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Nicholas Roerich – Eldritch Artist

Posted on November 19, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Nicholas Roerich, 1874 – 1947

When I was in Moscow I got the chance to visit the Nicholas Roerich Art Museum. Roerich lived in the early half of the twentieth century and was part of a movement that revolutionised Russian painting. He was keenly interested in spiritualism and tried to found a new religion for the 20th century based on a combination of Western and Eastern faiths.

Russian art from the time of Peter the Great was pretty much in thrall to the salons of Europe. With the young Tsar’s reforms anything traditionally Russian was sneered at as backwards and medieval, compared to the Enlightenment sophistication of the West. The Russian aristocracy spoke French, as can be seen at the start of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Not surprisingly Napoleon’s invasion seriously dented Russia’s love affair with Parisian sophistication and, with the rise of nationalism in 19th century Europe, Russian writers and artists started to turn to their own traditions for inspiration.

Madonna Laboris – 1933

Like the British Pre-Raphaelites, Russian artists started to explore their own medieval and ancient past. The Slavophile “Wanderers” were a Moscow based art collective who not only set about rediscovering ancient arts and crafts (building furniture and the occasional church), but also linked these to social reforms. In St Petersburg painters, writers and musicians gathered around the new Symbolist magazine World of Art. One of these was Nicholas Roerich who, after befriending both Diaghilev and Stravinsky, designed the sets for the dangerously primitivist ballet The Rite of Spring, which famously caused a riot on its first performance in (of all places) Paris in 1913.

Victory (Gorynych the Serpent) – 1942

Roerich was obsessed with ancient myths and legends. In the late 1920s he went on an expedition to Tibet and Asia. By now, steeped in eldritch ideas (under the influence of the wonderfully barmy Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society) he’d created a new pantheistic ethical religion, dressed himself in prophetic robes and published numerous pamphlets on the coming spiritual dawn, when all beliefs would re-unite.

Drops of Life – 1924

Roerich’s paintings are mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931), where they are described as ‘disturbing’. They are, in fact, both beautiful and astonishing, especially the canvases he produced during and after his expedition. They often show lone figures from Slavic, Indian and Asian mythologies standing in dramatic wastelands, illustrating key events from legends. Even though many of his pictures are simple and primitivist his portrayal of light is stunning, especially in his mountainscapes. Like most Symbolist paintings they are evocative, relying on mood for effect, rather than obvious imagery or narrative. They do have a hint of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith about them, and in overall composition and colour schemes they remind me of Bruce Pennington’s artwork.

And We Do Not Fear – 1922

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in Moscow is well worth a visit and is full of paintings, carvings and records of his expeditions. There is also the Nicholas Roerich Museum in Upper Manhattan. The best monograph in English I can find is Messenger of Beauty: The Life and Visionary Art of Nicholas Roerich by Jacqueline Decter.

Mohammed the Prophet – 1925

Nemesis the Warlock – Shriekback

Posted on November 2, 2012 by John Guy Collick

The anarchist demon alien Nemesis battles the fascist minions of Torquemada

In the mid 1980s England was ruled by a right wing conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. Like Cameron’s Tories and New Labour under Blair they espoused the values of liberty and justice while simultaneously suppressing free speech and clamping down on Trade Union rights and minorities. It was the first time in the 20th century that a British government had deliberately divided the population using ‘Them and Us’ rhetoric. In the wake of the Falklands War Thatcher famously referred to striking miners as ‘The Enemy Within’, an Orwellian divide and conquer strategy used by every oppressive government since the dawn of time. With the trade unions on the run, and traditional socialist opposition in tatters there emerged a new politics of dissidence. Essentially if you create a Them and Us mentality in society and label Them as ‘deviants’ and ‘outsiders’ they, more often than not, will respond with ‘Wahay’ and then set about exposing the cracks in the dominant world picture by making lots of noise. The new discourses of protest coalesced around feminism, LGBT movements and the politics of race, which moved in to fill the gap left by the disappearance of traditional union-based protest against Thatcherite capitalism and all its ills.

