Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Two

Rocket 88

I don't have a very good title for this new series, but when you're going to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, you've got to settle on something. I'll begin with Rocket 88.

After World War II, weird fiction faded and science fiction and the whole culture around it began to take off. Monsters were no longer the supernatural monsters of moors and marches, nor were ghosts the haunters of castles and abbeys. Instead, the ghosts and monsters of the post-war world were those of science and technology. We encountered them in places opened up by war as well as by exploration along the frontiers of science and technology. In The Thing from Another World (1951), that frontier is in the Arctic. In It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Them! (1954), the frontier is the American West, a place dotted with World War II-era military installations, the place where atomic bombs, rockets, missiles, and jet aircraft were developed and tested. These weren't the dark, decaying, gloomy, closed-in places of weird fiction and the Gothic romance. Instead they were bright, sunny, shiny, open, futuristic.

In 1949, Oldsmobile introduced its 88 model, nicknamed Rocket 88 for its Rocket V8 engine. The Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was a popular car, so popular and recognizable in its name that it inspired a song, "Rocket 88," released in 1951, sung by Jackie Brenston, and backed by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Like the car, the song was a hit. There were car songs before it, but this was a big one. Some people call it the first rock 'n' roll record. It's nice to think that rock 'n' roll started with a car song.

In its advertising, Oldsmobile tied its Rocket 88 to its namesake technology. For example:

Thirty-four years later, artist Dave Stevens created the following cover for Planet Comics in its issue of July 1984:

The print of this illustration is entitled "Rocket 88" after the emblem on the fuselage. Notice that the riders in each of these two pictures are two in number and in roughly the same posture and position. I wouldn't call this a swipe. Instead, it looks like the first picture inspired the second, or call it a variation or an homage. Notice that the blonde pilot in the second picture is wearing a Nazi-like hat like a British New Wave singer or musician of the same period. (As I write, New Order has come on the radio. I was thinking of Modern English, but my psychic powers aren't strong enough to make that happen.) This comic book was published in the same year as Neuromancer by William Gibson. Don't you wish we had 1980s culture back? 

By the way, Planet Comics was a revival of a comic book title in print from 1940 to 1953. The original Planet Comics was the first science fiction comic book and a spinoff of the science fiction pulp magazine Planet Stories. Ray Bradbury and Leigh Bracket were among the authors published in Planet Stories.

Here is a poster design for Rocket 88, a local band in Wisconsin from 1972 to the 1990s or after. Notice the influence of artist Jack Davis, also of underground comics:

I'm afraid I don't know the name of the artist.

Americans have tested not only rockets, missiles, and jet airplanes in the Desert West. We have also tested automobiles. In 1953, General Motors opened its new automobile proving grounds just outside of Mesa, Arizona. Those proving grounds are no longer in operation. In their place are maze-like subdivisions with science-, space-, and technology-related names: Neutron Point, Wavelength Park, Lunar Green Park. If you have ever watched American car commercials, you are familiar with all of the scenes shot in the Desert West. Automobiles go with the West like a-bombs at Trinity, the Bell XS-1 at Muroc Army Air Field, V-2 rockets at White Sands Proving Grounds, and giant ants in the tunnels under Los Angeles.*

Automobiles and rockets were tested on the salt flats and dry lake beds of the American West. In the 1950s, cars were made to look like rockets with their chrome trim and nosecones and trailing fins. I remember our neighbor, Mr. Sherman, who had a giant 1950s light blue Cadillac. (I think it was an El Dorado Seville, circa 1956.) One time he forgot to put it into park. After he went in the house, his car rolled down the driveway and with a crash speared a parked car at the bottom with its short, heavy fins. Mr. Sherman came out of the house and drove his car back up the driveway. He went back inside, and that seemed to be the end of it. His car was untouched. No such luck for the 1970s car on the receiving end of the crash. Anyway, from the 1950s to the 1970s, cars were named after spacecraft and celestial bodies: Ford Galaxie 500, Mercury Comet, Oldsmobile Rocket 88, Oldsmobile Starfire, Plymouth Satellite, Pontiac Star Chief, Studebaker Starlight, and from the advertisement in the previous entry, Chevrolet Nova and Chevrolet Vega. The Saturn line came along about a decade later. The point is that there were clear connections made between cars and rockets, and between cars and outer space. There were also connections between these things and other aspects of popular culture, including music, comic books, and science fiction. For example, in July 1979, the B-52s issued a single called "Planet Claire," which begins with these lyrics:

She came from Planet Claire
I knew she came from there
She drove a Plymouth Satellite
Oh, faster than the speed of light . . . .

So here is a science-fictional rock song played by a band named after a superfast jet airplane from the 1950s--with eight engines no less--in which the subject drives a Plymouth Satellite. The only thing missing in all of this is a comic book. But there will be another one of those in almost no time at all.

Hold onto the idea of the science-fictional automobile.

(As an aside, the U.S. Air Force rolled out the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in March 1954. It was preceded by the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, which had its first flight on July 8, 1947, the same day that the U.S. Army announced that it had recovered the remains of a flying disc near Roswell, New Mexico. The Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, named for one kind of airplane or another, made its debut in the same year as the B-52 Stratofortress, 1954.)

From 1960 to 1979-1980, the Oldsmobile emblem was a rocket blasting out of a cartouche. Maybe you remember it:

I wanted a simpler graphic representation. You will see why in 10, 9, 8, 7 . . .

