When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis now, we see an aesthetically daring landmark work of science-fiction cinema. When H.G. Wells watched Metropolis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw something very different indeed. “I have recently seen the silliest film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an opener for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.”
Despite its giant budget, Metropolis gives “in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” History remembers Lang and Wells both as visionaries who looked, often with little optimism, to the future, but clearly they had a difference of opinion as to how that future would actually play out.
The scientifically-minded Wells took the impressionistic Metropolis literally, taking issue with — among other things — how its airplanes “show no advance on contemporary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 models or earlier”; its vision of a vertically stratified city look, “to put it mildly, highly improbable”; the apparent condition that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used”; and the sentimentality of its makers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”
Metropolis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can readhere), but no contemporary critic could match Wells for sheer disdain. “Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events,” he wrote, steering his point-by-point takedown to its conclusion. “It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”
Strong stuff, but the highest form of film criticism, as the French New Wave would later articulate, is filmmaking. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, another cinematic spectacle of the future, this one built to the ostensibly more plausible specifications Wells laid out as its screenwriter — that film itself just one more predecessor to the unending series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.
So you want to be a writer? Good, you’ll find plenty of advice from the best here at Open Culture. Oh, you want to be a science fiction writer? The great Ursula K. Le Guin has offered readers a wealth of writing advice, though she won’t tell us “how to sell a ship, but how to sail one.” But wait, you also want to know how to publish, and make a living? For that, you’d better see Robert Heinlein, one of the acknowledged masters of the Golden Age of science fiction and a hugely prolific author who pioneered both popular hard sci-fi and what he called “speculative fiction,” a more serious, literary form incorporating social and political themes.
In his 1947 essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” Heinlein refers to these “two types” of science fiction as “the gadget story and the human interest story.” The latter kind of story, writes Heinlein “stands a better chance with the slicks than a gadget story does” because it has wider appeal. This advice sounds rather utilitarian, doesn’t it? What about passion, inspiration, the muse? Eh, you don’t have time for those things. If you want to be successful like Robert Heinlein, you’ve got to write stories, lots of ‘em, stories people want to publish and pay for, stories people want to read.
Heinlein spends the bulk of his essay advising us on how to write such stories, with a proviso, in an epigram from Rudyard Kipling, that “there are nine-and-sixty ways / Of constructing tribal lays / And every single one of them is right.” After, however, describing in detail how he writes a “human interest” science fiction story, Heinlein then gets down to business. He assumes that we can type, know the right formats or can learn them, and can spell, punctuate, and use grammar as our “wood-carpenter’s sharp tools.” These prerequisites met, all we really need to write speculative fiction are the five rules below:
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you start.
3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4. You must put it on the market.
5. You must keep it on the market until sold.
You might think Heinlein has lapsed into the language of the realtor, not the writer, but he is deadly serious about these rules, which “are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants.” Anyone who has tried to write and publish fiction knows this to be true. But what did Heinlein mean in giving us such an austere list? For one thing, as he notes many times, there are perhaps as many ways to write sci-fi stories as there are people to write them. What Heinlein aims to give us are the keys to becoming professional writers, not theorists of writing, lovers of writing, dabblers and dilettantes of writing.
Award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer has interpreted Heinlein’s rules with commentary of his own, and added a sixth: “Start Working on Something Else.” Good advice. Heinlein’s rule number three, however—“the one that got Heinlein in trouble with creative-writing teachers”—seems to contradict what most every other writer will tell us. Sawyer suggests we take it to mean, “Don’t tinker endlessly with your story.” Writer Patricia C. Wrede agrees, but also suggests that “Heinlein was of the school of thought that felt that ‘good enough’ was all that was necessary, ever.”
Like 19th century writers who churned out novels as serialized stories for the papers and magazines, Heinlein and his fellow Golden Age writers made their living selling story after story to the “pulps” and the “slicks” (preferably the slicks). One had to be prolific, and being “’prolific enough’ often involved not having time to polish and revise much (if at all).” So rule number three may or may not apply, depending on our constraints. The literary market has changed dramatically since 1947, but the rest of Heinlein’s rules still seem nonnegotiable if we intend not only to write—speculative fiction or otherwise—but also to make a career doing so.
H.G. Wells’ tales of fantastical inventions, never-before-seen beings, time travel, and alien invasion practically cry out for visual and sonic accompaniment. Of all the other artists’ interpretations of his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, Orson Welles’ infamous Halloween 1938 radio broadcast remains best known, but various illustrators have also brought the story of mercilessly destructive Martians’ arrival on Earth to equally vivid life. Last year, we featured Brazilian illustrator Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s horrifying work for the 1906 edition; today, we go back before TheWar of the Worlds’ first edition to behold the aliens as rendered by Warwick Goble.
“I’m doing the dearest little serial for Pearson’s new magazine,” Wells wrote to a friend, “in which I completely wreck and sack Woking — killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways — then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.” That dearest little serial, after its 1897 run in Pearson’s Magazine in the U.K. and Cosmopolitan in the U.S., appeared the next year in book form as The War of the Worlds, a common publication procedure for popular English-language novels in the 19th and early 20th century.
