When Mary Shelley's The Last Man was published in 1826, her Lionel Verney entered a literary scene already peopled by a significant number of last men, such that reviewers could not resist jokes at the expense of this crowd of solitary survivors. Cousin de Grainville's prose epic Le Dernier Homme, posthumously published in 1805, had initiated this post-revolutionary mode. An anonymous English translation entitled The Last Man, or, Omegarus and Syderia, a Romance of Futurity appeared in 1806. Byron's poem “Darkness,” one of his best-known works among his contemporaries, was written in 1816 at Lake Geneva, where Shelley also began Frankenstein. And the most popular variation on this theme, Thomas Campbell's lyric “The Last Man,” appeared in 1823 and was followed, in the next decades, by a wealth of imitations and parodies as well as by John Martin's remarkable, apocalyptic paintings of the subject from 1826, 1833, and 1850.

Shelley thus joins her contemporaries in her apocalyptic response to the horrors of the French Revolution, the subsequent carnage of the Napoleonic wars, and the metaphysical and cultural uncertainties attendant upon Romantic-era attacks on religious and political authority. Yet the extremity of her particular form of apocalypse bears comparison with twentieth-century existentialist, absurdist, and nihilist reactions to two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, such as Camus’s La Peste or Ionesco’s Les Chaises, thus revealing The Last Man, like Frankenstein, as an uncannily prescient novel. In its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature, then, The Last Man constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism.

The trouble with “men as they are”

“I am now writing 'Falkner,'” writes Mary Shelley in her journal for June 7, 1836. “My best it will be - I believe” (J I 548). What could she have been thinking, a modern reader might well ask. The identifying moral qualities of her characters appear immediately, and the “roundness” that Forster praised as being “capable of surprising in a convincing way” and which the novel as a genre has cultivated, is nowhere to be found. Yet Shelley was optimistic during the conception and execution of this, her last long work of fiction. Writing to her publisher, Charles Ollier, in January 1836, she told him she had had

Not only did she write the book “with a rapidity [she] had never done before” (L ii 267), but in a letter to her fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, she remarked that “it is not always the most studied & (consequently) the favourite works of an author that are his best titles {to} fame . . . but the flower that springs to bloom most swiftly is the loveliest” (L II 296).

The origins of science fiction

The word 'science' acquired its modern meaning when it took aboard the realization that reliable knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, carefully sifted by deductive reasoning and the experimental testing of generalizations. In the seventeenth century writers began producing speculative fictions about new discoveries and technologies that the application of scientific method might bring about, the earliest examples being accommodated - rather uncomfortably - within existing genres and narrative frameworks.

One genre hospitable to sf speculation was that of utopian fantasy, whose usual narrative form was the imaginary voyage. The rich tradition of sf travellers' tales was launched by one of the first and foremost champions of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, in New Atlantis (written c.1617; published 1627), although the importance of technological progress to social reform had earlier been recognised by Johann Valentin Andreae's account of Christianopolis (1619) and Tommaso Campanella's description of La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun, written 1602; published 1623). Most subsequent utopian fantasies took scientific and technological advancement into account, but relegated it to a minor role while matters of social, religious and political reform remained centre stage. Nor were those writers who took account of scientific progress always enthusiastic about it; Baconian optimism prompted a backlash of hostility from those who perceived a threat to religious values in the secularizing tendencies of religion and the materialistic encouragements of technology.

Great conductors tend to follow the imperatives of their teachers and apprenticeship, their national musical cultures, and above all the special requirements of their repertoire. Close study of their work reveals no code, conformity, nor Ten Commandments to be found across their individual approaches to rehearsal.

The Conductors on Film Collection at Stanford University has over two thousand hours of some two hundred and fifty conductors in concert, conversation, and rehearsal. From Abbado to Zender, they reveal an extraordinary canvas of action and aesthetic. This chapter will examine the elements of their work that seem to be most successful, vital, and enduring, although much of the (no doubt biased) advice also comes from the author's experience in concert, opera, and recordings. These comments are meant both for young conductors just setting out and for those trying to understand where the real work gets done with an orchestra.

