MUSIC

   This article is in 3 parts:

   1, Science Fiction in Classical Music; 2, Science Fiction in Popular and Rock Music; 3, Music in Science Fiction. Because of the almost endless proliferation of popular and rock music, and because there are so many ways in which the latter (in particular) interpenetrates with sf and fantasy, section 2 is itself divided into 2 parts, from different hands: Maxim JAKUBOWSKI's comments focus on the pre-1980s period, while Charles Shaar Murray's concentrate on more recent work.

   1. Science fiction in classical music By historical necessity, sf being in the broad sense a 20th-century phenomenon, earlier classical music was generally unaffected by it, but there are exceptions: Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785) in 1750 and Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1777each wrote a comic opera with the title Il Mondo della Luna ("The World of the Moon") to a libretto by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793). More directly attributable to sf is the musical adaptation by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), as "Le Voyage dans la lune" (1875), of the Jules VERNE bookknown in English as From the Earth to the Moon (2 parts, 1865, 1870; trans 1873). The Moon is again the scene of the action in the first part of theopera The Excursions of Mr Broucek (1917) by Leos Janacek (1854-1928), based on the novel by Svatopluk Cech (CZECH AND SLOVAK SF): the leading character dreams he has been transported there while in a drunken stupor. In The Makropoulos Secret (1925) Janacek adapted Karel CAPEK's play aboutIMMORTALITY. In the anthology Les soirees de l'orchestre (1853) Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) provides an interesting footnote in "Euphonia", a short sf tale of a musical city.Other musical works of the late 19th and early 20th century have taken on sf connotations because of their subsequent use, such as Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) by Richard Strauss (1864-1949), which was featured in Stanley KUBRICK's film 2001: A SPACEODYSSEY (1968). The Planets suite (1918) by Gustav Holst (1874-1934) has often been used in sf contexts. Many compositions since 1950 have followed Holst's astronomical (in his case, astrological) lead, especially thosefor which avant-garde instrumental techniques or electronic music might make more traditional titles seem incongruous; thus numerous titles such as "Cosmos", "Galaxy", "Nebula" and "Orbit" can be found. Works are named after star charts (Atlas Eclipticalis (1961) by John Cage (1912-1992)), inspired by types of celestial objects (NEUTRON STAR (1968) by Jan W. Morthenson (1940-) and Quasars (1980) by Christian Clozier (1945-)) or by individual heavenly bodies (Sirius (1968) by Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-)), and dedicated to or illustrative of the journeys of early astronauts and cosmonauts: in the USSR many songs and ballads were composed in honour of Yuri Gagarin (1935-1968).Electronic music for illustrating "the music of the spheres" - a phrase that has been used of the work of Terry Riley (1935-), François Bayle (1932-) and others - and stories of outer space can be found not only in film soundtracks, especially Louis (1923-) and Bebe (1928-) Barron's pioneering score for FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and the understated contributions by EduardArtem'ev (1937-) to Andrei TARKOVSKY's SOLARIS (1971) and STALKER (1979), but also in short pieces commissioned or adapted by music-hire libraries, like Desmond LESLIE's Inside the Space Ship and Music of the Voids of Outer Space (both c1957). Works with similar titles also appeared early onin concert programmes, with pieces such as Visions of Flying Saucers (1966 with Leo Nilsson) and Robot Amoroso (1978) by Ralph Lundsten (1936-). The use of electric instruments permeates the avant-garde reaches of jazz and jazz-rock as with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Sun Ra's Arkestra (whose varied names, including Blue Universe Arkestra, Solar MythArkestra and Cosmo Love Arkestra, testify to a kind of sf allegiance).Another relationship is the direct linkage of a piece of music to an existing sf story. In rare cases this consists of a vocal work with an sf text, as with the song-cycle The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (1969) by David Bedford (1937-), from Arthur