Sonny Blount, early 1950s (above), and Sun Ra, late 1980s (below). On photocopies of these images, Alton Abraham wrote: “Before” and “After—I turned him into ‘Sun Ra,’ they say.”
TOMORROWLAND
Space was everywhere during the Space Age. No longer the sole province of science fiction and its geeky fans, space provided popular culture in the fifties and sixties with a firmament of images, icons, narratives, and desires.1 In Megan Prelinger’s words, “Space was breaking out of the confines of genre-bound science fiction to become a mass civic object; it was becoming an inevitable and essential destination for human discovery.”2 The popularization of the outré visions of science fiction touched anyone who could attend movies, watch TV, buy appliances, or read. Well over two hundred science fiction movies appeared during the fifties alone, inspiring space-age hopes and fears with titles such as Rocket Ship X-M (1950), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), and Teenagers from Outer Space (1959).3 Science fiction television programs beamed outer space into America’s living rooms: Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe and the similar Space Patrol; Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Tales of Tomorrow; and of course those two perennials, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.4
Space imagery infected the design of architecture and consumer goods: the ray-gun chic of drive-ins and gas stations, the futuristic ovoids of midcentury-modern furniture, the aerodynamic fins on Cadillacs and Chevys, and even the sleek look of refrigerators such as Hotpoint’s “Space Age 18” (as advertised in the June 1960 issue of Ebony: it “brings you so many modern features”). By the early 1950s, science fiction publications had over two million readers.5 Toys, games, costumes, comics, and windup robots seeded the popular imagination with dreams of a happy future in outer space.6 More than Uncle Sam or Old Glory, the rocket became the privileged symbol of public yearning. Technicolor space vistas splashed across the covers of a thousand pulp magazines, providing the backdrop for a cosmic drama of good against evil in which Buck, Flash, and their interplanetary ilk generally triumphed, to the great happiness of humankind.
The rocketeers of science fiction’s golden age (roughly 1930–1945) blasted into space to colonize the galaxies. They returned after World War II to colonize popular culture, but with a difference. The cosmic drama of outer space had turned all too real on planet Earth. World War II demonstrated that modern rocketry and big ballistics could be useful to state security, and with the advent of the Cold War, good and evil acquired a historical dimension. The detonation of the first hydrogen bomb (comfortingly named Mike) on Eniwetok Atoll in 1952, followed by Bravo on Bikini Atoll two years later, opened up the dark prospect of intercontinental delivery of thermonuclear warheads.7 Missiles were so much faster than B-52s! The dreams of mass destruction that fueled the space race, a competition of planetary proportions, gave the astral adventures of movies, television, and magazines the gravity of real life. Science fiction had never before seemed so science factual, especially when it played by the rules of rocketry. Images of satellites, rockets, astronauts, atoms, moons, planets, and galaxies circulated truth among a postwar population hungry for something big to believe in. Religion couldn’t unite a people constitutionally committed to religious toleration. The two-party politics of American democracy produced a divided polity except during times of open war. Science and its plausible fictions appealed across these divides, creating a basis for social unity that possessed strong ideological appeal. Rocket research and development helped launch the iconography of science fiction on a popular space odyssey that swept America and the world along with it.
