Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

Adventure Rocketship! #1

by Jonathan Wright (Editor)

Adventure Rocketship! is steeped in science fiction and geek culture. Mixing fiction, interviews and essays, its subject is nothing less than the future.

The first in what is set to become a science fiction series of books Adventure Rocketship! explores the theme Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco – focusing on the intersection between music, SF and the counterculture. That means, among other subjects, we’ll be looking at how JG Ballard invented post-punk music (sort of…), the curious and enduring appeal of Rush’s magnum concept opus 2112 and the strange vistas of cities daubed with tomorrow’s digital street art and David Bowie, the alien connection...

We’ll be talking to writer and sometime musician Michael Moorcock, three-times Clarke Award winner China Miéville, and counterculture troublemaker and SF novelist Mick Farren. Essayists include David Quantick (Radio 2’s The Blaggers Guide), BSFA Award winner Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and comics writer Rob Williams (Marvel, 2000AD). We’ll have new stories from World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar, Liz Williams, Martin Millar and Tim Maughan.

Genres: Science Fiction, Music

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic civilization at St John's College, Oxford. He joined Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. He has served as Reuters' Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. From 1998 to 2003, he was based in Washington, DC, covering U.S. foreign policy for Reuters.
Wright came to literary translation comparatively late. His first major work of translation was Taxi, the celebrated book by Egyptian writer Khaled al-Khamissi. This was published by Aflame Books in 2008 and republished by Bloomsbury Qatar in 2012. Since then, he has translated several works including Azazeel and The State of Egypt.

Reviews

[nks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The benefits to reading this book are as follows: You will come out of it with a “to look into” list of music and books a meter long. You will enjoy contemplating the many interesting intellectual facets of music in science fiction and science fiction in music (example: is music, in fact, magic?). You will get to (all too briefly) hear from China Mieville. You will read an essay by N.K. Jemison about her favorite sci-fi-steeped singer and race in the genre (my favorite essay in the book), and you will be taken along to a place in Africa where an mp3 market is an actual, physical location in the real world, yet feels more cyberpunk than any virtual reality you’ve imagined. You will also learn about the thousands of J.G. Ballard references in post-punk (though I beg to differ with the author that the association implies that Ballard’s shelf-life has passed). Then you will arrive at the fiction, unannounced as it is, and read a story and a half before you realize this dude did not actually meet David Bowie. You will feel chagrined, and possibly annoyed at the inclusion of fiction at all because Mind Blowing Essays! (I stalled at this point in the collection, though did force myself to read every word. I would have preferred the collection stick to non-fiction myself.)

This is a snippet from a review originally posted on www.bookpunks.com. The read the entire review click here: http://www.bookpunks.com/adventure-ro...

[Daniel Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, informative collection of essays and short fiction on the surprisingly long and elaborate history of how Scifi and Music (particularly Afrofuturism and Disco in this first collection) have influenced one another.
From a profile on Delia Derbyshire - an Electronic musician who arranged Ron Grainer's original Doctor Who theme - to a look at internet-less West Africa's MP3 Markets, where people go to trade Music in distinctly Cyberpunk-y dens via USB.
While 'Let's all go to the science fiction disco' (as an aside, it's a title which I adore) is a relatively short volume (Just over 200 pages when considering the essential '20 Mind-Expanding ways to start your SF album collection' placed at the back of the book) there's also room for half a dozen short Scifi stories that (bar the final story) are all music-themed, be it heavily or not-so. Particular stand-outs here are 'Starmen', 'Between the Notes' and 'Flight Path Estate'.
This Volume is an essential read for any who want to touch that special place where Neal Peart of Rush and Kevin J Anderson meet and collaborate, or that overlooked time when J G Bollard accidentally influenced Post-Punk.
Volume 2 can't come soon enough.

[Tyrannosaurus regina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this and then sat on it for a long while, to my extreme regret because it turns out its wonderful and thought-provoking. I was most interested in the fiction at first, believing it to be the focus of the anthology, but it was the essays and interviews that ended up surprising me. So much history, so much intersection, so broad of a scope.

And then I loved the fiction, too—every bit of it, which virtually never happens. It was breathtakingly good.

I hope this anthology series does continue, because this was a hell of a start.