“The Long Tomorrow”: Discover Mœbius’ Hard-Boiled Detective Comic That Inspired Blade Runner (1975)

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky may nev­er have made his film adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s Dune, but plen­ty came out of the attempt — includ­ing, one might well argue, Blade Run­ner. Mak­ing that still huge­ly influ­en­tial adap­ta­tion of Philip K. Dick­’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Rid­ley Scott and his col­lab­o­ra­tors looked to a few key visu­al sources, one of them a two-part short sto­ry in com­ic form called “The Long Tomor­row.”

Illus­trat­ed by none oth­er than French artist Mœbius, one of the rich­est visu­al imag­i­na­tions of our time, it tells the futur­is­tic hard-boiled sto­ry of a pri­vate detec­tive in a dense, ver­ti­cal under­ground city filled with androids, row­dy bars, assas­sins, and fly­ing cars. “I’m a con­fi­den­tial nose,” says the pro­tag­o­nist by way of intro­duc­tion. “My office is on the 97th lev­el. Club’s the name, Pete Club.”

Then comes the fate­ful piece of nar­ra­tion that begins any detec­tive sto­ry worth its salt: “It start­ed out a day like any oth­er day.” But by the end of that day, Club has tak­en a job from a clas­sic dame in need, fend­ed off both a four-armed thug and a hired assas­sin, slain an alien mon­ster with whom he finds him­self in bed, and recov­ered the pres­i­den­t’s miss­ing brain.

The sto­ry was writ­ten writ­ten by Dan O’Ban­non, then known main­ly for the film Dark Star, a sci­ence-fic­tion com­e­dy he’d made with his Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia class­mate John Car­pen­ter. On the strength of that, Jodor­owsky had brought him onto Dune to work on its spe­cial effects, just as he’d brought Mœbius on to cre­ate its sto­ry­boards and con­cept art. With noth­ing to do before shoot­ing began — which it nev­er did — O’Ban­non first drew “The Long Tomor­row” him­self as a way of keep­ing busy. Mœbius took one look at it and imme­di­ate­ly saw its promise.

The French may have coined the term film noir, but this ear­ly work of future noir ben­e­fit­ed from hav­ing an Amer­i­can writer. “When Euro­peans try this kind of par­o­dy, it is nev­er entire­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry,” Mœbius writes in the intro­duc­tion to the book ver­sion of “The Long Tomor­row.” “The French are too French, the Ital­ians are too Ital­ian … so, under my nose was a pas­tiche that was more orig­i­nal than the orig­i­nals.” It also, with Mœbius’ art, laid the visu­al ground­work for gen­er­a­tions of sci-fi sto­ries to come.

“The way Neu­ro­mancer-the-nov­el ‘looks’ was influ­enced in large part by some of the art­work I saw in  Heavy Met­al,” said William Gib­son, refer­ring to the Eng­lish ver­sion of Métal hurlant, the mag­a­zine that pop­u­lar­ized Mœbius’ work. (O’Ban­non also worked on the ani­mat­ed Heavy Met­al anthol­o­gy film, released in 1981.) But per­haps Rid­ley Scott, who start­ed work­ing with the artist on 1979’s O’Ban­non-script­ed Alien, described the influ­ence of Mœbius’ art on our visions of the future best: “You see it every­where, it runs through so much you can’t get away from it.” In a cul­tur­al sense, all of us live in Pete Club’s city now.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

In Search of Mœbius: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to the Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book Fea­tures The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead & Rid­ley Scott (1982)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

What turns peo­ple into sci­ence-fic­tion fans? Many enter through the gate­way of Star Trek, an ear­ly 1960s tele­vi­sion series “set on the worlds vis­it­ed by a giant Space­ship, the U.S.S. Enter­prise, and on the ship itself. Its crew is on a mis­sion to explore new worlds and ‘to bold­ly go where no man has gone before.’ ” Though “not par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful in the rat­ings,” Star Trek nev­er­the­less “attract­ed a hard core of devot­ed fans, ‘Trekkies,’ who made up in pas­sion­ate enthu­si­asm what they lacked in num­bers.” Per­haps cre­ator Gene Rod­den­ber­ry’s sig­na­ture “blend of the mild­ly fan­tas­tic with the reas­sur­ing­ly famil­iar, and his use of an on the whole very like­able cast, attract­ed view­ers pre­cise­ly because its exoti­cism was man­age­able and unthreat­en­ing.”