Sun Ra’s space program would fly on the fuel of popular culture but to ends far different from the ones science could then imagine. Mass-media accounts of the promises and perils of rocketry show how fifties science fiction ultimately blurs into Cold War fact. In the first of a famous series of articles appearing in Collier’s magazine beginning in the spring of 1952, Wernher von Braun, fast becoming American’s foremost science celebrity, explains in enthusiastic detail how a multiple-stage rocket could extend America’s reach into outer space and all the way to the moon.8 This glorious vision—straight out of the pages of golden-age pulp magazines—comes preceded, however, by an ominous editorial caveat: “What you will read here is not science fiction. It is serious fact.”9 The seriousness arises from its political implications, which render the Collier’s material “an urgent warning”: “The U.S. must immediately embark on a long-range development program to secure for the West ‘space superiority.’ If we do not, somebody else will. That somebody else very probably would be the Soviet Union.”10 When science fiction meets rocket fact, the former falls into a narrative of deadly ideological struggle. Visionary hopes had to pass political muster in the 1950s media ecology, subordinating the dreams of science fiction to realpolitik, which turned them terrifyingly real:
A ruthless foe established on a space station could actually subjugate the peoples of the world. Sweeping around the earth in a fixed orbit, like a second moon, this man-made island in the heavens could be used as a platform from which to launch guided missiles. Armed with atomic warheads, radar-controlled projectiles could be aimed at any target on the earth’s surface with devastating accuracy.11
Political terror regulated the dreams of rocket science, holding popular culture hostage to Cold War realities.
At least, some of pop culture fell prey to these anxieties. As science fiction accommodated the facts of Cold War rocketry, it often served a patently ideological function. Case in point: the British movie Spaceways (sound familiar?), released in 1953.12 It hardly matters whether Sun Ra saw it, for the title resonates productively with his music. The story, presented in placid black and white, comes close to propaganda in its faithfulness to Cold War fearmongering. Dr. Stephen Mitchell, the handsome American head of engineering at Deanfield laboratory (located somewhere in England), designs rockets and discovers love—not for his shrewish British wife, Vanessa, who is confined to a military base that feels more like a concentration camp, but for his beautiful Slavic colleague, Dr. Lisa Frank, a mathematician with a fetching page-boy hairdo. The wife runs off (not an easy achievement under such close guard) with Philip Crenshaw, a suave biologist with a shadowy past—as a member of German intelligence. He has deviously infiltrated a crack team of scientists gathered by the British government, which seeks to win the race to become the first nation to place a satellite in orbit.
Personal and political intrigue in a context of technoscientific competition: Spaceways is science fiction at its most plausible and passionate. The rocket of Stephen’s design comes straight out of Collier’s, giving it von Braun’s imprimatur as the latest in rocket technology. Footage of its fiery launch comes straight out of history: a German V-2 screaming skyward (perhaps from Peenemünde to London, a strange tribute to the ethnic origins of modern rocketry). It all adds up to a happy marriage between science fact and fiction—but not between Stephen and his wife, who, after her adulterous flight from Deanfield, accidentally finds herself on the business end of Philip’s barking Luger. In a scenario too convoluted to explain clearly (involving unfashionably baggy but discreet spacesuits), Lisa cleverly maneuvers things so that she and Stephen end up alone on the first manned—or in this case, man-and-womanned—flight to outer space. It doesn’t spoil the romantic ending to mention their safe return to Earth, implied in the final scene by a warm embrace over warmer controls (operational now after short-circuiting) and the happy words “we’re turning back!”13
Like many B movies, Spaceways demonstrates with cringing clarity the ideological work that popular culture can perform. In its urgency to stay true to the facts of science, it purveys a science fiction that reduces its audience to ready boosters of imperialist adventurism—in the name of love, of course. Discussing the implications of a successful satellite launch, the project director, Professor Koepler, anticipates a near future when people will build the first space station, providing “a stepping stone to the moon, to the planets, to whole new worlds.” “And if necessary,” his interlocutor Colonel Daniels adds hastily, “a launching platform for atomic weapons.” Hence the urgency of the work at Deanfield and the necessity of confinement to camp, provoking Vanessa’s infidelity and her spiteful remark that Stephen and his colleagues are just “slaves in white uniforms.” Given the history of rocket production at Peenemünde, which relied on slave labor, that remark throws a momentary shaft of light on the social effects of Cold War rocketry. Is Vanessa unfaithful to her husband or rather to the politics of Western rocket science? Her resistance to both marks her for elimination. You’ve been warned. The only way out of Deanfield appears to be up: the trajectory of love between Stephen and Lisa. Sun Ra would have appreciated the basic scenario, namely, escape from confinement through space travel. Stephen and Lisa survive to become the first heterosexual couple in space, solving in advance the libidinal implications of sending two men into space in close quarters. Spaceways is science fiction at its most socially serviceable.
