Lost Transmissions
Editor: David Cashion
Designer: Jacob Covey
Production Manager: Michael Kaserkie
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958853
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3465-6
eISBN: 978-1-68335-498-7
Compilation © 2019 Desirina Boskovich
Cover © 2019 Abrams
Published in 2019 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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Foreword
JEFF VANDERMEER
Introduction
LITERATURE
Kepler’s Proto–Science Fiction Manuscript Somnium and Its Legal Consequences
How Jules Verne’s Worst Rejection Letter Shaped Science Fiction . . . for 150 Years
Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
CHRISTIE YANT
Early Feminist Utopias, from Gilman’s Herland to Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream
The “Timeless Green Kingdoms” of George MacDonald
Robert W. Chambers, Lesser-Known Father of Weird Fiction
The Inklings: A Friendship that Changed Fantastic Literature Forever
Henry Dumas’s Foundational Afrofuturism
JOHN JENNINGS
The Author of the Narnia Books Worked on a Mega-Creepy Time Travel Story . . . Probably
The Weird World of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast
The New Wave and New-Metal Men: The Almost-Forgotten Brilliance of David R. Bunch
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
Harlan Ellison’s Legendary Lost Anthology
The Otherworldly Visions of Philip K. Dick
The Empress of the Sensual: Kathy Acker
NICK MAMATAS
On Viriconium: Some Notes Toward an Introduction
NEIL GAIMAN
The Salvage Yard: Real-Life Experiences Revisited in Science Fiction
DARRAN ANDERSON
The Dark Fairy Tales of Angela Carter
Funny Fantasy’s Myth Conceptions
DAVID BARR KIRTLEY
GRADY HENDRIX
Foreword to John Shirley’s City Come a-Walkin’
WILLIAM GIBSON
An Interview with John Shirley
An Interview with Thomas Olde Heuvelt
An Interview with Karen Joy Fowler
FILM AND TELEVISION
Le Voyage dans la Lune, The First Science-Fiction Film Ever Made
Metropolis: The Long Shadow of the Never Seen
THX 1138: A Decidedly Un-Lucas-Like Production
The Enduring Creations of Ralph McQuarrie
The Death Star’s Architect: Concept Artist John Berkey
Star Wars vs. Battlestar Galactica: The Legal Battle Over Space Opera’s Look
“The Spice Must Flow”: Iterations of Dune
“The Tourist”: The Alien Sex Film Noir We Deserve
The Unicorn-Like Creations of Moebius, Concept Artist
MEG ELISON
How WarGames Changed American Military Policy
The Alien III(s) That Might Have Been
Behold, the Science-Fiction Cosmic Horror of Phase IV!
PAUL TREMBLAY
A Boy and His Goblin: E.T.’s Creepy Origin Story
The Overlooked Genius of Space Island One
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
The (Very) Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
EMILY ASHER-PERRIN
James Cameron’s Explorations of the Watery Depths On-Screen and in Real Life
ARCHITECTURE
Hugh Ferriss: Draftsman, Theorist, Gotham Visionary
Dreams in the Desert: The Utopian Vision of Paolo Soleri
Reality Ahead of Schedule: The Designs of Syd Mead
MATTHEW KRESSEL
ART AND DESIGN
Weird Tales Regular, Pulp Illustrator Virgil Finlay
The Surrealist Stylings of Richard M. Powers
STEPHEN SONNEVELD
The Dreamy Atmospheres of Painter Paul Lehr
Space and Science-Fiction Artist David A. Hardy
Psychedelic Master Bob Pepper
A New Realism: Contemporary Cover Artist Michael Whelan
On Fantasy Maps
LEV GROSSMAN
MUSIC
Science-Fiction Storytelling in the 1960s and ’70s, Set to Music
Astro Black
NISI SHAWL
The Who’s Lifelong Search for the “One Note”
Sweet Bye and Bye and Speculative Fiction in Musical Theatre
JOHN CHU
X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, and Punk Rock Science Fiction
ANNALEE NEWITZ
Weezer’s Songs from the Black Hole
Speculative Music of the New Millennium
The Timeless Brilliance of Deltron 3030
MARK OSHIRO
The Science-Fiction Soundscapes of Porcupine Tree
Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism: The Genius of Janelle Monáe
LASHAWN M. WANAK
FASHION
Plenty of Pockets: Fashion in Feminist Utopian SFF
PENNY A. WEISS & BRENNIN WEISWERDA
The Fashion Futurism of Elizabeth Hawes and Rudi Gernreich
EKATERINA SEDIA
David Bowie’s Queer Glam Futuristic Fashion
MEG ELISON
Textile Arts Are Worldbuilding, Too
JEANNETTE NG
Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
FANDOM AND POP CULTURE
The Surreal Potential of the World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript
Celebrity Robots of the Great Depression
SELENA CHAMBERS
The Historical and Literary Origins of Assassin’s Creed
Jack Kirby, the King of Comics
Valérian, the Popular French Comic Series that Inspired a Generation
Beyond D&D: Lesser-Known Fantasy Role-Playing Games
FRANK ROMERO
Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play: A Grim World of Perilous Adventure
MOLLY TANZER
Kentaro Miura, Grandmaster of Grimdark
JESSE BULLINGTON
The Ambitions of BioForge
The Massive Artificial Landscape of Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!
