![]() “Whereas some were taken with his womanliness, others were struck by his spaciness.” “Androgynous sexuality and extraterrestrial origin seemed to have provided two different points of identification for Bowie fans,” notes Philip Auslander in Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Le Guin’s visionary 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which takes place on an alien planet where transitions between genders are as routine as any other biological process-a concept that certainly resonates with Bowie’s aesthetic. In its celebration of androgyny, glam also lined up with Ursula K. In his scattershot quest for recognition, Bowie often switched up his stage names and identities, a process that eventually culminated in his androgynous image at the height of the glam movement in the early ’70s, when he reinvented himself as Ziggy Stardust. Both are products of swinging London’s mod scene of the mid-’60s, where Bowie cut his teeth as an up-and-coming performer. The parallels between Cornelius’s chameleon-like existence and Bowie’s otherworldly personae are unmistakable. ![]() In them, Cornelius is a mysterious, androgynous secret agent with a knack for sartorial elegance and introverted remove-and in his spare time, he’s also a rock star. In particular, his Jerry Cornelius series of novels and short stories-1965’s The Final Programme being the first book-length installment-summed up that wildly transitional period. Moorcock published some of his own work in New Worlds, and it exemplified his ideal: a style that became known as the New Wave. Burroughs’ incursions into genre-twisting radicalism as an integral part of the sci-fi canon-and the genre’s future. In their place, New Worlds substituted moral ambiguity, sexual fluidity, narrative experimentation, broken taboos, and sometimes even outright nihilism Moorcock and crew wholeheartedly embraced William S. ![]() Theirs were not simplistic tales of intrepid explorers such as Heinlein’s Starman Jones. Pollack).Īll of these New Worlds authors, and many others like them, challenged the predominantly optimistic outlook and linear storytelling techniques of science fiction up to that point. Disch, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, and Rachel Pollack (under the name Richard R. By 1969, New Worlds had become a beacon for transgressive work, regularly publishing forward-thinking authors from both sides of the Atlantic such as J. In 1964, a young editor named Michael Moorcock took the reins of New Worlds, a venerable British magazine that he used as a platform for avant-garde science fiction and fantasy. Meanwhile, science fiction was making a different yet similarly seismic shift of its own. Not only was the countercultural infatuation with astrology given a strong, television-validated antidote of applied astronomy, but millions of kids who had not signed up for either belief system were totally convinced.” As sociologist Philip Ennis noted, “It is probably not hyperbole to assert that the Age of Aquarius ended when man walked on the moon. The Apollo 11 mission culminated in a landing on the moon on July 20, 1969, marking a turn away from the vision of hippie utopianism, the back-to-basics movement that elevated pastoral romanticism over the hard logic of encroaching technocracy. The late-’60s was a heady time for science, sci-fi, and music. As far back as 1965, his fashion sense was pointed toward the future as Peter Doggett recounts in his book The Man Who Sold the World, even as a suit-wearing mod, Bowie’s hair “looked as if it had been created by the designers of a 1950s science fiction B-movie.” Early on, the voraciously bookish Bowie absorbed not only Heinlein, but the works of other sci-fi luminaries such as Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, whose classics The Illustrated Man and Nineteen Eighty-Four would prove to be vital influences as he became popular music’s ethereal, mercurial ambassador to science fiction. But it wasn’t his first or last foray into the imagery and themes of science fiction and fantasy. “Space Oddity” marked Bowie’s pivot from pop hopeful to bona fide star, and it remains the most immediately identifiable sci-fi song in rock history. Like Bowie himself, the single’s astronaut protagonist-Major Tom-was destined, or perhaps doomed, never to return to Earth. A decade later, in the summer of 1969, the 22-year-old aspiring rock musician released “Space Oddity,” the song that launched him into an undreamt orbit of fame.
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