred upon Britain, at a time when upheavals of other, more nebulous kinds were occurring in the country and the world at large.

The film itself, the second Milton Subotsky produced featuring Terry Nation’s creations The Daleks and the second featuring Peter Cushing as a character called Doctor Who, is a children’s romp with a grim undertone. Released during the school holidays at the height of Dalekmania, it begins with Bernard Cribbins as an affable copper Tom Campbell stumbling into the TARDIS after trying to stop a jewellery heist. As the TARDIS, because of a broken Chameleon Circuit, is stuck in the form of a Blue Police Box this is not an impossible mistake to make. Finding a similarly affable old man with white hair and a nice line in corduroy jackets (Peter Cushing as ‘Doctor Who’), his niece Louise (Jill Curzon), and his granddaughter Susan (Roberta Tovey), Tom is unsurprisingly puzzled. After a little bit of business about the TARDIS being bigger on the inside than on the outside and establishing that it travels in time and space, we are whisked to future Earth, only to find London in ruins.

Following the classic Doctor Who structure of separating the Doctor from his companions, the film wastes no time splitting Doctor Who and Tom from Louise and Susan, pitching the lot of latter in with the resistance and getting the former quickly into a bit of bother with The Daleks, who glide menacingly around the bombed out city with their human slaves, the Robomen.

Susan and Louise are taken down into the underground, literally, via Embankment tube station, meeting the three major figures of the resistance. David is a young, serious fighter, played with conviction by Ray Brooks. Wyler is a tough scot, played very straight by Andrew Keir. Dortmun (Godfrey Quigley) is a kind of Douglas Bader, in both the sense that he believes the resistance must take the fight to the Daleks and the fact he survives and thrives despite injuries or disabilities that leave him in a wheelchair. The resistance is working on bombs to battle the Daleks, drawing around the radio when the Daleks make broadcasts ordering them to surrender.

The film quickly establishes that humanity has been more or less vanquished by the Daleks, who bombarded the earth with meteors, arriving in their spaceship(s) to mop up. They take prisoners, ‘robotising’ the most resourceful and sending the rest to an immense work camp in Bedfordshire. These Robomen, dressed in black PVC jumpsuits and radio helmets with mirrored visors are the Daleks main troops. Patrolling the city in almost mechanical fashion and armed with whips and guns of Dalek origin, they are literally brainwashed into collaboration. Doctor Who and Tom narrowly miss being ‘robotised’ when they are captured and taken to the Dalek ship, the process interrupted by a resistance attack which ends in failure.

After this first act, setting up as it does the ruined city and showing just how much the Daleks have destroyed, the second act concerns the country under the Daleks, with the various characters weaving their way to an eventual rendezvous in Bedfordshire, the centre of the Daleks activities.

Tom and Louise, trapped on the Dalek spaceship, escape when it lands, only to discover they have escaped into a giant forced labour camp, where teams of prisoners, Robomen armed with whips guarding and running them, are worked to death. Susan escapes London with Wyler, leaving a message written in chalk at Embankment for the Doctor to meet her in Watford. Escaping in a van, Dortmun is killed by Daleks in the process, a fate that Susan and Wyler narrowly avoid when the Dalek spaceship targets them from the air as they drive down cold deserted country lanes, forcing them to continue by foot. The Doctor, saved by David from being robotised, is chased through the streets by Daleks. David saves him again leading him through a manhole down into the sewers, end then back to the resistance base. Reading through Dortmun’s notes, he decides that they must make their way to Bedfordshire, pronounced in a lovely eccentric fashion by Cushing as ‘Bedford-Shire’, to get to the bottom of the Daleks plan.

When Doctor Who and David are travelling across country to Bedford, the well-dressed and raincoated Brockley captures them, taking them to the Dalek camp, despite his puzzlement at their enthusiasm to go there. A fascinating character, Brockley, played by Philip Madoc, is a kind of spiv or quisling, a pantomime profiteer, selling information to the Daleks and food to the camp inmates. In one scene, after Doctor Who and David have been sleeping, we see Brockley cooking something in a tin over a small fire. When David says that it smells good, Brockley gestures for David to take some. When David bends to pick it up, Brockley gives the can a petulant kick and spills the contents.

There is pure malice in Brockley with no redeeming features, a kind of self-serving spoilt brat, lacking the backbone and moral fibre that, with the rosy glow of nostalgia, all Britons displayed in the face of threat. He is the nostalgic vision of those who made profit from the conditions of war, a ruthless, immoral turncoat, suspiciously flash and well groomed, a code for everything that the earthy, clean cut Britons of the propagandised national image were not supposed to be. There is no hint of the moral complexity of the situation that occupation actually forces upon people, Brockley is a bad ‘un, a ‘flash Harry’ who eventually gets his comeuppance when he is disposed of by his masters as he informs on the rebellion. In some ways, he represents the view that those who ‘go over to the other side’ do so out of a kind of spite towards the country that raised them.

Wyler and Susan have a similar experience. Deciding to make for Bedford on foot, the burly man and the bubbly schoolgirl in her red dress come across a house by a bridge, hidden amongst the misty trees. Stopping for food, they find an old women and her daughter. They are invited to stay the night and fed from the meagre rations the Daleks give the women for cleaning the clothes of people at the camp. Wyler wakes in the night to find the daughter sneaking in with a bag full of food. When he tries to wake Susan silently so that they can make their escape, after hearing the women cackling at their good fortune having, in himself and Susan such a prize to trade, he draws back the curtain to discover a Dalek waiting for them outside.

This episode has a paradoxical feel of both dream and grim reality. The women, dressed like medieval peasants in their house over the misty bridge feel like characters from fable or fairytale. Indeed, when Archeology of the Future saw this film as a child, we believed that the purpose of the women was to catch unwary travellers and turn them over to the Daleks, so much did they seem rooted in the logic of myth, like the witch in her gingerbread house, waiting intently forever for innocents to arrive and fulfil her function. The reality of the situation, the hunger, the ill health, the selfishness necessary for survival, the facts of most collaboration only really hit us as adults. Britain in this film is a country that has been, to borrow a phrase, almost bombed into the Stone Age.

The third act reunites all of our chrononauts, along with David and Wyler, inside of the Daleks forced labour camp. Here Doctor Who devises a way of disrupting the Dalek plan to detonate a bomb inside of the Earth’s core, part of a hazy plan to ‘pilot the Earth like a spaceship’ back to the area of their planet. Redirecting the bomb, it increases the Earth’s magnetic field and destroys the Daleks, freeing humanity and allowing just enough time for Doctor Who to return Tom Campbell to the present in time to foil the jewel thieves, before the jaunty, jazzy theme tune that plays over the cast list tells us it’s time to pick up our things and head out of the cinema into the bright, new world of mid-sixties Britain.

Considered in terms of the world that it is born into, Daleks Invasion Earth looks backwards rather than forwards for its inspiration. It arrived in a world where Pop Art, youth cult, rock ‘n’ roll, Tamla Motown and the Beatles and Stones were asserting the primacy of youth, where Harold Wilson and Tony Benn were exploring the possibilities of new markets and new technologies with MinTech, where the Telecom Tower would emerge glittering like a space craft landed at the heart of London, where everything was faster, shinier, newer, younger, more brash, less deferential, less respectful. It is a warning to the young, rather than a discussion for the old. It reduces fears and experiences of World War II to a fable told to damp the spirits of this world of uncertainty and possibility.

There are many explicit references to the lore of World War II, to the horrid litany of abuses carried out during its duration. When the chrononauts first arrive, Susan remarks that there are no people, and ‘no birds either’, bringing to mind the horror of death camps. At the Dalek mine in Bedfordshire, Brockley trades food for a handful of rings, again making reference to the horror of death camps, the implication that rings are not the only things of precious metal that are brought to Brockley. Near the beginning of the film, Doctor Who and Tom pass through a room that has a prominent framed picture of a Spitfire or a Hurricane. The use of the Underground as a refuge and a place were industry could continue is again an obvious reference, (see this article for more about the underground). The Dalek radio broadcasts, with their mocking tone, again speak to the lore of the War rather than an actual experience of it. The film is nostalgic for the War, in that it strips a complicated narrative down to its most evocative and emotive images, removing them from their context and making them emotional triggers only.

Like a fable, Daleks Invasion Earth reduces the characters and situations to ciphers and removes all notions of context or politics from the equation. With the characters of Brockley and the Mother and Daughter, we see that collaborators are resoundingly bad. With the Daleks, we are given an image of invasion that removes any of the difficult ambiguities that arise when examining history and the motivations of people. The Daleks are evil, because they are evil. There are no geopolitics, no history, no relationship before their invasion. In many ways, they are the reassuring bogeyman conjured up by wartime propaganda, an all destroying; unreasonable force that can only be beaten rather than accommodated or lived with. In a time of total war, there is a comforting certainty, and an escape from the anxiety of having to make responsible political choices, in having an implacable enemy to oppose.

One aspect of the film that is always pointed out is that it doesn’t look to be set in 2150 AD, but about five minutes from when it was filmed. Based on the underlying message of the film, this doesn’t pose as much of a problem as most reviewers suggest. Given the film’s deep hankering for the certainties of the War, the message to the present seems to be ‘don’t get too excited about relentless progress and forward motion, it could all just stop’. This is a very English response to the apocalypse, an anxiety about adversity stopping the march of progress and the advancement of civilization. American popular culture, overall, has a much more rosy view of the breakdown of civilisation, with many seeing it as kind of ‘back to nature’ return to the essentials of life where, at worst, you and your family will be enjoying the kind of life someone on the Frontier might have had. British popular culture, on the other hand, is usually concerned with what will be lost. If there was an invasion by immensely powerful alien beings tomorrow, the process of commodity capitalism as we know it now would stop. There wouldn’t be the time or resources to create new and exciting shiny things to signify that the future had arrived. Although it is a stretch to believe that the Britain of Daleks Invasion Earth is two hundred or so years hence of the date that the film was made, the cultural and technological entropy that it portrays does fit with its overall orientation.

On top of all this subtext, there is a fast moving children’s film, with excellent set pieces and some lovely, local references. When Tom and Doctor Who see the Dalek saucer, a brilliant bit of Dan Dare style design, landing in London, Doctor Who exclaims: “It appears to be landing in the vicinity of Sloane Square!”. The fact that Bedfordshire becomes a huge concentration camp adds a huge thrill to the proceedings; as does the fact that characters need to travel across country to get there, plunging into the chilly interior of the landscape. The use of the London Underground as a hiding place for the human underground adds a wonderful sparkle to Archeology of the Future’s enjoyment.

In many ways, the Daleks are amongst one of the most recognisable artefacts of the bright, brash, shiny, poppy mid-sixties. They achieved huge popularity and iconic status precisely because they were colourful, exciting and from a very low, mass-culture source, beginning with the kids then finding more and more fans amongst the grown-ups… Looking back at the film now, it almost seems to say, in a grumpy, reactionary way, that we should be careful, lest the new world of Pop and bright colours turn around and wreck our cities and enslave us…

Buy Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 AD from Amazon.co.uk here.

Technorati Tags: doctor who, peter cushing, daleks, science fiction, 1960s, british cinema

Val Guest, director of Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II dies

2006-05-15T00:46:00.000+01:00

Variety.com - Val Guest Obituary

It with great sadness that Archeology of the Future was informed this evening of the death of Val Guest, Director of 'The Quatermass Xperiment', 'Quatermass II', 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire' and 'The Abominable Snowman'. Val died Wednesday, May 10 in Palm Springs, California at the age of 94.

