Finding the Forbidden Planet

The music detective strikes again ...

If there's anything more annoying than trying to remember how a certain song goes and being unable to, then it has to be knowing how the song goes but being unable to listen to it because you can't find the recording.

I've written about a couple of previous attempts to track down lost music from the past. I located Space Escapade by Les Baxter, and discovered a whole genre of music called Space Age Pop in the process. And I tracked down Purple Moon by the Paul Desmond Trio -- something I remembered from my teen years and had been unable to find for over fifty years. But there was one more item that still eluded me.

This latest hunt was greatly complicated by not being able to remember either the name of the song or the group that had recorded it. What was left? Well, everything else. I could sing it for you, though it had no words. I could tell you the instrumentation: piano with string orchestra and some brass, plus a theremin. And I knew for certain that it had a science fiction motif.

At first I thought it had been called "Forbidden Planet," so that's what I searched for. There is indeed an album of the soundtrack to the 1950s movie by that name. It's a classic based on Shakespeare's The Tempest that inspired the original Star Trek series. This sound track was the first -- and still one of the very few -- to consist entirely of electronic music. In the era before synthesizers, that meant a laborious process using oscillators and recording tape. It was truly groundbreaking and interesting in its own right, but of course it does NOT include any pianos or string orchestras, nor even any traditional melodies, so I decided I must have been mistaken about the title.

Thinking it must have been the theme from some other sci fi flick, I looked through all kinds of collections. Unfortunately there are LOTS of them by now, and most of the material on them is from more recent things like Star Wars and Close Encounters. Nothing even close.

I gave up on this more than once when the Internet failed to deliver its usual instant gratification. We get so used to quick Google searches taking us directly to a download that when it fails we hardly know where to turn.

One night I got into it again with more time on my hands. Still no luck, but I did turn up some other interesting items. There's an entire suite of music to Destination Moon by Leith Stevens, for example, another 1950s classic. And some other choice examples of Space Age Pop, like Fantastica - Music from Outer Space by Russ Garcia. Then I got off track, looking for the original version of the Route 66 theme.

Noticing how many others besides Nelson Riddle had recorded things under this name made me wonder about "Forbidden Planet" again. What if someone else had recorded something and called it that? It turns out they did -- lots of them. Way too many of them. Most of them rock bands and homebrew electronic music buffs. But I kept looking, and finally noticed one that said "David Rose and his orchestra." Could it be?

The listing was on Amazon, but it was only available on a vinyl LP and was "out of print" as the saying used to go. That also meant there was no audio preview to confirm it was the one I was looking for. But let's see ... where can you turn for things that are not available new?

I typed the composer's name and the title into eBay, and lo and behold. multiple matches. Not only the full LP, most of which didn't interest me, but also the 45 rpm single which was exactly the one I used to own. There it was, staring me in the face, the yellow label with the big hole in the middle. Should I place a bid? Let me read about it first, see if it sounds like the right one...

Sure enough, the paper cover said, "inspired by" the MGM film. To my amazement, the seller included a link to a Youtube upload of the audio so buyers could listen first. I clicked, clicked again, and there it was. Pops and hisses characteristic of the medium, even a wavering from a slight warp, but all the same ... the familiar opening swoop of the theremin, a blare of brass, and the strings burst into song. Ahhh.

Here you go -- you can listen to it.

The only thing better would be finding a pristine CD or mp3 version, but for now this will serve me just fine. I fired up VLC to save myself a copy of the video (with audio only), and then convert it to an audio flac. Just like that, it's part of my library. Ain't life good?

On the Joys of Reading Long Books

There was a time in my life when I found books of a certain size intimidating. Maybe it goes back to my attempt, at the age of twelve, to absorb my father's copy of War and Peace when the only adult literature I had read until then was science fiction. I remember getting to the end of chapter one and feeling like I'd just eaten way too much chocolate cake. I knew it was good stuff, on a level above anything I'd seen, but I also knew I wasn't ready for it.