Nemesis the Warlock

At this time the comic 2000AD was at the height of its popularity. 2000AD grew out of an earlier comic called Action, which itself had created controversy with its brutal, anti-authoritarian story lines and sparked a brief moral outrage similar to the Horror Comics panic of the 1950s. The main character in 2000AD was Judge Dredd, but perhaps the strip that most closely captured the spirit of the times in Thatcher’s Britain was Nemesis the Warlock, written by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill. The first strip was based directly on the song ‘Going Underground‘ by The Jam, and described the anarchic alien rebel Nemesis being chased through a transit system on a future Earth ruled by the fascist overlord Torquemada and his hooded minions. Subsequent tales made it absolutely clear that the Grand Master Torquemada’s fascist state was the direct outcome of Thatcherism. In one episode the villain channels for previous rulers like himself, including the leader of a British right wing government in the late twentieth century. The essential creed of Torquemada’s state is one of racial and ideological purity, combined with eternal vigilance. His code is summed up by ‘Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave’. By definition all non-human aliens are deviants who must be expunged from the galaxy. Nemesis, the demonic alien, leads the resistance against the forces of Torquemada, a battle that played out through ever-increasingly complex story lines.

Kevin O’Neill’s artwork bordered on the hysterically surreal

The main difference between the comic strips in 2000AD and those of, say, Marvel, was the constant current of Pythonesque humour that ran through the stories. Nemesis the Warlock is often very funny, with constant in-jokes and references to the joys of living in 1980s Britain. “Here comes my nineteenth nervous breakdown” says one citizen staring out of the window in the giant planet city of Termight. The style of the series became more extreme and violent as it progressed. Kevin O’Neill really went to town on Torquemada himself, often illustrating him surreal, hysterical detail that added to the overall feverish quality of the strip. The series finished in 1989, with a sequel volume appearing in 1999.

The 80s Indie band Shriekback were huge fans of 2000AD, especially Nemesis the Warlock. Their album Oil and Gold alternates between belting post-punk anthems to reptilian evolution, anarchy and decadence, and eerie ballads describing a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Shameful and naked, out there in the great cold outdoors we have to learn these things again” are the lyrics to the haunting track ‘Faded Flowers’. The single ‘Nemesis’ is a direct tribute to Nemesis the Warlock, with its bizarre refrain “Big Black Nemesis, Parthenogenesis, no-one move a muscle as the dead come home.” In the video to the song you can see Nemesis the Warlock himself hovering in the shadows at the back.

Shriekback

You can view the video for Shriekback’s Nemesis on YouTube

The complete Nemesis the Warlock series is available from Rebellion in three volumes, though sadly the first one appears to be out of print.

Kings of Space – Captain W. E. Johns

Posted on October 25, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Captain W. E. Johns is best known as the author of nearly a hundred books about Biggles, the pilot who started his career flying Sopwith Camels against the Hun over the trenches in World War I and who, by 1968 was foiling the nefarious deeds of British Post Office heroin smugglers when his author died of a heart attack mid-sentence. I was a massive fan of the early Biggles books. They are resolutely ripping yarns for boys, full of details of biplane warfare that only someone who’d actually flown in the first World War would know (Johns was a bomber pilot at the end of the war, and was shot down and imprisoned by the Germans). The early editions of the books are unusual for their occasional grimness, with references to booze, fags and shell shock that were removed from later, more kid-friendly editions. Biggles had a grip on multiple generations. I vividly remember being on holiday at a Whitby hotel when I was eight and an old gentleman in his 70s ( another veteran of the War to End All Wars) kept stealing my Biggles books to read until his wife shouted at him to stop.