If you're a fan of 1950s science fiction, maybe you'll recognize the rocketship emblem:

This one was on the spine of the Winston Science Fiction series of juvenile novels published from 1952 to 1960. That series was graced by the artwork of former comic book artist Alex Schomburg and included the images of many, many rocketships.

Here's another rocketship blasting off into space:

Weird still had some cachet in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Sometimes it was paired with superheroes (Captain America's Weird Tales, 1949-1950), more often with science fiction and fantasy as in EC Comics' Weird Science (1950-1953), Weird Fantasy (1950-1953), and Weird Science-Fantasy (1954-1955). Above is the cover of Weird Science-Fantasy #24, published in June 1954, with cover art by Al Feldstein. The rocket design in the left margin was a standard feature of that title. By the way, Jack Davis, mentioned above, also worked on EC Comics. By the way again, Weird Tales magazine came to an end in September 1954, just two months after this comic book was published. Science fiction magazines lived on.

The first time I ever heard the word modockin, I was a student at a flatland high school in Indiana. A friend named Greg used it a lot. I knew what it meant by the context. It means to drive really fast or for a car to run really fast. I thought I knew its origin. For years I thought it was in reference to a place in California where jet airplanes and maybe rocket sleds were tested. But that was Muroc, not Modoc. Muroc is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 1947, a month after the U.S. Air Force was created and the same year in which the first flying saucers were sighted. You could say that in his flight he was really modockin.

If you look on the Internet, you will see that the word modockin is supposed to be from Modoc Brothers Trucking, which supposedly operated in Indiana and Illinois back in the old days, whenever that was. I haven't found any mention of the modockin Modoc Brothers in old newspaper accounts. I did find, though, that there was a racehorse called Modockin in the 1960s. Before that, there was a song, "Modockin" by the Silver Jets, recorded in 1962 in Frankfort, Indiana, and released by Parr Records. (I think it was actually a rock instrumental.) The Silver Jets were a local band in Frankfort. In 1962, they shared a bill with Roy Orbison at Shady Acres auditorium outside of Mulberry, Indiana. Mulberry, by the way, was the birthplace of brothers Vesto M. Slipher (1875-1969) and Earl C. Slipher (1883-1964), both of whom were astronomers. They didn't do any modockin themselves as far as I know, but they studied celestial objects that have a lot of get up and go. These two non-modockin brothers have a crater of the moon and an asteroid named after them. Anyway, the word modockin has its Indiana connection, maybe in fact has its origins in the Hoosier State. I also found that there is a school in Modoc, Indiana, called Union Junior/Senior High School. Guess what the name of their school mascot is. Believe it or not, it's the Rockets!

Watch them blast off!

*The non-science fiction equivalent of Them! might be He Walked by Night (1948), in which a man who may be a sociopath is finally tracked down in the tunnels under Los Angeles. The sociopath or psychopath--recognizable, describable, diagnosable by science--can be interpreted as a monster of science and suitable for the post-weird fiction twentieth century.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 by Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part One

Introduction

I write on July 3rd. In a few hours, the day of our 250th birthday will begin.

I have readers from all over the world. Some of you may think that my last entry, posted this morning at the tick of midnight, was a little negative. You may have a point. I wrote more obviously about what America is not rather than what it is. But I was trying to make a point, which is that we in America feel that many other nations--including nations that Americans died to help liberate or to help protect from tyranny--are drifting from freedom. We are alarmed. We want other nations to wake up before they drift too far. In beginning with a metaphor, I will say that if you fall asleep at the wheel--worse yet, if you let a self-destructive person drive your car with you in it--then you are in peril. You must leap into wakefulness and regain control if you are to survive. In beginning this new series, I would like to offer something of what America is rather that what it is not.

What America is can be summed up in one word: Freedom.

Some of you--whether American or not--may scoff. If you're not an American and you scoff, you should ask yourselves why so many of your countrymen wish to come here. You should ask yourselves why America continues to be so successful when other countries--perhaps including your own--have faltered. If you're an American, you should hear yourself as you exercise your freedom to scoff at the idea that America is the land of freedom. There are many countries in this world, including supposedly free countries in western Europe--countries that hold the graves of American soldiers--in which you are not permitted to speak freely, to speak ill of your government or its ways, or even to speak the truth or simple facts without fear of punishment.

I wish I could tell you what it means for us to reach this anniversary. We are proud of ourselves and our nation. We have every reason to feel that way. We, the American people, have accomplished so much in our time on this earth. But we also rightly and more accurately feel humble, for none of this was guaranteed. We have risked much and sacrificed much. Two hundred and fifty years ago, we entered into a great compact. We have again and again rededicated ourselves to that compact and to these propositions:

"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In that time, we have also continued in our efforts--in words written a dozen years later--to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." These blessings have come to us from that same Creator who endowed us with our rights. We recognize that we are not our own gods, for there can be only One. Again, none of this was guaranteed.

We are blessed because of the compact we have made. If we were to break that compact, it would all come crashing down. And so we must rededicate ourselves every day, most especially and most acutely on our Day of Independence, to hold to our founding ideals. On this and every day, we must devote ourselves, we must resolve--in words spoken fourscore and seven years after July 4, 1776--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

I wish I could tell you. But this is our sacred secular holiday, and maybe only we can feel it.

I invite good feelings from you and wish you well in your own quests to be free.

