Television and the Road

"Movie Night at Phil's" by Don Webb (2012) is a story about watching TV.  "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, from the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), is also about watching TV. Watching TV is not an activity. It's actually the opposite of an activity. A person can descend into himself, as he would like, by watching TV. Watching TV can also lead him to a descent into himself without his seeking it. As with loneliness, nothing happens while a person is watching TV. Nothing can happen. Driving on the other hand is an activity. I suppose it's possible, but I'm not sure that anyone has ever descended into himself by driving, by actually going somewhere in the world. He might descend into himself at the end of his journey, in some small, dark, and enclosed space, but while he's there, on the road, the road goes on.* The road is a straight line into the future and not a descent into a figurative parking garage, into the hollow, cave-like, concrete gyre of the self. The road is a ribbon stretched out before you, in the sun, in the sun. Walker Percy wrote a novel called The Moviegoer (1961).** His novel is about a lot of things, including watching movies in the dark, on a big screen. If you're Walker Percy, you can write about watching movies on a screen. If you're not Walker Percy, you should probably write about something else. Joseph Conrad wrote about a journey into the heart of darkness. If you watch TV and think of that as an activity of interest to anybody but yourself, you may be on your own journey into a heart of darkness. But that heart is only in your own bottomless, cramped, empty, cave-like interior. In short, nobody wants to hear about your TV-watching "experience."

There are two stories about cars and driving in the Cosmic Horror Issue. First is "The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini. Although "The Traveler" is partly about driving, we don't know the make or model of the car. All we know is that it has both an airbag and a cigarette lighter. In other words, it's a car of the imagination, dreamed up so as to meet the requirements of the author and his plot. He can't alter his plot to fit the real world. Oh no. The world has to be altered instead, thereby making his story inauthentic. Mr. Tignini works in television and movies, and it shows. He, like many of the writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue, has what essayist Lincoln Michel calls "TV brain." He and they are not principally writers of prose. In this issue they're only slumming. TV is where the bread is.

Mr. Tignini lets us know that his narrator is listening to the radio as he drives. A Chuck Berry song plays, and he lets us know that, I think because he wants us to know that he's cool and knowing and with it. Chuck Berry sang one of the most famous of car songs, "Maybellene," released in 1955. Here are the words of the first verse:

As I was motorvatin' over the hill
I saw Maybellene in a Coupe DeVille
A Cadillac a-rollin' on the open road
Nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford
The Cadillac doin' 'bout ninety-five
We was bumper to bumper, rollin' side to side

There is more excitement and color in the brief lyrics of "Maybellene" than in the whole of "The Traveler," which isn't very much longer. But then there's a difference between good writing and the other kind.

I think modockin must be the Indiana version of motorvatin'.

"The Traveler" is a warmed-over version of the alien contact/alien abduction story told so many times in the history and culture of flying saucers. There is almost nothing original in its very meager contents. And it is written under the influence of TV brain. "Radar Love" by Golden Earring (1973) is a not entirely authentic driving song. Even so, I'll take it over a story written by a TV-influenced keyboard operator. In fairness to him, though, I will lay the blame for his story at the feet of his editor, who should have sought out a better story or nursed his friend along in the development of his own. Anyway, the singer in "Radar Love" is also listening to the radio as he drives. His driving song is Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong." He lets us know that not because he's trying to be cool. It's simply to add a concrete detail to his story and to give a backdrop to his quest. Mention of Brenda Lee and her song is not product placement nor a case of namedropping, two literary offenses that are becoming all too common these days. I guess in the minds of contemporary authors, every story has to have its commercial breaks, for they have been conditioned to be that way by a lifetime of TV-watching. It's probably automatic and unavoidable for them because they lack imagination. A mind free of commercials and brandnames is probably inconceivable to them, maybe even frightening, for it would leave them naked and alone, without things--physical objects--around them. They have to have and display their stuff, and they have to let you know about their expertise when it comes to their stuff. My advice to every aspiring or practicing author: turn off your TV and pick up a book. And it's probably best to make it a book published before the year 2000.

The second car-and-driving story in the Cosmic Horror Issue is "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson. I'll write about that next.