C. CLARKE's story "Transcience" (1949), and The Music and Poetry of the Kesh (1985) by Todd Barton,musical settings of the poems in Ursula LE GUIN's ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). More often a purely electronic or instrumental composition wasinspired by or evokes the atmosphere of the original story, as in Quatermass (1964; Nigel KNEALE) by Tod Dockstader (1932-), Alpha RalphaBoulevard (1979; based on a 1961 story by Cordwainer SMITH) by Ralph Lundsten, the cycle Kristallwelt (1983-6; in homage to J.G. BALLARD's THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966)) by Michael Obst (1955-), and several further works by Bedford, including Jack of Shadows (1973; based on Roger ZELAZNY's 1971 novel), Star's End (1974; refers to Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation trilogy) and The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas (1976; based on the 1973 story by LeGuin). The Birthplace of Matter (1975) by Sten Hanson (1936-) refers to sf concepts, while his The John Carter Song Book (1979-85) is more unusual: it is based, we are told, on the minimal information about Martian music in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's novels supplemented by Hanson'sdirect contact with Carter; for lack of available recordings these examples of Martian music were perforce recreated by means of computerized vocal synthesis.Dramatic cantatas and music dramas concerned with sf subjects but without the involvement of an sf author include the RADIO drama Comet Ikeya (1966) by Joji Yuasa (1929-) and Cometose (1987) by Kristi Allik (1952). In the latter, Samuel Clemens (Mark TWAIN), who wasborn and died during consecutive appearances of Halley's Comet, is transported with his house to the comet's core, returning to Earth's vicinity in 1985 only to have the Giotto satellite destroy the house. Halley's Comet is celebrated also in The Return (1985) by Morton Subotnick(1935-). Deep concern over humanity's future can be found in the work of the composer and poet Lars-Gunnar Bodin (1935-), such as his Cybo (as in CYBORG) trilogy (1967-8) and the cantata For Jon (Fragments of a Time toCome) (1977), the final section of which is called "Instruction Manual for Interdimensional Travel".Staging and costumes have emphasized sf elements in certain musico-dramatic works, including Licht ("Light"), Stockhausen's cycle of 7 full-length operas to his own scenarios (in progress since 1977), and the Surrealist Le grand macabre (1977) by Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-), loosely based on the play by Michel de Ghelderode (1898-1962). Among the operas for children by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-) are the tongue-in-cheek Help, Help, The Globolinks! (1968), which tackles alien INVASIONS, and A Bride from Pluto (1982), a modernized fairy tale. AnALIEN being provides a suitable updating of the role of deus ex machina in Michael Tippett's opera The Ice Break (1976), and three alien visitors play significant parts in his New Year (1988).The most substantial connection between sf and classical music can be found in recent operas based on sf stories. One of the most successful has been Aniara (1959) by Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1916-1968), a musical version of Harry MARTINSON'sepic starship poem featuring the Mima computer. Other operas that fall into this category include Vaclav Kaslik's Krakatit (1961; based on Karel Capek's 1924 novel), VALIS (1987; based on the 1981 novel by Philip K.DICK) by Tod Machover (1953-), and two operas by Paul Barker, Phantastes (1986; based on George MACDONALD's 1858 fantasy) and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1987; based on Doris LESSING's 1980 novel). The composer who has had the greatest success in radicalizing and popularizing opera in the late 20th century, Philip Glass (1937-), likewise selected Lessing's The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four and Five for an opera he has been working on since his 1988 setting of thesame author's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982). Another work by Glass, more music drama than opera, is 1000 Airplanes onthe Roof (1988), involving TIME TRAVEL; the climax of his plotless first opera, Einstein on the Beach (1976), takes place on board a spaceship, as does a significant part of the action of his much later opera Christopher Columbus (1992).