* * *

For three years in a row, I moved on July 4th. In one of those moves, I drove through a dark Missouri night and watched fireworks go off if the far distance, like meteors burning through the atmosphere, a celestial event over earthly places unknown to me, then or later. In America, we connect driving to freedom, cars to freedom, mobility to freedom. It was fitting that I drove to a new place and started a new life on Independence Day. Freedom includes freedom of movement. It helps that we can in America drive 10,000 miles--I did that two and a half years later--without once being stopped to have someone check our passports or papers. In America we don't have papers. Papers are a part of unfreedom. Free people go where they want without having to check in, without being tracked, without being held to account for any (legal) thing they do, or any place they go, or how long they spend there. Cars and driving and being on the road are part of being American. And so in this series I will write about these things, about automobiles and music and rocketships, once again about freedom and tyranny, and about two kinds of fiction, weird and science.

To be continued . . .

"Spirit of America," an advertisement for Chevrolet from 1974, getting ready, I guess, for the American Bicentennial, never mind the egregious misspelling. There's a line between celebration and economic exploitation (exploitation in the neutral sense). The advertisement above seems to have crossed that line. Nevertheless, it's a nice bit of nostalgia. I would take any one of these cars now, even the Vega. By the way, Nova and Vega are astronomical names. There will be more of those in this series.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

250 Years of Freedom & Independence!

Two hundred fifty years ago today, fifty-six men then assembled in Philadelphia and representing the Thirteen Colonies unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence by which we separated ourselves from the Old World and its ways. American Independence and everything upon which it is predicated and all that it entails is one of the most radical events in human history. It is such a miraculous development that perhaps only the intervention of Divine Providence can explain it. Fifty years ago, the Old World sent its tall ships to America. Now it sends its soccer players and fans, and we welcome them. Perhaps this will give them a view of what is possible once a people and a nation break through the iron-hard bounds of the past, throw off their tyrannical governments, and embrace the rights and freedoms and dignity inherent in every individual person who has ever lived and ever will live. Today we celebrate Independence Day.

Independence Day the movie was released thirty years ago, on June 25, 1996, or the day after Flying Saucer Day. I don't know whether that release date was intended to match an anniversary. Now we have Disclosure Day, which was released in the United States on June 12, 2026, or twelve days before Flying Saucer Day. The initial showing was in Paris. Five out of the six leads are British or Irish. So we have an American movie about an American phenomenon, and yet it was first shown overseas and its actors and actresses are from lands we left behind. Curious.

Disclosure Day involves psychic powers and mind control. In other words, it is not a science fiction movie, for there isn't any science in these things. Psychic powers and mind control are, in scientific terms, nonsense. Physicists talk about all kinds of forces and brands of matter and energy supposedly at work among the stars. Some of these are propositions only. They are not known to exist. And yet they have been set forth and are discussed and considered as scientific possibilities. In contrast, no one has ever proposed a scientifically plausible means of communicating psychically, viewing remotely, moving things with the mind, or any other psychic exercise. Again, in scientific terms, these things are nonsense. In the real world, the idea of psychic powers draws charlatans, or maybe more charitably we can call them performers.

Psychic powers have been a staple in science fiction since at least the Golden Age of the 1930s through the 1950s. But they are not science, and they don't belong in proper science fiction. Call them something else if you'd like, but they're not science fiction. Write about them in some other genre, but don't call it science fiction. Use them in your movie, but don't try to pass it off as a work of science fiction. Beyond any of that, to use psychic powers in a supposed science fiction film at this late date is the equivalent of having a character wake up completely unharmed after being knocked over the head with the butt of a pistol, or, alternatively, developing amnesia from a blow to the head, or having an evil twin, or any other of the very hoary clichés and conventions from decades ago and all of the cheap melodramas of the past. These are not serious ideas. They are instead shortcuts and easy ways out for the unimaginative screenwriter. If you have every possible story to tell about aliens on Earth, why are you writing about psychic powers?

My understanding is that Disclosure Day is also about the contactee and abductee phenomena, which are among the shabbiest (re.: contactees) and saddest (re.: abductees) aspects of the flying saucer story. (In the 1950s, there was a split between those who wanted to study UFOs as a hard, physical, aerial phenomenon and others who wanted to talk about "occupants.") In one advertisement I have seen for Disclosure Day, there is an image of a crop circle. Crop circles are British. They are not part the flying saucer story in America. They really don't belong in an American movie. (That was one of the flaws in the movie Signs, from 2002.) Finally, there are conspiracy theories in Disclosure Day, theories that, in the real world, are or tend to be shabby as well.

So: two movies about two days, a positive and triumphant Independence Day and a paranoid, conspiracy-minded Disclosure Day. How things have changed in the past thirty years. But those of us who remember things from thirty years ago already knew this.

For full disclosure, I have not seen Disclosure Day. But when I heard a review on the radio and it mentioned psychic powers and mind control, I immediately turned against it in my own mind. If I could have sent a psychic message to the moviemakers, I would have. Anyway, if I get a chance, I'll watch it. Maybe it won't be so bad after all.

* * *

Now some facts about America versus the United Kingdom, Europe, and the rest of the Old World:

A quote from: "As Summer Begins, Let’s Give Thanks For A Life-Saving American Invention: Air Conditioning" by the Issues & Insights Editorial Board, June 10, 2026, at the following URL:

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/06/10/as-summer-begins-lets-give-thanks-for-a-life-saving-american-invention-air-conditioning/

Compare the U.S. total [of heat-related deaths] to the EU [European Union], where there are regularly far more deaths from heat than in the U.S. Last year, for example, from June through September, the EU had 62,755 heat-related deaths, or 26 times more than the U.S. in 2024. Here’s another shocking statistic: The EU heat-death total is more than total U.S. deaths annually from gun violence (44,447 for all of 2024).