Those quotes come from The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion, a free online resource fea­tur­ing more than 17,500 entries explain­ing all things sci-fi, whether new or old, main­stream or obscure. Some of its pages deal with works of doubt­ed sta­tus as sci­ence fic­tion at all: Star Wars, for exam­ple, “an enter­tain­ing pas­tiche that draws upon com­ic strips, old movie seri­als, West­erns, James Bond sto­ries, The Wiz­ard of Oz, Snow White, Errol Fly­nn swash­buck­lers and movies about World War Two” whose “grat­i­fy­ing­ly spec­tac­u­lar – at the time – spe­cial effects and mar­tial music hyp­no­tized the audi­ence into uncrit­i­cal accep­tance of the basi­cal­ly absurd, delib­er­ate­ly Pulp-mag­a­zine-style con­flict between Good and Evil.”

That sort of thing is a long way indeed from the work of, say, a sci­ence-fic­tion grand­mas­ter like Isaac Asi­mov, who wrote pro­lif­i­cal­ly in “the clear unerr­ing voice of a man speak­ing rea­son, utter­ing tales about how to solve the true world.” Some read­ers of Open Cul­ture might well have found their way into sci­ence fic­tion through Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, which despite its “many nar­ra­tive flaws” remains “one of the most impor­tant sf movies made,” hav­ing showed “almost for the first time – though fans had spent years hop­ing – how visu­al­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sf in film form can be.”

Blade Run­ner’s entry includes, of course, a ref­er­ence to the scrip­t’s basis on Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, “a fig­ure who helps define by con­trast those iden­ti­fied in this Ency­clo­pe­dia as Main­stream Writ­ers of SF: writ­ers, that is, whose com­pre­hen­sion of the sig­nif­i­cant lit­er­a­tures of the last cen­tu­ry has some­times seemed less than full. An author like Thomas Pyn­chon, who is not described in this ency­clo­pe­dia as main­stream, will under­stand what he owes Dick; a main­stream author like Mar­garet Atwood has worked to make it clear that she does not.”

Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the most ambi­tious sf film of the 1960s and per­haps ever,” has also done its part to prop­a­gate a sci-fi way of look­ing at the world, explor­ing as it does “the idea of human defi­cien­cy in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.” Kubrick devel­oped it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with nov­el­ist Arthur C. Clarke, anoth­er of the gen­re’s titans, indeed “the very per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of sf. Nev­er a ‘lit­er­ary’ author, he nonethe­less always wrote with lucid­i­ty and can­dour, often with grace, some­times with a cold, sharp evoca­tive­ness that pro­duced some of the most mem­o­rable images in sf.”

Oth­er entries tell of writ­ers not so close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with tra­di­tion­al sci­ence fic­tion but high­ly regard­ed and endur­ing­ly influ­en­tial in the wider world of spec­u­la­tive lit­er­a­ture: Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, with his “ ‘sense of ecsta­t­ic enclosed­ness in the Word Incar­nate’ that may be unique­ly intense in world lit­er­a­ture,” or J.G. Bal­lard, “revered (and detest­ed) for the cor­ro­sive­ly inescapable vision of the late twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry world, which his sto­ries seemed not so much to reflect in a dis­tort­ing mir­ror as (alarm­ing­ly) to reflect, for the first time, with­out defen­sive eva­sions.”

“Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in phys­i­cal form in 1979,” writes Lithub’s MH Rowe, “the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion won a Hugo award for best non­fic­tion book in 1980. A sec­ond edi­tion fol­lowed in 1993, with a CD-ROM sup­ple­ment a few years lat­er. The ency­clo­pe­dia won anoth­er Hugo in 1994, and a decade lat­er began its migra­tion online, where it launched in 2011 as a pre­cur­sor to its cur­rent dig­i­tal form” — albeit a far cry from a crowd­sourced, objec­tiv­i­ty-ori­ent­ed resource like Wikipedia. “Mak­ing no effort to avoid the par­ti­san­ship that’s a hall­mark of being a fan, the SFE pos­sess­es the kind of puri­ty you can only get from cor­rupt endeav­ors. It’s by turns cranky, self-doubt­ing, and ultra-con­fi­dent, but it couldn’t be more deeply engaged with the genre of sci­ence fic­tion.” And if any­thing char­ac­ter­izes sci­ence-fic­tion fan­dom more than deep engage­ment, even the gen­re’s most pow­er­ful imag­i­na­tions haven’t dreamed of it.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: 355 Issues of Galaxy, the Ground­break­ing 1950s Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Asbestos-Bound, Fireproof Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Even by the extreme stan­dards of dystopi­an fic­tion, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 can seem a lit­tle absurd. Fire­men whose job is to set fires? A soci­ety that bans all books? Writ­ten less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil inten­tions with book burn­ings, the nov­el explic­it­ly evokes the kind of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers sur­vived or thrived in Nazi Ger­many by hew­ing to the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy (or at least not chal­leng­ing it), which, for all its ter­ri­fy­ing irra­tional­ism, kept up some sem­blance of an intel­lec­tu­al veneer.

The nov­el also recalls the Sovi­et vari­ety of state repres­sion. But the Par­ty appa­ra­tus also allowed a pub­lish­ing indus­try to oper­ate, under its strict con­straints. Nonethe­less, Sovi­et cen­sor­ship is leg­endary, as is the sur­vival of banned lit­er­a­ture through self-pub­lish­ing and mem­o­riza­tion, vivid­ly rep­re­sent­ed by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, “Man­u­scripts don’t burn.”

Bul­gakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guer­ni­ca, is say­ing that “great lit­er­a­ture… is fire­proof. It sur­vives its crit­ics, its cen­sors, and even the pas­sage of time.” Bul­gakov wrote from painful expe­ri­ence. When his diary was dis­cov­ered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “prompt­ly burned it.” Some­time after­ward, dur­ing the long com­po­si­tion of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el, he burned the man­u­script, then lat­er recon­struct­ed it from mem­o­ry.

These exam­ples bring to mind the exiled intel­lec­tu­als in Bradbury’s nov­el, who have mem­o­rized whole books in order to one day recon­struct lit­er­ary cul­ture. Europe’s total­i­tar­i­an regimes pro­vide essen­tial back­ground for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key con­text, Brad­bury him­self not­ed in a 1956 radio inter­view, was the anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia of the U.S. in the ear­ly 1950s. “Too many peo­ple were afraid of their shad­ows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burn­ing. Many of the books were being tak­en off the shelves at that time.” Read­ing the nov­el as a chill­ing vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the arti­fact pic­tured above par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant—an edi­tion of Fahren­heit 451 bound in fire­proof asbestos.

Released in 1953 by Bal­lan­tine in a lim­it­ed run of two-hun­dred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qin­ter­ra,” notes Lau­ren Davis at io9, “a chryso­lite asbestos mate­r­i­al.” Now the fire­proof cov­ers, with their “excep­tion­al resis­tance to pyrol­y­sis,” are “much sought after by col­lec­tors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fire­proof Fahren­heit 451, on the one hand, can seem a lit­tle gim­micky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the per­fect man­i­fes­ta­tion of a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the nov­el as a sto­ry about ban­ning and book burn­ing. All of us who have read the nov­el have like­ly read it this way, as a vision of a repres­sive total­i­tar­i­an night­mare. As such, it feels like a prod­uct of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry fears.