Johns was on less firm ground when he turned his attention to space. I’ve just picked up a first edition of his book Kings of Space (1954) from my local Oxfam. This was the first of ten science fiction novels he wrote between 1954 and 1963, and describes trips to the Moon, Venus and Mars in the company of Group Captain Timothy Clinton, R.A.F., his son Rex and Professor Brane aboard the Spacemaster, a flying saucer the mad boffin has built in his shed at a remote castle in Scotland. It’s very much in the tradition of Grand Tours of the Solar System, with a handful of cardboard characters flying from planet to planet and going oooh and aaah amid long passages of scientific exposition designed to inform the young reader. In fact the book gets most of the science wrong. It’s not simply a case of astronomy being less accurate in 1954, Johns seems to make science up as he goes along and I suspect that his research came from hazy recollections of stuff he’d heard or read, rather than actual hard facts. The illustration of the solar system at the start of the book bears this out. The artist has made it look like a spiral galaxy with planets dropped in at random. The inner planets are in approximate order, on the other hand the gas giants appear to be stuck in as an afterthought by an artist who doesn’t have much of a grasp of their orbits.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Scotsman in a kilt, er, Saturn, er …

The book follows the convention whereby the nearer a planet is to the sun the younger it is. Therefore Venus is identical to Earth during the Jurassic era, with a few cavemen thrown in to liven things up. Johns’ invention deserts him here. Instead of coming up with any new monsters he merely drops in a bunch of terrestrial dinosaurs. “Pterodactyls!” exclaimed the Professor. “I have never studied paleontology closely,”, a statement that pretty well sums up the science in the whole book. The Moon has a thin atmosphere with plants and creatures “so grotesque, so uncouth” that the artist can only fall back on a painting of an armadillo to represent their utterly alien appearance. Mars is also disappointingly pedestrian. The adventurers find dying Martians who are described as tall thin chaps in Roman togas, and whose ancient civilisation (hence the togas) has succumbed to mosquitoes.

Venusian caveman gives a demonstration of How Not To Be Seen

The dialogue is wonderful, “What do you think of my welding?” is one opening conversational gambit. “Please remain seated while I make preliminary tests of the external conditions.” says the Professor when the Spacemaster lands on the Moon, “While you are waiting it might be a good moment to have a sandwich.”

The most utterly hideous alien imaginable

This sums up the whole atmosphere of the books. Like They Came from Mars, Johns’ novel reduces interplanetary travel to the same level as a Sunday afternoon stroll round the perimeter of a small English village. Local eccentrics build flying saucers, eat sandwiches on the Moon and confront interplanetary horrors with the responses of a slightly alarmed vicar. “Bless my soul!” is about as passionate as it gets. In one brilliantly Pythonesque scene in a later book, The Man Who Vanished Into Space (1963) the adventurers find the body of a Scotsman floating in the void, wearing a kilt. In my earlier post on Cockcroft’s short tale I suggested that writers like this were desperately trying to assert a comforting vision of parochial English life in a world where the British Empire no longer held sway. In Johns’ book wherever the travellers go they find the reassuringly familiar – dinosaurs on Venus, Romans on Mars, Scotsmen floating in outer space. Yet Johns was not as much of a Little Englander as he’s been painted. Like many who fought in both wars, he had enough experience of a world beyond English village life to understand that British chaps weren’t the only heroes on the planet. There are enough positive characters from other lands in his Biggles books to refute crude accusations of racism (though the extent of Johnny Foreigner’s moral worth does seem to be measured by how like a decent Englishman he is). Unfortunately in space both Johns’ imagination and his grasp of science fail him, and we are left with an odd version of The Famous Five Do Something Thrilling in Orbit.

Johns was up against it. When he penned Kings of Space, writers like Robert Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were writing books of staggering imagination. By the time his last novel in the series appeared, New Worlds was in full swing, with British science fiction and fantasy writers tackling themes of politics, sexual identity and urban psychology that would have severely alarmed Professor Brane and his chums, to say the least. Nevertheless, as an essay in nostalgia with Monty Python undertones, Kings of Space and its sequels are hard to beat.

