Given that sf is notoriously difficult to define, and that postmodernism is (usually) resistant to any absolute definition, any account of postmodernism and sf risks collapsing under the weight of its own hesitations. This chapter will isolate several theories of postmodernism, examine the interplay of postmodernism and sf and offer a brief critique of postmodernism. It should perhaps be taken for granted that much postmodernism reads like sf.

Definitions

Postmodernism came into critical focus as an approach thanks to an article by Fredric Jameson, and soon became one of the commonest critical approaches to sf. The term pre-dates Jameson; most significantly in architecture ‘postmodernism’ had been used to designate a particular style which rejected the brutalism of modernism in favour of eclecticism, quoting from earlier styles and mixing aesthetics.

In the 1960s and 1970s ‘postmodern’ began to be applied to a series of writers active after 1945 whose works demonstrate knowledge of their own fictionality, either by drawing attention to the creative process of narration, by containing books within books or by breaking down boundaries between author and characters – examples include the works of Beckett, Burroughs and Borges. Kurt Vonnegut is perhaps the author who has most featured himself as a character within his own science fictions – partly in the debate about sf in the novels featuring Kilgore Trout, but most clearly in his interventions into such narratives as Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), drawing on his experience in Dresden after the Allied bombing raid, or Breakfast of Champions (1973), especially at the end when he sets his characters free. It should be emphasized that Vonnegut here is just another character, just as Tom Robbins is when doing battle with his typewriter in Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) and Robert Sheckley when he tries to get his narrative to work in Options (1975).

Much present-day conductor training is moribund, weighted down by highly questionable tradition and surrounded by self-serving myths and misconceptions. The training of conductors remains virtually unchanged from the early days of the composer-conductor timekeepers who stood before their bands of players with a complete knowledge of the creative fabric of their own compositions, but without a stitch of conducting technique. Conductor training still concentrates on learning and understanding the music, at the expense of the technical expertise needed to convey this knowledge to the orchestra. No other component of the symphonic world has remained so resistant to change, so we continue to graduate nineteenth-century conductors in the twenty-first century. The entire subject of conductor training needs fresh ideas, open minds, and a willingness to create a rapport with a new technical proficiency based on the demands of the music.

Four factors have kept contemporary conductor training from embracing new techniques. (1) The separation of pulse and music, which first emerged in the divided leadership of the eighteenth century, has fostered the notion that the two are indeed separable. (2) Traditional beat patterns have been accepted as the sum of conducting technique. (3) The myth of the “born conductor” continues to subvert the new models of training; why bother with classes if charisma is the central ingredient? (4) The increasing virtuosity of the orchestra has made the job of the modern conductor easier; modern professionals are capable of playing much standard repertoire without any leadership at all.

Mary Shelley's waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, gave birth to one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. Frankenstein can claim the status of a myth so profoundly resonant in its implications that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. The condemners of genetically modified meats and vegetables now refer to them as “Frankenfoods,” and the debates concerning the morality of cloning or stem cell engineering constantly invoke the cautionary example of Frankenstein's monster. Nor is the monster-myth cited only in regard to the biological sciences; critics of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons alike often make use of this monitory figure. Of course, both the media and the average person in the street have frequently and mistakenly assigned the name of Frankenstein not to the maker of the monster but to his creature. But as we shall see, this “mistake” actually derives from a crucial intuition about the relationship between them. Frankenstein is our culture's most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern “scientific” man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the horrifying but predictable consequences of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female.

The history of conducting is hardly a linear progression of technical watersheds. The modern practice of conducting emerges slowly over several generations, but through a variety of different practices in different countries, genres and venues. During the first half of the nineteenth century, audible time-beating, different forms of divided leadership, and violin-bow direction all continue, with experiments in where to stand, which way to face, what to hold and generally what to do to bring order as larger ensembles struggle to play increasingly complex music.

To complicate things further, the rise of conducting happens while other aspects of European music-making are changing. The eighteenth-century musician may not have had a high place in society, but it was a clear place. The Kapellmeister was either a civil or high-level private servant charged with providing musical events from start to finish. This would generally include composing, copying, rehearsing, and performing the music. Musicians “wrote” music largely as notes for their own performances. Then technological changes made cheap music printing and mass-produced pianos possible. Political and economic changes ended the wealth of many royal patrons, who disbanded their orchestras and “freed” the musicians, creating a new middle-class market for their services. While musicians tried to piece together a living from teaching, composing, and performing (in both private and the new public concerts), music-making fragmented. The ability to purchase a piece of music on paper (instead of hiring musicians to perform) was a profound shift.