Preparing for the first rehearsal

No serious work is possible without consideration of the performing edition to be employed. Especially since the rise in the mid-twentieth century of the scholar-conductor, it is no longer acceptable simply to hire a full score and go at it. It is essential first to acquire a copy of the manuscript and its variants, and to look into its published history. Many first-class university or conservatory music libraries will have microfilm or microfiche of mainstream repertoire in autograph and first edition. Study these sources closely.

The 1960s - like the turn of the twentieth century, and the apocalyptic, futuristic millennial years 2000 and 2001 - carried a special freight of nervous expectation. While atomic weapons still had limited capabilities, public perception was of a world facing imminent destruction, and people daily suppressed their anticipation of radioactive doom from the skies. That terror had been manifest, in disguised form, in earlier sf tales and movies of monsters, horrific transformation and alien invasion. By late 1962, the world actually faced just such a science-fictional threat - the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed about to erupt - and saw it narrowly averted. Two images epitomize this turbulent, paradoxical era: the brief, grainy film frames of President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and the equally indistinct television coverage, live from the moon, of Neil Armstrong's first step into the lunar dust in July 1969. These were beamed about the planet via a medium, television, that just forty years earlier had been, in the contemptuous phrase journalists love, 'mere science fiction'.

A studio is not a concert hall and a recording is not a concert. A recording is music made objective. The experience of setting an interpretation into stone in a recording is a humbling one for even the most ego-crazed, over-coiffed, mega-multi-media-jet-setting superstar. It creates a multitude of unique problems which often require immediate decisions that have lasting and sometimes costly consequences. Much debate is focused on the battle between “live” and studio (by implication, “dead”!) performances, where intellectual laziness has exaggerated the claims for “live” recording. As with “live” theatre and film, the differences (in both means and ends) between recordings and concerts are so vast, that they are hardly the same art form, but we can enjoy both without needing to set one above the other. How do conductors adjust to these challenges and what does the producer do? The conductor in the studio, particularly for an opera recording, can be compared with a train driver on a journey from A to Z, but travelling from R to Z first, and A to B last, with all of the bits in between jumbled together, sometimes twice or three times over, to allow for passengers who missed the train the first time. At the end, one literally does not know if one is coming or going, or if all the passengers have been safely delivered. Not so far removed from the opera conductor is the conductor with a soloist. The studio magnifies the pressure on the conductor and presents an interesting opportunity to examine this exotic creative ego.

Science fiction and the idea of sexuality

Knowing sf’s potential for using the future to explore contemporary reality and its alternatives, one might think the genre ideal for the examination of alternative sexualities. Critics of sf have generally agreed that science fiction is a ‘literature of ideas’. Indeed, for many people, it is the ideational content of sf that is its primary characteristic. Sexuality is also an idea. In this sense, one might well expect to find an intrinsic compatibility between sf as a genre and the exploration of human sexuality. For many people, however, sexuality – and particularly heterosexuality – can be envisioned only within the category of the ‘natural’. To these people, sexuality is quite specifically notan idea; it is the very reverse of the ideational – instinctive, sensate, animalistic. It is at once both ‘common sense’, as in the apparent logic of procreative sex, and unthinkable, since even apparently procreative sex calls into play emotions, positions, actions and desires whose potential for perversity, even if it is merely the perversity of pleasure, are too frightening to contemplate. And yet, even for these people, sex is an idea because it is, after all, an ideology and one which contemporary Western societies have tried very hard indeed both to propagate and to control.

I started in the business in 1971, at the age of twenty-five, when a well-known US manager told me he was opening a European office. The conductors were not particularly well known, but with youthful enthusiasm I worked night and day for them. I had gathered experience for this largely at the Royal Festival Hall, where, as a student, I always bought the cheapest seats behind the orchestra in order to watch the conductor. Through observation, I came to learn how physical gestures and eye contact conveyed musical structure, excitement, and internal balance to an orchestra. I also collected records of all the major conductors of the past and present, so although I was completely green about managing conductors, I had acquired a system of aural and visual evaluation about the conductor's art. I have experienced the artist/manager relationship, the elements needed to build an artist's career, and the changes to both over the last thirty years. These reflections are offered in the hope that future conductors will be better prepared for what may lie ahead of them.

From impresarios to managers

In the nineteenth century, conductors managed their own careers. Conductors tended to stay in permanent positions for ten to fifteen years or even more. Faster travel opened up more opportunities and created the notion of a conducting “career,” which then led to the need for more administration and planning.