   HD/MJ

   2. Science fiction in popular and rock music It was in the mid-1960s, with the widespread assimilation of sf into general Pop culture, that sf came into its own as a factor in popularmusic.Nowhere was this relationship more visible than with the San Francisco groups, where sf themes and imagery often became the subjectmatter of songs. The Steve Miller Band's early albums are titled Children of the Future (1968), Sailor (1968) and BRAVE NEW WORLD (1969), and feature songs like "Overdrive", "Song for our Ancestors" and "Beauty of Time"; a similar fealty was paid by The Grateful Dead - with Aoxomoxoa(1969), From the Mars Hotel (1974) and improvisatory pieces like "Dark Star" - and by Spirit - whose Future Games (1977) flirts with STAR TREK - Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Byrds, Moby Grape, Kaleidoscope and, in a satirical guise, The Mothers of Invention. But the Californian group most influenced was certainly Jefferson Airplane, spearheaded by Paul Kantner (1942-), Grace Slick (1939-) and Marty Balin (1942-). Theirearly albums Surrealistic Pillow (1967), After Bathing at Baxter's (1968), Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969) are consummate examples ofdynamic melodies and furiously articulate lyrics often referring to sf (including Robert A. HEINLEIN and John WYNDHAM). Shortly after Balin'sdeparture from the group, guitarist and songwriter Kantner recorded Blows Against the Empire (1970) with Jefferson Starship, an amalgam of theprevious band with other outstanding San Francisco musicians. This concept album (nominated for a HUGO in 1971) is sometimes thought to have been the finest fusion of the genres, though the opposite opinion has also been published: it is a symphonic poem in the rock mode about the hijacking of a spaceship by a group of rebels in a fascist future USA, and their hopeful journey to the stars. Later albums by Jefferson Starship saw Kantner adopting a persistent revolutionary stance interlaced with starkdepictions of a totalitarian planet; the return of Balin to the group in 1975 brought an end to the predominance of Kantner's sf situations.Whilethe West Coast groups heartily embraced sf in the USA, the situation in the UK was more fragmented. Despite the early, arguably sf imagery of The Shadows' ethereal guitar style or The Tornados' "Telstar" (1962), PinkFloyd were the premier sf group to gain popularity. Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Ummagumma (1969) and Atom Heart Mother (1970) are among their many albums having sf subject matter contained in and illuminated by highly evocative music, using the quicksilver guitar and organ runs which have since become closely associated with the sf-music concept. Their style was widely imitated in Europe by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Nektar and a score of supposedwizards of the synthesizer.Another important UK group was Peter Hammill's Van Der Graaf Generator, who were particularly adept at mapping thepowerful, bleak vistas of post-nuclear desolation: The Aerosol Grey Machine (1969), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (1970), "Afterthe Flood" (1970), "Pioneers over C", "Lemmings" and Hammill's solo album Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night (1973). One band to attempt awholeheartedly sciencefictional concept album was the UK-based Nirvana (no relation to the much later US band), with The Story of Simon Simopath (1968), but it was fairly execrable on release and has not improved withage - although it caused some stir at the time. The composer/singer David Bowie (1947-) enjoyed worldwide fame and showed a comprehensiveunderstanding of sf in his work, ranging from the early "Space Oddity" and "Cygnet Committee" (both 1969) to the songs about Ziggy Stardust, theultimate superstar of the apocalypse, on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), or Diamond Dogs (1974),an impressive jaunt through a DELANY-like city of fear. Other notable UK groups conversant with the use of sf concepts included: Yes (showing the influence of lyricist/singer Jon Anderson, who also used sf material in his solo albums); King Crimson; Emerson, Lake \& Palmer; Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970); The Incredible String Band; The Rolling Stones (notably onTheir Satanic Majesties Request (1967)); Genesis; Man (whose guitarist Deke Leonard peppered his songs with sf references); and the Anglo-French group Gong, who evolved a complete mythology full of pixies and flying teapots. Hawkwind, with whom Michael MOORCOCK was associated, built songs around stories by Roger ZELAZNY, Ray BRADBURY and others, introducing many sf archetypes, while Moorcock's own group, Deep Fix, recorded the uneven New World's Fair (1975). A better use of aggressively high-energy musicwith sf connotations can be found in the US group Blue Oyster Cult.There have also been popular settings of sf classics. Though the style might not be called popular, Anthony BURGESS set his own A Clockwork Orange (1962) to music for a stage production. Notable (and controversial) was Giorgio Moroder's new 1984 score for the 1926 film METROPOLIS, and the songs are abasic feature of EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY. Other sf films were musicals in the first place, including BIG MEAT EATER, It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman (SUPERMAN), JUST IMAGINE, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and TOOMORROW.

