Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

ART AND SCIENCE FICTION

Is there a relationship between art history, daily and Sunday comic strips, the great illustrators, and the evolution of science fiction?

Does science fiction and its unreal mirror image, fantasy, have wild roots in the art metaphors of the nineteenth century?

Does it all influence a mob of twentieth-century film magicians?

Finally, do these celluloid geniuses reinfluence the others?

We might as well ask: Are houses haunted? Does life thrive on other worlds.

Yes.

How so?

Houses are haunted by Fuseli/Blake/Goya imaginations.

Far worlds are seeded with Frank R. Paul/Robert McCall dreams.

Here-and-now cities sprout from old Melies’ sprocket-dancing pictures, Little Nemo full-page Sunday architectures, and skyline images from William Cameron Menzies’ art-directed Things to Come.

In the ricochet between night remembrance, palette and paint, printed word, and phantom cinema, a multitude of new worlds, spoken, seen, or watercolor-sketched, have come to birth.

A long Thanksgiving dinner. I will try to translate the menu.

Where to start?

Most of my generation, as young readers and writers of time-traveled pasts and hoped-for futures, was seized into novels illustrated by two artists: N.C. Wyeth and J. Allen St. John. Wyeth piloting his great metal white whale under-the-sea Nautilus. St. John astride his eight-legged thoats, dusting the acres, atrot along dry Martian seas.

We all knew that Wyeth’s Captain Nemo never was and that St. John’s Mars could never be. Yet amid all the chalkboard configurations of new physics and Viking Landers, we now know that the thoats will rove forever in the blowing Martian nights and Verne’s crazed captain will always rave under the tides—and all because Wyeth and St. John did more than facts and physics can to figure out God’s dreams for man. Both artists could describe the madness that is youth and the limitless territories that exist between a youngster’s left ear and his right.

Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Bruce Murray of the Jet Propulsion Lab—the list of young dreamers who did not grow old is endless. The meadowlands of Cape Canaveral are strewn with grown-up kids who swam after the grand concourse of submarines or marched behind the impossible thoats in a storm of red.

My experience differs little from theirs. Fairy tales awakened me, Wyeth and St. John sat me up, and the bright covers of Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, and Buck Rogers in the 1929 daily papers, exploded me into the universe.

I never came back.

Would that more teachers learned to find and teach such metaphors as, once sighted, would cause the impossible desire to rise in the human breast making them want to live forever.

Why want to live forever?

So as to be able to stroll in the channels of those dead Martian “seas,” or stand on the rim of that Grand Martian Canyon, which is as long and almost as wide as our entire continental United States.

So as to be able to stride into the front covers of the twenties’ science fiction magazines and never come out. To be encompassed, devoured, assimilated by those wondrous metaphors of humanity’s childhood dreams.

For that, almost completely, is what science fiction means to me. It is the history of towns and cities yet unbuilt, ghosting our imaginations and lifting us to rise up and find hammers and nails to build our dreams before they blow away.

I dare suggest some architects who, if you asked, would say the same: that a Frank R. Paul cover painting on an October 1929 issue of Amazing Stories caused them to buy pens, pencils, rulers, and drawing boards to paper up a concept and create a living world.

If you bombarded an audience with three minutes’ worth of covers from the old science fiction magazines, each screened for just two or three seconds, the effect would be stunning. For city after city, wall after wall, avenue after avenue, would strike the retina and stimulate the brain. How could you not, after seeing all that explosive stuff, want to stick around and be part of the fantastic years ahead?

I was reminded of this all over again just last week when some mysterious friend sent me a complete set of tear sheets from the serialization of H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1892. In vivid illustration after illustration, the concept of a man plastered against a crystal dome four hundred feet above an incredible future city, staring down in wonder at its skyports and car-streams, was enough to locomote the old engine and ventilate desire.

It was thus with all the H.G. Wells stories and the Verne tales published between 1850 and 1912. The future was actually there. You could touch it on the bright paper. You could smell it in the oils and perfumes that permeated the ink.

It was thus when Buck Rogers awakened, in October 1929. With the help of Wilma Deering, who found him wandering out of a long-winter sleep and strapped an inertron belt on his back and jumped into the air. A million hearts leaped to life that afternoon and never stopped leaping.

These futures, so wonderfully pursued in color and line, repeated in the Sunday full-page spreads, collided with the future actually built in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and again in New York in 1939. I walked through those fairs, brimming with tears of joy, glad to be inside the covers of Amazing Stories at last, closeted with illustrations come to life and reared to touch the sky and the soul. When the two fairs were torn down, part of my heart fell with them. The future was suddenly sunk and lost. My heart would break if it never returned.

I, like others aged twelve, built the future out of papier-mâché in my backyard, in order to guarantee its return, and repeated the stuff in my first stories. As I grew into my twenties I knew that if I wrote long enough and hard enough and willed the future to return, one day it would.

So the world we live in today is the direct result, I think, of the artwork, the illustrations, and the architecture of only-yesterday’s artists, who influenced films and comic strips as well as young writers and budding scientists.

If you flip back through the years 1905 to 1915 you will find the incredible cities, the impossible architecture of Little Nemo, as drawn by one of the greatest cartoon illustrators of the century, Winsor McCay.

Simultaneously, in France, the magician-become-cinema illusionist George Melies was popping rabbit films out of hats, full of Verne/Wells imagery, alive with architecture, impossible beasts, moon landscapes, and a pomegranate imagination that refused to sit still. If Melies influenced McCay or if McCay influenced Melies, I do not know. They are twins, racing down the same genetic track, so devastatingly full of the life-force that they knock everyone head over heels before them.