In this letter of September 1827 to Frances Wright, the Scottish-born author and social reformer, Mary Shelley reveals just how much she felt her life and thought to be shaped by the social and political ideals of her parents, William Godwin, the leading radical philosopher of the 1790s, and his wife, the proto-feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The multiple literary, political, and philosophical influences of Godwin and Wollstonecraft may be traced in all six of Mary Shelley's full-length novels, as well as in her tales, biographies, essays, and other shorter writings. Yet while she consistently wrote within the framework established by her parents' concerns, she was no mere imitator of their works. Writing with an awareness of how French revolutionary politics had unfolded through the Napoleonic era, Mary Shelley extends and reformulates the many-sided legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft in extreme, imaginatively arresting ways. Those legacies received their most searching reappraisal in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley's remarkable first novel, and were reexamined a year later in Matilda, a novella telling the story of incestuous love between father and daughter, which, though it remained unpublished until 1959, has now become one of her best-known works.

Travel writing is both overture and finale to Mary Shelley's career. Her History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), an account of two continental trips co-authored with Percy Bysshe Shelley, marks an exuberant coming of age: it bursts with young love, defiance of parental control, and a search for political meaning. Her pensive Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) mourns the deaths of her husband and two of her children as well as the loss of her own health, but ultimately comes to terms with those losses, expressing chastened joy at the pleasures that remain: the company of her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, and of his friends; the delights of travel; the beauty of mountains and sea, painting and music. Rambles also assesses her political losses and those of a generation of English liberals, whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution but dashed by its terroristic and imperialistic results.

History of a Six Weeks’ Tour sounds a variation of the customary “Grand Tour,” in which young English aristocratic men capped a university education with a two- to three-year journey to France and Italy, accompanied by a tutor. Ostensibly committed to polishing their French and studying Roman antiquities in situ, these young men often pursued sexual adventure as well, while their extended absence displayed, at home, the wealth of their families. Thus, by traveling abroad, the son and his family both acquired what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital.1 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour took new, more inclusive, forms: shortened versions affordable by the middle class and continental honeymoons that included women in the ranks of travelers.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the conductor developed into an independent musical being, who took sole charge of the performance and was devoted generally to the execution of scores by others. With the deaths of Wagner and Brahms, the public's admiration and loyalty shifted from the composer to the virtuoso conductor. On posters, programs, and record jackets, the names of conductors grew larger as they gradually began to dominate the publicity that accompanied orchestral and operatic performances. By the middle of the twentieth century, conductors had become central to the marketing of music by record companies, opera houses, and concert organizations and were powerful figures in the music business.

With the increasing dominance of the conductor in the nineteenth century, two types of conducting emerged: Mendelssohn's more mechanical model of a “transparent” conductor, as preserved at the Leipzig Conservatory, and the more “subjective” approach of Liszt and Wagner, where the execution of the “external” musical details was dependent upon finding the true “internal” meaning of the work. The latter idealist view became dominant and helped to establish both a core repertory of Austro-German musical works and the German Romantic ideology that sustained them. As the visibility of composers diminished, their scores gradually acquired an iconic status and later conductors challenged this model of performance, proposing a reversal of interpretative loyalty from the interior to the surface of the score. By the middle of the twentieth century, the printed material was paramount and the modifications that a conductor could make to the text were severely limited.

It was not until the mid-1930s that a Russian school of conducting began to reap what had been so carefully sown at the beginning of the century. In the constant swinging back and forth of the pendulum whereby Western conductors were welcome (in the late 1920s), then avoided (up to the dissolution of the Association of Proletarian Musicians in 1932), then welcome again, and finally shunned when Stalin turned his country upside down in 1937, there turned out to be more virtue than necessity in relying on homegrown talent. Since then, the line has been unbroken, and even at a time when the ranks of the old guard are rapidly diminishing, the tradition seems to have passed effortlessly to a whole new generation of younger conductors taking up positions with orchestras in the West.