If you look at his filmography here, you can see that Val had a hand in everything from the bleak majesty of Quatermass, to the youth cult of Expresso Bongo to the ill lit, freezing cold smut of 'Confessions...'. As a writer, director, writer of music, producer and even actor Val was around for almost every weird twist and turn taken by the British film industry from the 1930s onward.

A sad loss that even the hard headed Quatermass of Val's two Quatermass films would have to mourn...

Archeology of the Future offers these two previous articles in memory of his work:

http://archeologyofthefuture.blogspot.com/2006/03/theres-nothing-better-than-apocalypse.html

http://archeologyofthefuture.blogspot.com/2006/05/were-on-verge-of-something-so-ugly.html

Archeology of the Future feels saddened that Val's death seems to have been mentioned nowhere of any note. The UK does have a film heritage, but we seem to want to forget it, as if it makes us uncomfortable because it was different to Hollywood. It's as if we feel that people like Val, who were involved in British commercial cinema for all of their careers, are somehow embarrassing, being a reminder of a time when we thought that as a country we could make films on our own terms.

A sad death, for the most part unremembered in the country and industry where he worked for the majority of his life.

Technorati Tags: science fiction, british cinema,

Meme Therapy: Archeology of the Future guest blogs on SF Memes

2006-05-10T20:19:00.000+01:00

Meme Therapy: Archeology of the Future guest blogs on SF Memes

In response to a discussion at Meme Therapy, Archeology of the Future has managed to escape from the twisted wreckage of Winnerden Flats for long enough to discuss Science Fiction memes. Responding to a previous discussion, Archeology of the Future advances the idea that rather than Science Fiction ideas being more prevalent now in popular culture than in the past , it is that Science Fiction fandom is more watchful and ready to cry foul when the wolf of popular culture snatches an idea from the cosy enclosure labelled SciFi.

Science Fiction is, in its most potent form, only a distorted mirror of the present. Science Fiction ideas are tools and machines for making new and surprising understanding...

The postcard that accompanies this post can be considered a trailer for an excavation that we're currently undertaking at the request of a regular reader. Just taking in what's going on in the photograph should give you an idea of what's in store when we present what we've dug up...

Thanks to Meme Therapy.

"We're on the verge of something so ugly": Quatermass II

2006-05-07T23:41:00.000+01:00

It is fifty years ago or so, in a place not so alien… In the greens and browns of the countryside, New Towns of tile, concrete and rational planning spring up. Roads arrive metre by metre to join them. Places of work, factories and refineries grow and evolve like intricate corals between. A government still wary of the people that it works to protect plans and plots for the worst of all worlds. Wary people keep quiet; blowing the whistle will destroy a chance of a comfortable life for them and their families. A man tries to turn the tide of history, aware that his vision of the future, clean and bright, is slipping away, consumed by the squalor of plans for war and national hubris…

Quatermass II, the second film Quatermass film produced by Hammer, is often held up as a kind of British answer to American films such as ‘Invasion of The Bodysnatchers’. While there are similarities, with people being controlled or replaced by a malevolent alien force, there are also significant and interesting differences.

Often coming off a critical third when compared to the two Quatermass films that bookend it, Quatermass II is generally seen to lack the imagination of its siblings, producing a hackneyed exploration of themes treated far more excitingly in US films of the period. What this analysis misses is the very thing that gives Quartermass II its particlular power. The film is imbued with very a particular sense of British unease, and is, in fact, extremely responsive to the domestic concerns and unease of a nation nearly a decade out of the War but still in many ways living with it.

Quatermass returns, played again by famously thirsty American actor Brian Donlevy, this time in a far more precarious position than when we last saw him in The Quatermass Xperiment. The future of his British Rocket Group is hanging in the balance, a grand plan to colonise the moon passed over for funding. Still a hard headed driving force, eyes locked upon achieving his aims, we now see Quatermass as others see him: A grumpy man with big ideas, pacing the corridors of his own scientific fiefdom, his life rotating around the aerodynamic rocket that pokes into the overcast sky above his experimental research establishment.

Travelling back from another meeting with the people from the ministries, Quatermass runs into a couple in trouble, beginning about a chain of events which climax in the ending of an insidious alien threat and a perversion of his beloved rocket, the Quatermass II, which like the predecessor we saw in our previous meeting with him, brings destruction rather than scientific hope. He can’t even manage to be civil to his own staff, complaining that they are wasting valuable time tracking a succession of meteorites that entering the atmosphere with precise regularity.

Investigating the claims of the young couple, Quatermass travels into the green emptiness of the English countryside, travelling up a new road that quite literally ends under his feet in a mess of government property signs and distant chainlink fences. Tracking back, he finds the remains of a village, Winnerden Flats; he also finds a huge copy of his moon base, all domes and pipes, sitting seemingly undiscovered amongst the hills. His colleague, uncovering one of the meteorites we’ve seen being tracked, is struck down by what Quatermass describes as ‘a big black bubble’ shooting from it. Uniformed and armed guards arrive, complete with breathing apparatus, bundling Quatermass’s colleague into a car and sending Quatermass on his way.

Nearby, Quatermass finds a New Town in the early stages of construction. Housing for the workers at the plant, it is still in the process of coming into being and carving its existence into the countryside. It has wide, planned but unfinished streets that end in empty fields and a general air of desolation.

The community centre, the only bit of the town with any sign of activity, is plastered with posters extolling the necessity of secrecy. Trying to ring for help, Quatermass is stopped by a community leader who tells him directly not to stir up trouble. The plant produces synthetic food, no more, no less.

Travelling back to London, Quatermass is put in touch with MP Vincent Broadhead, implicitly Labour, who is as unconvinced as Quatermass that the production of synthetic food is what is actually going on at Winnerden Flats. Broadhead has been campaigning and asking questions, mainly about the huge amounts of public money being channel into the project and, having finally arranged an official site visit, invites Quatermass to accompany him.

Once there, Quatermass, Broadhead and other visitors are guided around the sprawling plant, all tangles of huge pipes, domes and gasholders, empty and exposed. Quatermass manages to sneak off, finding an empty infirmary and no sign of his associate. Their guide is most forceful that they remain with the group, as they have a schedule to keep.

Broadhead manages to slip away, and it becomes clear to Quatermass that there is some sort of unpleasant fate awaiting him. The guide’s brittle efficiency soon evaporates as Quatermass manages to escape, only to find Broadhead screaming covered in horrid black ooze, slumping to his death amongst the steel and concrete. Under fire, Quatermass manages to escape and make it back to London, taking his experiences to his old friend Inspector Lomax.

Despite what Quatermass saw, the newspaper shows Broadhead to be alive and well. Lomax, hoping to ask his superior for advice notices a tell-tale mark on his hand, one not dissimilar to the marks that Quatermass has described on those who have been exposed to the meteors… Picking up a drunken yet sharp reporter played by Sid James, a long way from Carry On and all the better for it, Quatermass and Lomax set out to get to the bottom of what seems to be no less than a silent, careful invasion, where figures of authority are being controlled from afar…

Giving a commentary on the current DVD edition of Quatermass II but nowhere credited on the disc itself as doing so, Nigel Kneale, who handled the adaptation of his script from the television series he had written the previous year for the BBC, says that in the 1950s, there were plenty of things to be afraid of. He talks about a country that was secret prone, where too much was taken for granted. All over, actual research projects and military sites were being created at the same time as New Towns were being built. It is the Hemel Hempstead New Town Development Corporation that is acknowledged in the opening credits, alongside the Shell Haven Refinery, for providing the settings for events. Rather than being set in an imagined landscape of secrecy and change, Quatermass is actually set in a real landscape minded for its maximum discomfort. He talks of consciously setting the events in “the new British scene of the 1950s”, of how it was "easy to imagine anything at that time” with the “guarded, secretive announcements of the War Department” where “no-one knew who was responsible for what” and where “people took a great deal more on trust than they should have”. As we have seen, the UK really was a place where rockets took off and where huge structures did spring up guarded by secrecy.

Britain as portrayed in Quatermass II is a threatening, dark place full of dislocations and only partially perceived threats. Shot under overcast skies and in squally winds, even the familiar green and pleasant lands have a sense of menace and bleak emptiness, as if the pastoral celebrations of Powell and Pressberger and the little people in triumph of Ealing that so informed Britain’s image of itself during the war years had turned sour in the mouth of post war realities.

The film has a particularly British sense of localism, displaying a pre-flight and pre-mass car ownership understanding of landscape. Advances in popular mechanical modes of transport, as well as ever proliferating media outlets, mean that we have progressively collapsed space and time, folding together geographically distant points until we feel that we know intimately everything about the UK. We can hold an image of what we think the UK is in our minds, so used are we to moving almost instantly from place to place, town to town, eating up the landscape and carrying it in our heads as an illusion of a totality. In Quatermass II, the landscape is unknown, unknowable. It is possible to go slightly off the usual path and find a whole huge development, unknown to the world at large. New towns are springing up, their inhabitants as distant from London as settlers on a distant island. When Quatermass asks the way to the police station in Winnerden Flats, he is told they don’t have one, the implication being not that this new town is so peaceful and well ordered that it doesn’t need one, but that it is like a frontier town, pushing beyond the reach of the law. When Quatermass finds the site of the alien project, his colleague remarks, “Maybe we’ve struck a rival project”, as if it were to be expected that the countryside would be littered with top-secret establishments. Scenes of uniformed, gasmasked troops spreading out across fields like a virus, occupying the unfamiliar terrain, heighten this sense of the unknown regarding one’s own county.

There is a sense of fading idealism in Quatermass and his Rocket Group that very much mirrors the feelings of engineers who worked on the real British Space Programme. (See this previous post for more details) Relaying the results of his meeting in London to his staff, Quatermass says:

“No more money… To date you’ve spent a lot of money on a rocket that isn’t even safe to launch. At the moment we have projects of far more importance. Isn’t it important enough to be the first to build a colony on the moon? To get men there against the odds?”

While it may be inferred from the plot that the project of more importance is the alien bridgehead at Winnerden Flats, there is a much stronger indication that it is the military application of Quatermass’s work which is of interest, a point underlined by the use of his rocket as a bomb to destroy the alien base and the huge, dirty and unpleasant creatures that emanate from it at the films climax. The film seems concerned with this inversion, with the sullying of science by its association with The Bomb. As Nigel Kneale says: “There was a lot of cheap joy when the British H Bomb exploded… It was not healthy that people should rejoice such a thing”. Quatermass is concerned that his work should be put toward constructive, not destructive purposes, but the plot systematically turns this wish on its head. His rocket, the Quatermass II of the title, doesn’t bring life to other worlds; it destroys life on this planet. His moon base design doesn’t protect humanity from the hostile elements; it encloses hostile elements to nurture a hostile form of life. Even this form of life represents ‘getting your hands dirty’, comprising as it does of a huge liquid thing resembling nothing more than a kind of caustic manure, leaving a black, stinking trail behind it. The plant itself is said to produce food but in fact produces the opposite, materials that kill rather than sustain life. There are two wonderful shots in the film of a huge dome, with the party of visitors walking towards it, followed later by Quatermass running away from it alone. Standing as it does on a flat horizon, the dome looks like nothing less than a huge black sun, taking in light and life rather than giving it out.