Road to the Stars

Posted on October 19, 2012 by John Guy Collick

The British Space artist David A. Hardy has just re-released, on DVD, the rare Soviet 1957 film Road to the Stars, directed by Pavel Klushantsev. It’s available from his website, The Astroart of David Hardy for £9.50. The documentary begins with the work of the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolovsky, credited as the Russian father of rocketry, who proposed that orbital velocity could be achieved through the development of multi-stage rockets. In the second half it shows a 1950s Soviet vision of the future including life aboard a Space Station and a manned landing on the moon.

Building a space station.

This version is taken from a German print of the film. David Hardy has removed the narration and replaced it with subtitles. He’s also added a soundtrack by The Light Dreams. Personally I’d have preferred something by these guys, who I saw in performance as a kid many years ago, but you can always turn down the ambient electronic score and stick on your own copy of The Orthodox Singers: Basso Profundo, who are just as wonderful, and a bit more in keeping with the spirit of the film.

Original photo of Tsiolkovsky in traditional Russian clothes.

It’s a great documentary. One thing that is striking is the undercurrent of Russian Romanticism that runs through the movie. This first comes out in the portrayal of Tsiolkovsky. Russia has a long tradition of the itinerant wise man, and the literature and culture of the country is shot through with images of saintly yet profound thinkers, often in traditional Russian clothes, sitting in their dachas far away from the corruption of city life and thinking Great Thoughts. Leo Tolstoy (who was a contemporary of Tsiolkovksy) is perhaps the most famous example when, in later life, he formulated his own version of anarchism. In Road to the Stars the father of rocketry is portrayed in a similar way, musing in a cabin in the woods, not tinkering with big machines in a lab, which is how we usually think of space scientists. Similarly the first astronauts and the guys involved in the moon landing seem quite emotionally engaged with their experiences, waving their arms about and oohing and aahing as they step off the ladder, or float weightless in their cabin for the first time. It reminds me of one of the Russian scientists who worked on the Lunokhod Rover who said, in an interview for the BBC series The Planets, that he wanted the buggy to ‘die in beauty’ when it finally stopped working on the moon.

In the second half of Road to the Stars we see the Soviet roadmap of space exploration circa 1957, from the first men in space to a space station and, ultimately, a landing on the moon. David Hardy intersperses this with shots of paintings by Western space artists which the matte painters ‘borrowed’ for the film. There are also scenes that appear to have been directly lifted from the George Pal’s film Destination Moon (for example, a space walk scene is virtually identical), although the huge difference between the US movie and the Russian documentary is the presence of women doing jobs of equal responsibility to men in the latter. It’s no secret that Soviet Russia was not adverse to copying the West when it suited them (remember Konkordski). I think it would have been better to stick these comparisons at the end of the DVD in an extra. Although it’s interesting to see the similarities it comes across as a little bit gratuitous and breaks the flow of the original film. The imagery at the end is wonderful, plagiarised or not, and belongs to the tradition of great space artists like Chesley Bonestell and Hardy himself. The moon landscape is what have should have been, huge pointy mountains and cracked crater floors, rather than the dull grey hills of reality.

Road to the Stars is a fascinating piece of history. It’s available in PAL and NTSC DVDs from The Astroart of David Hardy.

UPDATE: The Light Dreams’ soundtrack to the film is now available for purchase separately from here.

Pop Art Spaceman

Posted on October 2, 2012 by John Guy Collick

I grew up in the Swinging Sixties, and as my parents were an architect and an artist our house was full of the latest trendy examples of art and furniture. As I mentioned before, the interior of Kubrick’s space wheel in 2001 was our lounge, without the curving floor. My mother went to Leeds College of Art and in Yorkshire at that time there was a thriving Modern Art movement in the area. David Hockney was just starting out and his early pictures were shown at the Goosewell Gallery near Bradford. In 1977 my parents bought the gallery and we ran it as such until the early 1980s, though by that time Hockney had moved on to bigger things.

