Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Four

Cars

"Cars" by Gary Numan was released in 1979, but it seems like the first song of the 1980s. It's as if he had gone into the future, discovered what it looked like, and then, after returning to the then-present, wrote a song to capture what he had seen.* "Cars" is science-fictional in that much of its music is played on synthesizers, that is, on musical instruments dependent upon twentieth-century electronic technology. The video for "Cars" is also science-fictional, with its robot-like humans or human-like robots, including the singer, who is dressed in a red leather space cadet suit, the same color as the robot Maximilian in The Black Hole from the end of the year. There is a darkened interior space like the inside of a spaceship, a lighted pyramid like a recharging booth or a force field, and rows of vertical lights as in the vast, curving corridors of the Death Star.

"Cars" is from Gary Numan's debut solo album The Pleasure Principle. On the cover is a photograph of Mr. Numan looking at a small, glowing, red pyramid. (Pyramids must mean something to him.) With its strange and mysterious artifact and its enthralled (or spooked) onlooker, the image reminds me of the pictures from the Led Zeppelin album Presence, from 1976. The Pleasure Principle had been preceded by two albums recorded by the band of which Gary Numan was a member, Tubeway Army. Those albums were Tubeway Army (1978) and Replicas (1979). I have heard the second but not the first. Evidently, both are replete with the themes and imagery of science fiction. (The album cover for Tubeway Army has a groovy and clever 1970s display face like the title logo of Star Wars.) Replicas is said to be a concept album about a dystopian future. Gary Numan and his bandmates were influenced by Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, about whom I have written lately. I point that out not to draw attention to myself but to show that these arrows are still flying through the subjects before us. By the way, one of the members of Tubeway Army, Jess Lidyard, is or was nicknamed Rael. I take that to be a reference to the flying saucer religion Raëlism, founded in 1974.

A dozen years ago, I wrote about "Cars" and the song and video for "Breathe" by The Prodigy, released in 1996. The video for "Cars" is futuristic and science-fictional. The video for "Breathe" on the other hand is decadent and horror-fictional. I asked the question, What happened in those intervening years? My answer was that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) happened. That was a flippant answer and I don't put very much stock in it, but something did happen in those years during which genre fiction seems to have turned from science fiction and towards horror, fantasy, and weird fiction, as if writers, readers, and fans had lost confidence in the future and looked instead to the past. They stopped liking rocketships and computers and started liking vampires and zombies. Music seems to have followed suit. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe both music and genre fiction descended at the same time, hand in hand. By the way, both Tubeway Army and The Prodigy were punk influenced.

The Prodigy play electronic music. Like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan, they are reliant upon twentieth-century technology for their sound. Nevertheless, their video for "Breathe" is in no way technological, nor futuristic, nor science-fictional. In fact, it's the opposite, a visual/video catalogue of horrors, filled with the imagery of squalor and decay. The video for "Sober" by the American band Tool, released in 1993, is similarly nightmarish. It's actually fascinating, perfect in its weirdness, creepiness, and horror. Made by way of stop-motion animation, it's like the dark flipside of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and those other specials we watched as children. We watched Ray Harryhausen movies when we were kids, too, and I have always thought that stop-motion animation of that type is very creepy, far superior in its effect and appearance to later computer-generated imagery or CGI. If you want to make a monster, make it from something real and physical rather than as a ghost out of a machine.

There were milder Gothic and romantic videos from that time. One I can think of is the video for "Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy, released in 1990. Formerly of the British goth band Bauhaus, Peter Murphy played a kind of romantic hero in the video for "Cuts You Up." Running through a dark and gloomy forest, he's like Heathcliff, whose compound mononym denotes his wildness and his dark romantic nature. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Heathcliff is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy." That makes me think of the singer in "Going Mobile," who proclaims: "I'm an air-conditioned gypsy." Those two phrases are close enough to make a song rhyme. In popular culture, the gypsy is a free and romantic figure, unbound by convention and missed by both the police and the taxman. Another name for gypsies is Romany. Like the Gothic romance, they come from the dark and distant past.

I asked what happened between 1979 and "Cars," and 1996 and "Breathe." Another question is what happened between 1971 and "Going Mobile," and 1979 and "Cars." Exactly eight years to the month separated those two songs, but they are very different despite their somewhat shared subject matter. Both are science-fictional, but "Going Mobile" is happy, outward, exuberant. "Cars" on the other hand is insecure, fearful, closed in, even paranoid. You can almost see Pete Townshend smile as he sings his song. "Beep beep," he chirps, as if this were a number on Sesame Street. In his video for "Cars," Gary Numan is shifty-eyed and robotic. He seems fearful or suspicious. His face is a blank. There is close to a snarl on his lips. "Going Mobile" is a song of rebellion against authority. It flies in the face of the establishment. "Cars" on the other hand can't be taken as a political song. Its world is small, as small as the inside of a womb-like car where the singer feels "safest of all." I confess I don't know what happened, but there are and always have been outward songs and inward songs.