In a wonderful shot of the New Town earlier on in the film, a street of houses, empty but for a mother pushing a pram, simply ends in fields. This sense of artificiality is another factor of the film that may not travel well. The people of Winnerden Flats New Town are dependent on the Refinery for work, marooned as they are. The scene where all ages are having a dance or function at the community centre, with drinks served by a brassy young lady from behind a makeshift bar, is at once a perfect expression of the dreams of town planners and a throwback to the frontier towns we are used to seeing in Westerns. They have no choice but to be complicit in the goings on at the Refinery, only rebelling and marching upon it when the actions of Quatermass and his colleagues bring about a brutal repression. The worry about artificiality versus organic growth in communities is a British preoccupation; with town planning being both demonised and lionised depending upon circumstance. The suggestion that the relocation of people to newly created places may introduce them to new pressures and problems may seem obvious now, but at the time of the films production the first wave of post war New Towns was in full swing. It would eventually result in the construction of twenty-nine 'New Towns'. Twenty-three towns in England and Wales and six in Scotland, Stevenage being the first. (See this previous post for more on New Towns)

Quatermass II has a sense of unease in the future that can only be experience by engaging with the present, which it shares with many British New Wave films that followed it. It also suggests that there are more problems in Britain than can be solved by the final destruction of the Refinery at the films climax. While it was possible to vanquish the alien foe, the conditions of the country continue beyond the titles. There is a sense that, while there were extenuating circumstances, the way in which Britain functions made it ripe for an invasion of the sort detailed in the film, with secretive governments and deferential workers conspiring to allow unspeakable things to happen. At one point Quatermass, in despair, exclaims: "We're on the verge of something so ugly."

In many ways, Quatermass II is the most British of the three Quatermass films, depending as it does on topical, domestic developments for its sense of uneasiness. In a genre widely considered American both in parentage and in practice, Quatermass II unsurprisingly fails to push the right buttons for some audiences.

Archeology of the Future, on the other hand, thinks it’s a bleak, British wonder.

In a strange piece of life imitating art, the climax of Quatermass II had an almost exact mirror in real life when Hemel Hempstead was the scene of the biggest fire in Europe since World War II when Buncefield oil depot exploded. The BBC reported the initial explosion like this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4519382.stm

This site includes some amazing pictures of the huge plumes of smoke and the devastation caused:

http://www.buncefield-oil-fire-hemel-hempstead.wingedfeet.co.uk/

Suddenly, the world doesn’t seem so predictable or cosy…

Buy Quatermass II from amazon.co.uk here

Technorati Tags: science fiction, Quatermass, british science fiction, post war britain, Nigel Kneale, 1950s

Barbican Conservatory: A virtual garden?

2006-04-27T17:30:00.000+01:00

Come and explore the Barbican Conservatory in this 360 degree model!

To further illustrate why I love the Barbican Conservatory, as discussed in this previous post, why not have a virtual look round it by following the link above?

If you can't imagine an episode of popular children's television programme Doctor Who taking place there, we think that maybe we've been talking cross purposes for the last two months...

Photograph from sleekit's collection at Flickr

Technorati Tags: science Fiction, doctor who, barbican

Techniques of Escape: John Wyndham's Chocky

2006-04-26T21:05:00.000+01:00

Archeology of the Future has been raiding the mouldering piles of paperbacks in the cupboard under the stairs, digging through the accumulated strata to uncover some rich gems.

Chocky by John Wyndham, published in 1968, is the story of a family afflicted, or blessed, with a 'special child'. Rather than dealing with a wider apocalypse or with the world plunged in violent change, Chocky is the exclusive story of one suburban English family. It's a novel of relationships; the relationship between husband and wife, between father and son and between a young boy and an intangible presence that takes up residency in his mind. There is a great change, but not necessarily the one that the reader might expect.

Before we discuss Chocky and the boy who brings him/her to our attention, we’d like to introduce you to another outlandish figure, an almost- contemporary of Chocky:

“Alan Measles was the leader, the benign dictator, of my made-up land, the glamorous, raffish, effortlessly handsome, commanding character… When I was about ten, I worked out the game was set one hundred years in the future in the 2060s and 2070s. There had been a calamitous nuclear war, almost obliterating Planet Earth. Everyone agreed that technology had advanced too far, so an international agreement was forged stating that from now on technology could only move backwards. Armies once again began to use old-fashioned, conventional weapons.”

In the book ‘Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’, a book of interviews with the 2003 Turner Prize winning artist by Wendy Jones, Perry outlines the content of his childhood fantasy world ruled over as it was by Alan Measles, his teddy bear. A series of rationalisations that allowed him to include whatever toys, and later Lego and Airfix models that came along, the world of Alan Measles, improvised from the topography of Perry’s bedroom, provided both a rich territory for the young Perry’s imagination but also a refuge from his disrupted home life and uneasy, and often violent, relationship with his stepfather. As Perry says:

“Alan Measles was the ultimate male presence. The Germans were the invading force, or at least they were as soon as my stepfather appeared on the scene. Gradually, the Germans occupied Alan Measles’s realm. As the years passed, Alan became more of an underground guerrilla, more a spy. In the beginning it had been open warfare, whereas towards the end it was subterfuge… As I was growing up I progressively bestowed all my noble masculine traits of a high achiever, a winner, a lover even, on to my teddy bear for safe keeping. He was the guardian, the custodian of these qualities. “I lived in Alan Measles’s realm, carrying it around with me like a comfy sleeping bag I could pop into at any time… I no longer had separate games, they were all facets of the one game: everything was linked..”

This retreat into fantasy as defence and the creation of an avatar representing some essential qualities was a key experience for Perry, as they represent a kind of reflexive therapy and playing out of drama that would eventually find expression in his art. For those unfamiliar with his work, Perry works in ceramics, producing glazed vases and other objects with images and photographs that, to us at least, are reminiscent of Pulp songs, with an uneasy mixture of fantasy and ‘kitchen sink’ reality.

In many ways, the realm of Alan Measles seems to have prompted Perry into pursuing certain paths, as if such interior richness, once tasted needs to be returned to repeatedly in different ways.

In Chocky too, there is a figure that exists in the mind of a small boy, but of a small boy with a very different set of problems.

Matthew is the adopted child of the stable Gore family of Hindmere, Surrey, happily undertaking the pursuit of a normal English childhood. His father, David, the narrator of the book, tinkering with a lawnmower in the shed, overhears Matthew one sun kissed suburban afternoon arguing with an unseen 'friend’ about the number days in the week and the number of months in the year. Before he can see who it is that Matthew is arguing with, a child from next door calls and Matthew runs off to meet him.

For David Gore, the narrator and patriarch of the Gore family, this is the beginning of the story of Matthew and his involvement with Chocky.

David and his wife Mary debate the best course of action, reasoning that Matthew may be too old for an imaginary friend, but also intrigued by the ‘unMatthewness’ of the questions that he has taken to asking. Hoping that it is a phase that Matthew is going through, like his younger sister had with her imaginary friend Piff, they agree to keep a benign eye on things.

As the novel progresses, Matthew causes consternation at school with his outlandish questions about matter, space and intelligence. He becomes extremely upset when the family buys a new car, only to have Chocky criticise it as primitive. In art class at school, he finds that Chocky can show him how to do things if he lets his mind go blank, channelling Chocky’s will through him, producing drawings, that while technically proficient, present a certain off kilter air. He manages to save his sister from drowning when they are both deposited into a river when a boat hits a jetty, despite previously being unable to swim. When asked how he did it, he can only answer that Chocky showed him. After coming to national prominence as a boy who was saved from drowning by a guardian angel, as well as winning a prize for his drawings completed under the influence of Chocky, Matthew is finally abducted by the government, which prompts the departure of Chocky.

Despite being a story about a possible alien incursion into the life of a young boy, Wyndham gives the reader no solid confirmation that Chocky is an actual real entity, despite both David and Matthew believing this to be the case. The ways in which Chocky manifests him/herself are resolutely non-physical, and while stretching credibility, are not impossible. People do spontaneously ‘learn to swim’ in extreme circumstances and other people do manage to tap into ways of manufacturing art that produce unsettling or slightly skewed results.

David, the narrator and father of Matthew, is a rational, freethinking man, uncomfortable with ‘common sense’ and questioning of orthodox answers. A self-aware suburbanite, he comments when visited by Mary’s sister and her husband: “Kenneth and I kept mostly to the safe, and only slightly controversial, topic of cars.” The world of the Gore family is comfortable and unremarkable: the world outside of their garden hedge is experienced as being filled with grumpy maths teachers, avuncular policemen, skittish arts teachers and irascible family doctors of English sitcom life.

In the early days of his marriage David decides to move Mary away from her more traditional family, to escape their fecundity, saying of Mary’s family: “There was so many Bosworths that I had a feeling of being engulfed”. Seemingly unable to have children, David wonders at Mary’s need to do so. Rationalising his feelings as despair at the seemingly unending generative powers of the Bosworth family, while revealing an inability for things to be ‘just so’, he tells a friend: “She’s in a circle where it’s kind of a competition in which every married woman is considered ipso facto an entrant – which makes it damned hard on a non-starter.” Ever practical, David and Mary adopt Matthew, and then move the family to Surrey, allowing them to make a fresh start, away from the interfering figures of Mary’s family, soon afterward conceiving Polly.

Both Mary and David, eschewing the traditional, earthy advice of Mary’s sisters, seem insecure in their parenting of Matthew in a way that they don’t of his younger sister, Polly. Throughout the book, Mary and David take it in turns to be dismissive of Polly, telling her to be quiet, or to stop being silly. It is as if they feel comfortable in doing this with a child that they brought into the world themselves, but feel that Matthew is something of an unknown quantity. When Chocky first manifests, Mary says:

“I do wish we knew a little bit more about his parents. That might help. In Polly I can see bits of you and bits of me. It gives one something to go on. But with Matthew there’s no guide at all… there’s nothing to give me any idea what to expect…”

Interestingly, rather than representing a unity, David and Mary are divided in their response to Matthew’s ‘difficultness’. David is more indulgent, at different points instructing Matthew to hide the evidence of Chocky’s presence from his mother. He finds Mary to be too rigid and hard in the face of Matthew’s ‘specialness’. When Matthew informs his parents of Chocky’s departure, completely heartbroken at the loss of this part of himself, David comments after Mary is dismissive of his pain:

“I have been astonished before, and doubtless will be again, how the kindliest and most sympathetic of women can pettify and downgrade the searing anguishes of childhood.”

Both Mary and David refer to the collusion between David and Matthew in supporting the existence of Chocky. Unable to define exactly what gender Chocky is, Matthew eventually decides that she is more female than male. When David tells Mary this, she answers: “You decide she’s feminine because you feel it will help you and Matthew to gang up on her.”

Throughout the book the reader feels that David, in Matthew’s experiences has glimpsed a land that, maybe, once he himself inhabited. It is as if David, for all of suburban sophistication and outward stability, wishes for something else. Remember that, if this book is taken as being set within a few years of its release, Britain is swinging, the Beatles and the Stones are duking it out in the charts, the world is between the tragedy of Apollo 1, exploding on the dry Florida concrete and the live footage of the planet below beamed back by the triumphant Apollo 7. David seems to want something beyond his nine-to-five family existence. Under the guise of distracting one of Mary’s sisters from expounding her opinions on Matthew, David lets slip his distain for ‘normality’. Talking of his nephew, he says:

“Your Tim is so splendidly normal. It’s hard to imagine him saying anything odd. Though I sometimes think… that it’s a pity that thorough normality is scarcely achievable except at some cost to individuality. Still, there it is, that’s what normality means – average.”