Rather than fear­ing mass book burn­ings, we seem, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of infor­ma­tion (and dis- and mis-infor­ma­tion). We are inun­dat­ed with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever find­ing time to read the accu­mu­lat­ing piles of books and arti­cles that dai­ly sur­round us, phys­i­cal­ly and vir­tu­al­ly. But although books are still pub­lished in the mil­lions, with sales ris­ing, falling, then ris­ing again, the num­ber of peo­ple who actu­al­ly read seems in dan­ger of rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing. And this, Brad­bury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture,” he claimed, “just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.”

We’ve mis­read Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury told us in his lat­er years. It is an alle­go­ry, a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a gross­ly dumb­ed-down soci­ety, huge­ly oppres­sive and destruc­tive in its own way. The fire­men are not lit­er­al gov­ern­ment agents but sym­bol­ic of the forces of mass dis­trac­tion, which dis­sem­i­nate “fac­toids,” lies, and half-truths as sub­sti­tutes for knowl­edge. The nov­el, he said, is actu­al­ly about peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the pro­lif­er­at­ing amuse­ments of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 not as a dat­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 40s fas­cism or 50s repres­sion, but as a too-rel­e­vant warn­ing to a dis­tractible soci­ety that deval­ues and destroys edu­ca­tion and fac­tu­al knowl­edge even as we have more access than ever to lit­er­a­ture of every kind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Stanley Kubrick Explains the Mysterious Ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a Newly Unearthed Interview

Dur­ing the mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “the film’s nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry point­ed inex­orably toward a big end­ing, even a rev­e­la­tion, but Kubrick kept chang­ing his mind about what that end­ing would be — and nobody who saw the film knew quite what to make of the one he final­ly chose.” Those words come from a piece by The New York­er’s Dan Chi­as­son, pub­lished to mark the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the film’s release. Since then, gen­er­a­tions of view­ers have inter­pret­ed 2001, and espe­cial­ly its end­ing, in their own way. But these debates over mean­ing may all change now that Kubrick­’s own inter­pre­ta­tion seems to have sur­faced.

Not only that, it turns out to dif­fer marked­ly from most of the ones in cir­cu­la­tion. “I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the pic­ture came out,” Kubrick tells jour­nal­ist Junichi Yaoi when the lat­ter asks what 2001’s end­ing means.

“When you just say the ideas they sound fool­ish, where­as if they’re dra­ma­tized one feels it, but I’ll try.” He then reveals his view of the con­cept behind it:

The idea was sup­posed to be that he is tak­en in by god-like enti­ties, crea­tures of pure ener­gy and intel­li­gence with no shape or form. They put him in what I sup­pose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life pass­es from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to hap­pen as it does in the film. 

They choose this room, which is a very inac­cu­rate repli­ca of French archi­tec­ture (delib­er­ate­ly so, inac­cu­rate) because one was sug­gest­ing that they had some idea of some­thing that he might think was pret­ty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with ani­mals to try to give them what they think is their nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment.

Any­way, when they get fin­ished with him, as hap­pens in so many myths of all cul­tures in the world, he is trans­formed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, trans­formed and made some kind of super­man. We have to only guess what hap­pens when he goes back. It is the pat­tern of a great deal of mythol­o­gy, and that is what we were try­ing to sug­gest.

This makes sense, or at least as much sense as any of the bet­ter inter­pre­ta­tions of 2001’s end­ing out there. Draw­ing explic­it­ly on ancient mythol­o­gy has become stan­dard prac­tice for big-bud­get spec­ta­cles, espe­cial­ly after Star Wars did it to much greater com­mer­cial suc­cess almost a decade lat­er, but in devel­op­ment the idea must have seemed rad­i­cal. Some will take Kubrick­’s expla­na­tion as defin­i­tive, and oth­ers, sub­scrib­ing to a dif­fer­ent phi­los­o­phy of artis­tic cre­ation, will show no more inter­est in it than they do in Rid­ley Scot­t’s per­son­al views on whether Deckard is a repli­cant.

