Ziggyology Read online

  His own life-giving flame was cruelly snuffed out in Vienna on 26 March 1827. Beethoven was 56. He’d spoken his last words on his deathbed three days earlier, when a shipment of wine arrived to ease his suffering: ‘Pity, pity, too late.’

  Shortly afterwards he slipped into a coma until stirred by a violent thunderstorm. It’s said he opened his eyes, rose forward from his pillows and clenched a fist at the sky before flopping back dead. The last thing Beethoven saw was a flash of lightning, his room illuminated by a whip of electrical energy zigzagging across the heavens.

  IN 1977, FOUR years after the death of Ziggy Stardust, NASA launched the two Voyager space probes. Their purpose was to send data back from the outer gas planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – before continuing their journey beyond our solar system, out into the unknown of the Milky Way. Each Voyager carried aboard written messages, photos and a gold-coated copper phonograph record with its own playback equipment containing human greetings in nearly sixty languages, whale song, sound effects and a selection of music: ‘A message to possible extraterrestrial civilisations that might encounter the spacecraft in some distant space and time.’

  Choosing which music to send out beyond the stars excited great debate among the Voyager scientists. Among them was Bernard Oliver, founder of Hewlett-Packard, who suggested all it should contain was Beethoven’s Ninth. In the end twenty-seven pieces of music were chosen from around the world. The Beatles didn’t make the selection only because their record company were too stupid to give consent. But Chuck Berry did, alongside a diverse mix including Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Blind Willie Johnson, Stravinsky and three pieces by Bach.

  Two pieces by Beethoven also made the final Voyager Golden Record playlist. The first movement of the Fifth Symphony (‘Der-der-der DERRR!’) and the Cavatina from ‘String Quartet No.13 In B Flat’, one of his celebrated Late Quartets written just before his death. Dismissed at the time as ‘the work of a lunatic’, the Late Quartets are now revered by scholars as the apex of his canon. Strange, sparse, challenging, they are a cosmic musical aurora unto themselves. The Voyager team’s Ann Druyan, wife of cosmologist and fellow team member Carl Sagan, was so moved the first time she heard the Cavatina she wondered, ‘How it would ever be possible to repay Beethoven for the experience?’ Sagan ensuring its place on the Voyager Golden Record ‘at least partly’ repaid that debt.

  The record is sequenced in such a way that whichever alien ears first encounter it, the very first thing they’ll hear is the opening bars of Beethoven’s Cavatina followed by the spoken greetings. The twenty-seven pieces of music follow, with the Cavatina in full as the last track. Of all the human beings who have ever lived, it is Ludwig van Beethoven who has the first and last word in contacting extraterrestrial life. It may take a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand, a million or more. Voyager’s Golden Record is built to survive over four and a half billion years. It may even be traversing distant galaxies long after the human race has ceased to exist; the obscure time capsule of an insignificant species.

  The tyrant over all vocal organs, the son of the gods and the unhappiest of his creatures did more than help create Ziggy Stardust. Somewhere out there, right now, his music is soaring through deep space: the outstretched hand from an alien world on the far side of the cosmos ready to inform whoever finds it they are not alone. Encrypted for ever on Voyager’s Golden Record, Beethoven is Ziggy Stardust.

  FOUR

  THE DIFFERENT BOY

  NO ONE WOULD have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth-century, that this world was being keenly prepared for the coming of an extrater-restrial rock ’n’ roll demigod. Not Queen Victoria, not Charles Darwin, not the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. By the year 1872, one hundred years before the Starman landed, humanity had discovered astronomy, glamour and music but had yet to fully flinch with the panic and wonder of visitation. Not until an arch futurist, whose shoe leather warmed the same suburban streets as the boy who would be Ziggy, took his fearless pen and fearsome imagination to forever change our relationship with outer space. Future generations would call him ‘the father of science fiction’. His mother called him ‘Bertie’. As in Herbert George Wells.