Illustrious visitors: the nineteenth century

Russia in the nineteenth century was far too busy establishing and consolidating its musical institutions to breed that luxury, the great interpreter. In any case, the rival factions who so blurred the lines of real distinction in the 1860s, combined with the lack of any recorded evidence, make it difficult for us to establish any kind of objective truth. Was that leader of a truly national aesthetic, Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), a fine or a mediocre conductor when he took charge of the Russian Musical Society concerts?

Science fiction film: the first fifty years

In the first book of film theory, written in 1915, Vachel Lindsay imagined a modern America transformed into a permanent World's Fair. Central to his poetic vision of the coming technocracy was the cinema, whose 'prophetwizards will set before the world a new group of pictures of the future' surpassing even Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. Lindsay's peculiar rhetoric has obvious resonances with the interplay of entertainment, education and prophecy in Gernsback's model of scientifiction, but as the manifesto for a new kind of cinema it found few, if any, adherents - not least because sf cinema had been developing in a different direction since the Lumière brothers' Charcuterie méchanique (The Mechanical Butcher, 1895). A one-minute, single-scene short, it showed a pig being fed into a machine from which various cuts of pork soon emerge. Audiences might well have also seen the film projected in reverse, and one of its imitators, Dog Factory (Porter, 1904), utilized this basic technique to depict a machine that reconstituted strings of sausages into whatever breed of dog the customer required.

If there is a clear turning point in the history of British conducting – a point at which the modern era may be said to begin – it is marked by the arrival in England of the Italian conductor Michele Costa (1808–84). In 1829, Costa was sent by the composer Niccolò Zingarelli to direct a Birmingham performance of the latter's Cantata on the Book of Isaiah, Chapter XII, though in the event he only sang in it. The following year Costa settled in London, where he became maestro al piano at the King's Theatre and adopted the anglicized Christian name Michael. He made his mark quickly and indelibly. In less than two years he had abolished the prevailing system of dual leadership (see chapter 8) at the King's Theatre, and established himself as sole director, with the baton as his tool and symbol of authority.

London audiences had seen visiting conductors use the baton before, notably Spohr, Weber, and Mendelssohn; but as a resident Costa was able to carry on a sustained campaign. Nearly four decades after Costa's appointment at the King's Theatre, George Bernard Shaw wrote that

The period of sf history from 1926 to 1960 can justly be called the magazine era. Even though many well-known works appeared in other venues during this period - books, comics, movies, and even radio plays - sf magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction were chiefly responsible for creating a sense of sf as a distinctive genre.

Science fiction is not only a mode of story-telling but also a niche for writers, a marketing category for publishers, a collection of visual images and styles and a community of like-minded individuals. All of these aspects of the genre took on their most familiar guises within the magazines that dominated the field for half a century. The magazines exerted considerable influence on sf's form and subject matter; the nature of magazine publishing and distribution, and, in particular, boom-and-bust cycles within the industry, have likewise played a part in shaping what is written and read. In addition, the location of most of the magazines' publishers in the USA has strengthened the association between sf and American culture, both in the United States and abroad.

Origins of the science fiction magazine

The first English-language magazine entirely devoted to sf was Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories , founded in 1926. Nineteenth-century literary magazines, such as Blackwood’s and The Strand in the UK and Putnam’s and Atlantic Monthly in the USA, had occasionally published works of fantasy and what might be called proto-science fiction alongside more realistic fare. Early in the twentieth century, a number of inexpensive periodicals, called pulp magazines because of the poor-quality woodpulp paper on which they were printed, included sf stories by writers such as Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs as one of several categories of exotic adventure. Burroughs’s first novel, A Princess of Mars , was first published in one of these pulps, All-Story Magazine , in 1912.

In a famous 1941 wartime photograph (Fig. 15.1) Sir Henry Wood stands amid the ruins of London's Queen's Hall, atop the rubble and chaos of what had once been his artistic domain. The image is of desolation, but also defiance in the face of a Luftwaffe raid. Wood's biographer, Arthur Jacobs, has pointed out that two similarly earnest BBC officials were airbrushed out of the original. Propaganda required the symbolism of the artist's civilizing vision amidst its destruction by the nefarious Nazis. Wood's hegemony over the Proms was drawing to a close. Although he was never officially artistic director, his association dated back to their inception in 1895. He died three years later, having seen his famous music festival transferred to the Royal Albert Hall where it prospers beyond his wildest dreams.