The nadir (or inverted apogee?) of science fiction’s fall into Cold War rocketry perhaps came two years later in an episode of the television program Disneyland broadcast on March 9, 1955. This episode, entitled “Man in Space,” was presented as part of the recurring “Tomorrowland” series; the program’s episodes were matched to the proposed theme park’s various sectors, and the “Tomorrowland” series would eventually include “Man in the Moon” and “Mars and Beyond.” “Man in Space” offers a contemporary look at the way science and its hucksters, Walt Disney foremost among them, appropriated the inspiring iconography of science fiction. It opens with Walt Disney himself sitting on his desk while holding a red-nosed model rocket and, in his avuncular voice, proffering sage clichés about the ubiquity of science: “In the modern world, everywhere you look you see the influence that science has on our daily lives. [. . .] Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.”14 Sun Ra puts this vapid language to arresting use when he applies it to the force of sound. Here, folded within the idiom of an infomercial (Disney pitching “Disney”), the language is used to repeat one of the basic credos of science fiction deployed in the context of factual rocket science. More revealing, then, is the producer and director Ward Kimball’s expressed intention of “combining the tools of our trade [film and animation] with the knowledge of the scientist.” Kimball’s remark is a declaration of pop-cultural imagination’s dependence on the truths of science, a strategy of willed ideological design Disney would later call “imagineering.”
A stirring sight for science fiction aficionados follows: the camera pans across a room full of seated designers surrounded by rocket mockups, some several feet long. The alluring imagery of innumerable sci-fi magazines suddenly takes material form, although it isn’t clear whether those designers are rocket scientists or Disney animators. In a sense they are both, since the viewer’s knowledge of rocketry comes pre-engineered by Disney’s staff. A short history of modern rocketry serves to establish their authority, translating liberally interpreted “facts” into a past that merges the technologies of rocket science and cinema.15 Jules Verne gets the show going with his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, but the real originator of Disney history is Georges Méliès, whose 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune constitutes the first science fiction movie, complete with a cannon-fired moon shot.
Robert Goddard receives a brief homage as the father of modern rocketry and the American Rocket Society (no mention, of course, of the great Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky). Hermann Oberth, the German visionary, gets a nod primarily as the designer of the rocket in Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1930), foreshadowing the rise of German rocketry that comes to fulfillment in the vengeful V-2, seventy-five of which, the television audience learns, found their clandestine way to New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range near the end of World War II. But the real end of Disney’s rocket history, the purpose that pulls it irresistibly forward, is a montage of American rockets, sleek and virulent, screeching upward in full color. Kimball’s voice deadpans the ideological message for anyone who might have missed it: “A rocket firing is an awesome demonstration of tremendous power.”
Under the sign of this tremendous power, “Man in Space” installs a new kind of celebrity as impresario of popular culture: the scientific expert, technocratic engineer of tomorrow. Listed in the credits as “scientific advisors,” three such experts guide the television audience through the basics of contemporary rocketry. Dr. Heinz Haber handles the delicate business of placing a satellite in orbit. Willy Ley presents an introductory lesson (with prankster animation) in “Space Medicine,” a survivor’s guide to zero gravity. The renowned Dr. Wernher von Braun, impeccably coiffed, relates his latest thinking about rocket design for a successful journey to outer space and a return to Earth. These experts, all with German accents, take control of the popular imagination, directing the fantasia of science fiction toward “man’s conquest of space.” Willy Ley, for instance, speaking over the antics of an animated “common man” (a cigar-smoking, martini-swilling white guy in space), describes the new regime that awaits “Homo sapiens extraterrestrialis, or Space Man”: “He must accommodate himself to an entirely new set of rules.” Acceleration, weightlessness, vacuum, deep freeze: outer space environs prove inclement for terrestrial organisms.