The mys­te­ri­ous nature of the inter­view clip itself, a piece of the footage gath­ered in 1980 for a nev­er-released Japan­ese doc­u­men­tary, suits the nature of the rev­e­la­tion. We see only Yaoi as he inter­views Kubrick over the phone, but not, accord­ing to Pixar direc­tor and Kubrick super­fan Lee Unkrich, because the direc­tor was­n’t there. Unkrich post­ed to Red­dit that, as the Warn­er Broth­ers pub­li­cist who toured the Japan­ese crew around told him, “Stan­ley was actu­al­ly at the stu­dio that day, but didn’t want to meet with the crew and be inter­viewed on cam­era.” So even though we hear his voice on the phone, “he’s actu­al­ly just in anoth­er office!”

But then, nobody ever accused Kubrick of pos­sess­ing con­ven­tion­al habits, per­son­al or pro­fes­sion­al. Not that a con­ven­tion­al mind could ever have direct­ed the film that 2001: A Space Odyssey turned out to be, one that, in Chi­as­son’s words, “took for grant­ed a broad cul­tur­al tol­er­ance, if not an appetite, for enig­ma, as well as the time and incli­na­tion for pars­ing inter­pre­tive mys­ter­ies.” Kubrick might have com­plet­ed the film with his own ideas about the mean­ing of every­thing in it, but he sure­ly knew, and respect­ed, that every­one who saw it would also come out of the the­ater with their own.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

What’s the Dif­fer­ence Between Stan­ley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son)

In 1968, Stan­ley Kubrick Makes Pre­dic­tions for 2001: Human­i­ty Will Con­quer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn Ger­man in 20 Min­utes

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch the Winners of the 48 Hour Science Fiction Film Challenge: The 2018 Edition

Writes Metafil­ter: “Every year, as part of their sci­ence fic­tion film fes­ti­val, Sci-Fi Lon­don organ­ise a chal­lenge in which entrants are giv­en a title, line of dia­logue and descrip­tion of a prop, and then have 48 hours to turn in a com­plet­ed 5 minute film or piece of flash fic­tion. The win­ning films and flash fic­tion sto­ries from the Sci­Fi Lon­don 48 Hour Chal­lenge are now avail­able to watch and read.” The first place film win­ner you can view above. Find oth­er win­ning entries via the links below:

THE FILM CHALLENGE:

THE FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE:

Enjoy.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Cre­ates a List of His 12 Favorite Sci­ence-Fic­tion Movies (1984)

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Stream 47 Hours of Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­els & Sto­ries: Asi­mov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Love­craft & More

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Watch the New Trailer for Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the First Feature Film on the Pioneering Sci-Fi Author

On June 10th, at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in Eng­land, direc­tor Arwen Cur­ry will pre­miere Worlds of Ursu­la K Le Guin, the first fea­ture film about the ground­break­ing sci­ence fic­tion writer. The film’s web­site notes that “Cur­ry filmed with Le Guin for 10 years to pro­duce the film, which unfolds an inti­mate jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery as Le Guin comes into her own as a major fem­i­nist author, open­ing new doors for the imag­i­na­tion and inspir­ing gen­er­a­tions of women and oth­er mar­gin­al­ized writ­ers along the way.” Star­ring Le Guin her­self, who sad­ly passed away ear­li­er this year, Worlds of Ursu­la K Le Guin fea­tures appear­ances by Mar­garet Atwood, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany, and Michael Chabon. You can watch the brand new trail­er for the film above.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Record­ing from 1985

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Covers: From the Fantastical 1920s to the Psychedelic 1960s & Beyond