The histories of cinema and comic strips parallel each other on similar rail tracks, speeding up on through our century, rushing over mile-high viaducts, racing toward our elusive tomorrows.

The combination of all these metaphorical art forms, comic strips, magazine covers, magical films of the early twentieth century, and the World’s Fairs in between, have produced the architectural science fiction films of the last twenty years.

Architectural science fiction films?

I use the description because these films have rebuilt our concepts of the future. They are the manifestations of the words of science fiction and the architecture of our dreams.

2001 for starters. Next the big artillery that knocked us flat out: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the charming Star Trek II, III and IV.

Long before them, there were Metropolis and Things to Come, echoing and presaging the wild fancies of Frank Lloyd Wright and the unrealized blueprints of Norman Bel Geddes.

The unbuilt visions of lost architectural genius have at last been raised from the graveyard sands and reared on 50-foot-high and 90-foot-wide screens by today’s production designers and science fiction illustrators.

It was the cities we went to see.

Let us face it: In the final moments of Close Encounters, that is not—I repeat, not—a Mother Ship that drifts down from the universe. It is an entire country, a land put up in a massive architectural pod, so irresistible that, in hearing its five Pied Piper notes played again and again, the children of the world, myself included, rushed across the tarmac in our minds to get aboard and go away forever.

Such is the pull of futures riveted together as cities that pretend to be ships.

In The Empire Strikes Back, more cities, more architecture. What is the Emerald City doing, suspended on its own platform in a weird skyscraper, waiting for our seekers?

And, again…

Why do we go back to see 2001 over and over and over? Surely not for its one-track acting and baffling finale. We return to it because the very possibility of its interpretations frees us to carom off into the greatest of all architecture: the universe itself.

Who will ever forget their first cinematic trip into the unknown universe? The first sighting of that immense city-ship adrift to Strauss waltzes on the first night of viewing 2001?

Or that first thunderous explosion of a Star Wars rocket blasting across the stars? The night I heard it, a thousand people gasped with shock, knocked in the pits of their stomachs. The glad cry that followed the shock was like the city of a thousand babes slapped into life: pure joy at the sound of the future.

I am reminded of an article I wrote for a major magazine a few years back. The magazine hated the aesthetic concept of my article so much that they paid me off and trashed the piece. What had I said that knocked their wigs askew?

I simply pointed out that science fiction and science fiction art were revolutionizing the world of the museum, the gallery, the concert hall, the cinema, and all or most of fiction.

The cultural impact of your average science fiction film made kids wandering into art galleries wonder where all the metaphors were. They found instead drip-dry, cross-hatched, and empty canvases, bereft of any romance, poetry, image, or so much as one half of a dog-eared haiku symbol. If the cinema screens could flood their minds with such vivid portraits of imagined dreams, why not the art galleries?

From the imaginative film came the inevitable bleed-over and discovery of such illustrators as Rackham, Dulac, Grandville, Dore and the Victorian pre-Raphaelite painters. All because kids ran off to 2001 and fell from a thousand-story building, into the past as well as the future.

So the new-old clichés of the abstract and super-abstract revolution were cut across at their nonexistent knees by a riot of heretofore uninformed teenaged art critics who demanded story, symbol, and the reinvention of tale telling.

What fragmented the art galleries soon knocked a few orchestra conductors off their podiums. What started as a hum-along with the Strausses through two hours of 2001 prolonged itself into science fictional symphonies with Berlioz, Vivaldi, and a half-dozen others. The kids in their bright ignorance stumbled out of John Williams’ score for Star Wars into The Four Seasons and Symphonie Fantastique. One helluva way, the aesthetes protested, to be educated to their finer impulse.

What, after all, did these damn-fool kids know about art?

Almost, you might say, everything.

They knew that life without image or metaphor is empty and meaningless. Hell, they said, you can learn from the Bible. Witness Daniel in that old lions’ den. Once the cage doors slam and lions roar, you never forget that, do you? Well, then, in this age of machines that embody all the metaphors of man’s dreaming in the last one hundred years, how come the galleries are empty of concept, vacuumed free of one lint-thread of idea, long lost from dream? You do not go to visit an elevator shaft with no elevator in it, do you? Better one bottomed out in trash, if necessary, as long as you, in the finale, are lifted.

Well, if I have beaten the dead thoat a dozen times too many, forgive. Not all of our teachers, our intellectuals, our movers and shakers, have yet discovered that this is the greatest age of metaphor, because the metaphors have peeled off the canvases, marched out of the haunted World’s Fair grounds, leaped out of the comic strips, and unreeled themselves from cinema screens and computer tapes to become our whole existences, our lives, our further dreams. The artistic haiku of just the other morning has become the logarithm written to displace the astrological houses above us.

If educators and parents only truly understood, our children today are all quasars, galaxies, black holes, laser discs, and rocket-submarines built to submerge and swim in Jupiter’s soups. The architecture of the future is the substance of their dreams, fed by some of the best-wishing artists, authors, and architects.

We are all kin to the Gustave Dore and John Martin landscapes that caused the roustabout sorcerer Melies to film his secret moon, and Winsor McCay to walk his small boy Nemo upside down through inverted boulevards, and cause yet further films to be built around that grand door and wall and the huge skull on Kong’s island. Ending at last with the birth of Spielberg and Lucas, who picked up the bottle marked Drink Me—inside of which was the whole history of magazines, comics, science fiction covers, nineteenth-century painters and etchers—and drank the whole damn thing until the founts of Technicolor squirted out their ears.

The worst, you might be tempted to say, is yet to come. Yes, but the best also, I say. Why not the best? Science fiction remains the architecture of our dreams, and science fiction illustration will continue to inspire our next generation of dreamers.