No worries. Von Braun has engineered a vehicle to carry ten men safely into space, a four-stage rocket with a winged nose cone suitable for high-occupancy orbital travel and reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. It’s somehow comforting to hear all this from a man described as “one of the foremost exponents of space travel,” whose military credentials (“Chief of the Guided Missile Division of the Army’s research division at Redstone Arsenal”) seem less imperious than his coy smile. Scientific experts such as von Braun, Ley, and Haber have taken command of the future, which will run smoothly on the astral rails of rocket science: “MISSION COMPLETED: Man has taken his first great strides forward in the conquest of space. His next goal will be the exploration of the moon, then the planets and the infinite universe beyond” (fade out to “When You Wish upon a Star”). Technocrats forever. Disney hands over popular culture to the engineers of futurity.
But here’s the Disney difference—their future depends as much on the wonders of the media as on the wonders of science. “Man in Space” is more about film as the medium of popular rocketry than about the hard science of space travel. From the animated intro of Tinkerbell shaking stars from her wand over “Tomorrowland” to the closing segment of ten white men traveling the vacuum in von Braun’s space bus, animation makes space imaginable. Disney teaches popular culture to think space in cartoons. Such is the force of television that it distributes the future en masse. Between experts and animation, the conquest of space seems guaranteed. It must be admitted that Disney is a powerful pedagogue. As a popular introduction to the fundamentals of rocketry, space medicine, and space conquest, “Man in Space” does an effective job of instruction. But it colonizes the minds it enlightens, too, authenticating an approved imagery for imagining tomorrow. Disney dreams the future for the audience of Disneyland, animating a tomorrow for popular consumption condoned by experts and sanctioned by broadcast. Science fiction turns factually plausible in the open arms of “scientific advisors,” and Disney frosts it all in cinematic magic. For those hankering after even more reality, a visit to the physical Tomorrowland, which opened on July 17, 1955, at Disneyland, would materialize a future as only corporate America could imagineer it, with showcases sponsored by Monsanto, American Motors, and Dutch Boy Paint.
But not all science fiction was so cozy with the nationalist ambitions of technoscience. Some movies told cautionary tales that qualified the enthusiasm of Disney’s vision. Them and Godzilla, both from 1954, confront the possibility of unanticipated horrors from nuclear fallout: the mutation of a colony of ants into carnivorous giants in New Mexico and the creation of the famous fractious reptile in Tokyo Bay. A classic of the genre, The Day the Earth Stood Still, from 1951, tests Cold War rocket-rattling against the possibility of an infinitely superior alien science—and the weaponry that would go along with it. The movie’s opening sequence follows the reports of an unidentified and extremely fast flying object caught on radar. Calcutta, France, England, America: radios beam the news around the world. The Day the Earth Stood Still insists on a global rather than a national perspective on postwar geopolitics. To the alien if (mercifully) humanoid occupant of the flying saucer that lands on the mall in Washington, DC, American political interests and scientific aspirations seem partisan and petty. Klaatu, as he calls himself, has traveled millions of miles through space with an urgent message for planet Earth: its scientific achievements (atomic energy and rockets) threaten the security of other planets.
Much to the consternation of the US government, Klaatu refuses to speak to “any one nation or group of nations.”16 He requires the world’s attention. This insistence on totality—implying that the advances of science touch all of Earth’s inhabitants—leads to the unprecedented event of the movie’s title, Klaatu’s half-hour noontime interruption of all electrical activity the planet over (save where it would threaten life). Only such a demonstration of superior science holds any hope for uniting the people of Earth in Klaatu’s simple, superior truth: “There must be security for all or no one is secure.” Klaatu answers Cold War nuclear nationalism with a vision of total security, the prospect of a solidarity of planetary proportions. Both his vision and his language would make an impression on Sun Ra, whose music aspired similarly to transform the planet, appealing to science of a higher kind. Klaatu leaves Earth without receiving a commitment to his vision. Must the same be said of Sun Ra?