If you’ve nev­er seen Gen­tle­men Bron­cos, the lit­tle-seen third fea­ture by the Napoleon Dyna­mite-mak­ing hus­band-and-wife team Jared and Jerusha Hess, I high­ly rec­om­mend it. You must, though, enjoy the pecu­liar Hess sense of humor, a blend of the almost objec­tive­ly detached and the hearti­ly sopho­moric fixed upon the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of deeply unfash­ion­able sec­tions of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca. In Gen­tle­men Bron­cos it makes itself felt imme­di­ate­ly, even before the film’s sto­ry of a young aspir­ing sci­ence fic­tion writer in small-town Utah begins, with a tour de force open­ing cred­its sequence made up of homages to the pulpi­est sci-fi book cov­ers of, if not recent decades, then at least semi-recent decades.

The style of these cov­er images, though ris­i­ble, no doubt look rich with asso­ci­a­tions to any­one who’s spent even small part of their lives read­ing mass-mar­ket sci-fi nov­els. To see more than a few high­er exam­ples, watch “The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers,” the Nerd­writer video essay above that digs into the his­to­ry of that enor­mous­ly inven­tive yet sel­dom seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered artis­tic sub­field.

Its begins with the world’s first sci­ence-fic­tion mag­a­zine Amaz­ing Sto­ries (an online archive of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) and its pieces of fan­tas­ti­cal, eye-catch­ing cov­er art by Aus­tria-Hun­gary-born illus­tra­tor Frank R. Paul. In the mid-1920s, says the Nerd­writer, “these cov­ers were prob­a­bly among the strangest art that the aver­age Amer­i­can ever got to see.”

It would get stranger. The Nerd­writer fol­lows the devel­op­ment of sci-fi cov­er art from the hey­day of the Paul-illus­trat­ed Amaz­ing Sto­ries to the intro­duc­tion of mass-mar­ket paper­back books in the late 1930s to Pen­guin’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with exist­ing works of mod­ern art in the 1960s to the com­mis­sion­ing of new, even more bizarre and evoca­tive works by all man­ner of pub­lish­ers (some of them sci-fi spe­cial­ists) there­after. “You can walk into any used book store any­where and get five of these old pulp books for a dol­lar each,” the Nerd­writer reminds us. “And then the art is with you; it’s in your home. As you read the sto­ries, it’s on your bed­side table. It’s art you hold with your hands. It’s not pre­cious: it’s bent, fold­ed, and creased. And above all, it’s weird.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

Pulp Cov­ers for Clas­sic Detec­tive Nov­els by Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Ray­mond Chan­dler

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stream 47 Hours of Classic Sci-Fi Novels & Stories: Asimov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Lovecraft & More

The pro­nounce­ments of French the­o­rist Jean Bau­drillard could sound a bit sil­ly in the ear­ly 1990s, when the inter­net was still in its infan­cy, a slow, clunky tech­nol­o­gy whose promis­es far exceed­ed what it could deliv­er. We hoped for the cyber­punk spaces of William Gib­son, and got the beep-boop tedi­um of dial-up. Even so, in his 1991 essay “Sim­u­lacra and Sci­ence Fic­tion,” Bau­drillard con­tend­ed that the real and the imag­i­nary were no longer dis­tin­guish­able, and that the col­lapse of the dis­tance between them meant that “there is no more fic­tion.” Or, con­verse­ly, he sug­gest­ed, that there is no more real­i­ty.

What seemed a far-fetched claim about the total­i­ty of “cyber­net­ics and hyper­re­al­i­ty” in the age of AOL and Netscape now sounds far more plau­si­ble. After all, it will soon be pos­si­ble, if it is not so already, to con­vinc­ing­ly sim­u­late events that nev­er occurred, and to make mil­lions of peo­ple believe they had, not only through fake tweets, “fake news,” and age-old pro­pa­gan­da, but through sophis­ti­cat­ed manip­u­la­tion of video and audio, through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty and the onset of “real­i­ty apa­thy,” a psy­cho­log­i­cal fatigue that over­whelms our abil­i­ties to dis­tin­guish true and false when every­thing appears as a car­toon­ish par­o­dy of itself.