Raëlism: The Space-Age Message of the Elohim
ROBERT LEVY
On the Internet, No One Knows You Aren’t a (Gay) Wizard: An Ode to Fan Fiction
K. M. SZPARA
The Time of the Mellon Chronicles
SYLAS K. BARRETT
An Interview with Hugh Howey
Contributor Biographies
Sources and Credits
Index of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
As a twelve-year-old, lo those many decades ago, I would sneak away from my school’s expeditions to the public library and set up camp in the adult section—especially the science fiction and fantasy section, where I would read through any number of pulp magazine anthologie
s. The Best of Galaxy was a particular favorite of mine because the stories were so weird, and often mysterious—a fair number of them might even be called science fantasy.
Whether it was flying coffins invading earth, a misdelivered anatomy package from the future wreaking mayhem, or a future under-earth populated with talking animals, I was transported by amazing imaginations and ingenious stories. I discovered writers that I still read to this day, some of them mentioned in this volume, like Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance. To me, as a kid, speculative fiction was mysterious and, yes, a secret experience.
This feels like the right way to have been introduced to science fiction and fantasy, long considered low and debased genres, not at all “serious.” Many of us had to sneak off to read it outside of class, which was generally bereft of such material except in the most boring and unexciting iterations. How, as a teenager, I would have loved to read a book like Lost Transmissions—a guide to a wealth of unusual treasures.
Because the thing about science fiction and fantasy is this: They always need more histories and more books that reclaim or examine what has been hidden or forgotten. Science fiction in particular started out as a kind of mom-and-pop genre, which lends itself to a “secret history” as well—a fan-based, pulp-book culture, a genre that allows for mash-ups of all kinds and whose collective history might be relegated at times to mentions in mimeographed fanzines.
Fantasy could always fall back on the world of myth and legend for legitimacy, but the term “science fiction” more or less came from the US pulp magazines of the 1920s that mostly published startling adventure stories set in space, by a very white and male set of authors. Within certain constraints, however, science fiction also allowed for the flourishing of unique and bizarre imaginations. In fact, the state of the field has always been more complex than memory suggests, sustaining ebbs and flows of acceptance of certain types of writers. For example, translated SF and work from outside of core genre gained more acceptance in the 1960s and 1970s, under the aegis of editors like Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight and Michael Moorcock—with the 1980s also seeing a flowering of translations of Soviet SF in anthologies published by McGraw-Hill and championed by Theodore Sturgeon. This is not to mention the rise of feminist science fiction and fantasy in the 1970s and the more recent influx of nonwhite writers into the field, both pivotal moments that utterly transformed science fiction and fantasy into something ever richer, more imaginative, and more open to all readers.
The book you hold in your hands provides an admirable introduction to the secret history of science fiction and fantasy—not just through my entry point (books!) but other media as well—guided by an able assemblage of contributors providing an abundance of points of view. (The work of those contributors could itself form an amazing speculative anthology worthy of further exploration, including wonderful creators like John Jennings, Ekaterina Sedia, and Charlie Jane Anders, to name just three.)
Galaxy Science Fiction ran from 1950 to 1980. Under the guidance of editors H. L. Gold and Frederik Pohl, Galaxy became possibly the most influential SF magazine of the era, publishing luminaries such as Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Cordwainer Smith, and Jack Vance.
The joy of a compilation like Lost Transmissions is that it is itself a kind of secret eccentricity, cataloguing misfits and ne’er-do-wells possessed of astonishing imaginations. As an editor of reprint anthologies of science fiction and fantasy I am always struck by the unjustness of who becomes successful and who does not—the luck, bad fortune, and other factors—and thus the immense responsibility of reclaiming the underappreciated, the misunderstood, the forgotten.
This book conjures up not just a sense of wonder for its work in that regard, but also gives readers the sweet regret of might-have-beens. What if this film had been made or that book written? (We cannot, of course, know how many existing books and movies once teetered on the edge of oblivion, of never reaching an audience.) So, in a sense, Lost Transmissions is itself a science-fiction narrative, daring us to imagine other timelines and other universes in which things turned out differently and, for example, William Gibson made an Aliens movie.