In other words, Europe sacrifices its people in order to propitiate the gods of global warming. Meanwhile, we in America fend off so many heat-related deaths by comporting ourselves with reality. In Europe, people die for the sake of what European elites call progress. In America, people live and thrive by real progress.

* * *

A quote from: "America at 250: The Greatest Compounding Machine In History" by Meb Faber, dated June 10, 2026, on the website Real Clear Markets at the following URL:

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2026/06/10/america_at_250_the_greatest_compounding_machine_in_history_1187441.html

Since 1800, $1 invested in U.S. equities would have grown to more than $200 million today. Over that same period, the rest of the world combined turned $1 into roughly $2 million. The gap isn't incremental; it's exponential. As Charles Ellis observed, time is Archimedes' lever in investing--and no nation has pulled that lever longer or harder than America. [Boldface added.]

Other nations have squandered their resources on war, attempts at empire-building, schemes of social engineering, the creation and maintenance, such as it is, of welfare states, and various isms, including statism, globalism, internationalism, multiculturalism, and experiments in various brands of socialism and other harmful and destructive ideologies. Under socialism, the deaths and suffering of countless millions, if not billions, are considered historical necessities. They are considered necessary for our march into glorious futures. Now European governments seem determined to destroy their own nations and their own peoples by, among other things, letting in hostile invaders and welfare colonists from other lands. All of these things are also called progress. Meanwhile, Americans have built, maintained, and continuously improved upon a successful, powerful, and enduring means of generating wealth for everyone interested and of raising countless millions, if not billions, out of poverty. You're welcome, Europe and the World.

* * *

According to various sources: the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of Alabama is greater than that of Canada.

According to various other sources: the per capita GDP of Mississippi is greater than that of the United Kingdom. In other words, if the United Kingdom were a state, it would rank 51st in per capita GDP.

According to the World Bank and the United Nations: the per capita GDP of West Virginia is greater than that of Germany.

In other words, three of our southern states (if West Virginia is a southern state), which our elites tell us are full of backward and ignorant people, are outperforming three of the world's supposedly great economies on a per capita basis. I think we can lay the blame once again at the feet of socialists and other progressives, but there are plenty of others to blame, too, including global warmists and, in the Venn diagram of progressivism, the overlapping globalists who prefer foreign invaders and colonists from afar--especially members of the religion of pieces--to their own people. They try to shed blame, of course. To them, these things are also known as progress.

* * *

Finally, according to various sources: the fifth leading cause of death in Canada is assisted suicide, or state-sponsored euthanasia, in other words, murder.

The United States has invaded Canada twice in hopes of bringing that British-oid nation into the fold of American freedom. Both times they sent us packing. But we don't want them now if they're going to remain in the business of murdering their own people, who can no longer be considered citizens but instead have been reduced to serfs, or something even lower than that in the great chain of being. Call them instead livestock. One explanation for this kind of thing is that a suicidal nation will encourage suicide in its people.

I said we don't want them, but I guess we'll take Alberta if that comes about.

* * *

Thank God and thank the Founding Fathers and all of the Patriots of the Revolutionary Era that we separated ourselves from the madness, murder, tyranny, and oppression of Great Britain, Europe, and their now worldwide ideological satellites. Once again, America, the Empire of Liberty, stands alone. And still we will stand, I hope for hundreds of more years to come, for as long as we remain the indispensable nation and dedicated to the propositions stated so profoundly and eloquently in our Declaration of Independence.

Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1942, with cover art by Charles de Feo (1891-1978).

Happy Independence Day, America!

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Another Neuromancer Coda

In this Columbo world, there is always one more thing. I thought I had finished writing about William Gibson and Neuromancer (1984). But serendipity (or weird) had something else in mind for me when I found a collection of science fiction stories at a local secondhand store a few weeks ago. It's called The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection, and it was published in 1985 by Bluejay Books of New York. The editor was Gardner Dozois (1947-2018).

The late Mr. Dozois entitled his introduction "Summation: 1984." Yes, this book is about 1984, the year in which George Orwell's novel of 1949 is set and the year in which Neuromancer was published. Gardner Dozois obviously admired Mr. Gibson and his book. Mr. Dozois mentioned them at least a couple of times in his introduction, beginning with this:

As I explained in last year's anthology, new talent seems to enter the SF world in waves, discrete generational groupings, usually at five-to-ten-year intervals. Now, at the beginning of the '80s, we are clearly in the process of assimilating yet another generational wave of hot new writers, and in the years to come you will be hearing a whole lot more about writers such as William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear [. . .]

and so on. (Boldface added.) (p. 11)

I have been writing about generations and waves. Now here they are together in the same place. In the very next paragraph, the term and concept cyberpunk makes its appearance. The editor referred to a group of writers--"Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear"--as "cyberpunks." I can't say just when the idea that certain authors were "cyberpunks" began, but this must have been an early occurrence.

Mr. Dozois listed the books he had read during 1984. He wrote: "I was most impressed by: Neuromancer [by] William Gibson," and then went on into a long list. But Neuromancer was first. Mr. Gibson's story in this collection is "New Rose Hotel," originally in Omni in July 1984. In his introduction to "New Rose Hotel," the editor expressed his admiration again for William Gibson and his work. He described the story as "a typically fast-paced and hard-edged tour through the decadent high-tech underworld of the future." (p. 207) I have added emphasis to the word decadent, as I have also been writing on that topic lately.