   MJ/PN

   2A. To the more adventurous pop fans of the late 1960s, sf was a literary and cinematic extension of fashionable interest in Eastern mysticism and psychedelic drugs, all three providing ways oftaking the mind "where minds don't usually go", as Pete Townshend (1945-) put it in The Who's Tommy (1969). Most rockers' 1960s favourites were 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (the movie - complete with "trip" sequence - ratherthan the 1968 Arthur C. CLARKE book) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN's fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-5; rev 1966; omni 1968). The former providedthe most spectacular vision extant of the wondrously enigmatic nature of the Universe, and the latter offered a grand struggle between Good and Evil, with the heroes representing the purest of hippie virtues: bucolicgentleness and a fondness for pipeweed and munchies. It was tailor-made for Yes fans and admirers of Crosby, Stills \& Nash, the latter's primary contribution to the apocalyptic end of rock's sf strain being "Wooden Ships" (1969), a collaboration with Jefferson Airplane (who also recordedtheir own version of the song) in which the hippies escape from a polluted, war-torn world in the wooden ships of the title; the song was highlighted as an anthem in the cinematic rock testament of hippiedom, Woodstock (1970).But the primary rock science-fictioneers of the hippieera were Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix; 1967-8 classics like the former's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", "Astronomy Domine" and"ASaucerful of Secrets" and the latter's "Third Stone from the Sun", "The Stars that Play with Laughing Sam's Dice" and "1983/Moon, Turn the Tides" graphically equated the explorations of INNER SPACE and outer space: a direct musical expression of the same concerns as the NEW-WAVE sf of the era. Yet pop's first real signpost to the future came not from the UK or the USA, but from the German quartet Kraftwerk, who during the first half of the 1970s not only pioneered the use of the then-exotic synthesizer but extended the process of computerized, digital music-making into a madly seductive vision of the romance of technology with records like Autobahn (1974) and, most significantly, We Are the Robots.The ever-alert DavidBowie began a new age of sf-influenced rock when "Space Oddity" (1969), his comic-angsty tale of Major Tom, the astronaut who decides not to come back, was used as the theme for tv coverage of the first Moon landing. His later excursions into post-apocalyptic speculation included the albums The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), about aleper- MESSIAH rocker, and Diamond Dogs (1974), jointly derived from George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) and Harlan ELLISON's "A Boyand his Dog" (1969). Bowie also helped to kick in yet another phase when he became an early devotee of Kraftwerk and, with the aid of Brian Eno (1948-), himself a pioneer synthophile from his stint as a member of RoxyMusic, helped to transform synthesizer technology from method to metaphor with Low (1977). This enabled the likes of Gary Numan (1958-) to trivialize the new style into the superficial kitsch futurism which has all too often been rock's perception of sf. More to the point was the work of George Clinton (1940-), the funk prankster and mastermind of such acts as Parliament, Funkadelic and Bootsy's Rubber Band. Parliament's Mothership Connection (1976), the stage version of which generally beganwith Clinton descending from the flies in a massive flying saucer, and The Clones of Dr Funkenstein (1976) used sf devices as an enhancement ofmeaning rather than a substitute for it. Grandiose concept albums like 2112 (1976) by the Canadian power-trio Rush rubbed shoulders withheavy-metal imagery drawn from horror (Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper (1948-) being the "onlie begetters" of an entire school of contemporary death-metallists including Slayer, Metallica and Sabbath's own former lead singer Ozzy Osbourne (1948-)) and SWORD-AND-SORCERY heroic fantasy of the Robert E. HOWARD variety (early-to-mid-1970s Led Zeppelin favourites like "Immigrant Song" and "Stairway to Heaven", drawing on, respectively, Nordic fantasies of rape'n'pillage and the most sentimental aspects of Celtic faerie). Chris de Burgh's "A Spaceman Came Travelling" (1974) blended the Christmas story with the Erich VON DANIKEN-esque notion that the infant Christ arrived by UFO, to produce one of the more memorable 1970s sf commercial pop songs.An important piece was Jeff Wayne's musicaladaptation of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). The