And yet, no secret history can include the secret history entire. One reason for this is that one person’s perception of “secret” is so different from another’s. Take my treasured memories of childhood reading in the library. Cordwainer Smith was a giant in my mind, someone I just assumed everyone knew and read, while I never would have guessed, to be honest, when I first encountered Isaac Asimov, that he was practically a household name. We create by our enthusiasms and our passions the secret history we need and deserve, and, you, dear reader, are no different.
If you know nothing of science fiction and fantasy, Lost Transmissions will be an utter revelation; for others, it will be an affirmation of favorites you’ve carried a torch for, for years or even decades. Some readers may even curse and say, “What about X, Y, and Z?,” for that is the joy of cultivating eccentric tastes. But what this book provides for all readers is a beautifully illustrated and edited jumping-off point for your own memory cathedral—your own secret history.
I hope you think of this book not as a destination but as part of a continuous and fulfilling journey, one of unexpected discoveries and storytelling joys that grows in the imagination and fuels your curiosity and passion. And with that good thought, I will get out of the way to let you enjoy the book before you.
Jeff VanderMeer
Tallahassee, Florida
February 2019
The King in Yellow by Vicente Valentine (tribute to Robert W. Chambers).
INTRODUCTION
When we explore the history of speculative storytelling—science fiction and fantasy, and all the weird, magical, surreal, and uncanny threads they contain—we usually point to the landmarks that determined its course, the household names that defined the canon. But as all SFF fans know, there is always a world beneath the world, or just beyond it, or even woven artfully inside it. There are alternate dimensions and hidden doors. This book is about that history: the secret history.
In this book, we explore stories and projects in all genres that never saw the light of day, but if only they had—they might have changed the course of SFF storytelling forever. We tease out the hidden connections and subtle forces that pushed creators in one direction instead of another. We uncover the work of artists who, for whatever reason, did not receive their due . . . because their identities, and consequently their voices, were marginalized by the dominant demographics of the field, or because their work was too odd, too unfamiliar, too ahead of its time. We pay homage to artists, designers, architects, and fashion icons outside the “strictly genre,” who nevertheless shaped SFF in their own ways, by providing the raw material of imagination and invention that seeped its way into dozens of stories to come.
What emerges is an image of science fiction and fantasy both as it is, but also as it could have been—and still might be. Speculative fiction is a genre of ideas, and the only limit to its potential is how far we’re willing to eagerly and patiently explore its threads—even the ones that, like those illuminated here, are a little bit fragile and tough to unwind.
Within these pages, dozens of contributors delve into underappreciated works, discuss their own creative influences, and share their favorite obscure pieces of SFF lore. Such multiplicity is inherent and necessary. Because above all, this is not the secret history, but a secret history. For every story surfaced here, there are a dozen still buried. For every creator finally receiving their belated due, another waits patiently to be rediscovered. Our history is always evolving. And—as we discover and rediscover how we got to where we are—our genre’s future is always evolving, too.
Fiolxhilde summons a daemon from Lavania to transport herself and her son to the moon. Original illustration by Jeremy Zerfoss, 2018.
LITERATURE
We all know the famous story of how, in 1816, a nineteen-year-old girl named Mary Shelley invent
ed science fiction. It was a gloomy and wet summer retreat at Lake Geneva. The party included Mary’s new husband, the philosopher and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with their friend, famous Romantic poet Lord Byron. To amuse themselves, they began inventing ghost stories by the fire. Spurred by the dreary atmosphere, the stimulating conversation, and her vivid dreams, Shelley invented a modern twist on the classic ghost story—and a new genre was born. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818.
But the story of science fiction hardly begins or ends there. Its seeds were planted in much earlier eras, in every culture’s mythological tales of supernatural beings and otherworldly planes. Its future was shaped by many creators and influencers who, intentionally or not-so-intentionally, gave the genre a push in one direction or another. Their contributions may not be so well-known, but they are no less worthy.
And then there are the forks in the road; the inflection points whose impact on the genre is only recognized much later. What if the weather had been fine that summer in 1816, and ghost stories were abandoned for pleasant days by the lake? Through secret history, we also explore these inflection points . . . and the stories that could have been.
Kepler’s Proto–Science Fiction Manuscript Somnium and Its Legal Consequences
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was a German mathematician and astronomer who played an essential role in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also wrote a work of proto–science fiction that landed his own mother in jail.
Kepler is known today for his laws of planetary motion, which set the stage for modern astronomy. He correctly proposed that planets travel in elliptical orbits (although he incorrectly imagined these orbits all occurred on the same plane). He was the first to explain that the gravitational pull of the Moon is what causes the ocean’s tides. He even coined the word satellite.
As a literal Renaissance Man, Kepler’s scientific contributions went well beyond astronomy. He’s also been called the founder of modern optics, as he developed significant theories of refraction and depth perception, and even the principle of eyeglasses.