Stardust
The scarcity of science fiction titles on David Bowie's list of 100 favorite books is notable because, from lyrics to stage personalities and film roles, it's apparent that speculative fiction inspired the musician. That influence, on Bowie as well as on several of his contemporaries, is the subject of Jason Heller's Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded (Melville House, $26.99; see our review below).As Heller looks closer at each of the performers in his book, including Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and George Clinton, he traces connections between the artists' work and their influences. Links seem obvious between David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the song was hardly an anthem to a single film. The BBC's Quatermass series, which young Bowie watched in secret behind his parents' sofa, is where Heller points for further influence, together with Ray Bradbury's short story "Kaleidoscope," Clifford D. Simak's "You'll Never Go Home Again" and popular magazines like New Worlds and Impulse, which fed glossy doses of both human potential and doom to Bowie's postwar Britain.
Heller writes that Hendrix, like Bowie, devoured sci-fi novels, reading with a pace and hunger for imaginative worlds that seemed suited to the uncertainty of the time. He moves chronologically from the end of 1960s to the start of the 1980s, noting shifts in musical styles and trends in science fiction. As the pastoral hippie movement clashed with the space race, the counterculture with the cold war, the fears and freedoms of fantastical stories proved a rich vein for musicians. Varied as the music of David Crosby, Sun Ra and Joy Division may be, Heller shows similar speculative fiction themes throughout as they strove to make music to reflect possibilities as dually foreboding and enthralling as the world they lived in. --Kristianne Huntsberger, Shelf Awareness partnership marketing manager and co-host of Bowie Book Club
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In your chapter on gender hormones, you mention Christine Jorgensen. You call her the "Caitlyn Jenner of the 1950s." Who was she, and how does her story fit into the history of the transgender community?
In the late 1980s, advertising executive turned aspiring author Peter Mayle relocated from England to southern France, where he and his wife (plus two dogs) bought a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the Lubéron countryside. Mayle's move meant a big change from decades of globetrotting and transatlantic commuting, chasing a bucolic vision of long meals, good wine and slow schedules with plenty of time to work on a novel. But Provence itself proved the real story. Mayle's memoir of French country living, A Year in Provence (1989), brought an honest, humorous eye to a paradisaical place not without its share of problems. Surprisingly strong weather, shady truffle dealers and workers working on their own time provided their own headaches--more than offset by Provençal cooking. Each chapter covers a month in Ménerbes, the hilltop commune made famous by Mayle's writing.