There are no politics in Utopia; as in its neighbour Dystopia, the government of people has been replaced by the administration of things. To many observers, this state of affairs implies anything but freedom. It is the absence of political debate, as much as the absence of privacy and the relentless presence of morality, that makes the communism of Anarres, in Ursula Le Guin's anarchist classic The Dispossessed (1974), so oppressive. When her hero Shevek finds himself in conflict with aspects of his society he has no forum in which to express it, no way to find like-minded individuals with whom he might find common ground; instead, his conflicts become conflicts with other individuals. He is as isolated as any dissident in a totalitarian state.

For a Western tradition of political thought which begins with Aristotle and continues through such diverse philosophers as the conservative Edmund Burke, the radical Thomas Paine, the liberal Lord Macaulay, the communist Antonio Gramsci, the socialist Tony Polan and the social democrat Bernard Crick, politics provides the forum to which free people – not always, of course, a majority of the adult populace – bring their conflicts of collective interest for peaceful resolution. For most of these thinkers the forum is as central an institution of a free society as the market and the court of law, and the interaction of politics, economics and justice is the substance of public life.

It is sometimes said that the ability of the writer to imagine a better place in which to live died in the course of the twentieth century, extinguished by the horrors of total war, of genocide and of totalitarianism. The genre of utopia, created unwittingly by Sir Thomas More when he published Utopia in 1516, died when idealism perished, a victim to twentieth-century pessimism and cynicism. It is the contention of this chapter that utopia has not disappeared; it has merely mutated, within the field of sf, into something very different from the classic utopia.

Hoda M. Zaki, whose Phoenix Renewed (1988) is the only published monograph on sf utopias, was on the point of recognizing this, although she failed; as a political scientist, she was still looking in vain for the classic utopia. She concluded that 'the disappearance of utopian literature in the twentieth century is surprising' and 'an issue with serious implications for the entire body politics'. Her study was based on the nineteen novels which had won the Nebula Award between 1965 and 1982. Almost all these novels had utopian elements, she concluded, but none of them were actual utopias: although many of those novels offered critiques of the contemporary world, none of them offered the necessary coherent account of a superior and desirable alternative in the future. Modern sf thus had no utopias to offer, but only ‘tantalizing fragments in the utopian tradition’.

Science fiction and the criticism of the genre have so far paid very little attention to the treatment of issues relating to race and ethnicity. The African-Caribbean writer Nalo Hopkinson says about her sf novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), 'I saw it as subverting the genre which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves.' Most English-language sf is written by whites. While some African-American writers produce work that has fantastic or magical elements, this work is not generally grouped with sf or fantasy; it is instead published as and treated by critics as African-American literature. The magical realist elements of Mexican, Native American or Indian subcontinent literatures are also not published or reviewed as speculative literature. Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1980), for example, explores Indian independence and the tensions between Moslems and Hindus through the eyes of a boy who is one of a group of children born with powers such as telepathy, but it is not generally considered science fiction. Samuel R. Delany and other black authors, including Charles Saunders and Walter Mosley, have written about the racial issues connected to the field, ranging from the initial cold-shoulder treatment of Delany by racist old-guard white writers to the lack of a substantial black audience for the genre, but neither sf about race nor criticism of it have achieved the same prominence that works about gender issues have.

Shelley and the Scottish magician

Early in 1820 the Shelleys, then living in Italy, received a crate packed with various household articles and a selection of the new novels that had become the talk of the nation. In one, Ivanhoe, the “Dedicatory Epistle”- a letter purportedly sent by one Laurence Templeton to his antiquarian colleague, the Reverend Dr. Dryasdust - mentions a “Scottish magician, [who], you say, was . . . at liberty to walk over the recent field of battle, and to select for the subject of resuscitation by his sorceries a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence, and whose throat had but just uttered the last note of agony.” Templeton's necromancer, who must have reminded Mary Shelley of the “unhallowed arts” of her own Victor Frankenstein, was none other than Templeton's own creator, Sir Walter Scott. In the opinion of numerous reviewers, such necromancy, resuscitating bygone figures from historical fields as varied as Norman England and eighteenth-century Scotland, had endowed the novel form itself with a new dignity. Typical is one review, which advises that Scott's Waverley should not be “consider[ed] . . . in the light of a common novel, whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for the day, and to be afterwards forgotten for ever”; it should rather be, this critic wrote, lauded as a “vehicle of curious accurate information upon a subject which must at all times demand our attention - the history and manners of . . . the inhabitants of these islands.” This claim for historical novels' pedagogic and national significance was to become a refrain over the next decade and a half, repeated on the appearance of each new entry in what Scott was to call the “Waverley Series,”after his immensely popular novel of 1814.