recording, Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, was released in1978.The advent of rock video in the early 1980s reemphasized the fact that much of sf's imagery enters rock music by way of the movies - like the "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll", "Martian Hop" and "Purple People Eater" of the 1950s - and the visual style of movies like BLADE RUNNER(derived from Philip K. DICK's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968)), George MILLER's MAD MAX series and The TERMINATOR provided instant raw material for many of the rock videos of the 1980s. At worst, there was Duran Duran, mindlessly recycling the usual leather-jacket-apocalypse cliches; at the other end of the intelligence spectrum were Z.Z. Top, constructing elaborate sf mini-comedy-dramas in videos like "TV Dinners" (1983) and "Rough Boy" (1985).What was most apparent, however, was that the late 1980s and early 1990s saw an actual sf future arrive in pop's present. The 1970s experiments of Kraftwerk and Bowie bore genuine CYBERPUNK fruit in the shape of hundreds of "house"dance records produced, as often as not, in bedrooms and home studios rather than in the 24-track establishments of the previous decade. Their creators took full advantage of the proliferation of affordable sampling and sequencing technology to generate an authentic "cyberpop" which seemed to have sprung full-blown from the brows of William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, and which rapidly achieved mass popularity. At the time ofwriting (late 1991) at least half the records in the UK pop charts were classifiable as "bleep" of one sort or another: records which made no attempt at all to sound human. For every synth record that attempted to mimic "real" drums, strings or keyboards, there were dozens that actively celebrated their digital origins: vocals or raps were sampled into digital keyboards and triggered on the stuttering electronic beat. "Robotic" dance moves were the norm, humans imitating machines rather than - as early sf visionaries had warned - machines imitating humans. An entire generation of pop fans embraced a futurist metaphor quite unselfconsciously, demonstrating that sf has, in this sphere at least, invaded and conquered the present.Rock bands of both the orthodox and synthesized varieties continue to name both themselves and their songs after their sf favourites, just as the fiction of sf writers like Howard WALDROP, Sterling, Jack WOMACK and Lewis SHINER reflects their preoccupation withrock and its attendant culture. William S. BURROUGHS still leads the field in this respect (groups like Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk and Steely Dan have borne witness to his influence); The Comsat Angels derived theirname from a short story by J.G. BALLARD; the alter-ego KLF outfit Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu demonstrate their allegiance to Robert AntonWILSON and Robert SHEA's Illuminatus books; Level 42 drew their name from a reference in Douglas ADAMS' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series; while jazz-rock bass virtuoso Stuart Hamm has paid an entire series of tributes to William Gibson, most recently with the album Kings of Sleep. As long as both sf writers and rock musicians continue to share a vestedinterest in the hegemony of the imagination, the relationship is likely to remain a fruitful one.

   CSM

   3. Music in science fiction Of the ARTS, music is the one most commonly featured in sf - albeit not quite to the extent that FANTASY is pervaded by it. Several sf writers studied it, notably including Lloyd BIGGLE Jr (PhD in musicology), Langdon JONES and Edgar PANGBORN, or were for a time professionally or semiprofessionally involvedin music: Philip K. DICK purveyed classical music on a radio programme and in a record shop; Douglas ADAMS, Biggle, Jerome BIXBY, Anthony BURGESS, the film director John CARPENTER, the sf editor Edmund CRISPIN, Samuel R. DELANY, L. Ron HUBBARD, Jones, Desmond LESLIE, Pangborn and especiallySomtow Sucharitkul (S.P. SOMTOW) have composed music, while Delany, Laurence M. JANIFER, Anne MCCAFFREY, Barry N. MALZBERG, Michael MOORCOCK, Dan MORGAN, Chris MORRIS and Janet E. MORRIS, Charles PLATT, John B. SPENCER, Boris VIAN and many others have appeared as performers, often of their own compositions.Music, dependent on the instruments with which it is played, is more than most artforms associated with contemporary technology. Also central, though we now take it for granted, is the technology of sound reproduction. The "frozen words" of François RABELAIS's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52; trans 