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*There were genre authors who ended up that way, including L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), whose end is a study in extreme decadence. I remember also the female character who kills herself (does she double back on herself?) in the dark and suffocating bedroom in the rear of an apartment in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). By the way, there is a character in that movie named Camilla. That fact will become pertinent in a matter of seconds . . .

**The mother of the narrator in The Moviegoer has as her maiden name Castagne. I would not be surprised if David Lynch had read The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895), but was Walker Percy also a reader? The spelling is different, but maybe that doesn't matter very much. On the other hand, maybe it's just a coinkydink.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

I read a long time ago an essay about American literature and how many stories and novels begin with a character arriving on a train. An example given in that essay is Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron (1951). In the first episode of Dark Shadows (1966), Victoria Winters, played by Alexandra Moltke, travels to Collinsport by train. The former is considered a Southern Gothic novel. The latter was part of a Gothic revival in popular culture during the 1960s and '70s. The title Lie Down in Darkness sounds like it could be a vampire story. Dark Shadows becomes a vampire story.

Railroad stories are or tend to be Romantic (or Gothic), even if they rely on technology in order to get the story literally moving. A possible explanation: railroad trains originated in the first half of the nineteenth century, in fact during the Romantic Era (or Gothic Revival period) and before science and technology took over Western thought and culture. (Old railroad trains look like Gothic monsters and railroad stations like Gothic churches and cathedrals.) There are or must be science fiction stories that take place on trains, but it's hard to think of any. If John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate is part science fiction (or low science fiction--see below), it has a sequence set on a train, but that sequence is not science-fictional. It's actually the beginning of a romance. The film Horror Express, from 1972, blends science fiction with the horror, monster, and weird fiction genres. If this movie is science fiction, it's a Gothic kind of science fiction, as monster stories tend to be. (I'm against genrification, but I might be in favor of considering monster stories as their own separate genre or sub-genre.) "Take the Z Train" by Allison V. Harding (Weird Tales, Mar. 1950) leaps to mind as an example of a weird-fictional tale set on a train. "The Return of Paul Slavsky" by Captain George Warburton Lewis (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923) is another, and a good, though minor one. There are many, many more Romantic or Gothic stories--genre and non-genre stories alike--that involve train travel. We could start making a list. We might finish around the end of next year.

Another possible explanation: a story set on a train is like one set on board a ship, and that makes it a Romance, for ships predate science, and there is a romance of the sea.* There was even a Baby Boomer TV show made by this equation: Romance + Ship = The Love Boat. Stories set on fast, high-technology-type conveyances can be Romances, too, but not necessarily.

Once they enter the realms of fantasy, airplane stories and car stories are more often science-fictional than horror-, Gothic-, or weird-fictional, although they may include horror, Gothic, and weird elements, too. A perfect example is "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" by Richard Matheson, adapted to an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963. It's a monster story and a story of psychological horror and modern anxiety, but it can also be seen as a kind of science fiction story in that it's about a creature of the air that lives by damaging and destroying technological works. (He must be one of the gremlins of the World War II years. AMC named one of its cars of the 1970s after his relatives.) The Twilight Zone was hosted by Rod Serling. His older brother, Robert J. Serling, who worked in aviation, wrote a novel called The President's Plane Is Missing (1967). The older Serling's novel is a thriller, but it's also a story set on the day after tomorrow, in other words, it is a speculative or alternative future history, or a near-future history. Does that make it science-fictional?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about planes and trains in an entry called "Weird Webs and Sci-Fi Lines." In particular, I made a point that if Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air (2001) had been written in 1960 about air travel in 2001, it would have been a science fiction story. That's how great a part the details of air travel play in Mr. Kirn's novel. The automobile dates from almost the twentieth century, the airplane from the twentieth century. Both came along after the early nineteenth-century Romantic Era had faded away. By 1900, science and technology strode over our culture, displacing or even kicking aside the traditions upon which other genres of fiction are based. They even displaced religion. In his book The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Henry Adams wrote (in the third person) about his visit to the world's fair in Paris in 1900, his encounter with a new force and symbol in the form of the dynamo, and how it changed his way of looking at the world:

to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. (Chapter XXV)

I wonder if the hall of dynamos was on Divinity Avenue, as in e.e. cummings' poem.