The feature that unites every kind of sf is the construction - in some sense - of a world other than our own. This may be another planet (or even another universe); or it may be a 'future world' in which conditions have changed in some dramatic way. But whatever new conditions or circumstances apply - alien invasion, Martian colonies, a permanent cure for the ageing process - the writer has to signal the changes, and the reader has to be able to understand the significance of these signals. Thus, the reading of an sf story is always an active process of translation. What are we being told about the characters, the politics, the social conditions of the imagined world, through the medium of these bizarre artefacts, landscapes, relationships, industries and customs? The icons of sf are the signs which announce the genre, which warn the reader that this is a different world; and at the same time constitute that difference.

More than in any other fiction, in sf the imaginary setting is a major character in the story – and this fictional surface is held together by the highly foregrounded description of unreal objects, customs, kinships, fashions, that can be identified and decoded by the reader. The word ‘icon’ is derived from the Greek eikon – it means an image, but the term came into English usage via Byzantine art, where an ‘ikon’ is, specifically, a stylized representation of Christ or one of the saints. Similarly, an sf icon will represent something both supernatural (or at least other-worldly), artistically conventional (in that certain features are mandatory) and yet clearly belonging to the public domain. Just as Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein constructed the monster rather than ‘inventing’ him, it is probably fruitless to trace any of the icons of sf back to a single, original author.

Traditionally, sf has been considered a predominantly masculine field which, through its focus on science and technology, 'naturally' excludes women and by implication, considerations of gender. To varying degrees over its history, sf has in fact functioned as an enormously fertile environment for the exploration of sociocultural understandings of gender. My use of the rather slippery term 'gender' here refers to the socially constructed attributes and 'performed' roles that are mapped on to biologically sexed bodies in historically and culturally specific ways. Rather than a comprehensive account of representations of masculinity and femininity, this chapter explores sf's potential to engage with gender issues, highlighting texts that have served to disrupt or challenge normative cultural understandings.

Despite populist notions of the overwhelmingly masculinist nature of sf, the problematic spaces signaled by ‘gender’ are crucial to sf imaginings. The presence of ‘Woman’ – whether actual, threatened or symbolically represented (through the alien, or ‘mother Earth’ for example) – reflects cultural anxieties about a range of ‘Others’ immanent in even the most scientifically pure, technically focused sf. The series of ‘self/other’ dichotomies suggested by ‘gender’, such as human/alien, nature/technology, and organic/inorganic, are also a central (although often unacknowledged) facet of the scientific culture informing much sf.

Mary Shelley well knew that books can make good companions. In the Preface to Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, she writes: “I have found it a pleasant thing while travelling to have in the carriage the works of those who have passed through the same country . . . If alone, they serve as society; if with others, they suggest matter for conversation”(NSW VIII 65).With this “if,”Shelley gives us two images of her life: first, a lonely, widowed life of reading and writing, isolation and anxiety; and second, a convivial life of adventurous friendship. It was Shelley's way to live both lives at once. In Italy, in the tight embrace of the Shelley circle, she withdrew after losing two children to the vagaries of an itinerant, expatriate life. Soon her dejection was compounded by marital estrangement and by 1822, she was left a widow. After she returned to England in 1823, however, her long widowhood was punctuated by enduring friendships, a proposal of marriage, nights at the theatre and opera, endless correspondence with editors and publishers, and two continental journeys taken with her beloved son and his Cambridge friends. In one of the great ironies of the era, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two visionaries of social renovation, invented in Frankenstein the loneliest character in the English novel. But this is no more ironic, perhaps, than that Shelley conceived her great novel of loneliness in a writer's game, among the flamboyant companions of her youth.