Indeed, it is revealing that when Chocky makes his/her final departure, she takes David aside to explain. With Matthew channelling her voice in a way now familiar from many UFO fringe cults, she outlines her reasons for settling on Matthew and then warns David that Matthew must remain out of sight in life and not attempt to make use of the insights she has provided him into science, as this will lead him into being used badly by the powers that be. She tells David:

“If you are wise you will discourage him from taking up physics – or any science, then there will be nothing to feed their suspicions. He is beginning to learn how to look at things, and to have an idea of drawing, As an artist he would be safe…”

It is almost as if the entire book is a justification for David in allowing his son to follow his own path, harnessing his creativity to find a route out of the constraints of orthodox suburban life of which he is acutely aware. We get a feeling of this from David early on in the book when he mentions the demise of Polly’s imaginary friend Piff, forgotten about on a trip to the seaside:

“I was able to feel quite sorry for the deserted Piff, apparently doomed to wander for ever in summer’s traces upon the forlorn beaches of Sussex.”

It seems to us that Chocky almost represents a way for all of the family to accept that, for Matthew, his path will be the path that leads from suburban dreaming into a more uncertain and more creative future.

Certainly, Chocky does seem a convenient way for Matthew to raise some issues that trouble him. At one point he raises the question of loving two parents at once, and how difficult Chocky thinks this must be, underlining the dichotomy that exists in Mary and David’s relations with him:

“She thinks it must be terribly confusing to have two parents, and not a good idea at all. She says it is natural and easy to love one person, but if your parent is divided into two people it must be pretty difficult for your mind not to be upset by trying not to love one more than the other. She thinks it’s very likely its’ the strain of that which accounts for some of the peculiar things about us.”

Chocky allows Matthew to state very baldly both his dilemma and the dilemma that his parents find themselves in regarding him and his sister. This non physical entity that exists only inside Matthew serves to fulfil a similar role to Grayson Perry’s adventures with Alan Measles, providing a safe way of dealing with anxieties.

Unlike Grayson Perry, who found himself chastised by family for the directions that his fantasy world took him in, Matthew finds acceptance. At the climax of the book, once Chocky has departed, it is David that encourages Matthew to continue his drawing as a way of keeping alive the strange sense of otherness that came to their suburban home.

Rather than changing the entire outside world, the events of Chocky only open up for one child of the surburbs the possibility of exploring further his own interior world. A profound upheaval, if not a world changing one.

In many ways, all of us who fall prey to science fiction or to dreams about the way that the future could be different, do the same thing, escaping when we can into another world inside ourselves, peopled with voices and places that don’t really exist.

Like David Gore, we can’t help but feel that somewhere, there’s always an Alan Measles and a Chocky waiting for the children who left them behind to return.

You can read a slightly abridged version of John Wyndham’s Chocky online here:

http://arthurwendover.com/arthurs/wyndham/chocky10.html

You can buy ‘Grayson Perry: A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Girl’ by Wendy Jones at Amazon.co.uk here

Technorati Tags:science fiction, john wyndham, wyndham, grayson perry, imaginary friends, book reviews, british suburbs

Bank Holiday Archeology Part 2

2006-04-19T00:12:00.000+01:00

As promised, Archeology of the Future has returned to share the remainder of our bank holiday activities with you...

The Traveller On Returning

Saturday was, of course, the return of a champion, reborn and made anew for each generation. David Tennant, as the latest incarnation of Doctor Who in the popular BBC Television children’s programme of the same name is, on this showing and his first appearance on Christmas day last year, a more disturbing proposition than any of his previous incarnations.

Saturday’s programme, in which The Doctor and Rose, his South east London travelling companion, visit the home of humanity in the far distant future and uncover a conspiracy in its eqivilent of the National Health Service, revealed a Doctor who was by turns beguiling and unsettling. For the first time since childhood, we found ourselves wildly jealous of the Doctor’s assistant, ready to throw all caution to the wind and join the Doctor in whatever adventure he chose.

This Doctor has the wild eyes and quicksilver emotions of a manic-depressive, one moment goggle eyed with childish wonder, the next cynical or flip, suddenly moving to righteous anger and then wet eyed emotion. He is also more self consciously dandy-ish, coming across as more mannered, more brittle than his predecessor. Whether through accident or design, this Doctor is far less centred than Chris Ecclestone’s portrayal of his previous regeneration. Despite his energy and his zaniness, Ecclestone’s Doctor exuded solidity and strength, and a quiet kind of reassurance. Tennant’s Doctor is, on these early showings closer to a Harlequin. Witness this description of Harlequin from wikipedia:

“His everlasting high-spirits and cleverness work to save him from several difficult situations his amoral behaviour gets him into during the course of the play. In some Italian forms of the harlequinade, the harlequin is able to perform magic feats. He never holds a grudge or seeks revenge.”

The reason this connection occurs lies in our reading of ‘A Cure fore Cancer’ by Micheal Moorcock as detailed in this previous post. Jerry Cornelius is specifically refered to as a Harlequin, an essentially immoral and clever dandy figure whose appetites get him into trouble. Everything is farce to him and nothing important, making him immoral in the way that a child is. It is the strutting, peacock nature of him and the way in which the tone of him alters dependant on the mood of his times that puts us in mind of the current Doctor. His enthusiasm to explore and adventure is the only thing that precipitated the events of Saturday’s episode. For all of his cleverness, charm and charisma, he was essentially dancing between events he set in motion but could not control.

Watching, Archeology of the Future couldn’t work out whether we wanted to follow him or, more worryingly, be him or be like him. Imagine that, being able to escape into time and the wide universe at will, to skip where and when you pleased…

The Most Science Fiction Place In London

On Sunday, Archeology of the Future found ourselves in the most Science Fiction place in London. Standing in the wet artificial heat, surrounded by the sound of birdsong and the fecundity of huge tropical plants climbing and possessing grey concrete walkways, eyes drawn astray by the golden flash of fish in cool water, we thanked whatever powers that exist that the relentless marches of time have overlooked the Barbican Conservatory.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Barbican, it is a huge housing development that brings together flats and houses, amenities, gardens, a huge theatre, cinemas, offices and green spaces in the City of London. Designed originally as social housing, it is the most well realised example of utopian architectural practice in the UK. Everything about it screams out possibilities of new ways of living, new ways of constructing life in a city. It was purposely built so that everyone could feel themselves to be an actor in a great drama of their own. Through a long gestation period, where different pieces of the development were design, modified, scrapped, reinstated and then finally built, The Barbican absorbed all of the new ideas and experimental developments of British architecture, making it like a dream of possible future architectures. It is here that Archeology of the Future has a spiritual home and here that we shall explore in far greater depth in future posts.

The Conservatory, opened in 1984, was a late addition to plans and is like a set for a botanical area onboard a space station. Walkways criss-cross the high vault under the glass exterior. Even the interior doors have rounded corners suggestive of airlocks. There is just something so incongruous, so wondrous about the sheer artificiality of the space, surrounded by tall concrete towers and brown brickwork, looking out beyond to the ever growing office towers of Moorgate. Standing there, Archeology of the Future could see the possible future, the new people meeting there under their artificial canopy, the last generation to have a faith in the possibility of changing the course of the future.

Archeology of the Future wasn’t even aware of the existence of The Conservatory until an afternoon exploring amongst the different levels and structures delivered it to us as we rounded a corner. It was like a homecoming. All of the beautiful dreams of bringing nature and artifice together in way that it can be enjoyed at the leisure of the participant come together for us under the glass. The nearest that we can think of is the kind of thing that you get in some large corporate buildings or shopping developments, but this so radically different that the similarity is only fleeting. The Barbican Conservatory is no less than a stab at an artificial Eden, a place to play without being directed or moved on…

The Conservatory is being run with a skeleton staff now, and is ever having its opening times reduced. Only open on Sundays now, the popular consensus is that it is being run into the ground before it is closed. This enhances the charm, because there is a sense of the working future, where people patch thing up and things evolve rather than being pristine.

If you have the opportunity, we advise you to visit this beautiful glass bubble outside of time while you can. If Archeology of the Future were ever to meet any of you, our audience, it would be among the green fronds of the Conservatory

Designing a New World

On Monday, Archeology of the Future made it to the wide, spy haunted streets of South Kensington to visit the Victoria & Albert Museum to see the Modernism 1914-1939: Designing a New World exhibition. It was an exhibition that we’d been waiting for since our teens, bringing together as it does the largest collection of modernist objects ever in one exhibition in the UK. The effect was like sherbet fizzing in our brains, or more correctly, finding that other people shared the dreams you’d nursed inside of you since childhood too.

Exhausted by the First World War and energised in one way or another by the Russian Revolution, a generation of artists and designers worked to literally remake the world and bring about a future where the division between art and everyday life was dissolved and where the terrible weight of the past could be escaped. At this exhibition, everything in one-way or another, was Science Fiction.

We point this out, because as we said in a previous post, Archeology of the Future is about Science Fiction as a practice of looking or a way of interrogating the world. Too often Science Fiction is limited and inward looking, happy to exist on its own as a genre. In an essay on Philip K. Dick, the late Stanislaw Lem recognised this. Comparing genre fiction to a situation where natural selection is frustrated or interrupted he states:

“In culture an analogous situation leads to the emergence of enclaves shut up in ghettos, where intellectual production likewise stagnates because of inbreeding in the form of incessant repetition of the selfsame patterns and techniques. The internal dynamics of the ghetto may appear intense, but with the passage of years it becomes evident that this is only a semblance of motion, since it leads nowhere, since it feeds into nor is fed by the open domain of culture, since it does not generate new patterns or trends, and since, finally, it nurses the falsest of notions about itself, for lack of any honest evaluation of its activities from outside.”

Walking around the Modernism exhibition, it was clear to us that for the men and women involved in creating the artefacts on show, the division between Science Fiction and the real world would have seemed laughable, as they were actively engaged in a process of trying to build a new future. Everything was geared toward making the future happen in the present, to changing and making anew.

We advise anyone with even a passing interest in the idea that it possible to find new ways of organising or living human existence to get along there. It’s on until 23 June 2006, and worth travelling for.

It was too much for us to take in, so we bought a badge that says ‘UTOPIA’ from the shop on our way out of the exhibition and began plotting ways to skive off work and visit again.

For Archeology of the Future, it was like finding a home.

For more information on Modernism 1914-1939 visit the V&A minisite here.

The essay 'Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among Charlatans' by Stanislaw Lem appears in the anthology 'Microworlds'. Buy it from amazon.co.uk here.

Doctor Who is broadcast on Saturday nights in the UK, as it should be. It is best watched whilst eating beans on toast.

More excellent photographs of the Barbican can be found here, here and also here. The conservatory photograph was taken by sleekit, the waterfall by will survive.

Technorati Tags: science Fiction, doctor who, barbican, modernism

Bank Holiday Archeology

2006-04-18T00:36:00.000+01:00

Archeology of the future had a smashing time this bank holiday weekend, undertaking a variety of activities that relate very strongly to the purpose of this blog.