  In 1872, Wells was a six-year-old living above his family’s ailing crockery shop at 47 High Street, Bromley. Once a market town in Kent, Bromley was undergoing a dramatic population boom thanks to recent rail links destined to transform it into a commuter suburb of the late-Victorian London sprawl. As the pseudonymous ‘Bromstead’, Wells described his childhood surroundings in one of his later novels as ‘a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense clustering of futilities’. To puncture the tedium young Bertie escaped in wicked daydreams of military assault over his humdrum townsfolk. ‘I used to walk about Bromley, a small rather undernourished boy, meanly clad and whistling detestably between his teeth,’ he recalled. Pictures of carnage and devastation raged in his head, of ‘phantom orderlies’ galloping at his command ‘to shift the guns and concentrate fire on yonder houses below’. At the age of 13, the Martian heat ray hibernating deep in H. G. Wells’ subconscious was already laying waste to Greater London.

  Bertie spent much of his youth serving dismal apprenticeships as a draper and chemist, his schooling interrupted to boost the desperate finances of his parents’ crockery business, which was doomed, much like their marriage. His eventual salvation was a love of writing, science and a free studentship scheme which accepted him as a trainee teacher in London. He’d recall the first morning he walked from his shabby Notting Hill lodging house across Kensington Gardens to what was then the Normal School of Science as ‘one of the great days of my life’. Wells’ teacher and mentor during his first year was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the great evolutionary biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, grandfather of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley. When student poverty relented, the young Wells treated himself to the occasional concert at the school’s neighbouring Albert Hall; in his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Tono-Bungay he recalls being there ‘one night in a real rapture’ transfixed by Beethoven’s Ninth. He also fell under the spell of socialism and the budding Fabian Society, attending Sunday meetings at William Morris’ house on the riverbank in Hammersmith, just a few hundred yards from the site where the Odeon cinema would one day stand flickering Technicolor tales he’d yet to write.

  It took him seven years of redrafting before he published his debut novel, by then a twice married 28-year-old working from the kitchen table of a rented flat in Camden. Nobody had read anything quite like The Time Machine, a concept so familiar to us after over a century cemented in our thoughts that we can barely comprehend how outlandish and original it must have seemed in the year 1895, when late-Victorian readers were still mourning Sherlock Holmes’ fatal tussle with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls and otherwise outraged by that year’s trial of Oscar Wilde. The older Wells would jokingly lampoon its story of a scientist who builds a contraption capable of rushing ‘to and fro along the Time Dimension’ as ‘a tissue of absurdities’. But the core of the book was a political allegory, imagining a nightmare world eight hundred millennia into the future where the evolutionary consequences of the Victorian class divide lead to two violently contrasting human species: an ineffectual bourgeois elite and a savage, cannibalistic ape-like proletariat. This hierarchical conflict between Homo sapiens and Homo superior would prevail in much of Wells’ work, provoking harsh criticism from his socialist peers with his morally ambiguous portrayals of Nietzschean-style ‘Supermen’.

  The Time Machine was the first of many groundbreaking science-fiction firsts that Wells rattled out of his Camden kitchen in a ferocious two-year burst of creativity. The Wonderful Visit was a proto-Ziggyish fable of the man who fell to Earth, an angel shot down in a country village by a vicar mistaking him for a rare species of bird. The Island Of Dr Moreau offered a grim genetic morality tale, the horror story of a shipwrecked man who stumbles upon a crazed vivisectionist whose cruel experiments transform wild
animals into semi-human ‘beast folk’. And the self-explanatory The Invisible Man was another genre-defining classic about the dangers of scientific miracle and its effect on the frail human ego predisposed to evil.

  These alone ensured Wells a degree of literary immortality. But in 1897 he went one better with a story so simple yet fantastic it not only beckoned down the Starman but inspired the human race to launch itself beyond our atmosphere, commencing the countdown for the next century’s space race. By the time he began writing it he’d retreated back to suburbia. To Woking, where he learned to master the bicycle, his blazing muse haunted afresh by the ghost of his meanly clad, detestable whistling genocidal boyhood. ‘I wheeled about the district,’ Wells recalled, ‘marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians.’ From the vantage of his saddle trundling down the leafy byways of parochial Surrey, Wells’ mind conceived the extraterrestrial carnage of The War Of The Worlds.