Pop Art was the big movement of the 60s. Although it’s associated with major American artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, it actually began in the UK where it continued to flourish in parallel with the US version. The first Pop Art work is generally held to be Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

Pop Art focused on the concept of the Media Landscape; a world of advertising, popular icons and mass-produced commodities that increasingly defined the world we lived in, and which was rapidly becoming as significant to us as the ‘real’ world. In consumerist 60s more and more people identified themselves by what they bought and wore. Pop Art took images from this world and turned them into bold, colourful art. It’s great to look at, but it also works as a critique of a civilisation obsessed with shallow consumerism and imagery for its own sake. You can find the science fiction equivalent of Pop Art in J. G. Ballard’s middle period novels – Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and the magnificently weird The Atrocity Exhibition.

Since I was six years old this print hung on the wall of our lounge. It’s now above my desk in my study. It’s called Komtek I and is by the Bradford Pop artist Michael Fossick, who was a friend of my mother’s. It was a limited edition of 15 prints. What is interesting is that the master print is in the Smithsonian Institute, where it incorrectly states that its origin is the US (and that it was transferred from NASA). Fossick was from Bradford in Yorkshire. The blurb on the website describes how in the 1960s NASA and the US National Gallery of Art sent artists to NASA’s facilities to record what they saw, and to capture the great project that would eventually lead to man walking on the moon.

Jackson Pollock – the CIA’s favourite artist

What many don’t know is that art and US politics were closely intertwined during the Cold War, to the extent that the CIA funded modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Abstract Expressionism, long derided as meaningless modern art at its worst, was, to the spooks, a perfect example of the American Dream. It was big, bold, romantic and passionate, and the guy who did it dressed like a cowboy. By the time Pop Art came around the CIA had lost interest, the new movements were a bit too cynical and anti-establishment. Nevertheless the Pop Art print Komtek I is a fascinating example of Modern Art meeting NASA at a time when the Gemini and Apollo programs symbolised all that was great in American civilisation. The fact that it was created by a bloke from Bradford in Yorkshire makes it all the more intriguing, and Komtek I has a decided Russian feel to it.

When I was in Moscow I spotted this statue of Yuri Gagarin. It dates from the 1980s and so it’s not quite Soviet Realist, rules had relaxed a bit. I think it’s great and I wish I could get a copy to put on my desk under Komtek I. I also would like to find out who the astronaut is in Komtek I so if anyone recognises him let me know.

Under the Moons of Mars

Posted on September 26, 2012 by John Guy Collick

I’ve just got back from a trip to Moscow and was planning to write a few posts on some of the things I found there; especially the wonderful Symbolist Art of Nicholas Roerich. Then Curiosity sent back one of the most amazing space photos I’ve seen. It’s not much to look at, but for anyone who has an abiding interest in Mars, both the real and the fictional versions, this really is incredible. Have a look at the top right corner of the image below. See that white crescent? That is the moon Phobos photographed from the surface of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity Rover. It is an image taken from the surface of another world, looking up into the sky at one of two moons. If both were in the sky that would be even more mind-blowing, but this is amazing enough, I think.

A few weeks ago Curiosity also took a photograph of a partial eclipse on Mars, again with the moon Phobos. Here is the image below:

As Phobos is only a big rock it doesn’t take much of a bite out of the sun. You can learn more about the above picture in this Guardian report.

The original title for Edgar Rice Burrough’s first Martian novel, A Princess of Mars, was Under the Moons of Mars, published in the magazine All Story in 1911 under the pen-name ‘Normal Bean’. Phobos appeared in the eighth book in the series, Swords of Mars, where it’s called Thuria by the inhabitants of Mars. It’s about 15,700 Haads from Mars to Phobos, and it takes round about five Zodes to get there, just in case you were wondering. Here’s Bruce Pennington’s cover for the New English Library edition of 1972 showing one of the inhabitants of Phobos.

The reality, though uninhabited, is just as dramatic. This is a NASA photograph of Phobos taken from close up:

Of course the first picture above would be much enhanced by the silhouette of Tars Tarkas on a Thoat looking up at it. As that’s not going to happen, to finish with here’s one of Frank Frazetta’s paintings of John Carter and Dejah Thoris on Mars with both moons, Phobos and Deimos, in the background.