The practice of the archaeology of the future, by its very nature, involves sifting through the remains of the past to look for hints of the future, picking through the dustbins of history to find the glittering jewels of hope or apprehension. This means casting a wide net and making investigations far beyond the boundaries of genre.

Talking about the testimonies of those who had been involved in revolutions, uprisings, strikes and other attempts to alter the direction that the river of history seemed, in retrospect, to be bound to take, Greil Marcus writes:

“…If one reads in the right frame of mind, the leavings of those stories stir with a truly strange power. Suddenly they are not ephemeral, not extraneous to real history. But plainly, obviously, the true story the events of the past years have been straining towards all along.”

It is this right frame of mind that Archeology of the Future seeks to apply to a world littered with the remnants of attempts to build, create, imagine or explore possible futures. There are, then, many ‘jumping off points’, both fictional and actual, where it is possible to see efforts to imagine a present very different from our own, or a different course that events could have taken given different conditions.

For Archeology of the Future Science Fiction is more a way of seeing than it is a strictly policed exercise in genre exploration. Anything that is suggestive of an attempt to build an alternate future, or that shows a direction that history could of taken, but did not, is an object for interrogation.

On Friday, Archeology of the Future spent a pleasant day exploring the expanses of Greenwich Park, the man made expanse of recreation ground surrounding the Royal Observatory and, incidentally, the place where the measurement of time begins. We especially enjoyed our pilgrimage to the Henry Moore sculpture ‘Standing Figure Knife Edge’ which sits on one of the three hills of the park and resembles nothing less than one of those distorted figures that would grace sixties science fiction paperback covers. One of a few monuments in the park, it is like a memorial of some transfiguring event that has yet to occur, a marker of a visitation or a transmogrification.

Looking down from the base of the statue you see the Royal Navel College, the centre of the naval might of the British Empire and as such a strong presence suffused with power and might, and then over to its distant descendant at Canary Wharf across the Thames, an arrogant series of exclamations shouting out their monetary power to all London.

The Royal Observatory itself has a working telescope, and has the globular dome that you would expect. It is sometimes possible to see a green laser beam coming from the Observatory and arcing into the dark night.

We were excited to find that Greenwich was the mooring point for The Pierrot, Jerry Cornelius’ cruiser in Michael Moorcock’s “A Cure for Cancer”, which we read over the weekend. In a UK over-run and under siege by the US for no clear reason, Jerry is his usual immoral, swinging London self, shagging, shooting and rollicking through the landscape. Sitting in the park, the spirit of this infused our afternoon:

“The white hovertruck sang onwards into the ruined roads of South London that were full of columbine, ragged robin, foxglove, golden rain, dog rose, danewort, ivy, creeping cinquefoil, Venus’s Comb, deadnettle, shepherd’s purse and dandelion, then turned towards Greenwich where Jerry’s cruiser, The Pierrot, was moored. As Jerry directed his patients up the gangplank Karen von Krupp pointed to a battered, broken looking building in the distance. ‘What is that, Jerry?’

‘Greenwich Observatory,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit redundant now, I suppose…’

The banks of the river and the fields and ruins beyond them were carpeted with flowers of every description… they sailed between fields and old ruined farmhouses, deserted villages and abandoned pubs.”

As we have noted previously, Greenwich has a strange ambience and is an odd spot for entropic chaos, with various versions of the future winding down and lying to rust. In the novel, Jerry is the spirit of the age, an embodiment of the late sixties. As the initial utopian lust for change dissipates and becomes mired in the actual heavier events of the seventies, Jerry himself begins to run out of energy with it. Entropy is the point at which no movement is possible because all energy has been expended, so it seems fitting that Jerry should find himself in a Greenwich returned to wilderness, with all cultural energy expended. As we never tire of saying: There’s nothing better than an apocalypse on your doorstep.

We’ll tell you about the rest of our weekend later today, but to give a couple of hints, including the picture a the head of this post, it involved the return of a traveller; the most science fiction place in London and the designing of a whole new world…

The Greil Marcus quote in this post comes from the essay "The Dustbin of History in a World Made Fresh" which features in the collection "The Dustbin of History".

Buy The Dustbin of History by Greil Marcus from amazon.co.uk here.

Buy A Cure For Cancer by Michael Moorcock, as featured in this Jerry Cornelius Anthology, from amazon.co.uk here.

Technorati Tags: greenwich science fiction michael moorcock greil marcus

Save The Devil Girl From Limbo

2006-04-07T17:32:00.000+01:00

The above embedded video clip is from the much maligned 1954 film 'Devil Girl from Mars', starring Patricia Laffan as the titular extraterrestrial female. Going on this clip it doesn't look half as bad as it's made out to be, with the robot, Chani, having a fair degree of charm and a quite imposing bulk.

The problem is that Archeology of the Future only has this clip to go on. Whilst the American films of the same period are well documented and widely available for the most part, the British science fiction cinema that was its parallel has all but disappeared. To the best of Archeology of the Future's knowledge, 'Devil Girl from Mars' is not commercially available anywhere at the moment. Currently, there are very few available British Science Fiction films, or at least very few that are currently 'in print'. Lacking the budgets, charm or allure of their more canonical American counterparts, and falling into the gap between commercial viability and archivists objective, they seem to be consigned to the limbo of small viewership satellite channels and charity shop shelves. Like most things, something has to be considered either of overwhelming historical importance or of salable value to be saved from limbo.

Reading through some histories of British Science Fiction, Archeology of the Future has come across a long list of 'missing presumed dead' films that read like a litany of possibilities, frustratingly just out of reach. Some of them Archeology of the Future remembers seeing as a child, others we know only through stills and articles where they appear almost as footnotes to the 'real' business of science fiction on the big screen.

Each one represents a possible excavation of a known site that we don't, as yet, have access to, like a rumour of something untoward happening on the moors just out of town, waiting to be investigated.

These remote and exciting possible future digs, misty and indistinct, known only through snapshots and third person accounts include:

High Treason (1928)
The Tunnel (1935)
The Perfect Woman (1949)
Mr Drake's Duck (1950)
Dick Barton at Bay (1950)
The Four-Sided triangle (1953)
Immediate Disaster (1954)
Fire Maidens From Outer Space (1956)
Satellite in the Sky (1956)
Strange World of Planet X (1957)
Man Without A Body (1957)
First Man Into Space (1958)
Fiend Without A Face (1958)
Behemoth, the Sea Monster (1959)
Womaneater (1959)
Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)
Konga (1960)
Gorgo (1960)
Village of the Damned (1960)
The Damned (1963)
Unearthly Stranger (1963)
Children of the Damned (1963)
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)
The Night Caller (1965)
The Projected Man (1966)
Invasion (1966)
Night of the Big Heat (1967)
Priviledge (1967)
The Body Stealers (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)
The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
No Blade of Grass (1970)
Percy (1971)
The Final Programme (1973)

Each film, regardless of its place in the overall pantheon of cinema history represents something which we wish to interrogate, question and explore... They really are some of the lost worlds of British Science Fiction. As we've said before, there's something deeply cherishable about an apocalypse on your own doorstep, no matter how small or marginal.

Archeology of the Future asks all of you to consider us in our task. If you have a copy of any of these films, taped off late night television or boxed inappropriately for the 1980s video shop boom, we'll happily pay costs if you can let us have them for a while.

It'd really help us, if for no other reason, to save from obscurity the history of British futures.

Come on, look at the Devil Girl... There's no way she should be consigned to oblivion...

For more about the history of British Science Fiction Cinema, read the superb Kim Newman introduction to SF:UK: How British Science Fiction Changed The World.

Buy SF:UK from amazon.co.uk here

Technorati Tags: british science fiction science fiction science fiction films british films cinema history

Prospero: The Little Satellite That Could

2006-04-05T22:06:00.000+01:00

Above us, travelling at 17,000 miles per hour, a tiny piece of British Science Fiction orbits the Earth every one hundred minutes. The final child of the British Space Programme, a satellite launched from a rocket called Black Arrow in the parched heat of the Austrailian desert in 1971, Prospero is a tiny refugee, a little ball of metal and electronics, an orphan of a future that never happened. A future where, to quote Stephen Baxter, “one day an old Spitfire pilot would fly into orbit… pipe clutched inside his space suit helmet.” A future where Britain would extend itself beyond this planet and take its place amongst the stars.

It’s a little remembered fact that, up until October 1971 the UK had its own, independent, space programme. As Francis Spufford puts it in his excellent book “Backroom Boys: The secret return of the British Boffin”:

“In the geography of the Space Age, Cape Canaveral and the Baikonur Cosmodrome were joined for a while by the faint presence of Woomera, on the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia… Big Rocket motors were test-fired at Spadeadam in Cumbria; polite MOD policemen would step out of the heath and turn you back if you tried to motor towards the installation on days when the ground was shaking. Smaller engines filled the air with the sound of ripping linen, titanically magnified, at a converted gun emplacement on the coast of the Isle of Wight. Men in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches sat in control rooms watching bakelite consoles. The countdown was heard in regional accents.”

This is familiar territory for Archeology of the Future, a land where, looking back, we can see the direction that things could have taken, a land where possible futures never materialised, forever suspended tantalisingly out of reach.

The British Space Programme was much as you would imagine it to have been. No golden heroes, no huge research establishments, no races for glory. As many have observed, the American / Soviet space race was an exercise in mythology as much as it was an exercise in technological advancement. As much as the control of an actual new territory was important as an objective, the rush to space can be seen as the culmination or climax of belief in technology as ideology with two systems trying to claim their position as the victors of a battle for possession of the future.

For a while, Britain sat at this table, dutifully taking the minimum stake possible to stay in the game. It’s instructive to see just how close to reality the world of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass plots actually are. The real British Space Programme followed a very similar pattern, with quiet, dignified engineers constantly accounting to the Government for every expenditure, constantly worrying and regretting their work being put to military aims, dreaming of the possibility of finally firing an inhabitant of the British Isles beyond the chimney smoke and grey skies and up into the emptiness above.

Prospero’s parents are varied. His first ancestor is Blue Streak. The bastard offspring of American technology and the British workshop pride of De Havilland of Stevenage, Blue Streak was an intermediate range ballistic missile developed as part of a treaty with the US. Commissioned in 1954, it had cost £60 million by 1960, and would have needed another £440 million to be installed in its concrete home in East Anglia. A stillborn, the world moved on while it was crafted and tinkered with, a good rocket but a poor missile. In a race to fire destruction at the enemy, Blue Streak was too dignified and stately, the next generation already threatening to arrive in the time it took Roger Bannister to run a mile.

The knowledge developed during the building of Blue Streak would eventually find it’s way into a joint project between France, Italy, Great Britain and West Germany. Naming itself The European Launcher Development Organisation, it would build Europa, a three-stage European satellite launcher, with Blue Streak as the brute force that would punch it into the blackness above. After a change to a Labour Government in October 1964, and a growing sense of economic crisis, British will reduced to carry on such costly activities. Leaving behind some test firings of Europa, and, according to this site, in the jungles of Guiana, one rocket abandoned, lying in the South American jungle, being used as a chicken coop, the British Space Programme again returned to solely British hands.