1653-94) anticipatesound recording, as, more scientifically, do the hi-tech Sound Houses of Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1629). Edward BELLAMY, in Looking Backward,2000-1887 (1888), saw mechanically reproduced music as fundamental to a UTOPIA. In "The Colours of the Masters" (1988) Sean MCMULLEN imagines a 19th century in which a clockwork "pianospectrum" has been invented in time to record Chopin and Liszt.Many sf authors, like most of the general public, believe that radical musicians (often using electronic technology) are producing work that is deliberately ugly and unintelligible. Others believe that the influence of technology on music is unavoidable and will eventually give rise to new masterpieces. Arthur C. CLARKE, in The Songs of Distant Earth (1986), makes the realistic extrapolation that historical processes will integrate today's electronic music and instruments into the artistic mainstream. Futuristic or ALIEN music is, of course, rather difficult to describe, and stories which try - including "The Music Makers" (1965) by Langdon Jones and Sweetwater (1973) by Laurence YEP -set themselves a near-impossible task.Musicians from the past, both rock and classical, occasionally figure in sf. A flute-playing character in Piers ANTHONY's MACROSCOPE (1969) is obsessed by the life of the19th-century poet and musician Sidney Lanier (1842-1881); the seeming revival of Richard Strauss - to demonstrate the future poverty of hi-tech music - in James BLISH's "A Work of Art" (1956) turns out to be a mental pattern imposed on the brain of a totally unmusical person; Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) is mysteriously revived, with no desire to perform music, inMichael MOORCOCK's "A Dead Singer" (1974). Other stories of interest in this context include Gregory BENFORD's "Doing Lennon" (1975) and Michael SWANWICK's "The Feast of St Janis" (1980).Music has always played asubstantial role in literature, whether as a principal plot element or only incidentally, as in Captain Nemo improvising at the organ or Gully Foyle plucking primitive tunes on an egg-slicer while marooned in space.The profound effects achieved by music (and particularly singing), both beneficial and destructive, have been favourite subjects from the stories of Orpheus and HOMER's sirens through to, for example, Edgar Pangborn's "The Music Master of Babylon" (1954) and "The Golden Horn" (1962), or theoperatic "Un Bel Di" (1973) and "The Fellini Beggar" (1975) by Chelsea Quinn YARBRO. (The Orpheus legend features commonly in sf versions, arecent and interesting example of its HARD-SF transmutation being Fool's Run (1987), by Patricia MCKILLIP.) Music's therapeutic powers can be seen in Delany's "Corona" (1967) and the impact of the Singers in his "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969). Anne McCaffrey'straining as an opera singer is evident in her The Ship who Sang (fixup 1969) and elaborately reflected in The Crystal Singer (1974-5; fixup 1982)and its sequel Killashandra (1985), all of which focus on the potency of music. In Orson Scott CARD's Songmaster (fixup 1980) both the healing and destructive powers of music are shown. Music is effectively used as a weapon in Tintagel (1981) by Paul H. COOK and in Dargason (1977) by Colin COOPER; in Charles L. HARNESS's "The Rose" (1953) the unusual timesignature of Tchaikowski's 6th Symphony (Pathetique) is used as a weapon in a fight with a villain. Music may be a political tool; it instigates revolution against repression in Lloyd Biggle's The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets (1968), but supports the soulless, mechanical nature of thesocieties in Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's My (trans as We(1924) and George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949). (Biggle's interest in music is also apparentin many of the stories in The Metallic Muse (coll 1972).) In Frank HERBERT's "Operation Syndrome" (1954) music is a means of revenge, and it is a means of escape from the constraints of the physical body in ON WINGS OF SONG (1979) by Thomas M. DISCH.Since the late 1960s the charismaticnature of rock music - and its power to create emotions so strong that they can be read by those who feel them as transcendent - has played an important role in sf, sometimes ambiguously, as in the Satanic heavy metal of George R.R. MARTIN's Armageddon Rag (1983), with its power both to heal and to destroy. This novel, part horror and part sf, has an intense feeling for the music of the 1960s of a kind quite common in recent sf. It (relevantly) powers such stories as Howard WALDROP's "Flying Saucer Rock \&Roll" (1985) and "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance" (1988), the former about Black kids picked up by aliens on account of the transcendent power of old Frankie Lymon songs, the latter about "a song that was gonna change the world" and, two decades later at a class reunion, does. 1960s rock appears by way of local colour in many novels by Stephen KING, sometimes relevantly, and wholly irrelevantly in Allen STEELE's Orbital Decay (1989). This last was reviled by some critics as culturally trapped in arock'n'roll era (dead even now), even though it is set in the mid-21st century; it is a specific case of a general problem - the future story whose cultural referents, often musical, are so absurdly anachronistic that willing suspension of disbelief flies out the window. Other authors who draw powerful metaphors from the rock'n'roll era are Jack WOMACK - whose Elvissey (1993) plays on the Elvis Presley myth, as do Robert RANKIN's Armageddon books and Allen Steele's Clarke County, Space (1990) -Lewis SHINER, Norman SPINRAD - notably in "The Big Flash" (1969) and Little Heroes (1987), another book about revolution and the music business - Bradley DENTON, in Wrack and Roll (1986) and BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE (1991), and John SHIRLEY, in Eclipse (1985). Two predecessors of this particular strand of sf writing were The Book of Stier (1971) by Robin SANBORN and Barefoot in the Head (1969) by Brian W.ALDISS; in both, youth movements are at least partially inspired by popular music, as a prelude to the triumph of the counterculture, and at the risk of creating enormous personal power. One of the most interesting variants is Bruce STERLING's acid, precise fable of an ALTERNATE WORLD in which rock critic Lester Bangs (1948-1982) lived on, "Dori Bangs" (1989). Some of the conventions of this strand are parodied in The Truth about TheFlaming Ghoulies (1984) by John Grant (Paul BARNETT), and the elevation of the vampire Lestat to rock megastardom in Anne Rice's series of fantasies, The Vampire Chronicles (1976-92), can also be read as in part a parody(perhaps an unconscious one) of the subgenre.Colonizers of alien planets might get back to their roots with access to a piano (Frank Herbert's "Passage for Piano", 1973), but more commonly music in alien circumstancesis used as a means of understanding or even as the only means of COMMUNICATION. Touring musicians thus may have an ambassadorial function,as in the string quartet that visits the advanced society of Jules VERNE's L'ile a helice (1895; trans as The Floating Island 1896). Aninterplanetary touring opera company features in Jack VANCE's ironically titled Space Opera (1965). Aliens may well be biologically musical, as with the trumpet-faced heralds, one form of the Selenites in H.G. WELLS's THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), the hollow-horned unicorns in PiersAnthony's Apprentice Adept sequence (1980 onward) and the centauroid titanides in John Varley's Gaean trilogy (1979-84). Mutated singing plants feature in J.G. BALLARD's "Prima Belladonna" (1956). Musical contact is achieved over interplanetary distances in Barrington J. BAYLEY's "The Big Sound" (1962), in which an orchestra of 6000 becomes not only a soundtransmitter but also a receiver. Music as a kind of alien LINGUISTICS is central to Jack Vance's "The Moon Moth" (1961); it has since become almost a CLICHE. The aliens communicate with us this way in the film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), initially with the most celebratedfive-note musical phrase in sf. Music is combined with dance in Spider and Jeanne ROBINSON's STARDANCE (1979), another novel which supposes thatrapport with aliens might be made easier by the use of the kind of nonverbal communication which music represents; yet another is The Rapture Effect (1987) by Jeffrey CARVER. An amusing, well told ecologicalmelodrama is Sheri S. TEPPER's After Long Silence (1987; vt The Enigma Score 1989 UK), in which giant, crystalline lifeforms can be appeased -or, it turns out, spoken to - only by specially trained musicians.Music unlocks galactic history for terrestrials in Piers Anthony's MACROSCOPE (1969). It achieves such religious significance for the Third Men in OlafSTAPLEDON's LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) that a Holy Empire of Music is founded; one of Stapledon's Last Men describes the Music of the Spheres and, in its most rarefied application, it has become part of the very fabric of some early universes described in Stapledon's STAR MAKER (1937), where all movement is musical rather than spatial. Kim Stanley ROBINSON's The Memory of Whiteness (1985) uses a great interplanetary "Orchestra" - avast