There is romance in travel by car and airplane. There is even an expression, "the romance of the road." And just because a story is about being in the air or especially about being on the road doesn't mean that there is necessarily an emphasis on the technology of flying or driving. But if there is an emphasis on the car as a way of traveling--or rocketing--through time and space, and if the story is dependent upon the science and technology of automobiles, then maybe the car story can be considered a kind of low science fiction. If high science fiction is about the effects that distant, speculative, or extrapolative science and technology have on human beings, then is low science fiction about the same kind of effects that near or current science and technology have? Or is a car story just a car story? (I'm proposing a thesis and shooting down my thesis, both at the same time.)

High science fiction. Low science fiction. These terms already existed before I began writing today. I take it that they are analogous to low fantasy and high fantasy. If they work in fantasy, why shouldn't they in science fiction? I have heard Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996) described as science fiction. If it is, it would have to be a kind of low science fiction because it can plausibly (maybe) take place in the world of today, no extra science or technology needed. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer (what a contrast in surnames), is a crime/detective story, but it's also sometimes considered a science fiction film. It's the earliest movie I have seen with an answering machine: technology bears on the plot. In the movie, everybody is looking for a locked box inside of which is a mysterious radiological hazard: science and technology bear even more on the plot. In fact they are central to it, and yet the story takes place in the present day of 1955. The end of the movie is nothing short of apocalyptic. In monster movies from the 1950s, A-bombs and radiation awaken monsters or bring them about by genetic mutation. In Kiss Me Deadly, they do the same things to people, i.e., they awaken the monsters in us or turn us into monsters in pursuit of their power.

The screenplay for Kiss Me Deadly was written by A.I. Bezzerides (1908-2007). No, he was not a machine, although he was an engineer. In the near future there will be a different kind of A.I. writing screenplays. In trying to think of the first novel about cars and driving, I remembered his novel The Long Haul, from 1938. It was made into a movie called They Drive by Night in 1940, starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. I have seen the movie but have never read the book. Now I'll have to go looking for it. (Kiss Me Deadly and They Drive by Night both begin with picking up a female hitchhiker.) Billy Idol is now making a return appearance to this blog, for on his debut album with Generation X, the self-titled Generation X from 1978, there is a song called "Kiss Me Deadly," presumably named for the earlier film. Kiss Me Deadly was an influence upon French moviemakers of the Nouvelle Vague, the name of which was (or must have been) an influence upon the names of British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and British new wave music of the 1970s and '80s. The French group Nouvelle Vague have made a name for themselves by redoing British new wave songs, often in the mode of Brazilian bossa nova. I just heard one of the originals tonight, "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17. Nouvelle Vague remade songs by lots of other groups about which I have written lately, including Joy Division.

In looking further for the first novel about cars and driving, I have discovered The Scarlet Car by the American author and journalist Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916), published in 1906. Before that, there was an epistolary novel, The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a Motor-Car by a husband-and-wife writing team, Charles Norris Williamson (1859-1920), a Briton, and Alice Muriel Williamson (1858-1933), an American, from 1902 or 1903. Williamson was also an engineer. He and his wife wrote a number of novels involving automobiles and motoring, as it was called then. She may actually have been the principal author of their books, and that makes me happy, for she was an American. I like to think that Americans were the first to write stories about cars and driving. And imagine: people born before or during the Civil War wrote those first car stories. In 1908, Royal Book Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, published a dime novel called Automobile Lillian: The Daring Girl Bandit of Arizona. The author of that book appears to have been anonymous. Gawen Brownrigg, also British, wrote Later Than You Think (1938), about auto racing. There were many more novels about auto racing after that, and some of them were made into movies. World War II intervened, but after that we were off to the races.

There is a lot of driving in that quintessential American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). There are also lots of cars and driving in movies from that time and later. Moviemakers seem to have caught on to cars and driving faster than did authors of short stories and novels. Science fiction authors wrote about electronics, rayguns, robots, and rocketships. Cars and driving were left to those working with lower levels of science and technology. An exception: the Tumblebugs in Robert A. Heinlein's story "The Roads Must Roll," in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940. In that story, the roads themselves move and carry people from place to place. As in Italian Futurism, speed counts. By the way, George C. Patton was the first American to use motorized vehicles--three Dodge touring cars--in a military attack. That was in 1916 in Mexico. Maybe he had taken a lesson from Automobile Lillian.