By way of contrast, in 1983 Simon Rattle was captured on film inspecting the building site of Symphony Hall, in Birmingham, with tousled hair barely suppressed beneath the regulation hard hat. Rattle was in the middle of an astonishingly successful period as Principal Conductor and Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (his title changed during his tenure). Not entirely coincidentally, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw the rebirth of Birmingham as an international city. 1960s urban planners had wreaked almost as much havoc as the Luftwaffe did in wartime. Concrete was universally employed as the material of the moment as the city was rebuilt. Paradoxically, musique concrète was successfully featured amongst Rattle’s programming as he took the CBSO around the world for over two decades, winning renown for Birmingham and personally embodying the renaissance of its reputation.

When Hans Keller set about debunking musical professions he considered “phoney,” his “hit list” was predictable: opera producers, music critics, musicologists, and of course, violists and conductors. These professions were new to his generation as independent full-time activities; they were consequences of a historical process in Western Europe sociologists once termed “rationalization.” During the second half of the nineteenth century, professions became more bureaucratized along lines of ever more narrowly defined specialties. These in turn demanded the creation of targeted processes of training and certification. Expertise, particularly in medicine and science, but in the arts as well became more competitive on a massive international scale justifying discrete divisions and narrow fields.

Music critics once did something else as professionals. They were composers (Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Virgil Thomson), teachers (Richard Wallaschek, Robert Hirsch feld, Eduard Hanslick, and Paul Henry Lang) or writers (consider Max Kalbeck, Ludwig Speidel, and, in the extreme George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound). Musicology became an autonomous academic field relatively late, and only in the generation of Guido Adler and Hermann Kretszchmar did music history emerge as a distinct branch of scholarship. In Keller's world (he trained in Vienna as a violinist and was forced to flee to England in 1938) great violists were actually violinists; no one set out to become a violist. Opera producers, in the contemporary sense, were entirely unknown.

Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca was a novel surprisingly long in its gestation. Although not published until 1823, its inception actually dates from six years earlier. “I first thought of it in our library in Marlow,” Mary Shelley wrote as she was completing it in 1821 (L I 203), thus placing its beginnings at some point in 1817. She does not stipulate what book in the library which she and Percy Bysshe Shelley had assembled in Marlow prompted her to conceive the idea of this new novel, nor is there anything in either's correspondence that would further elucidate her claim. But among the components of an ideal library P. B. Shelley later enumerated to his cousin Thomas Medwin were the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli, the Italian Renaissance political theorist. Beginning with the first English translations of The Prince in the early seventeenth century, it became a common practice to append to that work Machiavelli's admiring biographical account of Castruccio Castracani dei Antelminelli, the warlord of fourteenth-century Lucca, whom Machiavelli, in 1520, looked back on as an exemplary Italian “prince.” This is the work that Mary Shelley denigrates in the first sentence of her Preface to the novel as a mere “romance”(V i 5). One might therefore infer that Mary Shelley's original idea for the novel centered on simply setting the record straight about Castruccio; her original title - The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca - focusing on him alone, would seem to substantiate that inference. The change in title by which Valperga became centered was owing to Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, who reconfigured the novel's balance by emphasizing its female protagonist, the Countess of Valperga, a fictional Tuscan duchy.

Any discussion of conducting technique can be problematic. The potential for disagreement over what constitutes a conductor's technique is huge, so this chapter will be limited to the ways in which conductors express their thoughts and ideas through physical movements, the tools they use, and the skills that they employ. The film footage of conductors like Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Klaus Tennstedt, and Pierre Boulez demonstrates that there are as many styles of conducting as there are conductors, and to attempt to codify, to dissect, and to analyze fully the variety of gestures used by conductors is beyond the scope of this, or perhaps any, chapter. Although the gesticulations that they use seem to vary widely, all conductors' techniques have a basic task in common: to act as a kind of conduit through which their ideas are transmitted to the musicians. Of course, body movements are not all they use: a conductor also communicates verbally in rehearsal and makes eye contact with fellow performers throughout the performance process. A member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra once remarked laconically to the present author that “it matters not whether a conductor stands on his head and wiggles his toes or beats time like a metronome as long as his intentions are clear.” While the first position described has more in common with yoga than music, the player's basic thesis has merit; clarity of intention is paramount for any conductor.