In 1965, The Labour government of Harold Wilson made a great commitment to modernisation through technology and creating a Ministry of Technology on it’s arrival in office, commissioned the Royal Aircraft Establishment to begin work on a new project: Black Arrow. This was almost fact following fiction. The RAE was a place where ideas and concepts were toyed with before being commission and put out to private contractors for production, almost an analogue of Quatermass’s British Rocket Group. Just look at the photographs on this page and tell us that they you can't imagine, just out of shot the sleek shape of the Quatermass 2 rocket. Whilst a military establishment, the RAE had a remit to explore any technologies that might deliver a future strategic advantage, so it is easy to imagine that it became home to people committed to science who tried, where possible, to shoehorn in research into matters lass aggressive and more wondrous. It was charged with the development of an all British Satellite Launcher, but only on the condition that it cost next to nothing. Black Arrow would be funded with the scraps from the table of ELDO and any budget leftovers for the UK’s purchase of Polaris missiles. Eventually, the entire budget for the project would come to £9 million pounds, a drop in the ocean of NASA spending.

It was this programme that would finally fire Prospero into history rather than the future. Designed and built in the small workshops of the British Aerospace industry, Black Arrow gradually took shape. Finally, on October 28th 1971, this precision engineered hunk of machinery manufactured and designed in the Midlands and the Home Counties posthumously blasted off from the flat plain at Woomera in Australia, three months after the Minister for Aerospace in Edward Heath’s Conservative government Frederick Corfield told the House of Commons that Black Arrow was cancelled. Spinning off from Black Arrow and on into orbit unobserved even by a camera; as a final hurrah, little Prospero proved that we could do it after all, just as the axe finally fell and consigned British Space research once more to realm of the amateur in their garden shed.

While it was the military that dreamed up the scheme and ran it, it was the men who worked at place like Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty that made it happen. As Francis Spufford explains:

“Many of the rocktmen themselves were attracted to Black Arrow precisely because it was not a weapon… They were conscientious men, committed to the defence of Britain, who were going to be relieved to find at the end of the cold War that they had not spent their lives procuring the end of the world. They preferred working on space to working on nuclear weapons because space was more innocent.

“John Scott-Scott remembers the lectures in the plant at Ansty by invited space gurus. ‘It kept us very fired up. Getting into real space one day had to be the better thing to do than just sending something to the enemy’s county, if it had to be done.’”

What is interesting about the British Space Programme is that it is unclear what exactly the reason behind it was. From as early as 1957, NASA was offering free rides into space for experimental payloads. When questioned later, Sir Morien Morgan, director of the RAE stated that he “regard(ed) these small rockets in very much the same way I regard simulators and wind tunnels”. Black Arrow, for him, was an experimental tool, a way stage on the path toward Britain’s space future. It’s possible that there was a military purpose, as an independent method of launching satellites may have conferred some advantage in negotiations with the US. What is most interesting to Archeology of the Future, though, is the possibility held out by historian David Wright as quoted by Spufford:

“I would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow. Even people who worked in the Ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science fiction stuff on the television; they dreamed too.”

In the 1950s, there had been no question that the UK would go into space. Technological advance was all around; everything seemed, in one way or another to be on an upward trajectory, pushing at the very boundaries of the possible. By the time that Black Arrow was commissioned, the focus for the space dream had already moved to the US space missions, to the race to the moon. The British Programme was already out of date and parochial. It wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t being pushed forward by a collective yearning, but by the fantasies and dreams of a small group of engineers who, raised on the very stuff of space, had sustained their wonder with the dreams of science fiction.

Francis Spufford points out that, to have spent the money to develop a proper space programme in the 1960s, the UK would have had to jettison some of its other achievements. The example that Spufford gives is all of the new universities of the 1960s. It is tempting to think that the collective yearning for space and the future that was lost or refocused found its way into the utopian architectural and cultural ideas that developed in the 1960s. Rather than trying to build the future in space, Britain tried to build the future in Britain.

As Spufford puts it, the space dream continued in hearts and dreams of those engineers and science fiction fans:

“So long as something was still happening, no matter how modest, a path could still be imagined that led from the present by many obscure twists and turns to the future in which a squadron leader drank tea on the moon… All possible futures depended on a starting-point in the present. To sustain the work of the engineers was to prevent the whole fan of futures from disappearing.”

The ghost of this dream still orbits above us now, sucking in energy from the sun. According to this article, amateur satellite trackers heard the last tiny cries of Prospero as late as 2000, a phantom voice from an aborted future…

As a postscript to this post, it seems that there is some real Archeology of the Future to be carried out on the remnants of the British Space Programme. According to this Department of Trade and Industry Committee of HM Government Report published in 2000 great hunks of Britain’s Space History are lying forgotten and overlooked including “The Spadeadam Blue Streak, rotting in a car park in a restricted area hidden from the public.” For more details see:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmtrdind/335/335ap10.htm

Real life artefacts from a future that never happened, right here right now. Even in the space of thirty years we seem to have forgotten what might have been...

Check this previous post for more information on the British Space Programme.

Click here to buy the extremely wonderful 'Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of The British Boffin' by Francis Spufford from amazon.co.uk

Technorati Tags: science fiction rockets space space history

Science Fiction and the Suburbs

2006-03-29T12:11:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you come across something that speaks to something inside of you that you didn't even know was there. In many ways the origin of this blog can be traced back to a single photograph. You can see it here. The photograph is labelled "In July 1956 Robby visited New Malden as part of a trip to promote Forbidden Planet". It appears in 'SF:UK' by Daniel O'Brien. It is one of Archeology of the Future's favourite pictures ever.

There are so many beautiful and suggestive details in it as an image that it seems to sum up something about Science Fiction and Britain that it is like a map of territory barely explored, beguiling and filled with promises of riches available to the brave adventurer should they chose to begin the journey.

The suburbs of the thirties and forties built semis are spooky places to begin with, as they represent a dream of life embodied in plasterwork and hedges and windows inset with coloured stained glass. The suburbs are quietness, control, a sunny land between city and country. They are a place where humanity is atomised and separated. The patterns of streets and houses minimise the uncomfortable sense of unpredictability that the overlapping of lives and people in The City brings. Meetings and interactions must be planned. For some this is comfort and stability, for others this constitutes an eternal stasis, waiting and longing for something, anything to happen.

Once you have walked down your driveway and closed your door, you are allowed to be anything you can dream of being. In bedrooms and garden sheds, people create whole fantasy lives for themselves. They begin the process of becoming something else, something that transforms them. In the city, everything is about interaction, whether chosen or not. Other people are unavoidable. You can become anonymous or peacock-like in the city, but you always do it in the company of The Crowd. Due to the density of people, of industry, of work and shopping and all of the other actions of human existence, the City is unpredictable. It moves and shifts on its own, far greater than the sum of individuals in it. Whatever happens happens in public in one form or another.

In the suburbs, as long as it doesn’t happen in public, anything goes. As long as your actions don’t impinge on someone else’s space, they are fine, unknown maybe but fine. You can be as radical, as regressive, as whimsical, and as normal as you wish, as long as you’re behind your own front door. The suburbs produce the eccentrics and the enthusiasts of which Britain is so celebratory.

The suburbs in Britain are like a great dream battery, a place where energies and longings collect, waiting to be put to some sort of use. People want something else, but in their houses on their own, they can never tell if anyone else wants the same.

Imagine the suburb of New Malden in 1956. The Suez crisis is in full swing. England the great is becoming tarnished, the World is minutes away from Sputnik and a sense that the heavens are far closer than they have ever been before. The Rock ‘n’ Roll years have barely begun…

Look at the children in the photograph, dressed as children might have been a decade ago. They’re quite possibly the fruit of returning soldiers, born into the optimism of the post-war period. They’re standing in that street in the gap between Quatermass 2 and Quatermass and The Pit. Everything seems calm and ordered…

And there he is, Robbie the Robot, looking bewildered, an exotic growth transplanted. How did he find his way there? Despite being a piece of high American design, he somehow looks at home; as if by sheer force of will the dreamers of the suburbs have created him there and then. Modernist design does poke its way into suburbs in the strangest places. It crops up in public buildings mostly, and the odd secluded street. There are Sci-fi curves and moulded concrete painted blinding white vying for space with Tudor fronting and muted classic flourishes. Every so often, it seems that a dream has managed to push through to make itself real.

So it is with Robbie, lost and befriended by children already alive to the possibilities of technology. Looking at their faces, they look like they have always fully expected that a robot will turn up in their street, or that something else equally exciting will occur in payment for all of the years they have waited for something exciting to happen. Robbie is a visitor in many ways adrift in a land very different from the one in which he originated. He has arrived from a land of colour, a land of noise and movement and, basket in hand, is trying to acclimatize himself to this strange world of things that are both new and old at the same time, steeped in tradition yet also freshly minted.

We defy you to look at this picture and not feel a strange and elusive magic, a sense of something difficult to define about Science Fiction and childhood and England captured and expressed.

In quiet streets, fantastic things happen…

The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary is a fundamental of UK Science Fiction.

Buy SF:UK: How British Science Fiction Changed The World at amazon.co.uk

Technorati Tags: science fiction forbidden planet suburbs

Out on the Peninsula, the future passed by...

2006-03-26T22:42:00.000+01:00

Archeology of the Future's been out and about this weekend. We took part in this project: Greenwich Emotion Map. The project itself is as Science Fiction as they come. Christian Nold, the artist, using Global Positioning System technology and measuring galvanic skin response to indicate arousal, is engaging members of the local community in building an emotion map of the Greenwich Peninsula, home to the Millennium Dome, described by Iain Sinclair as "the tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of The Royal Naval College". You walk, your arousal is recorded, along with your position, then when you get back the whole thing is combined and uploaded onto Google Earth, where it sits with the walk data from all of the other people who have taken part. The arousal appears as a series of peaks on the map like jagged mountain ranges. The higher the peak, the higher the emotion. Combined, the sum of the walks shows a topography of the Peninsula, a map of feeling with sloughs and heights, a physical/psychic landscape overlaying the real one.

We turned up on the first spring-like Sunday afternoon this year and were kitted out by Christian with a little GPS device that looked like a mobile phone and , attached to the first two fingers on our left hands, two wires that led to a little silver box that measures a tiny electric current across the skin. The more aroused we are, the more we sweat, the more conductive of current our skin becomes. Standing in a silent residential street, Christian explains with relish that there are twenty four satellites above us and that the GPS device needs to contact at least three of them to be able to locate my position. We tell him it's all a bit Science Fiction.

"I designed this stuff, so it can't be that science fiction," grins Christian. "Off you go."

Setting ourselves an hour to walk, we set off with no fixed idea of where we're going.

According to Iain Sinclair's book 'Sorry Meniscus' , the Peninsula was never a part of the Greenwich story. Formerly Bugsby's Marshes, "The Peninsula was where the nightstuff was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordinance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly sweet perfumes... The Peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone can remember much of this land has been hidden behind tall fences. Walkers held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. A site on the west of the Peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, had once featured a gibbet where the corpse of some pirate, removed from Execution Dock in Wapping, would be left to decay."

There's still ghosts on the Peninsula, the physical remnants of The Millennium and all that it did or didn't mean. The Dome itself, we noticed walking around the outside of it today, is like a tribute act to that other great Dome of national identity, The Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain. There is obviously the Dome itself, but also the struts that hold it up, each one like a child's version of the Skylon. Pressing our noses up against the fences and gazing in, there are weeds pressing up through the concrete of deserted car parks. There are empty offices, all of the furniture pushed to one end as if the Peninsula had been tipped and shaken slightly. Small pieces of wreckage, shards of scrap, metal, upended benches. All looks as if the area has been vacated in a hurry.