“The story is still a bit rough round the edges,” writes sci-fi author John Guy Collick, but “what makes the magazine special are the fantastic illustrations by Warwick Goble. These are the first pictures of the Martians and their tripods and, I think, the best.” He praises their low-tech style and their faithfulness to the text: “in the novel Wells is at pains to point out that the Martian legs are rigid,” not articulated as the films and other illustrations have tended to portray them.” The Martians themselves he considers a “bit too cute, though they are the first attempt to visualise beings from another world,” and these depictions of terror from another planet (more of which you can see here) certainly marked a departure in Goble’s children’s book-oriented career. Even an artist of whimsy has to cause a few nightmares once in a while.
During the next fifty years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billions, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources.
Then, in 1958, a young reporter named Mike Wallace had Huxley play prophet on a 30-minute TV show. Overpopulation gets discussed again. But then Huxley returns to some familiar dystopian themes, identifying some emerging threats to our freedoms.
Overorganization: “Well another force which I think is very strongly operative in this country is the force of what may be called of overorganization. Er…As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations, and incidentally the advance of technology is being accompanied by an advance in the science of organization.
It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than it was ever possible before, and so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracy, either the bureaucracies of big businesses or the bureaucracies of big government.”
Abuse of new technologies: “There are certainly devices which can be used [to limit freedoms.] I mean, let us er…take after all, a piece of very recent and very painful history is the propaganda used by Hitler, which was incredibly effective.
I mean, what were Hitler’s methods? Hitler used terror on the one kind, brute force on the one hand, but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda, which er…he was using every modern device at that time. He didn’t have TV., but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people. I mean, the Germans were a highly educated people.
Drugs: I mean, in this book that you mentioned, this book of mine, “Brave New World,” er…I postulated it a substance called ‘soma,’ which was a very versatile drug. It would make people feel happy in small doses, it would make them see visions in medium doses, and it would send them to sleep in large doses.…
If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in “Brave New World,” partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery.
“We live in interesting, exciting, and anxious times,” declares the booming narration that opens the movie trailer above. Truer words were never spoken about our age — or about the mid-1930s, the times to which the narrator actually refers. But the picture itself tells a story about the future, one extending deep into the 21st century: a hundred-year saga of decades-long war, a new Dark Age, and, by the mid-2050s, a rebuilding of society as a kind of industrial Utopia run by a technocratic world government. It will surprise no one familiar with his sensibility that the screenplay for the film, Things to Come, came from the mind of H.G. Wells. Watch it in full on YouTube or Archive.org.
Welles had made his name long before with imaginative novels like The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds (find them in our list of Free eBooks), all published in the previous century. By the time the opportunity came around to make a big-budget cinema spectacle with producer Alexander Korda and director William Cameron Menzies, conceived in part as a rebuke to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the writer had settled into his role as a kind of “eminent fortune teller,” as New York Times critic Frank Nugent described him in his review of the collaboration’s final product.
“Typical Wellsian conjecture,” Nugent continues, “it ranges from the reasonably possible to the reasonably fantastic; but true or false, fanciful or logical, it is an absorbing, provocative and impressively staged production.” It included work from not just important figures in the history of filmmaking (Menzies, for instance, invented the job of production designer) but the history of art as well, such as the Bauhaus’ László Moholy-Nagy. You can watch and judge for yourself the free version of Things to Come available on YouTube or, much preferable to the cinephile, the restored and much-supplemented Criterion Collection edition, whose extras include unused footage that more fully shows Moholy-Nagy’s contributions.
At the time, this much-ballyhooed spectacle-prophecy drew responses not just from movie critics, but from other eminent writers as well. In his Criterion essay “Whither Mankind?”, Geoffrey O’Brien quotes those of both Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell. “The heaven of Wells and Alexander Korda, like that of so many other eschatologists and set designers, is not much different than their hell, though even less charming,” Borges complained of the envisioned near-perfection of its distant future. Wells, like many 19th-century visionaries, instinctively associated technological progress with the moral variety, but Borges saw a different situation in the present, when “the power of almost all tyrants arises from their control of technology.”
Things to Come has, however, received retrospective credit for predicting global war just ahead. In its first act, the London-like Everytown suffers an aerial bombing raid which sets the whole civilization-destroying conflict in motion. Not long after the real Blitz came, Orwell looked back at the film and wrote, ominously, that “much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the airplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.” Or, in Nugent’s chilling words of 1936, “There’s nothing we can do now but sit back and wait for the holocaust. If Mr. Wells is right, we are in for an interesting century.”
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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, and the start of a love affair between fans and the show’s utopian promise. With only 79 episodes over three seasons in the original 1966–1969 series, it might have disappeared into pop culture history. Instead, it has lived long and prospered, with movies and sequels and New Generations, and reboots and more sequels. And that’s not counting the labor-of-love fan films that have spawned around the fringes.