The skepticism that The Day the Earth Stood Still directs toward science and its wondrous achievements characterizes much of the pulp science fiction published in the wake of World War II. Ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons threw dark shadows over its brightly colored covers. The old pulp magazines from the thirties and forties, with titles such as Science Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories of Super-Science, gave way after the war to less wide-eyed publications, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, both of which actively solicited stories less innocent than those of the genre’s golden age. Galaxy, for instance, called for writing “too adult, too profound, or revolutionary in concept” to appeal to its creaky competition.17 Writers seemed happy to oblige. Doomsday scenarios, inspired by the superpowers’ pursuit of doomsday weapons, became familiar magazine material, and with the emergence of the paperback as a medium for such dreams (the pulp-novel publishers Ace and Ballentine both began operation in the fifties), science fiction acquired new seriousness as a genre. Some writers, Robert Heinlein chief among them, would keep the national faith in rocket science as a means to superior strength. His novel Starship Troopers (1955), with its militarized starships and weaponized space suits, presents a goose-stepping libertarian defense of perpetual preparedness for intergalactic war, which in his view the biological facts of species survival render inevitable.
Less jingoistic writers advanced sci-fi confrontations with an increasingly technocratic American society: Kurt Vonnegut, Clifford Simak, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, and, soon thereafter, J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs. In their hands, science fiction, no longer content to sling amazing stories on behalf of super-science, became a medium of social criticism and resistance. A “New Wave” of science fiction built and crashed over a sixties society bent on landing men on the moon but bedeviled by social crises: segregation, racism, overpopulation, pollution, and an undeclared war in Vietnam. For all its Disneyfied complacency, science fiction also promotes countervisions that imagine prospects for popular culture other than technocratic triumph, worlds other than a corporate-sponsored Tomorrowland. Sun Ra and his music for a better tomorrow partake of this more critical lineage. His music allows the message of his Thmei brethren to serve as more than just fodder for South Side uplift. By wrapping occult wisdom in the colorful textures (and textiles) of contemporary science fiction, Sun Ra and the Arkestra aligned their music with a wider popular impulse to imagine worlds better than the one being built by rocket science and the Cold War. Why stop with the moon? Space music aims higher: planets, stars, galaxies, infinity.
Sonny Blount, early 1950s (above), and Sun Ra, late 1980s (below). On photocopies of these images, Alton Abraham wrote: “Before” and “After—I turned him into ‘Sun Ra,’ they say.”
Sun Ra and his Arkestra performing in Chicago, late 1950s. From left to right: Ronald Wilson, Marshall Allen, unknown (standing), John Gilmore, Walter Perkins, Nate Pryor, Ronnie Boykins, Phil Cohran, and Sun Ra (in space helmet).
Claude Dangerfield, unused design for record jacket.
Sun Ra broadsheet, mid-1950s. Note the equation HOOT = NOTHING = ETHIOPS, yielding the conclusion that NEGROES ARE NOTHING.
Tickets to performances of Sun Ra and his Arkestra sponsored by the Atonites and the Campaign Committee for the Mayor of Bronzeville.
Promotional flyer for Sun Ra and his Arkestra.
Saturn Records catalog of singles and a “Handy Katalog,” mid- to late 1960s (note the order form on latter).
A page from a Sun Ra notebook, mid-1960s; note the verbal equations and permutations.
Sun Ra and his Arkestra (and friends) parading in New York, 1966. From left to right, as identified on back of photo: Bernard Pettaway, Robert Cummings, Marion Brown, Marshall Allen, Ronnie Boykins, Sun Ra, and Danny Davis.
Record jacket, Interstellar Low Ways (1969; first released as Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus, 1966).
Members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, early 1970s, among them James Jacson, Marshall Allen, June Tyson, Danny Thompson, John Gilmore, Cheryl Allen, Sun Ra, and Wisteria El Moondew (Judith Holton).