By the time I reached high school I was able to plow my way through not only Tolstoy but Dostoyevsky, and not only Russians but Americans like Steinbeck and Faulkner -- even Absolom, Absolom with its pages-long sentences. In my college years Hermann Hesse came into vogue, so I consumed most of his works including the monumental Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game) which is supplemented at the end by a sort of appendix of poetry and three short stories  purported to have been written by its main character, a wonderful example of a book that contains other books. I also developed my fondness for philosophical works by digesting William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and Aldous Huxley's The Perrenial Philosophy. Both of those are heavy wading, but they made an interesting pair since they shared the idea that all the world's religions have much in common, an idea that appealed to me as a Unitarian who was destined to become a Quaker.

Then, as happens to many of us, I became so caught up in the world and the need to make a living that I found less time for reading. I returned to my first love of science fiction for recreation, and gravitated toward short stories that were quicker to consume. I lost my taste for big thick books that revealed from their sheer bulk the amount of time and attention that would have to be give to them. It was so much easier to take two hours to absorb a movie or a magazine.

I suppose it has just been reaching a later stage of my life that has drawn me back to those substantial works I had avoided for so long. But the pleasure of discovery -- or rediscovery -- has been well worth the wait. Armed only with the willingness, I launched into such projects as reading the twenty volumes of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, and Neal Stephenson's trilogy of 700-pagers set in the Baroque period. I also got an ebook reader and have been using it to catch up on many of the classics that I had somehow managed to overlook, things like Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, and the other wonderful novels of Joseph Conrad which are not called Heart of Darkness.

Having acquired the taste, it is now one of the most satisfying feelings I can imagine to sit down and crack the covers on something that measures a couple of inches in thickness. I'm finally reading Shadow Country, Peter Matthieson's final version (900 pp.) of his legend about Mr. Watson, the backwoods killer who was shot down by his neighbors in the Florida Everglades.

And, just to keep things interesting, I've also started in on the three volumes of Shelby Foote's definitive account of the Civil War. Something wonderful happens when you realize the author will take as much time and space as it takes to give you the full picture. Thus we begin with two capsule biographies of Lincoln and Davis, the rival Presidents, and proceed at leisure up to the first conflict at Harper's Ferry.

The reader can sit back with a sigh, confident in the hundreds of pages remaining to unfold the whole tale, and comforted by the other two volumes still waiting on the shelf. When you're having this good a time, the best news you can hear are the words, "To be continued ..."

Back to the Future

New variations on traveling through time ...

Nothing is more fun than time travel in the arena of science fiction. Ever since H.G. Wells came up with the original Time Machine in his 1895 novel, hordes of others have continued to explore the possibilities and paradoxes of moving at will through the medium we are normally stuck in.

A recent effort is Joe Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine. In this one, an MIT lab assistant discovers that his latest gadget, a "calibrator" that serves as the novel's McGuffen or plot instigator, has the unintended characteristic that pressing its reset button sends it into the future. He quickly discovers a further flaw -- not only does it move only forwards in time, but it does so by a factor of twelve times farther each time.

It doesn't take long for him to figure a way to go along for the ride, and the adventure begins. Each jump takes him to a future world stranger than the one before, and complications soon have him hoping to find someone still farther ahead who might be able to send him back home.

An old favorite of mine is The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) by Barrington Bayley, unfortunately now out of print. It involves a war fought between two empires millennia apart, and their attempts to undo one another by altering each other's past. The final cataclysm turns the universe inside out and starts it over again, like a computer that crashes and reboots.

The book includes an interesting variant on the old paradox about what happens if you go back in time and meet yourself there. The character aptly named "Narcis" goes into the future and kidnaps himself back to the past so his twin selves can live in wedded bliss. The only problem is that they will eventually arrive at the night when a stranger from the past comes to kidnap one of them, leaving the other alone again.

Just for laughs, there's a short story called "A Niche In Time" that I remember from the 1950's or 60's, by an author I can't recall. It involves a man named Harry Styne who uses a time machine to avoid prosecution for murder by jumping ahead of the statute of limitations. Confronted with this dilemma the judge finds for the defendant, stating, "in this case, a niche in time saves Styne." [Groan, groan.]