Now, fan-created films usually fall down in the acting and effects department, or they try too hard. But even if you’re not a dedicated Trekkie, the independently-produced Star Trek Continues holds up as some great sci-fi that recreates the original series’ look to perfection, while skirting parody. (Plus it got the blessing of series creator Gene Roddenberry’s son, who said his father “would consider this canon.”)
When we first told you about Star Trek Continues in February, five hour-long episodes were viewable on YouTube or the show’s official website, funded through two Kickstarter campaigns and personal moneys from executive producer Vic Mignogna ($150,000) and co-executive producer Steven Dengler ($100,000). Above, you can check out the two new episodes, “Come Not Between the Dragons” (Episode 6) and “Embracing the Winds” (Episode 7). Or watch the entire series, from start to finish, below.
Despite Star Trek Continues’ not-for-profit status, other Star Trek fan films have raised the ire of CBS and Paramount’s legal divisions, and may end up harming the future of such endeavors. But remember, CBS had no faith in the original series back in the day, placing it in later and later time slots. It was syndication that made the show a cult hit, and it was those original fans that lovingly fanned the embers until the show reignited. For them on this half-century mark, they deserve as much a thank you as the original crew of the Starship Enterprise.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The original Star Trek TV series took to the airwaves nearly 5o years ago–on September 8, 1966. Poor ratings meant that the show didn’t last very long (only three years). But everything changed once the show went into syndication. It achieved cult status. And a franchise was born. The original Star Trek has now spawned five additional tv series, 13 feature films, and a number of fan-made sequels.
One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film’s rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman’s physical traits onto the body of a destructive android—the so-called Maschinenmensch—for example, began a very long trend of female robots in film and television, most of them as dangerous and inscrutable as Lang’s. And yet, for all its many imitators, Metropolis continues to deliver surprises. Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page program distributed at the film’s 1927 premier in London and recently re-discovered.
In addition to underwriting almost one hundred years of science fiction film and television tropes, Metropolis has had a very long life in other ways: Inspiring an all-star soundtrack produced by Giorgio Moroder in 1984,with Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant, and a Kraftwerk album. In 2001, a reconstructed version received a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register added it to their roster. 2002 saw the release of an exceptional Metropolis-inspired anime with the same title. And in 2010 an almost fully restored print of the long-incomplete film—recut from footage found in Argentina in 2008—appeared, adding a little more sophistication and coherence to the simplistic story line.
Even at the film’s initial reception, without any missing footage, critics did not warm to its story. For all its intense visual futurism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, naïve tale, struck through with earnest religiosity and inexplicable archaisms. Contemporary reviewers found its narrative of generational and class conflict unconvincing. H.G. Wells—“something of an authority on science fiction”—pronounced it “the silliest film” full of “every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the story, and despite its overt religious themes, many saw it as Communist propaganda.
Viewed after subsequent events in 20th century Germany, many of the film’s scenes appear “disturbingly prescient,” writes the Unaffiliated Critic, such as the vision of a huge industrial machine as Moloch, in which “bald, underfed humans are led in chains to a furnace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou—who wrote the novel, then screenplay—were of course commenting on industrialization, labor conditions, and poverty in Weimar Germany. Metropolis’s “clear message of classism,” as io9 writes, comes through most clearly in its arresting imagery, like that horrifying, monstrous furnace and the “looming symbol of wealth in the Tower of Babel.”
The visual effects and spectacular set pieces have worked their magic on almost everyone (Wells excluded) who has seen Metropolis. And they remain, for all its silliness, the primary reason for the movie’s cultural prevalence. Wired calls it “probably the most influential sci-fi movie in history,” remarking that “a single movie poster from the original release sold for $690,000 seven years ago, and is expected to fetch even more at an auction later this year.”
We now have another artifact from the movie’s premiere, this 32-page program, appropriately called “Metropolis” Magazine, that offers a rich feast for audiences, and text at times more interesting than the film’s script. (You can view the program in full here.) One imagines had they possessed backlit smart phones, those early moviegoers might have found themselves struggling not to browse their programs while the film screened. But, of course, Metropolis’s visual excesses would hold their attention as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futuristic city have always enthralled viewers, filmmakers, and (most) critics, such that Roger Ebert could write of “vast futuristic cities” as a staple of some of the best science fiction in his review of the 21st-century animated Metropolis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhilarating.”
The program really is an astonishing document, a treasure for fans of the film and for scholars. Full of production stills, behind-the-scenes articles and photos, technical minutiae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Harbau, the “authoress,” excerpts from her novel and screenplay placed side-by-side, and a short article by her. There’s a page called “Figures that Speak” that tallies the production costs and cast and crew numbers (including very crude drawings and numbers of “Negroes” and “Chinese”). Lang himself weighs in, laconically, with a breezy introduction followed by a classic silent-era line: “if I cannot succeed in finding expression on the picture, I certainly cannot find it in speech.” Film history agrees, Lang found his expression “on the picture.”
“Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Harrington rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, given what an original Metropolis poster went for. But markets are fickle, and whatever its current or future price, ”Metropolis” Magazine is invaluable to cineastes. See all 32 pages of the program at Peter Harrington’s website.
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