  WELLS CREDITED HIS older brother, Frank, with the original idea – a funny ‘what if?’ scenario discussed while strolling around Woking – though the novel was as much an ingenious marriage of a new nineteenth-century literary genre and contemporary astronomy.

  Twenty years earlier, British Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney published The Battle Of Dorking, a prophetic warning of British invasion by a German army who score a decisive victory in the Surrey market town of its title. Written as military propaganda after the end of the Franco– Prussian War and escalating concern over the future of Europe, its plot provided Wells with a readymade ‘invasion fiction’ template of provincial pandemonium. Dorking itself was only fourteen miles from Woking.

  The second influence on Wells was recent press speculation bringing an ancient human concern zapping into the modern world. ‘Is there life on Mars?’ The claims stemmed from an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, whose careful observations by telescope led him to believe the Martian surface was crisscrossed with a series of channels – canali in Italian. Schiaparelli’s use of the word canali was taken literally by America’s Percival Lowell who went further by proposing these aquatic byways had been specifically engineered by an intelligent species to syphon ice water away from the polar caps to irrigate Mars’ arid terrain. Lowell argued that the difference in gravity between their planet and ours would mean the Martian navvies could build their canals three times more efficiently. ‘Quite possibly, such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed,’ wrote Lowell. ‘Certainly, what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.’ The Martian debate and Lowell’s excited hullaballoo made front pages around the world, including London’s Evening Standard which remarked with typical Victorian caution, ‘The possibility of the presence of inhabitants on Mars, differing, of course, from human beings, cannot be denied.’

  It was against this backdrop of paranoia about homeland security, European unrest, the dying days of Victorian England and fierce debate about life on Mars that Wells first took to his bicycle, returning home to dash off The War Of The Worlds on a steady diet of little more than tea and toast.

  Like so many of Wells’ heroes, the book’s anonymous narrator is a thinly-disguised self-portrait of a science journalist living with his wife in late-Victorian Woking. After early astronomical warning of strange flares springing from Mars’ surface, an interplanetary missile crash-lands on the outskirts of town at Horsell Common. Locals first mistake it for a meteorite only to watch in horror as slimy, bear-sized ovoid monsters with tentacle limbs and V-shaped mouths emerge from its crater. Wells’ Martians, ‘cool and unsympathetic’, incinerate the gathering army with their heat ray before assembling an armada of fighting tripod machines and embarking on a campaign of total annihilation. The narrator narrowly escapes capture as he makes his slow journey on foot to London. When he finally arrives the city is mysteriously deserted. The sound of weird distress signals leads him through Regent’s Park to Primrose Hill (favourite strolling grounds for Wells and his second wife) where he discovers the aliens defeated. Not by human military strength but by the microscopic germs in Earth’s atmosphere. ‘The Martians – dead! – slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared.’

  First serialised in magazine form, The War Of The Worlds was published as a six-shilling novel to immediate acclaim in January 1898. It has never been out of print. Less than three hundred years earlier Kepler had first felt tremors of the Starman in his peculiar lunar fantasy The Dream only to land his mother in the dock for ‘witchcraft’. The reception to Wells’ Martian nightmare was proof enough of the progressive shift in humanity’s readiness to dwell upon the unknown awaiting us in space. In its frontispiece, Wells set a subtly paraphrased quote from his ‘favourite book’, seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton’s epic compendium The Anatomy Of Melancholy. ‘But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? … Are we or they Lords of the World … And how are all things made for man?’ Poignantly, the words were those of Johannes Kepler.