But seriously, folks ... Perhaps the best thought-out successor to Wells' original is The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter's sequel that picks up where Wells left off with the return of the Time Traveler from the world of 800,000 years in the future. He plans to go back to where he left little Weena of the Eloi falling victim to the vicious Morlocks, only this time he will be prepared to rescue her and to bring proper (Victorian) civilization back to humankind.

The plan immediately unravels, however, when he finds that the future he saw on his first voyage is no longer there -- somehow by traveling forward and back he has altered things completely. And this of course means that the past has changed as well, and that he will never have a home to return to.

This book, which was sanctioned by Wells' literary estate, does a great job, especially at the beginning, of resuming the old narrative voice of the original. Along the way Baxter investigates several alternate histories located in the past as well as the future, and ends in the "multiverse" where the infinite strands of possibility all collide. Bringing his hero back from that is quite a trick. But remember, in sci-fi all things are possible -- regardless of how probable.

One more short piece on the subject is Cory Doctorow's "A Place So Foreign," which leads off with the information that the father of the boy hero is "the ambassador to 1975" (from the year 1898). But we soon see that it is not the 1975 we know, but a radically more futuristic one resembling that of the Jetsons. Eventually we learn that the problem is that time travel is causing the future to "leak backwards" as technologies migrate into the past along with those who travel back and forth.

Perhaps our fascination with this subject is because we are all time travelers, even though like the hero of The Accidental Time Machine we can move in one direction only. The older we grow, the further back our memories extend, and the less familiar the world around us comes to seem. Eventually we must all end up displaced, born into one century but living and dying in another, like ambassadors from the past, strangers in a strange land, with no way to get back home.

[Does futurism have a future? See this article from New Scientist on the future of science fiction itself.]

The World of Wars

War of the Worlds, Peace, Power and Disaster

Only about a dozen years ago news commentators were speculating about the arrival of a Pax Americana--a period of global peace and prosperity that would follow the Cold War as the United States of America, at last the only super-power, presided over a "new world order." Such a hopeful phrase ... in the words of performance artist Laurie Anderson, it may not have been very specific, "but at least it promised to be something new, and worldwide, and orderly."

The reality has turned out to be something less than peaceful, all too familiar, and far from orderly, though certainly worldwide. America has emerged as an empire, and not a very nice one. Plagued like ancient Rome by "barbarians" at home and abroad, it has lashed out and in the process rediscovered the limits of military force.

Perhaps this sense of inadequacy is haunting us as a nation. That could explain the compelling nature of Steven Spielberg's remake of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Though shrill (someone should explain to the Tom Cruise character that the best way to calm a hysterical child is NOT to yell at her), it is nevertheless a vivid portrayal of what happens when society breaks down in the face of something it cannot control. The aliens are as technologically superior to us as, let's say, a cruise missile is to a cavalry charge on camel back. In one stroke--a scientifically accurate electromagnetic pulse--all communication and transportation is knocked out, reducing us to the status of vermin ready to be symbolically stepped on by the strides of the towering alien machines. Instantly, it's everyone for themselves.

This is an interesting contrast to what happened only a couple of years ago when our President visited Hollywood to get them to help whip up some war fever. There was a marked increase in the production of heroic new films, and an immediate abundance of old ones unearthed to be aired on television. A particular favorite of mine was Paul Verhoeven's take on Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, where the infantry heroes battle giant insects (the perfectly dehumanized enemy) in a landscape uncannily like that of Afghanistan. It didn't seem to bother anyone that the world government on earth had the militaristic trappings of the Third Reich, or that citizenship was not universal but had to be earned by things like, well, military service for example. Legislation anyone?

But it doesn't take a war or a superior enemy to deliver the nightmare of national impotence. Look what a handful of terrorists were able to do by redirecting the paths of a few airplanes. And see how we throw up our hands in helplessness when confronted with the wholesale destruction of a city by the natural forces of wind and water. Pulling triggers is easy compared to providing for the human needs of human beings. When we stop taking aim and start taking time to tend to the real needs of those at home and abroad, maybe then historians will be able to identify the Pax that emerged from this chaos, and to name a date when we finally outgrew our need to be powerful.