calliope-like instrument with a single player - as part of a complex metaphor, combining music and mathematics, in which musical structure and cosmic structure are seen as analogous. This sort of music/ MATHEMATICS/structure-of-the-Universe imagery appears also in DavidZINDELL's ornate Neverness (1988).Perhaps the most distinguished of recent sf novels with a musical theme is The Child Garden (1988) by Geoff RYMAN, in which a densely portrayed future world, whose people are infected into INTELLIGENCE by virally transmitted DNA, is both transcended and reflected- in all its infernal and purgatorial aspects - by the setting to music of DANTE ALIGHIERI's Inferno and Purgatorio (written c1314-21), works which also shape the novel. This is one of the most richly orchestrated portrayals of the function of music in all sf.The invention of imaginary musical instruments is surprisingly common in sf, and by no means only recently. It is touched on in several stories, notably "Automata" (1814) by the composer E.T.A. HOFFMANN. There have been many proposals for what, in recent years, have been known as sound sculpture and sound environments: early mentions include the sounds made by wind blowing through the statues in Samuel BUTLER's Erewhon (1872). More recent wind-powered sound sculptures can be found in the "Music Masons" entry in Dictionary of the Khazars (1983) by Milorad Pavic (1929-); theyintricately carve rock salt in preparation for the season of the 40 winds. Future instruments mostly fall into two classes: variants on traditionalinstruments and those that exploit future technology. The focus of J.B. PRIESTLEY's lighthearted Low Notes on a High Level (1954) is thesubcontrabass wind instrument, the Dobbophone, while more conventional instruments include the 9-stringed guitar-like baliset played by troubadors in Frank Herbert's DUNE (fixup 1965). Moderately conventional instruments tend to be found in low-technology and post- HOLOCAUST environments, like the pipe played by a 6-fingered MUTANT in Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), the 20-hole flute (played with fingers andtoes) fashioned inside a mutant's machete in Delany's THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967) and, in Richard COWPER's Corlay trilogy (1978-82), thedouble pipe articulated by its player's surgically twinned tongue-tip in the Britain of AD3000.Forms of instruments unknown at the time of writing but which could have existed a couple of decades later include: the Fourier audiosynthesizer in Charles L. Harness's "The Rose", whichanticipates programmable synthesizers by some 25 years; the three-bass radiolyn played in an ensemble in Delany's Out of the Dead City (as Captives of the Flame 1963; rev 1968); and the multichord in Biggle's "TheTunesmith" (1957). The sensory-syrynx in Delany's NOVA (1968) is operated like a combination of theremin and guitar, and has sympathetic drone strings. The ultracembalo in "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970) by Harlan ELLISON and Robert SILVERBERG is operated by electronic glove controllers.A direct neural input to the auditory lobes is achieved with Ballard's ultrasonic instruments in "The Sound Sweep" (1960), thereby reducing workload for the "sonovac" operators in a world overloaded with sonic pollution. Direct stimulation of the brain is featured also in Philip K. Dick's We Can Build You (1972) by way of the Waldteufel Euphoria and theHammerstein Mood Organ.Not all such instruments are played by soloists. Dance music in quintuple time in Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) is performed by 16 sexophones (plus additional ether music, synthetic music and a scent-and-colour organ). A typical "cosmos group" of audiovisual instruments is featured in Silverberg's The World Inside (1971): vibrastar, comet-harp, incantator, orbital diver, gravity-drinker, doppler-inverter and spectrum-rider, some of them generating sounds and images that are modulated by others. Similarly, in Ballard's Vermilion Sands (coll 1971) sonic statues with built-in microphones respond tosounds about them, replaying them in transmuted form. The most outrageous instruments, buried in concrete bunkers, are played by means of off-planet remote control by the rock group Disaster Area in Douglas ADAMS's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980): these are thephoton-ajuitar, bass detonator and Megabang drum complex, with the performance reaching its climax when a stunt ship is driven into the system's sun.A recent anthology of original stories relating to pop and rock music is In Dreams (anth 1992) ed Paul J. MCAULEY and Kim NEWMAN.

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