  The book’s rapid international fame owed much to pirate versions in foreign newspapers deliberately breaching Wells’ copyright. As Fighters From Mars it was serialised in The Boston Post, all mention of Surrey locations swapped for those in and around Massachusetts. Wells’ unofficial Boston remix gripped the imagination of one particular bronchial teenage boy in Worcester. Robert Goddard wasn’t so much scared of the alien heat rays obliterating the townsfolk forty miles away in Lexington as he was fascinated with the technical ingenuity of the Martian vessels travelling through millions of miles of interplanetary space to land on Earth. On an October evening in 1899, the 17-year-old Goddard experienced an epiphany sat among the branches of a cherry tree, lost in hallucinations of a manmade spacecraft hurtling towards Mars. Before going to bed he wrote in his diary. ‘I was a different boy when I descended from the tree.’

  Inspired by Wells, Goddard became the pioneer of twentieth-century rocket science, designing the first fuel rocket which ultimately put man in outer space. Remove Goddard from the equation of history and we remove Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind from the Apollo 11 lander to the surface of the moon, and with it the commemorative ballad of orbital isolation called ‘Space Oddity’. So the cosmic baton slips through the fingers of H. G. Wells to Robert Goddard and to Ziggy Stardust. From one different boy to another.

  FORTY YEARS AFTER The War Of The Worlds, Wells returned to the theme of Martian invasion in one of his last sci-fi novels, 1937’s Star-Begotten, which he dedicated to a lifelong admirer of his work, ‘my friend Winston Spencer Churchill’. In stark contrast to the tentacled aliens and three-legged fighting machines of his previous book, here the Martians adopt a covert cold war-style offensive, sending unseen cosmic rays through space which will transform all new-born children into superbeings until the human race has been entirely replaced. ‘This is the story of an idea,’ wrote Wells. ‘Maybe we have not heard the last of this idea.’

  At the time of his death on 13 August 1946, six weeks shy of his eightieth birthday, Wells had authored over one hundred and fifty books, pamphlets and collections. Among them was a short story first published in The Strand magazine in 1902 called ‘The Inexperienced Ghost’, about a man who meets a sorry spectre unable to return to the spirit world until he remembers the special series of hand gestures allowing him to pass between the dimensions. The year before Wells died the story was adapted into a comic ghost yarn about golfing and love rivalry in the Ealing horror compendium Dead Of Night: the film which triggered Fred Hoyle’s steady state theory and, inadvertently, his coining of the phrase ‘big bang’. The influence of H. G. Wells, however subtle, knew no bounds. As George Orwell saluted: ‘The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.’

  When The War Of The Worlds was first published in January 1898, The Spectator magazine nailed the source of its enduring fascination
. ‘As a rule, those who pass beyond the poles and deal with non-terrestrial matters take their readers to the planets or the moon. Mr Wells does not “err so greatly” in the art of securing the sympathy of his readers. He brings the awful creatures of another sphere to Woking Junction, and places them, with all their abhorred dexterity, in the most homely and familiar surroundings.’

  It was this mischievous positioning of visitors from space on English soil, in the streets of London, which most alarmed and awed its readership; a calculated yank on the waxed moustache of Victorian society, teasing with an infinite, uncontainable fear of creatures from another world wreaking havoc in the belly of the British Empire. An alarm which, years after he wrote The War Of The Worlds, Wells believed still ‘flickers about in people’s minds, not quite dead’.

  No, not quite dead. And soon to flicker in the mind of the most gloriously different Bromley boy since Wells himself.

  FIVE

  THE COLD REGION

  THE YEAR 1922. A mere fifty years before Ziggy Stardust, and his approaching storm can be felt in the faint breeze of cosmic awe and sensory seduction fluttering the first pages of the twentieth century, ruffling gusts from a distant yet now unstoppable gale. A brave new world obliviously prepares to welcome the Starman as it has already the motor car, the aeroplane, the radio, the brassière and the knowledge to make an atom bomb. Music, once the confines of the concert hall, the church and the ale house, can now be caged like a songbird within the concentric grooves of a phonograph record. The ways and means for Ziggy to spread his gospel may yet be rudimentary but are safely in place. All but a few technological stepping stones remain between the crackle of a shellac 78 vibrating the horn of a wind-up gramophone to that of an under-the-covers transistor buzzing to Radio Luxembourg.