-----

*Maybe a better candidate for the first song of the '80s is "Are 'Friends' Electric?" released by Tubeway Army in May 1979. It's science-fictional, too, but as far as I know, it lacks a video.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Three

Going Mobile

"Going Mobile" by The Who is a song about driving and the freedom of the road. It's on the album Who's Next, which was released in 1971, fifty-five years ago this summer. "Going Mobile" was originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project. Lifehouse was to have been not only a rock opera but also a whole, complex, and very ambitious multimedia and audience-participation project. It's fair to say that Lifehouse was visionary. Its goals or end products may very well have been unreachable. I confess that I don't understand very well just what it was supposed to have been. But imagine if it had come about.

The cover of Who's Next is an oblique reference to science fiction, specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Standing alone and without the reference, it has a decadent or post-apocalyptic look to it. The strange sky was added later to give the image, in the words of photographer Ethan Russell, "this otherworldly quality." The band was driving when they saw the monolith. They got out of their car, took the picture, and got back in again to drive away.

Lifehouse was a science-fictional concept, and so "Going Mobile" is, in its origins, a science-fictional song. I have two quotes to help explain Lifehouse. Here is Pete Townshend himself:

The essence of the story-line was a kind a futuristic scene [. . . .] It's a fantasy set at a time when rock 'n' roll didn't exist. The world was completely collapsing and the only experience that anybody ever had was through test tubes. In a way they lived as if they were on television. Everything was programmed. The enemies were people who gave us entertainment intravenously, and the heroes were savages who'd kept rock 'n' roll as a primitive force and had gone to live with it in the woods. The story was about these two sides coming together and having a brief battle.

And here is a quote from Wikipedia. I like this one better. It's clearer to me and more concise:

Lifehouse is set in the near future in a society in which music is banned and most of the population live indoors in government-controlled "experience suits." A rebel, Bobby, broadcasts rock music into the suits, allowing people to remove them and become more enlightened. Some elements accurately describe future technology; for example, The Grid resembles the internet and "grid sleep" resembles virtual reality.

So Pete Townshend invented the Internet. Take that, Al Gore.

I wrote recently about Billy Idol's multimedia project Cyberpunk, from 1993. I wonder if he could have been inspired or influenced in any way by Lifehouse, not in any of its details but in the larger idea that science-fictional or futuristic concepts could be combined with rock music and its technology to create something big and meaningful, even profound, certainly visionary.

Reading descriptions of Lifehouse leads me to think that it's dystopian and about a controlled society. I have another long quote from Wikipedia. Bear with me. This is going somewhere:

Bobby is the creator of Lifehouse. He is a hacker who broadcasts pirate radio signals advertising his concert, where the participants' personal data are taken from them and converted into music, quite literally "finding your song." At the climax of the album, the authorities have surrounded the Lifehouse; then the perfect note rings forth through the combination of everybody's songs, they storm the place to find everybody has disappeared through a sort of musical Rapture, and the people observing the concert through their Lifesuits have vanished as well.

I have been listening to a lot of '80s music and watching '80s videos. Several of these are dystopian and/or science-fictional in their imagery. One in particular made me think of Lifehouse, if I'm thinking about Lifehouse in the right way. The video is for the song "The Politics of Dancing" by the British new wave group Re-Flex. At first glance, the video is an espionage/suspense/thriller type of story, but it's actually about a dystopian society in which a political authority is trying to control musical expression. The mustachioed visage in the video is not that of Big Brother but of his opposite, the face of the resistance. A political authority--the political establishment--is trying to locate him, to stop him from broadcasting music from a pirate station called Re-Flex Radio. That authority is trying to keep young people from enjoying themselves and hearing things of which the establishment disapproves. In short, it's trying to control information. Here are some lyrics:

We got the message

I heard it on the airwaves

The politicians are now DJs

The broadcast was spreading

Station to station

Like an infection across the nation

Compare that to the lyrics of the Who song "Relay," which was added to Lifehouse, for example:

From tree to tree

From you to me

Traveling twice as fast as on any freeway

Every single dream

Wrapped up in the scheme

They all get carried on the relay

I'm not sure that the lyrics of "The Politics of Dancing" quite match the action in the video, but the video carries its own weight. As in Lifehouse, there is an underground leader who is trying to get the message out about music, dancing, and fun. He's a subversive, doing something forbidden by the establishment, broadcasting from an illegal radio station. At the end of the video, as in Lifehouse (as described above), the authority arrives at the station only to find the studio empty. The musicians have vanished.

"The Politics of Dancing" was released in 1983, perhaps in anticipation of 1984. I can't say whether Re-Flex was influenced by The Who and Lifehouse, but they didn't have to be. Political authorities try to control information. They want to silence differing opinions, disagreement, and dissent. They characterize opposing words and ideas as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. They are in the business of trying to control people's lives. One way to begin is to control what people say and can think. O'Brien in 1984 understands that. Rock musicians and songwriters know it intuitively, and they might even have personal experience with it. Of course they will write songs of protest and resistance. Rock music by its very nature is anti-establishment. When the police turn off your amplifier, you do what George Harrison did in his rooftop venue and turn it back on again.