We walked through the millennium Village, flats and houses built to take advantage of the regeneration of the Peninsula. Modernist design, of the kind that was used for social housing, is here repackaged and resold to a much more exclusive class of dweller. Some of the huge, colourful flats a quite literally cut off, surrounded by marshland crossed with wooden walkways, as if moated. These are buildings left stranded. The regeneration never happened. The Dome opened, then it closed. There's the great sense of a boom town built by the river, only to find that the river has changed path, leaving the roads empty, the sky too wide, the streets silent and unmoving.

For all of the order imposed by the rigid, controlling architecture and traffic flow design, the Peninsula is still home to the higgledy-piggledy overlapping of different periods and types of industry so beloved of location shoots. We even saw a film crew huddled in the middle of a mud coated concrete yard, dwarfed by huge boilers, all pipes and ladders like primitive space craft now lying on their sides and rusting in the rain. There are deserted houses. There are twisting pipes and strange smells behind chainlink fences. Wharfs jut into the grey river with machinery corroded to a halt. Great machineries sprout into the sky, some with chimneys burning off excess gas. There are yards full of scrap, huge piles of rubble. We see a decaying warehouse, one side collapsed, a rusting boat nuzzling it from the water. Despite of of the rhetoric, despite the notions of control and renewal, the Millennium Project failed. For most of our walk we were the only people in sight, half expecting to see an invasion, or a lonely astronaut lost and adrift amongst the concrete. Under a mile from hyper-ordered private Island of Canary Wharf, there's a landscape that is huge moon base copy at Winnerton Flats; a landscape that is the entropic world of J.G. Ballard where even meaning has run out of energy; a landscape where the Festival of Britain collides with the scrapyard where Susan goes home each night to her Grandfather, much to the curiosity of Barbara and Ian. Arcane technologies are housed in concrete or stand on masts, rotating slowly. On the Peninsula, different futures jostle with each other, all trying to remain viable, all past.

Returning to base camp, Christian uploads our walk onto a laptop which is projected onto the wall in front of me. A jagged set of peaks cuts a serated path up to the tip of the Peninsula, like a body drawn at speed towards the dense gravitational pull of the Dome then flung back on its way. Christian shows me how to label each of the peaks, letting us add annotations to our journey. We notice how much higher our arousal has been than some of the others who have taken part.

Science Fiction has a lot to answer for.

You can see section of the Greenwich Emotion Map here, with a further explanation of the technology and method: http://www.emotionmap.net/index.htm

Buy Iain Sinclair's 'Sorry Meniscus' from amazon.co.uk here.

Technorati Tags: science fiction psychogeography london mapping

"If this is living in the future today... I'm all for it."

2006-03-24T18:56:00.000+00:00

I've never really been a fan of Gerry Anderson and his various miniature and not so miniature extravaganzas. There's a horrid air of 'gadget' hanging over them that stifles any interesting ideas they might have. For me they're always like watching a piece of pornography made for a fetish I don't have: Where there should be a shot of an actors reaction there instead is a ponderous sequence involving some spaceships or some such; where there might be a long short of the couple 'doing it' instead there is a lingering close-up of a toe... Wholely unsatisfying to me, but obviously targeted at the taste of someone, somewhere.

I couldn't resist, though, flagging up this little snippet of Sylvia Anderson trying to pass off the clothes that the women wear in 'UFO' as practical fashions. According to the obsessively neat and categorized 'UFO' fansite the clip is from, it comes from a 1970 UK TV programme "Tomorrow Today". It's interesting how much it betrays of Sylvia Anderson's attitude to actors versus puppets. To quote her: "With puppets one could decide what body, what hairstyle a puppet has exactly, how they would dress and so on. You're a little more inhibited with an actor. You can't change a tall man into a short man."

To Sylvia, it seems, all is about appearance. That's the peculiar emptiness of the Anderson canon, I suppose.

In many ways, 'UFO' is the opposite of what I'm trying to connect with on this blog. It sits in isolation, a collection of gadgets and gimmicks that don't go any further than themselves. It doesn't manage to either create an alternative world or comment on this one, it just exists for the length of time an episode lasts then vanishes. From what I remember of watching it, it was like those action comics where a world was erected for the purposes of housing six pages of inky story and then collapsed again, all of the backgrounds hastily drawn and generic, the locations sketched in very quickly. I suppose what I can't see is the point at which the world of 'UFO' jumps off from this one, our 'real' world. I very much like the idea of fictions as 'secondary realities', realities that are like our world but have deviated at certain points.

What is great about this clip, at least, is the seventies future-ness of it. At one point the model in her spangley, stretchy nylon and PVC is seen in a clothes shop not a million miles away from record shop that we see Alex in 'A Clockwork Orange' (see this post for more). What is also great is the job we see our futuristic model at, all whirring tape wheels and grey enameled computer appliances.

It's a good example of the ephemera of something being far more interesting than the thing itself.

Posting up stuff like this wanders very close to what TVCream would call 'the wrong sort of nostalgia', taking the past out of context and applying a sort of cynical jokiness to it all. It's difficult to define the wrong sort of nostalgia but you know it when you see it or hear it. It reduces the past to 'blimey, weren't they all unsophisticated, they must have known how daft this would all look in a few years time'. It is ahistorical, because it assumes that the way things seem now is the way they must have seemed then, applying the notion of ironic knowingness retrospectively. It judges everything against the sophisticated 'now' and finds it wanting.

All that said, there's also a great futuristic car / freezing cold back road sequence to be cherished. A Sylvia says: "Modern design is very practical"...

UFO fansite: http://ufoseries.com/

Technorati Tags: science fiction gerry anderson british television

Worth going to college for?

2006-03-22T18:04:00.000+00:00

The British Film Institute is a wondrously arcane institution. Living inside the National Film Theatre on London's Southbank, it fights to save the last remnants of UK moving visual culture from disappearance. Sittings in the shadows, studiously taking notes and archiving things, the BFI only occasionally sharing the fruits of its labour with the rest of us.

A case in point is this site, www.screenonline.org.uk. It's a big database of important film and television, all stuck online for us, the people. Just check out this section on British science fiction television: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/445256/index.html.

You go in and wow! There's clips and complete episodes from such treasures as Doomwatch, Day of the Triffids, Quatermass and The Pit and the masterful Survivors. You click the link, for example, on the complete first episode of Survivors, salivating at the thought of seeing Peter Bowles cough himself to death in the seventies, and then you find that you can only watch these clips if you are in an educational establishment or public library.

So near and yet so far...

If there's anyone out there who can get Archeology of the Future into their college, library or other educational establishment out of hours to watch this stuff, we'd be over the moon.

Today's photo comes from www.ilike.org.uk, a wonderful blog of lovely ephemera, of which Archeology of the Future are huge fans. The picture's linked to the site. Please go and check it out, there's much to be seen and cherished. If Archeology of the Future could chose its family, www.ilike.org.uk would be the cousin that we thought was so cool we got too embarrassed to talk to them every time we saw them at weddings and birthdays.

We've been linked by a Triffid!

2006-03-21T13:35:00.000+00:00

It's not every day that you can say that you've been highly commended for your efforts by an extra-terrestrial plant, but that's exactly what happened earlier today.

Wyndham The Triffid has posted a glowing recommendation of this blog here.

Wyndham himself seems to be a rum old Triffid, more concerned with the worries of growing old, the toll that journalism takes on the soul and the way that films are never as good as you think they're going to be than wandering menacingly through deserted suburban streets and attacking people with his poisoned tongue.

Check out the thoughts of this most unconventional murderous vegetable invader here.

There's nothing better than an apocalypse on your doorstep

2006-03-20T20:26:00.000+00:00

There's a brilliant scene in 'The Quatermass Xperiment' (Buy it at amazon.co.uk here) where Victor Caroon, the last surviving member of the first British mission into space and in the process of transforming into a plant creature, is awoken from his sleep in a river barge by a seven year old Jane Asher playing with her doll. Framed by the wildness and decay of the riverbank at what is supposed to be Deptford, they are two isolated figures in a landscape, as alone as if they were the last people on earth. What you can't see in the colourised photo of this scene is the sheer sense of disarray and an area having been forgotten about. Despite being near to the centre of London, this scene seems to take place in another, more lawless and less structured country. Being the sad fantasist that I am, I couldn’t resist going down to the riverside where Deptford Creek (The River Ravensbourne) meets the Thames. It's changed out of all recognition in the eight or so years since I arrived in London, never mind since the 1950s when they were shooting Quatermass. Even when I arrived there was decaying warehouses, dark moorings and piles of rubble where the scrub pushed through. There's a small amount of the wildness left now, but enough to give me that fantasist’s thrill. Here I was, standing where the scene was supposed to have been (or near enough), early on a Saturday morning, close enough to the location and close enough to sleep to feel myself on the border between this world and the other world of spacemen and rocketships and silent dignified astronauts fighting to retain their humanity. It was the same when I lived in Surrey and read ‘War of The Worlds’ by H.G. Wells. Walking the quiet lanes and looking out over the green valleys I could almost see the great tripods striding towards London, the smell of burning flesh catching on the warm breeze and falling to the street with the ashes. There is nothing better than seeing the apocalypse on your doorstep.

'The Quatermass Xperiment' contains one of the most poignant and potent images of what I'm trying to capture in this blog. A sleek and beautiful rocket, a sister to the Skylon, sticks into the soil of an English meadow at almost a forty-five degree angle. There is no cordon, no helicopters, no quarantine. A van, with five men is all that is sent to retrieve it. Locals take cover in memory of the war when they hear it overhead, and then look on with an almost casual interest. There is a feeling that, for these people, a rocketship seems almost commonplace, as if they are thinking 'of course there's a rocketship'. These are people who have never had it so good. The presentation of technological marvels is an everyday occurrence to them. They are almost certain that they are living in the future. There is no reason not to expect that they belong to country who, having won the war, will go on to beat the world in whatsoever it chooses. The government and it's scientists are, in this world, working away to make the future British.

In this incarnation of Quatermass, Quatermass himself reflects this. Rather than the avuncular, donnish figure he is portrayed as elsewhere, in this film he is driven. When he succeeds in dispensing with the monstrous creature that Caroon eventually becomes, he walks from Westminster Abbey, the site of Carroon's final stand, and does not stop walking. He ignores those around him, determined and hard-headed; he brushes aside questions and pleas for information. He is literally the relentless march of science. He is on the way to carry on with preparations for the next launch. Nothing will stand in his way. Compassion, celebration, sadness, and guilt: all are alien to this Quatermass. He is science as destroyer, as over-reacher. Here is the steely callousness that presents more and more technology as the answer to unreliable humanity. Ruthless scientific advancement.

Interestingly, this Quatermass, played by American Brian Donlevy, is an accident of circumstance. Nigel Kneale had intended that his first Quatermass serial would be a check to the cheery post-war optimism he saw around him in the country, but it was the Quatermass of the television serial that was the motor for that. It was only in the making of the film, which Kneale didn't have direct involvement with, that it was Quatermass that became the chilling figure he is here. Donlevy, partial to the drink and used to playing hard-nosed characters made his Quatermass inflexible and unpleasant. This has the effect of shifting the anxiety away from the sympathetic Caroon whom we see suffer and fight his transmogrification, and onto the figure of Quatermass as scientist as authoritarian.

