The Art of Fiction was a famous essay by Henry James, from 1885. This blog is written by Adrian Slatcher, who is a writer amongst other things, based in Manchester. His poetry collection "Playing Solitaire for Money" was published by Salt in 2010. I write about literature, music, politics and other stuff. You can find more about me and my writing at www.adrianslatcher.com
Saturday, September 01, 2007
The Beach Boys and Science Fiction
I'm belatedly (say, the last 5 years) a massive Beach Boys fan. I'd had "Pet Sounds" for years and loved it, though perhaps not as "the best album ever" that it sometimes gets called. My pastoral days - of Cherry Red records and the Cocteau Twins - are long gone, and "Pet Sounds" sometimes fits a bit too neatly into that. Yet over the last few years I've been picking up Beach Boys CDs, which have all been exemplarily reissued (good liner notes, remastered, 2 short albums on 1 CD), and enjoyed them all. I'm as likely to like the pre-Pet Sounds songs of "All Summer Long" as the swish early 70s soft rock you find on "Holland" - and it hardly matters whether Brian Wilson was present or not (heresy, perhaps, but its true, here was a band that his spirit was always there, even when his presence wasn't). There's always been a darker side to these exemplaries of a sun-bleached California, as with their covering of a Charles Manson song (he'd struck up a friendship with Dennis Wilson), or the post-Smile breakdown of Brian. I'm fascinated to find out (thanks Wikipedia!) that there's a novel about "lost masterpieces" that centres on the unfinished "Smile", Lewis Shiner's Glimpses. I'll have to get hold of a copy. The slim rock n roll/sci-fi crossover genre expands - there's "Disaster Area", the made-up band in Douglas Adam's "Hitchhikers..." series, Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship's Heinlein-influenced, "Blows Against the Empire" album, the Moorcock-Hawkwind thing (never quite got this, I'm afraid), Bowie's "Diamong Dogs", and possibly that's all. I'm sure there are plenty of sci-fi novels that include rock and roll stars (time travel helps, of course) but I've not really come across any.
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Gwyneth Jones wrote an interesting scifi series called Bold As Love linked to Jimi Hendrix. It's pretty wild.
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