Update: My mistake, that’s a painting of Princess Thuvia of Mars and Carthoris of Helium, John Carter’s son, as any fule kno.

A medieval purse

Posted on September 9, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Many years ago I bought a facsimile leather late medieval wallet and coin purse from the Louvre shop in Charles de Gaulle airport. The wallet was useless. When you closed it up all your ducats fell out, but the purse was brilliant. Fill it full of coins and it was ideal for tossing onto a tavern table with a satisfying thump when buying Conan the Barbarian’s services for the weekend. Well, after five years it started to fall apart so I’ve been looking for a new one but the Louvre seemed to have stopped making them.

Fortunately I came across Crossman Crafts run by archeological illustrator Peter Crossman, who specialises in making authentic equipment from Pre-Roman times to the English Civil War era, and he made this fantastic medieval leather purse for me.

It’s cut from fine calf skin stained with a dye preparation. The thong is round leather (Peter offered me the option of more authentic square cut thongs) and the bag itself has two ears to make it easier to pull apart. At the moment the leather is stiff but once it’s softer I can keep my change in it. With the first one it was always a bit of a faff paying for things compared to fishing a handful of coins out of your pocket but it was a talking point, and looked pretty cool (to me and others with an interest in things medieval/renaissance anyway).

Here’s a picture of Peter making a wooden comb and looking like he’s just stepped out of Peasant Wedding Feast (1568) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This is at a living history demonstration, I don’t think that’s his normal work wear. He’s produced props for film and TV series (for example, The Tudors) and for Museums, including Hampton Court Palace in Richmond, London. To give you an idea of the kind of thing he works on here’s a sample of his upcoming projects:

“Another job I have on at present is causing me no less difficulty – a pair of medieval leather dog collars with suitable buckles and studs, to be carried out on a budget! I hope to finish them over the weekend and move on to some other projects… bronze thimbles, a wooden pestle, a boxwood comb, and horn dice.”

Please check out his website to see the range of historical artefacts he makes and sells for very reasonable prices.

A short while ago I wrote about King John’s House in Romsey. I managed to get access to the interior and take some photos of the 13th century graffiti I talked about. Here’s the upper room, with its wooden beam ceiling.

The walls are covered in cuts and scratch marks, presumably from when drunk lords started waving their swords about or decided to test the points of their daggers. Here are two examples of King John’s knights’ artistic endeavours.

As I said before, they were generally illiterate so they scratched heraldic coats of arms into the plaster. This is early medieval so the arms are relatively simple. It wasn’t till later that the nobles started quartering their shields and putting in all sorts of fancy stuff like rampant griffons and camelopard’s couchant with roses sticking out of their ears. The final picture seems to be an attempt at a profile of a man with a crown, possibly John himself. However the artist seems to have passed out in a puddle of mead (or been dragged away by his more sensible friends) before he completed the chin, hence the absence of a neck and the long gouge over the top of the image.

Orlando (1992)

Posted on August 31, 2012 by John Guy Collick

I’m delighted that Sally Potter’s film Orlando, based on the book by Virginia Woolf, is now available on iTunes. Orlando is one of those books that falls into the category of ‘literature therefore not science fiction’ that’s invented by snobs every time a science fiction/fantasy book by a renowned writer pops into view. Kingsley Amis reputedly penned the rhyme ”SF’s no good!” they holler ’til we’re deaf. But this is good! Well then, it’s not SF!” which pretty well sums up the sneery attitude of the literary establishment towards the genre. In fact pompous critics will jump through all sorts of semantic hoops to keep beloved literature free from the taint of SF, even if the book’s set in the future and has bloody rockets and robots in it. Therefore Brave New World and 1984 are ‘political novels’, as is The Handmaid’s Tale. J.G. Ballard’s science fiction disappeared off the shelves overnight as soon as Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun marked him out as a ‘proper author’. The whole lot re-appeared the next morning at the opposite end of the bookshop between Austen and Baudelaire with ‘SF’ scribbled out and ‘Modern Literature’ written on the spines in biro. I never forget seeing, in 1985, a renowned academic lauding the Women’s Press edition of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (Nebula Award nominee 1975) as a breakthrough type of writing.

