Butterworth QUEENS OF DELIRIA

The science fiction classic - based on an idea by MICHAEL MOORCOCK
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-9110-2
Verlag: BookRix
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 226 Seiten

Earth had already been devastated by the Death Generator... Then the Red Queen meddled with the very laws of Time to advance her evil ambitions. She transmogrified the planet into a world stalked by decaying ghouls and policed by satanic Bulls, their amplifiers meting out the punishing music of Elton John. Only the Hawklords could save the remnants of Humanity... only the Hawklords could restore the forces of Good. Their sole ally Elric the Indecisive; their sole weapon their music; they fought to the death with their awesome enemies, the macabre Queens of Deliria...   Queens Of Deliria by Michael Butterworth (born 24 April 1947 in Manchester) - based on an idea by Michael Moorcock - was first published in 1977: an echo of New Wave SF, an incomparable psychedelic rock fantasy - and a definitive cult novel! Queens Of Deliria is published in a new edition by Apex-Verlag, edited by the author (and supplemented by a new introduction written by Rick Evans).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Butterworth, Michael

Leseproben

  INTRODUCTION
  No one captures the mythology of the Hawkwind universe better than Michael Butterworth whose books Queens of Deliria and its prequel, Time of the Hawklords, take you into their actual mythical universe. Their rerelease by Apex-Verlag means there is something in the air, appearing as they do on the heels of the nearest other contender, Joe Banks’ Hawkwind: Days of the Underground, published in 2020 by Strange Attractor. The passage of time has made the politically progressive ‘Hawklords novels’ more relevant than when they were written, as though their author had a third eye looking into the future—both the Hawkwind future and our actual future. The consequences of Brexit in Butterworth’s own U.K., and Trumpism in the U.S., haven’t fully become clear, but it’s easy to see how possible scenarios might parallel those found in Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria. After Butterworth finished caricaturing the 1960’s in Britain, in Queens of Deliria he turned his fire to the U.S. and Watergate. Trump and the two agents of the Death Generator—Colonel Memphis Mephis and the Red Queen—are not identical figures, but they do have eerie similarities. The damage Mr. Trump did to my country is beyond repair. The damage to our democracy. The normalcy of his malignant fabrications. There have been so many deaths from COVID, which will continue because of the anti-vaccination people (99.5% of people dying in the U.S. at the time of writing are non-vaccinated) fueled by Trump’s lies. Trump is Mephis by another name! The pandemic itself makes the books more relevant than they were forty-five years ago. As does Hawkwind’s significance of long-overdue elder statesmen and oracle status. Below are some examples of the books’ bearing on what became Hawkwind’s future and the real world’s future. In making them I am not so much stretching for hidden connections or hidden meanings—the real allegorical themes for humanity to be found in these books—but pointing out how they capture a certain mythology that Hawkwind also captures. That’s what Butterworth was trying to do in the late seventies, when he intentionally or unintendedly foretold things yet to come both in the Hawkwind universe and in our real universe. To start with, Queens of Deliria takes place a hundred years or so after Time of the Hawklords. Now Hawkwind in the real world won’t live that long, but amazingly Dave Brock is still leading Hawkwind over fifty years later, and not as some oldie’s band, but one whose last few albums rival their best work. I can’t think of any other band like this. Sure there’s the Rolling Stones, but they haven’t put a good album out in decades. It’s as though Butterworth foretold that Hawkwind would have amazing longevity! Of course Brock is the only original member, but it’s the personnel changes that have kept the band a vibrant entity. The mythological paradigm they framed—or to put it another way, the spaceship that Brock pilots—to move forward, because the new crewmembers write and create within the broad Hawkwind-framed universe. More of Butterworth’s predictions include Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, who makes a significant appearance in Queens of Deliria years before Hawkwind’s excellent 1985 album, The Chronicle of the Black Sword. Granted Hawkwind had a long-standing relationship with Moorcock, with him contributing tunes like ‘Warriors’ and ‘Sonic Attack’ prior to Butterworth’s books, but those songs do not mention Elric. In Queens of Deliria Butterworth created Time Zones. Hawkwind/Psychedelic Warriors’ most experimental album is White Zone (1995), on which the cover art implies a similar disorienting microelectronic effect that a Hawklord experiences when entering a Time Zone. The author repurposed the term ‘the Horrors’—a sixties English colloquialism for a bad dope experience—for the effects the Death Generator’s deadly Cyndaim Waves have on most humans. In 1992 Hawkwind put out a great song called ‘Sadness Runs Deep.’ The music is rather morose, Eastern-influenced (the deserts) and epic in size, along with lyrics about ‘no place to hide’ from these feelings. It is rooted in the break-up of a relationship, but it’s not like any other break-up song I’ve heard, as the overall impact evokes the total gloom of the Horrors more than a single broken heart. Granted Hawkwind’s music always had a feel of dystopia, and the general malady that comes with that, but the way in which Butterworth uses the Horrors is wholly his creation, forecasting the horrors of today’s real world. The books are crowded with invention. In Time of the Hawklords his depiction of the ‘computer of minds’ seems to anticipate virtual reality. In less than one paragraph in Queens of Deliria he defines the ‘sector of domes’, where the Children live, as being essentially zero-carbon-emitting and sustainable: “By a policy of living design each house provided safe power, sufficient for its needs.” Geodesic domes were popular in the seventies, but these were more about strength and structure than sustainability. The point being, as Butterworth also did in Time of the Hawklords, he predicts the sustainability movement decades before it’s an actual thing. In turn, Hawkwind continued to gravitate to more earthbound green issues, notably in the last ten years with albums like Blood of the Earth, and the two companion albums The Machine Stops/Into the Woods.  Taking the environmental concept more broadly, Butterworth doesn’t actually explain the cause of the holocaust that pre-dates Time of the Hawklords, leaving us to think it’s probably a culmination of things, including environmental collapse. Even though the Death Generator is driving the enveloping worldwide catastrophe, today the books read more like they are portraying the imminent fallout from global warming. That he wrote it forty-five years ago is striking, and I wouldn’t mind hazarding a guess that they resonate more to a general reader today than they did to a reader in the seventies. These are themes that stand the test of time, with or without Hawkwind. The beaten homeless man that lives in squalor in the Waltzer at the San Francisco fairground in Queens of Deliria, and the general homeless encampments featured in both books, remind me of the encampments found all over Los Angeles and San Francisco today. His desolate San Francisco Playland is now our 2021 Venice Beach. San Francisco itself is a major tourist destination in decay; now packed with the poor desperate souls in tents relocated from Earth City. Homelessness in the U.S. has been a long-growing problem, but just in the last few years, it has mushroomed into something… out of a dystopian 1970’s novel! The author uses the concept of ‘horizons’ repeatedly, to evoke the sort of melancholy associated with ‘wondering what is’ (or isn’t) happening on the horizon, where we’re not physically present, or the image of distant horizons we can’t see. Hawkwind have the 1997 album and song, Distant Horizons.  I get a kick out the Squares vs. the Children depicted in Queens of Deliria and Time of the Hawklords, and all that goes with that: Greed vs. good. Consumption vs. conservation. Materialism vs. enlightenment. The image of the zombie workers in Queens of Deliria is both tragic and a little comical: “Reminds me of Work… Remember when we had to do that?” They’re controlled by the banalities of consumerism manifested through bad consumer music (product). I can say that it’s not as easy as simply foregoing a job. Politically I’m progressive. Musically I’m enlightened. Still, my company buys and sells real estate. We run the University’s commercial units, license university property for Hollywood film shoots, and operate the restaurants on campus. I do this however, in service to one of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the U.S. My company is a non-profit, and surplus revenue goes back to this public university. Music, politics and my work, help me straddle the fence between no-compromise and sell-out. I believe most Hawkwind, and Butterworth, fans try to embrace meaningful and positive lives. Queens of Deliria allows us to personally reflect on these values. One silver lining from this insane pandemic—straight out of a sci-fi book—is being able to transition most of my administrative employees to a remote work environment. I really want to be on the progressive edge of that. They’ve been working from home for a year and a half, and they’d like to continue that. The technology is available for us to do this. It feels like we’re part of a Michael Butterworth novel! Hawkwind still continue to put out great music within the sci-fi scope, ever expanding on their mythology, and Butterworth’s books still comfortably synch up with the ongoing story. His books are a lot of fun, even if a little tongue in cheek at times, but with some very deep meanings that some cynics and critics miss. I’m really excited that Queens of Deliria is being rereleased. Back in the day I enjoyed reading it every bit as much, or more than, Time of the Hawklords, perhaps because the...