* * *

As I was looking over this new-old addition to my library, I studied the illustration on the front cover. (See below.) Something caught my attention. "What is that?" I said out loud. "What is that?" You might say the same thing when you look at the upper left of the illustration, for there you will see an explosion at the top of one of the twin towers. Just what is happening there, I can't say. Maybe it's an event from one of the stories in the book. Or maybe the illustrator, Thomas Kidd, had a vision of the future.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

From Punk to Cyberpunk

Billy Idol was born on November 30, 1955. If he were an American, that would make him a Baby Boomer. Maybe that makes him a Boomer in his native country, too. Despite that, he belonged to a band called Generation X, or Gen X. Generation X was not named for Generation X, the truncated generation that came after the Baby Boom of 1946 to 1964. Instead the band was named for a book called Generation X by British journalists Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett, published in 1964, or the last year of the Baby Boom. Billy Idol was a fan of the Sex Pistols. They were all Boomers, too. The Sex Pistols were of course punk rockers. Generation X was a punk band, too.

Billy Idol is more well known for his solo career, which began in 1981. One of his songs was "Eyes Without a Face," released in 1984. The title is from the film of the same name, Les yeux sans visage in the original, which was released in 1960. That was during the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema, but I'm not sure that it was in the mode of Nouvelle Vague. I have never seen Eyes Without a Face. It's considered a horror movie, but as we know, weird fiction is called horror because nobody knows what weird fiction is. Maybe Eyes Without a Face is actually a weird story. Anyway, the film is supposed to have been influenced by Jean Cocteau. Without knowing it, he lent his name to Cocteau Twins, who were not a punk band exactly but who were supposed to have been punk-influenced in their early days. Early on, music critics compared them to Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus. Like the Thompson Twins, Cocteau Twins were not twins, there weren't two of them (after 1981), they weren't related, and none of them was named Cocteau (or Thompson). By the way, the Thompson Twins got their name from the comic strip Tintin. By the way, Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins collaborated with Harold Budd, about whom I wrote on February 4, 2021, here.

Billy Idol's sixth album was called Cyberpunk. It was released on June 28, 1993, so 33 years ago today. Since then, the earth has made as many trips around the sun as an LP makes around its spindle in a single minute, minus one-third. Cyberpunk is a concept album, but it was more than that at its release. Reading about it now leads me to think that it was a multifaceted and extremely complex project. But I have never heard it and don't remember its release. Cyberpunk was of course based on the culture of the same name from the 1980s and '90s, if there really was such a thing. William Gibson was a seminal figure in cyberpunk. There is a song on Cyberpunk called "Neuromancer." Cyberpunk wasn't very well received, I guess. I'm not sure that the real cyberpunks, if that was a term, would have recognized themselves or their culture in it. Whatever else might be true, you can't ding an artist for trying something really big and ambitious. If nothing else, Cyberpunk is a museum piece from the 1990s, a decade--the Generation X decade--that now, sadly, lies more than a quarter-century in the past.

So the first part of Billy Idol's career spanned from punk to cyberpunk.*

* * *

This entry is Wikipedia-ized research. It's a cheap kind of research, but oh well. It's better than AI research and better than AI writing. Anyway, Wikipedia has a list of supposedly cyberpunk films. One of them is Freejack, from 1992. One of the stars was Mick Jagger, who did not after all bail Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols out of jail in 1979. Freejack was based on Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley (1959). As it turns out, George Harrison watched an adaptation of Immortality, Inc. on British television in January 1969. I wrote about that encounter in this space on December 5, 2021. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Robert Sheckley was not explicitly a New Wave author, but he might have been closer to that movement than to the more positive science fiction of the Golden Age that preceded it. (If the Golden Age was like the Baby Boom, then maybe the New Wave was like Generation X.) Strangely, Sheckley lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, which is where Sid Vicious lived as a child. They were there at two different times, but time travel would have allowed them to live there at the same time. Maybe the past is all one time all wrapped up together.

I have just completed two long series on the British New Wave in science fiction, punk music, New Wave music, and cyberpunk. This has been going on since April. I have written about William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (1984). I have also written about J.G. Ballard, who was a New Wave author. Now I have another connection among these various topics. From "An Interview with William Gibson," conducted by Larry McCaffery, at the following URL:

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html

[Larry McCaffery]: How consciously do you see yourself operating outside the mainstream of American SF?

[William Gibson]: A lot of what I've written so far is a conscious reaction to what I felt SF--especially American SF--had become by the time I started writing in the late '70s. In fact, I felt I was writing so far outside the mainstream that my highest goal was to become a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser [J.G.] Ballard.

And that will have to do for now. [Update: Except for one more coda and the following essay-length footnote.]

-----

A pre-publication update:

*Billy Idol was also the inspiration for the look of the original cyberpunk, Rayno in Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk," published in Amazing Stories in November 1983. See "The Etymology of 'Cyberpunk'" by Bruce Bethke (1997). By the way, the editor of Amazing Stories at the time--the man who bought "Cyberpunk"--was George H. Scithers (1929-2010), later the co-editor of Weird Tales, from 1988 to 1990 and from 1998 to 2007.

In his forward to "Cyberpunk," from 1997, Mr. Bethke wrote:

IMPORTANT POINT! I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Norman Spinrad argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.) [Boldface added.]

The reference appears to be to "The Neuromantics" by Norman Spinrad, published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in May 1986. Gardner Dozois was the editor. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

[. . .] Spinrad argued cogently that the "romance" component of Gibson's triple-punning title Neuromancer ("neuro" as in nervous system; "necromancer"; "new romancer") is basic to the cyberpunk form. Spinrad proposed ingeniously that the cyberpunk authors should in fact be called "neuromantics" (nobody seems to have taken him up on this), for their fiction is "a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology." (Spinrad sees romanticism and science as having been damagingly split during the New Wave vs Hard SF [c.f.] debates of the 1960s; only with cyberpunk, he argues, did they fuse together again.)