"I could viddy myself very clear, running and running on like very light and mysterious feet, carving the whole face of the creeching world"

2006-03-13T20:04:00.000+00:00

Classic Trailers - A Clockwork Orange

I watched 'A Clockwork Orange'(Buy A Clockwork Orange from amazon.co.uk here) the other night and was surprised at just how dowdy, cold and worn out it looks. I like to think that Kubrick intended it that way as a counter point to 2001: A Space Odyssey, as if to show that for all of the grand dreams of space flight, the warm antiseptic cocoons of space stations and departure lounges, the ordinary people of the world would still be receiving a raw deal of things.

Watching it is like watching the seventies refracted through a kaleidoscope. All of the things that we consider to be so emblematic are there but in a slightly different form. Rather than being futuristic, it's contemporary to the time it was made. Kubrick is on record as stating that the locations were drawn from a survey of current architectural journals, catching the possible future as it hatched and then extrapolating its effects. Only three sets were constructed, the rest of the film shot in real buildings and locations.

Witness the Writer's home, with its split level rooms and pine cladding. The chilly clarity of Thamesmead and Brunel University are exaggerated versions of themselves, shot without warmth, the harsh lines and brutal concrete deliberately presented as alienating. The decor of the DeLarge household is high seventies modern, an explosion of plastic and glitter.

Watching it now, it's like an alternate seventies... Whilst masquerading as a film set in the future, it actually sat very much in its own present. It makes me think of the fact that none of the characters in the film know that they are 'in the future', to them it is merely the present, evidenced by Alex's parents with their archetypal British family set-up of factories and breakfasts. Despite being clad in tinfoil and garnished with moulded plastic, the life of the characters in 'A Clockwork Orange' show that as much as technology advances, many fundamentals of life remain the same. They are typically working class, transplanted as many people were, to the top of a tower poking up into a grey sky. Witness the 'People's Stylings' of the mural at the base of their block.

The Film is set in Avengerland almost, the same chilly country lanes, large villas and futuristic eruptions. There are parts where it veers toward British sitcom staples. The main prison guard, the chaplain and the prison governor could almost be moonlighting from 'Porridge'. There is nothing incompatible in 'A Clockwork Orange' that removes it from the seventies as they actually happened. This must have been evident at the time, with youth culture making it a building block, along with 'Cabaret' for Glam and later Punk.

It's a delicious thought, the idea that out in Thamesmead there actually were little Droogs at play, picking through the wreckage of a country on the wane. In the introduction to his 1974 book 'Soft City',(Buy Soft City from amazon.co.uk here) Jonathan Raban talks of a gang called The Envies haunting the South Bank praying on the cultured middle classes as they travel from the Royal Festival Hall to The Hayward to The Purcell Rooms. It's hard to resist the idea that Alex and Co. had escaped from the confines of their two dimensional prison and made it to an analog of their world, feeling immediately at home in the futurism and concrete next to the Thames. In the film there is certainly an implicit lampooning of the cultured middle classes with their self consciously modern art and exciting design and their retreat from the inner city, something oddly senile and dead in the way that they conduct themselves.

The scenes of Alex's everyday life reminded me of the consumerism of Jerry Cornelius in Michael Moorcock's series of novels and stories. The scene where Alex goes shopping in the reflective, shiny, noisy record shop with its mirrors and plastic and flashing lights, swaggering like the Elizabethan dandy he resembles could have come from Moorcock. The same with decadence of the Korova Milkbar with its achingly cutting edge mixture of sexual abandon and stylised nightclub stylings. If Alex has a close cousin in fiction it's Jerry. Both are led by boredom to escape into aesthetic violence. Both have a shocking hole where their conscience and moral bearings should be. Both enjoy dressing up. The amoral dandy as science fiction hero? I'd love to see more of Alex's everyday life in this hyper seventies.

I also, for the first time, saw the trailer for 'A Clockwork Orange', which can be viewed by clicking the link at the head of this post. It's a blinder, because it manages to put across an idea of the film without giving any firm idea of what it is will actually be seen on viewing it. Almost a lost art now...

Welcome to Avengerland

2006-03-12T22:52:00.000+00:00

According to this site, Avengerland is "the area within half an hour's drive of the Borehamwood and Pinewood film studios" which provided many of the locations for UK television programmes. Programmes such as as The Prisoner, The Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and many others seemed to inhabit a landscape made of odd, syphilitic stately homes, cold looking country roads and modernist shopping centres, factories and offices all linked by endless motorways...

If you have a flick through this site, you'll find a landscape so familiar, that other England, the England of secret bases, strange eccentics and alien invasions... For many, this other world was more real and more accessible than the actual landscape.

Quatermass would hang his head in shame...

2006-03-08T15:04:00.000+00:00

Black Arrow: British Rocket Science and the Cold War

An online seminar on the history of British Rocket Science in the post-war period. Will comment more when I get the chance. Once I do, we'll be able to see just how close old Quatermass was to the truth of matters...

"And a pub right next door to me"... "Oh no you don't."

2006-03-03T15:47:00.000+00:00

The National Archives Research, education & online exhibitions Exhibitions Public Information Films

Another Central Office of Information film, or more correctly, cartoon. Entitled 'New Town', it features Charley, a young cockernee gent on a bicycle extolling the virtues of his choice of a New Town to live in over his old home in the city. Made in 1948, this film presumably attempted to drum up demand for relocation from dirty old London to a nice, clean rational New Town. Quite excellently, it represents the growth of the New Town as being something akin to a 1940s version of Sim City, with isometric buildings and roads dropped into place on a pleasing grid pattern. Witness the city as described in this film: It's an almost exact representation of the London that George Orwell wrote about in 1984, completed the same year. It also mentions Community Centres and 'Hostels where the young people can get together'.

Charley complains of the hour it took him to get to work in the city, dragging himself into his office to a funeral dirge. As he puts it:

"Well, one day I was proper fed up with it all. It seemed to me we had made a real mess of things in our town. Still, if you can make a muck-up of things you can put them right. Boy, that's when I had a great idea. But. I wasn't the only one - oh no!"

Charley rises into the air and bursts through the roof of his workplace, to be followed by others across the city. There are obvious visual parallels here with pictorial representations of The Rapture in contemporary evangelical christian literature, with God lifting the chosen out of the strife and trouble of the earth as the apocalypse arrives. The film, therefore, seem to present the City as a kind of hell-on-earth, a mess of structureless and unplanned expansion which can be escaped by reaching the New Town in which Charley has made his home.

A further interesting point: The city and its spread into the countryside is described and represented as the spread of a disease, even going so far as to depict it as a kind of horrid amoeba only being repulsed and/or contained by the greenbelt surrounding it. When one of the characters in the film suggests moving beyond the greenbelt, it is represented on screen as if the release of spores ready to travel outward an contaminate the rest of the land.

"Yes, it's over... He's the smaller of the two"

2006-03-03T13:19:00.000+00:00

The National Archives Research, education & online exhibitions Exhibitions Public Information Films

A public information film produced by The Central Office of Information and The Observer two weeks before The Festival of Britain buildings were demolished.

There's something downbeat about it, as if it was already known that a brief moment of opportunity, a 'jumping off point' had passed. In the opening moments we see images of the future that would be so familiar later in Britain.

Despite being new and shiny, these buildings are presented as ruins or remnants, the Skylon standing like a totem for a culture already superseded. Somehow, this version of postwar optimism was already obsolete and strangely laughable. In the first thirty seconds there's a great shot of puddle with a sheet of newspaper trapped in it, underneath the canopy of the Dome of Discovery. There are strangely shaped buildings of a purpose made unclear sitting in amongst scrap metal and odd remnants. The figures in this landscape wander as if bewildered.

In the film, Patrick O' Donovan of the Observer describes the Festival, and by extension the possibilities it represents as: "Really, the place was like a gigantic toyshop for adults. It was a series of surprises; now serious, now witty, now rather vulgar, now even a little mad"

It seems to me that there's a message here about the prevailing attitude to the future present in the concrete and aluminum of the Festival, a certain desperate whimsy in the face of actual conditions. The film contrasts the Festival with the London that surrounds it, talking of darkness and drabness and churches put up 'on the cheap'.

Patrick O' Donovan paints a the visitors that seems to sum up Britain and it's relationship to the idea of progress and the future as much as it sums up the Festival:

"In among these unfamiliar shapes, there were the visitors, and they were not dwarfed by the show, they were part of it. There were the thousands of women whose feet hurt and weren´t going to give up. There were clusters of fierce little boys, filled with their secret purposes. There were suspicious housewives who wondered what they´d have to buy the disappointed ones who wanted free samples. There were the militant individualists who weren´t going to take any notice of the officious arrows, and blame the organisers when they got lost. There were the lovers that were indifferent to it all. There were people who began to feel uncomfortable yet hesitated to ask. There were cautious intellectuals who´d seen better in Stockholm and Paris There were the foreigners in un-English clothes who secretly got stared at behind their backs, while they were often amazed at this spectacle of the British at their ease. There were people who wanted tea, and people who wanted a four course dinner with two sorts of wine. And all of them in a special mood, slightly excited, slightly exaggerated. A mood that had been made by the building, the colour and the music."

As he summarises:

"Here at the South Bank there was a blueprint for new towns, light hearted, sensible, not too dear, practical and never boring... There were no resounding proud messages here, no one was taught to hate anything, At a time when nations were becoming assertive and more intolerant, here was a national exhibition that avoided these emotions, and tried to stay rational. In a bad year in the world´s history, it had a spiritual quality that is worth remembering. "

The Festival of Britain is cast as a tentative toe placed into the sea of the future, a possible direction taken where the major factors are lightness, shininess and, overall, fun. Like the Skylon, the film suggests, this future floats in isolation, unattached to the ground, an alien marvel destined never to be integrated into the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.

A shaking hand wipes Dean Jagger's pate...

2006-02-28T17:27:00.000+00:00

Watched X - The Unknown at the weekend, a phenomenal 1956 Hammer science fiction film.

Here are some preliminary notes for future exploration:

According to Jimmy Sangster, the screenwriter and production manager for the film, Dean Jagger the American actor who plays the Quatermass surrogate Dr Adam Royston, refused to work on the production because the director originally slated to produce had appeared before the House Un-American Activities committee.

There is a wonderful caption in the opening titles thanking the War Office for their kind help.

In the film, which features a hungry blob emerging from beneath the Earth's crust to feed on energy, nuclear research is carried out in what seems to be a garden shed.

Dr Royston is working on developing a way of neutralising radioactive material with a strange meccano contraption involving some panels spinning at the top of towers. He claims that he is trying to find a way of removing the energy without exploding it.

Nuclear research stations behind chainlink fences seem to be the norm in Scotland, where the film is set.

Leo McKern turns up as a kind of semi-governmental police officer who has the job of researching atomic events.

There are at least two pivotal scenes set in a church.

The military feature, with soldiers completing their national service involved in both the initial appearance of the unknown visitor and it's final destruction.

The establishment where the atomic material is seems to be a non-commercial venture, possibly government funded.

These thoughts to be expanded on later.

http://www.bmoviegraveyard.com/reviews/XTheUnknown/

Science Fiction that we like:

2006-02-28T13:34:00.000+00:00

The Politics of Space: 1 The Last Astronaut ABCtales.com

An example of the kind of UK science fiction in which we're interested. Contains allusions to various UK science fiction characters and situations alongside Walter Benjamin style meditations on ruins and ruination.