Finally, I have one example of a science-fictional car story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by Ian Fleming, from 1964. The subtitle is "The Magical Car," and Fleming's novel (or Romance) is naturally a fantasy, also a crime/suspense story and a children's story, but why not science fiction, too? (Does that mean that My Mother the Car, from 1966, is also science fiction? Or was it low fantasy? Either way, critics have not been kind. Here's one more thing for inside the parentheses: maybe KITT from Knight Rider was a souped-up Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.) By the way, the original Chitty Bang Bangs, real-life automobiles from the 1920s, were powered by airplane engines. And that brings me to . . .

Last year I read a book called Wild Wheels: Thrilling Adventures of Men and Cars, edited by Don McKay and published by Dell in 1968. One of my favorite stories in that book is "The 6 Transistors Go to the Races" by Allen Childs, originally in Boys' Life in May 1966. It's a very funny story about a group of teenagers who fill their tank with aviation gas and accidentally get themselves into an auto race. It's a car story, a humorous story, and a teenager story. But if the premise of the story depends upon technology, can we also call it a kind of science fiction? I'm not sure. But if we can, it must fall into the category of low science fiction, if there is such a thing. The flubber-powered car in The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) is more obviously science-fictional. After all, aviation fuel exists in the world of today. Putting it into your gas tank is only mildly extrapolative.

The creation of low science fiction as a critical or analytical category would of course be a further genrification, of which there has probably been too much already. Can we allow it? Or should there be just one broad and overriding genre for every story, regardless of how else it can be categorized? That would avoid the muddiness of genrification that has been going on for some time now. I'm not sure we can get rid of genres completely, but simplicity is better than overly intellectualized and academic complexity. After all, most people who read, read for fun. And car stories are fun. I wish there were more of them.

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*There was a clipper ship called the Romance of the Sea, launched in 1853. It was built by Donald McKay (1810-1880), who was obviously not the same Don McKay who edited Wild Wheels. The figurehead of the Romance of the Sea included the names of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, described in a contemporary newspaper account as "the greatest romancers of the century." If the science fiction authors of the twentieth century were the new romancers, then Scott, Cooper, and their contemporaries must have been among the old.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Six

More Songs of Science Fiction

The video for "Cars" by Gary Numan (1979) is science-fictional. It has similarities to the video for "I Ran (So Far Away)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982) (actually it's the other way around), which is also science-fictional and also fearful or paranoid. The Flock of Seagulls video is also shot inside of a enclosed place, like the inside of a spaceship. There are bright lights and mirrors. On the floor is silvery foil like the outside of the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM. Haunting that space are silent, robot-like women similar to the robot-like men in the video for "Cars." These women look like they could be aliens from Space: 1999 or Doctor Who. Should we call them gynoids rather than androids? 

Other dystopian/futuristic/science-fictional videos:

• "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" by The Alan Parsons Project (1977), in which a faceless robot capable of transporting itself instantaneously through time and space menaces a man in an otherwise deserted futuristic cityscape, one that looks like the city in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). The song "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" is from the album I Robot, which drew from Isaac Asimov's robot stories. In the video from 1977, it is a robot--a science-fictional creation--that transports itself instantaneously. In The Ring, from 2002, a movie about a video, it is a horror-fictional creature that transports herself that way.

• "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush (1985), a video with an otherwise sad but romantic mood but that includes futuristic and dystopian architecture and imagery, in particular gray faceless masses of people who wear masks over their facelessness. These remind me of later Internet memes showing masses of gray-faced NPCs, which are, ultimately, dystopian because the people they represent--people who repeat mindlessly the things spoon-fed them by their masters--are in pursuit of a perfectly awful future for all of us.