Anyway, rant over. Orlando is about a man who lives through four centuries and turns into a woman halfway through, so it’s fantasy. So there.

Sally Potter’s film is beautiful to behold. Tilda Swinton plays the lead, Orlando, who begins as an androgynous Elizabethan young man adopted as a favourite by Elizabeth I. The Queen tells Orlando he must live forever, and so he does. We see episodes from his life in Jacobean times, (including his tragic love affair with a Russian princess) and at the start of the eighteenth century when, after an injury in Constantinople he wakes up as a woman. She then spends the next 250 years battling against misogynist prejudice that regards her sex as inferior and powerless both legally and socially. Having lost the estate given to her by Elizabeth I she ends up as a quirky writer in Thatcher’s Britain, revisiting her old home which is now a National Trust property full of Japanese tourists and, rather oddly, covered in white dust sheets.

The photography is stunning, as is the depiction of each of the successive ages that Orlando passes through. Tilda Swinton has the striking combination of porcelain beauty with the ability to convey feeling with great subtlety. Having cut her acting teeth in Derek Jarman’s avant garde films of the 1970s she’s perfectly pitched to carry the main role through several centuries and both sexes, combining a sense of vulnerability with a sense of great poise and self-control. My favourite scene is the one where she confronts Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope regarding their appalling views on women. On the few occasions when she looks directly at the camera it’s a real shock and, in the last few seconds of the film, completely hypnotic.

Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I

Sally Potter compounded the theme of sexual identity with a couple of intriguing casting decisions. Queen Elizabeth I is played by the writer and critic Quentin Crisp, author of the famous biography The Naked Civil Servant (and inspiration for Sting’s song ‘An Englishman in New York‘). Jimmy Somerville, lead singer of Bronski Beat renowned for his remarkable falsetto voice (and later, The Communards), plays a singer who greets the Queen as she arrives at Orlando’s home for a banquet. He pops up again as an angel floating above the trees in the final scene. For those old enough to remember, Bronski Beat were perhaps the first band to deal with gay issues seriously in the post-punk music world of the early 80s (as opposed to the 1970s camp stereotypes of Village People).

Orlando is a wonderful film, memorable for its beautiful photography and a stunning performance by Tilda Swinton. It’s not Total Recall, but it’s very definitely SF/Fantasy in my books.

Frontiers of Space – in memory of Neil Armstrong

Posted on August 28, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Neil Armstrong, 1930 – 2012

For me the years 1968 – 1969 were a perfect storm for three reasons. Firstly I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of seven. Not only was I entranced by the movie’s images but also beside myself with excitement at the thought that I would be alive at the grand old age of 40 when the new century rolled around, and would experience all the things happening in the film (except, I hoped, the weird hippy bit at the end). Secondly my mum banned me from watching Star Trek because she thought it was rubbish. So my sole purpose in life became, surprisingly enough, watching Star Trek, when I wasn’t playing at being Mr Spock, because he was the one I most identified with.

The third reason was, of course, the moon landing. At 8pm on July 20th 1969 I sat in front of a black and white TV and tried to make out what was happening from those fuzzy images of Neil Armstrong climbing down the leg of the LEM to stand on the Moon’s surface. One worry at the time was that the surface might be dust to the depth of several meters so when he didn’t disappear into grey quicksand I was mightily relieved.

It’s hard to explain just how profound an impact the moon landings had on people (especially boys) who were my age at the time. Every newspaper, magazine, comic and toy store sold us a vision of a near-future space age. 2001: A Space Odyssey already revealed what it would look like, pretty much the same as our own 1960s but in orbit. My dad was an architect and interior designer and we already had some of the Scandinavian designed chairs and tables that littered the interior of Kubrick’s space wheel. This was the beginning of the road that would take us at least to a moon colony, and probably the exploration of Mars.