Whether Pete Townshend intended it or not, "Going Mobile" is an anti-establishment song, especially now, fifty-five years later. He wrote:

I don't care about pollution

I'm an air-conditioned gypsy

That's my solution

Watch the police and the taxman miss me

I'm mobile.

Those are the words of a free man, or a man aspiring to be free. The establishment is against him, most especially the establishment of today:

• The free man sings, "I don't care about pollution." (This was before carbon dioxide--a naturally occurring chemical compound generated by nearly every living thing and essential for life on earth--was classed as a pollutant.) The current establishment is "green," carbon-neutral, and pressing for zero emissions by which the people will be controlled, thereby impoverished and immiserated. Or maybe it's the other way around.

• He is air-conditioned. They believe on the other hand that air-conditioning is "a scourge," as Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire recently said. Evidently it's not a scourge for the high-ranking people in the European Commission, including Frau von der Leyen, for during the recent heat wave, they got to keep theirs while the Ugnaughts and Troglytes who labored away in the floors below them did not. And here we thought Europe is a democracy. The current controversy has gone so far that Wikipedia now has a page called "The Politics of Air Conditioning." I can't wait for the song.

• The free and mobile man avoids the police. In the United Kingdom at least, the police are an instrument of the establishment. It and the people who support it love the police. There the police will come knocking on your door if you write or say something the establishment doesn't like. That's how they get you to shut up. You can't make your escape the way the musicians do in the video for "The Politics of Dancing." You can't disappear among your own culture and society. You don't have that freedom.

• The free and mobile man avoids the taxman. The establishment on the other hand embraces him, for he's one of their agents of punishment and control. They'll even go so far as to say that paying taxes is patriotic, as our previous president, John Gill, did in 2008. What a bizarre inversion. What a non sequitur. I'm not going to go looking for the first protest song in rock music. "Taxman" by the Beatles (1966) is far enough. In case you haven't heard it, the Fab Four--specifically the songwriter George Harrison--were obviously not in favor. By excessive taxation, the people will also be impoverished and immiserated, and they will be controlled. Beyond that, their tax money will be doled out to people who want to stab and rape them. Another form of punishment, another means of control.

• Finally, the free man is mobile. Beep beep! They want him to stay put. They hate and fear the freedom that allows a man to go mobile, and they understand that mobility is an exercise in what is to them an intolerable personal freedom. The man driving down the highway is pursuing his own happiness. They can't have that. They want his mobility and thereby his freedom to be restricted. They want him to depend on them for his meager portion of happiness. For example, several American states are either already at it or are looking into ways to tax people on the number of miles they drive. There is also talk of installing a kill switch in new cars. In the United Kingdom, there is a controversy about "15-minute cities." Those in the establishment call it a right-wing conspiracy theory that one of the purposes of building 15-minute cities is to limit mobility. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but when someone in the establishment starts talking about "right-wing conspiracy theories," we should start paying attention. They could be letting us know what they want to do, or what they have already done.

There was also of course the big push to force people into electric cars. That push is also about control and about limiting mobility and thereby freedom. There is an old propaganda poster, "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!" I would paraphrase that to read that when you ride in an electric car, you ride with the enemy of your own freedom. That's not as catchy, but it obtains. In "Joy Connection," I showed an advertisement, including a picture of an automobile, in which the point was made that there are two choices, the first being this: "You can let a government decree what you shall do, what you shall buy, and how much you shall pay." That was the story with electric cars under President John Gill's administration and under other political authorities, present and recently past. Thankfully, all of that seems to be coming to an end, in the United States at least, with no longer the coercion and the big push and very rapid declines in the sales of electric cars. Talk about a scourge. Not the cars so much as the politics behind them.

I know I went pretty far in all of that. The most recent commenter on this blog will probably get on me about being insane or unhinged or silly or childish. I think he's trying to get me to shut up. In contrast, I'm not trying to get him to shut up. It's better when people disagree with and debate each other. It forces everyone to think about where he or she stands and to refine his or her ideas. Trees, bones, muscles, and ideas are made stronger by resistance.

Anyway, my points are these:

First, "Going Mobile" the song and going mobile the activity are about freedom. The establishment doesn't like freedom. They want control. In the 1960s and '70s, when they were not in control, liberals, leftists, and progressives were anti-establishment and pro-freedom. Now that they are in control, they are the opposite. What changed? Well, Pete Townshend provided an answer to that in the last words sung on Who's Next: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." Nothing actually changed. The establishment always (or almost always) seeks control. They are anti-freedom. The current establishment are no exception. They who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s but are now in control have no claim to the music and songs of freedom. For them to go to concerts and wear rock-and-roll t-shirts and act like fans now is a kind of cultural appropriation. Those things are ours, regardless of our youth or age. They should cut it out.

Second, as part of Lifehouse, "Going Mobile" is science-fictional. That leads me back to the idea that started me on this whole series, which is that the car story (or song) is or may be a kind of low science fiction.

Still to come: More science-fictional songs, a few Gothic or horror or weird-fictional songs, and then the long road back to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. Did you think I was done with that yet?

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

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