Tech­nol­o­gist Aviv Ovadya has tried since 2016 to warn any­one who would lis­ten that such a col­lapse of real­i­ty was fast upon us—an “Info­ca­lypse,” he calls it. If this is so, accord­ing to Bau­drillard, “both tra­di­tion­al SF and the­o­ry are des­tined to the same fate: flux and impre­ci­sion are putting an end to them as spe­cif­ic gen­res.” In an apoc­a­lyp­tic pre­dic­tion, he declaimed, “fic­tion will nev­er again be a mir­ror held to the future, but rather a des­per­ate rehal­lu­ci­nat­ing of the past.” The “col­lec­tive mar­ket­place” of glob­al­iza­tion and the Bor­ge­sian con­di­tion in which “the map cov­ers all the ter­ri­to­ry” have left “no room any more for the imag­i­nary.” Com­pa­nies set up shop express­ly to sim­u­late and fal­si­fy real­i­ty. Pained irony, pas­tiche, and cheap nos­tal­gia are all that remain.

It’s a bleak sce­nario, but per­haps he was right after all, though it may not yet be time to despair—to give up on real­i­ty or the role of imag­i­na­tion. After all, sci-fi writ­ers like Gib­son, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Bal­lard grasped long before most of us the con­di­tion Bau­drillard described. The sub­ject proved for them and many oth­er late-20th cen­tu­ry sci-fi authors a rich vein for fic­tion. And per­haps, rather than a great disruption—to use the lan­guage of a start-up cul­ture intent on break­ing things—there remains some con­ti­nu­ity with the naïve con­fi­dence of past par­a­digms, just as New­ton­ian physics still holds true, only in a far more lim­it­ed way than once believed.

Isaac Asimov’s short essay “The Rel­a­tiv­i­ty of Wrong” is instruc­tive on this last point. Maybe the the­o­ry of “hyper­re­al­i­ty” is right, in some fash­ion, but also incom­plete: a future remains for the most vision­ary cre­ative minds to dis­cov­er, as it did for Asimov’s “psy­chohis­to­ri­an” Hari Sel­don in The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy. You can hear a BBC drama­ti­za­tion of that ground­break­ing fifties mas­ter­work in the 47-hour sci­ence fic­tion playlist above, along with read­ings of clas­sic stories—like Orson Welles’ infa­mous radio broad­cast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (and an audio­book of the same read by Eng­lish actor Maxwell Caulfield). From Jules Verne to H.P. Love­craft to George Orwell; from the mid-fifties time trav­el fic­tion of Andre Nor­ton to the 21st-cen­tu­ry time-trav­el fic­tion of Ruth Boswell….

We’ve even got a late entry from the­atri­cal prog rock mas­ter­mind Rick Wake­man, who fol­lowed up his musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth with a sequel he penned him­self, record­ed in 1974, and released in 1999, called Return to the Cen­tre of the Earth, with nar­ra­tion by Patrick Stew­art and guest appear­ances by Ozzy Osbourne, Bon­nie Tyler, and the Moody Blues’ Justin Hay­ward. Does revis­it­ing sci-fi, “weird fic­tion,” and oper­at­ic con­cept albums of the past con­sti­tute a “des­per­ate rehal­lu­ci­nat­ing” of a bygone “lost object,” as Bau­drillard believed? Or does it pro­vide the raw mate­r­i­al for today’s psy­chohis­to­ri­ans? I sup­pose it remains to be seen; the future—and the future of sci­ence fiction—may be wide open.

The 47-hour sci­ence fic­tion playlist above will be added to our col­lec­tion of 900 Free Audio Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dra­mas of Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Philip K. Dick, Ursu­la K. LeGuin & More (1989)

Free: 355 Issues of Galaxy, the Ground­break­ing 1950s Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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