That goes along with what I have been writing lately, but like I said before, there aren't very many original ideas left. Most of the time we just rework what others have written before us. Maybe that's what I have done regarding Norman Spinrad's essay from forty years ago. But I confess I have never read it. (In what I have written lately, I have not touched at all on the detective--specifically Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe--as a romantic hero--a knight errant--and an inspiration for later science fictions, but that idea has continued to occupy a spot in my little brain.)

Anyway, I have three more things:

First, Bruce Bethke (born in 1955, he is the same age as Billy Idol) is (or was) a musician. In his introduction to "Cyberpunk," George Scithers wrote: "His avocation is computer/electronic music." He is also a software developer, and so we have another example of the fusion of music and technology as in the British New Wave of the late 1970s and 1980s. (By the way, composer, pianist, electronic musician, and sound designer Suzanne Ciani was born 80 years ago this month--in Indiana no less--and so I would like to say happy birthday to her.)

Second, in reading the beginning of "Cyberpunk," I was reminded of the song "Slip Kid" by The Who, originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project--can we call that project an example of proto-cyberpunk?--less so of "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles.

Third, I just remembered that I wrote a dystopian/detective/computer-hacker science fiction story at around the same time that "Cyberpunk" and Neuromancer were published without having known about either one. Now I'll have to dig it out and read it again.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Coda

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) opens like George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and of course other books, too, with an establishment of mood, atmosphere, tone, and setting. In Neuromancer, as the protagonist Case enters a bar, the sky is "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." In 1984, on a bright, cold, windy day in April, Winston Smith walks up to his flat where a telescreen is droning its ceaseless streams of information. He looks out the window and sees that "though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything [. . .]." There is in the beginning of both works colorlessness and the imagery of the electronic screen. (1, 2)

There are brandnames in Neuromancer. I remember that from my first and only reading of it many years ago. I thought I had remembered the bartender's arm as having a brandname. Instead there is only a description of it, but that works just as well:

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

That sounds like a commercial. Get yours today.

There is a branded place of the future in Neuromancer. It's called Chatsubo. It's a bar, a place for people to gather, drink, and talk. There is also a branded drink, Kirin, which exists in our world of today. There are other brandnames after that. Just keep reading.

In 1984, there is also a branded drink, Victory Gin, a "colourless liquid" that gives off "a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit." (Drinks in these colorless places originate in the Orient. I wonder what that could mean.) Most of the other proper nouns in that story have to do with Big Brother, the organs of the State, and the institutions of slavery, hatred, and oppression. There aren't any choices to be made. You take exactly what's given to you.

Neuromancer takes place in what I guess you could call a capitalistic society. It's no wonder that there would be brandnames and futuristic product placement. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a monopolistic society. There isn't any need for brandnames, for there is only one of everything and sometimes zero of everything, for there are usually shortages, an identifying feature of socialist economies.

The branded products in Neuromancer are of the imagination, even if they might be real today. The author may have partaken of Kirin, but his purpose in mentioning it isn't to get you to buy it, or to put his own status or knowing or consumer skills on display. It is instead literary or artistic. It has nothing to do with himself. If he has seen nine billion commercials in a lifetime of watching TV, he isn't letting us know that. It's clear that commercialism and consumerism haven't gotten into his brain.

In contrast, brandnames and product placement are everywhere today, in people's everyday language and perhaps most annoyingly in their fiction-writing and storytelling. People that you meet will even show you on their branded phones pictures of the branded products they have consumed, and they will tell you the brandnames of the places where they purchased those branded products.

The use of brandnames in Neuromancer doesn't serve the same purpose as in genre fiction of today, which is, truth be told, wholly consumeristic and commercialistic. Genre writers, for example those in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023), seem unaware that their brains have been taken over by large corporations and that they are offering free advertising for the various brands they have placed in their stories. They have been the watchers of nine billion commercials in which the nine billion names of products have been catalogued, and they can't or won't turn off their TV brains long enough to write, simply, a story. They just have to include their favorite brandnames in their prose. If I can stretch that metaphor past the breaking point, although their televisions have never been "tuned to a dead channel," their thoughts are as dull as the Neuromancer sky and as colorless as Victory Gin. I want to tell them: physical objects are not characters. They don't need names. They do not take action. They are inert. We as readers do not take any interest in them. And yet contemporary authors expect that brandnames will offer color and carry the weight of description, or even the weight of the story for them, completely oblivious to the fact that brandnames are not up to the task.  And these are professional writers.

Science fiction has as one of its purposes satire. Dystopian fiction is very often satirical, even when it is grim. Nineteen Eighty-Four is both grim and bitterly satirical. Neuromancer can be seen as satirical, too, though slightly less grim. At the end of April this year, at around the time the clock struck nineteen, we gathered in a bar for our monthly weird fiction/science fiction bookclub. (The bartender there does not have a prosthetic arm.) This April we read stories by J.G. Ballard, an author associated with the British New Wave. One of the stories we read is "The Subliminal Man," originally in New Worlds Science Fiction in January 1963. "The Subliminal Man" is about advertising and marketing, moreover about mindless and inexhaustible consumption. It's a funny, pointed, and utterly accurate story about the future, i.e., our present. For example, in the story, so many boxes arrive so rapidly at the protagonist's house that he and his wife don't even know what's in them. They sit unopened as more boxes arrive. Consider that in your own life. As you have been reading this, there have probably been more boxes arriving on your doorstep. You'd better fetch them soon so that there's enough room for the next box to arrive.