• "We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby (2002), another science-fictional video made for a song that is supposed to be about hope and affirmation. The video is ironic in that these people who are supposedly "made of stars" (like Carl Sagan's "we are star stuff") are all so wretched, debased, corrupt, and depraved. A double irony is that the singer haunts the video, apparently unseen, while wearing a spacesuit. He is hermetically sealed inside, apparently so as to avoid exposure to the taint of these people. Is he an alien observer on earth?

• "Push It" by Garbage (1998), an extraordinary video filled with striking and memorable imagery. Like the video for "Breathe," it is a catalogue of horrors, but also of mysterious and surrealistic figures and events. The singer Shirley Manson looks like a goth girl in the video and has admitted to dark themes and inspirations in her music. In the video for "Push It," there are the Children of the Damned; a cemetery, a Gothic house, and other Gothic, weird, and decadent imagery; a robot man with a lightbulb head; two weird-alien women; a staticky figure who looks as if he exists between two worlds, partly in ours, partly in another, like Captain Kirk trapped in the Tholian web or like an image on a television "tuned to a dead channel." I have included it here as a science-fictional video, but it's also a horror- and weird-fictional video, a synthesis made possible, I suppose, by changes in pop culture from the 1970s to the end of the millennium. At the end of the video, the singer licks a mirror. At the end of the video for "We Are All Made of Stars," Corey Feldman licks a cellphone screen, the black mirror of the contemporary Narcissus.

By the way, the first manned moon landing happened 57 years ago tomorrow, and this summer will be Shirley Manson's birthday, so Happy Birthday to her! There are more mentions of the Apollo missions coming up.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Five

Rocket

The song "Rocket" by the Smashing Pumpkins was released in 1994. The video for "Rocket" is science-fictional. It's like a miniature 1980s movie, like Explorers, from 1985. I'm not sure of the physics of the video, but then "Rocket" is not about the physics of space travel. It's about fun and innocence tinged with irony. It has a twist ending. But if you want to make it about physics, it seems to involve a time dilation, so it's not just about space travel. It's also about time travel. The members of the Smashing Pumpkins are now in their fifties and sixties. We are almost arrived at their future forecast in the video for "Rocket."

"Rocket" is a rocket video. The video for "1979," released in 1996, is a car video. It's like a miniature movie, too, like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. But there is melancholy in the video and song, a longing for something lost from childhood and adolescence. The video for "1979" also involves time travel. The singer, who is an adult, shares the backseat of a 1972 Dodge Charger with young people--they must have been his friends in 1979--who don't know he's there. He is a ghost from the future haunting his own past. Only he has aged. They are still frozen in time, like Keats' lovers on a Grecian urn.

So in the video for "Rocket," the children travel into the future in a rocketship to see the singer, while in the video for "1979," the singer travels into the past in an automobile to see and be among children. Seventeen years separated the release of the song "1979" from the year about which the singer sings. He travels backward from the year of "Breathe" to the year of "Cars." He reverses the decay of years and undoes time, but only for four and half minutes.

* * *

In "Rocket," Billy Corgan sings:

I shall be free
I shall be free

But the freedom for which he yearns is from "those voices inside me." His song and his feelings are inward, as in "Cars" by Gary Numan. Neither song is about anything larger than the singer.

The Monkees had a song in which they, too, expressed a desire for freedom. It's called "For Pete's Sake," and it was released in 1967, the year in which Billy Corgan was born. They sang:

(In this generation)
We gotta be free
We gotta be free

Their lyric is "we" rather than "I," and they sing for a whole generation. The generation of which they sing is the Baby Boom generation. Billy Corgan's is Generation X. The Monkees' song is outward, as in "Going Mobile" by The Who. Both songs are about something larger than the singer.

By the way, the Monkees had their own custom car. It was called the Monkeemobile, and it was built up from a 1966 Pontiac GTO base. One of the co-creators of the Pontiac GTO was John DeLorean, whose DMC DeLorean is used for time travel in Back to the Future (1985). In that movie, time travel is accomplished when the car reaches 88 miles per hour. Is that an allusion to the original Oldsmobile Rocket 88? The blurb in the advertisement I posted the other day reads: "Rocket Ahead with Oldsmobile." A parallel might be: "Rocket Back with DeLorean." So there is this question: is an automobile a rocket into the past or future?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

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.

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*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 go 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 might 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

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