What the future should have been. I used to eat my tea off tables like those.

Of course it never happened, and now the moon landings are history, along with the sleek formica and steel interiors of my childhood home.

In 1985 J. G. Ballard published a story ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ in Interzone. In the tale the narrator meets a beggar in Rio de Janeiro who claims to be an Apollo astronaut and who scrounges money from tourists in return for tales of his experiences. When the man dies the narrator takes his place. The UK adult comic Viz did a hilarious but poignant fake newspaper report about Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins in their post-Apollo 11 days re-forming as a comedy act called The Astronutties and performing out-of-season pier-end shows in faded UK coastal resorts. Finally here’s an intriguing anecdote by the SF/Fantasy writer Lucius Shepard about a possible encounter with Armstrong at the Neil Armstrong Museum where, according to the curator, he occasionally liked to sleep in their model of the lunar lander.

These tales carry a strong resonance for me because, in true Ballardian fashion, the remaining Apollo astronauts have become living ghosts of a future that was dead long before the last LEM touched down on the moon. Staggeringly brave, resourceful and intelligent men, they really were heroes in all senses of the word. For this reason they seem out of place in a world where manufactured celebs make up our media pantheon and ignorance is seen as cool. When I was eight I wanted to be an astronaut. Now kids want to be celebrities, but with no idea what they will do to become one.

‘That’s How It Felt To Walk On The Moon’ by Al Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut.

Andrew Smith’s book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth is a wonderful series of interview-based portraits of the Apollo astronauts, each one a very different personality and each one affected in a different way by their adventure. My favourite is Alan Bean from Apollo 12. He has spent a lot of his post-space days repeatedly painting scenes of astronauts on the moon, and you can see his work online at the Alan Bean Gallery. Other astronauts found god, became obsessed with the paranormal or suffered from alcoholism. Neil Armstrong simply kept himself to himself. By all accounts he saw his own role as minor in the context of the vast efforts that put him at the foot of the LEM’s ladder, and refused to condone the hagiography that surrounded him. Yet the first man on the moon wasn’t quite the mad recluse he was sometimes made out to be. This TV profile shows that he was perfectly happy to give detailed answers to intelligent questions in a 60 minute interview.

In 1969 I had two books, Manned Spacecraft and Frontiers of Space. The first one covered spaceflight up to that point. The second one foretold the future. What made it different from other books of this kind was its rigorously serious engineering focus. It tried, in all seriousness, to predict what would come after Apollo, based on the various projects then sitting on NASA drawing boards. The text was too dry and confusing for an 8-year old but the pictures were entrancing and entirely believable. Here are a couple of two-page spreads showing the next stages of moon and Mars exploration. The execution is scrappy but I didn’t care, to me this was my future.

Moon base circa 1978

Mars base circa 1980

For a fascinating account of how the dream of the space age was destroyed by NASA bureaucracy and Senatorial pork-barrel politics have a look at Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age by Greg Klerkx

I used to say that I didn’t want to die until I’d seen an astronaut on Mars. I don’t think that wish will come true. The way I see it now is that the Apollo missions were like Leif Erickson going to America in the 11th century. Viking exploration budgets and project management expertise weren’t really able to exploit the discovery and it was a few centuries before Europeans went back. We will send astronauts to Mars and those other places, but it may be a few hundred years away.

Off to Italy

Posted on August 19, 2012 by John Guy Collick

Just a quick couple of pieces of news:

1) There won’t be a post for a couple of weeks as I’m off on my hols to Lake Como in Italy, staying at a hotel in the beautiful village of Cernobbio. I’ve set myself the task of learning a bit of Italian as well, as Dante is one of my favourite poets and at some time in the very distant future I fancy reading him in the original.

2) The draft of Thumb is back from the editor. Positive feedback but huge amounts of work to do!! I will ponder the changes as I look over the lakes with a glass of wine in my hand and an interesting piece of local food on the end of a fork.

On and on I sped into futurity...