By the way, as we were discussing "The Subliminal Man," a song came on the stereo. It was "Thieves Like Us" by New Order. We did not request it. We were talking about a New Wave author and a New Wave song simply played and came into our ears. These are the things that happen in this world of circles and webs, of nexuses, matrixes, and connections, of serendipity and coincidences. Or maybe it's planning. By the way again, the words cyberspace and matrix show up in the first few pages of Neuromancer.

The point of this is that product placement and the use of brandnames in contemporary fiction is not satirical, nor is it ironic. It is in fact completely unironic, for its authors seem completely unaware that they have allowed their brains to be taken over by consumerism and commercialism. They have programmed themselves to be this way--programmed in the computer sense rather than in the TV sense. Having programmed themselves, they have made themselves unselfconscious, just as machines are unselfconscious. They have become robotic instruments of the corporations that produce and sell branded products. In short, they have ceased to think and should probably not be considered true artists or even hack writers or the authors of potboilers, for even hacks are self-aware. (It's one of the things that turns them to drink.) This is among the worst kinds of writing because it's completely unthinking and at the same time very apparently in earnest. These writers won't change their ways because they simply can't. They don't know that they're committing an offense, and they lack the ability to do anything differently. If you were to tell them that they have to change, they would probably start crying. Either that or they would lash out. This is not a good situation. What does it bode for the future of writing?

* * *

George Orwell completed work on 1984 in 1948, the year in which William Gibson was born. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in 1984, the year in which Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer was published. I didn't intend to write about him exactly today, but June 25, 2026, is the 123rd birthday of George Orwell, or, as he was christened, Eric Arthur Blair. Happy Birthday to him, one of the essential authors of the twentieth century.

Notes

(1) In the TV series The Big Bang Theory, the elevator doesn't work, just as in 1984. Winston Smith doesn't have a Penny across the hall, but he has his Julia. Penny saves. Julia tries but fails. Rats!

(2) Television was the name of a pre-punk or sort-of punk band from New York City. Their first album was released in 1977, or Year One of the punk calendar.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Seven

A Gothic Science Fiction

It has taken a lot of writing to get here, but my idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction, also a science fiction of decadence rather than of ascent. Romanticism and Gothicism are about the past. Very often they are about decadence and descent, as in weird fiction. Both science fiction and weird fiction descended (no pun intended) in part from the Gothic and Romantic works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. But I think the Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell, Jr. type of science fiction is more nearly an innovation. It is, I think, a break with the past and is discontinuous with other types of genre fiction.

My idea is that Gothic or Romantic science fiction is an attempted return to the past, to a time before there were discontinuities in fiction or literature. Again, science fiction is an innovation. Rather than evolutionary, as conservative institutions are or tend to be, science fiction is more nearly revolutionary, as modern science is in the real world. In contrast, a Gothic or Romantic science fiction would appear reactionary. Reaction is one way of being conservative.

If there are spectra, then Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe are, in this interpretation, on the conservative side of the spectrum. Scholar Lee Sterrenburg opened his essay "Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein" (in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher and published by the University of California Press, 1979) with what reads like a conclusion:

     Mary Shelley was the daughter of two of England's foremost intellectual radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. For a number of reasons--not all of which can be considered here--she rejected her utopian and radical heritage and opted for a more conservative and pessimistic view of the world. [Boldface added.]

As for Poe, American conservative author and poet Peter Viereck considered him among our culturally conservative authors. I won't argue.

I have written on these topics before. Here are titles and links to three entries:

• "Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Three" (Aug. 9, 2015)

• "Skilled Destroyers" (May 20, 2017)

• "Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science" (Aug. 11, 2015)

The last of those entries was supposed to have been the lead-in to the current series on Neuromancer and William Gibson. Well, better late than never. Besides that, I have brought in a lot of topics that I would not have had I written in 2015. This series is better--though longer--for it, I think.

I imagine there are other authors of Gothic and Romantic science fiction. Maybe William Gibson took the lead. If there is a category of Gothic or Romantic science fiction, then maybe its authors are like the Pre-Raphaelites in British art, i.e., a somewhat conservative or reactionary movement, or an attempted return to the past, before change and innovation had set in. The paradox is that the Pre-Raphaelites were not evolutionary. I don't know whether they ever published a manifesto--maybe their official publication The Germ was it--but their movement was conscious and intellectual, and it had a set beginning. In a way, it was revolutionary, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe and the year in which Karl Marx issued his regrettable and disastrous Communist Manifesto.

By the way, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites was William Morris. He was also a socialist, though utopian rather than "scientific" as in Marx's case. As we have seen, socialism is an essentially reactionary movement rather than an innovation, for socialists seek a restoration of the feudalistic past in which there are only two classes of men, the few on top and the very many below. They also of course seek complete stasis, as in the feudal ideal, with everyone fixed in his current status and no change permitted. In one sense, Nazis were more forward-looking and less reactionary than were their communist counterparts. One thing that Nazis and Bolsheviks shared is their hatred of the Jewish people. If you doubt that Marxism began with anti-semitism among its strains of thought, read what Marx had to say about Jews and the so-called "Jewish question" in the 1840s. (Why is there always a "Jewish question" but no equivalent questions regarding other groups?) Remember, too, that the worst villain in 1984 by George Orwell (completed in the centennial year of The Communist Manifesto) is named Emmanuel Goldstein and was undoubtedly based on Leon Trotsky.

In 1926 when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published, science fiction was an innovation. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, its various authors, artists, editors, and fans developed science fiction into a specific type--or two types, the hard science fiction type of Astounding Science-Fiction and what I guess you could call the adventurous or romantic science fiction or science fantasy of Planet Stories, Fantastic Adventures, etc. If there were two types, hard science fiction was the respectable one, at least in literary terms. It was or became the mainstream type. For example, in 1947, Robert A. Heinlein broke out of the pulps and into mainstream slick magazines with "The Green Hills of Earth," published in The Saturday Evening Post. (It's a story about music by the way.) Meanwhile, in 1947, the Shaver Mystery, a shabby chronicle based on the ravings of a real-life madman, was still the rage in Amazing Stories and related titles. Astounding Science Fiction started going the same way in May 1950 with the publication of "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind" by L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe a process of decay had set in and the Golden Age of Science Fiction was thereby ended.

Pulp magazines faded in the 1950s. In 1960 came the question Is science fiction dying? (That same year, Astounding Science Fiction became Analog Science Fact & Fiction. Name changes in popular culture often indicate trouble.) I wonder whether the British New Wave of science fiction was the first sub-genre of the post-1950s or post-Golden Age. Cyberpunk followed the British New Wave. I wonder whether it was the second. Anyway, were New Wave and cyberpunk reactionary? If so, does that mean that they were or are conservative in some way? Were the authors of New Wave and cyberpunk in particular attempting a return to the past, to a time before the innovations of hard science fiction, before the innovation of science fiction itself, or even before the splitting of fiction or literature into recognizable and nameable genres and sub-genres? Finally, was that past Gothic or Romantic in its orientation, themes, and so on?

My idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson and perhaps cyberpunk in general is a kind of decadent, Gothic or Romantic science fiction, oriented on the past and returning to the Gothic and Romantic origins of science fiction in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, before genrification set in, and when there was still continuity in literature. Neuromancer was a new romance and the work of a new romancer, a phrase from Hugo Gernsback's introductory essay of 1926. Mr. Gibson was fully aware of Gernsback and his brand of science fiction, for before there was Neuromancer, there was his story "The Gernsback Continuum," from 1981, in which there is talk not only of Gernsbackian science fiction--illustrated by Frank R. Paul--but also of Nazis and what a character in the story refers to as "raygun Gothic."

Innovations and revolutions very often begin with a gnosis or a priori systems of thought, very often expressed in a manifesto. Manifestos are very often intellectualized works, or they are pseudo-intellectual, as in Hubbard's "Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind." (Again, if we're looking for an end date to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, we might set it to May 1950 when "Dianetics" was published.) They are often visionary and sometimes seemingly mad and full of fury. They are often angry, aggressive, incoherent, or inarticulate. Science fiction is a field in which a pre-action manifesto was put forth in Hugo Gernsback's essay "A New Sort of Magazine," published in Amazing Stories in April 1926. Gernsback afterwards enacted his ideas. Unlike with other manifestos and the actions based upon them, nobody died as a result. Karl Marx had his manifesto, too. It was the basis of what he called "scientific socialism." Countless millions have died as a result of that idea. Nice work, Marxists. Marxism in general has been a model and an inspiration for science fiction authors since then, for example, Isaac Asimov and his  concept of "future history." A more immediate manifesto in the arts was the Futurist manifesto of 1909 with its emphasis on speed, newness, youth, technology--and destruction of the past and all old things. Italian Futurism is supposed to have influenced Italian Fascism. If it did, that wouldn't be much of a surprise to me. We should always remember, by the way, that Mussolini was a socialist.

I have been writing about music in parallel to science fiction. Cyberpunk was obviously named after punk music and punk culture. Did punk have a manifesto? I don't know. A more interesting question is this: was punk an innovation, or was it a reaction? If Neuromancer is an example of cyberpunk; and cyberpunk is or was an attempted return to the past; and cyberpunk took after punk music and punk culture; did it then depart from punk by being a reaction? Or did it actually follow punk, which may have also been a reaction? If it followed punk, does that mean that punk was also an attempted return to the past, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite movement except that it was Pre-Beatle-ite? In British music of the 1970s and 1980s, there were punk, New Wave, Goth, and New Romantic strains or genres. (Bauhaus, a British goth band, was named for the revolutionary and futuristic Bauhaus movement in art and design, founded in--when else--1919. Bauhaus had its manifesto, too, written by Walter Gropius.) The same strains and genres seem to have been in science fiction. Nothing stands alone in the arts. Music and science fiction must have fed off of each other during the 1970s and '80s. And it all makes for the most fascinating of ideas and speculations.

I have a coda still to come, and now something else has come up, too, so I'll have another coda after that. In the meantime, I would like to say: Happy 100th Anniversary to Pulp Science Fiction and Happy 50th Anniversary to Punk Music!

Amazing Stories, September 1928. The framework of the mechanistic logo of Scientifiction must be a cross section from the inside of a spaceship, but it takes a shape approaching that of a Gothic arch, and the planet-and-star studded blue background looks like a wizard's hat. Maybe the gears driving the writing pen should include "ROMANCE" and "MYSTERY."

And speaking of Gothic arches, a Gothic arch is a negative space. The positive shape that might fill it is the rocketship standing on its launchpad, ready to blast off, or on the surface of a distant planet, already having arrived on a new world.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley