From Jefferson Airplane to Starship: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Evolution

ABSTRACT: Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire (1970) is the only rock album to have been nominated for a Hugo Award. Kantner's lyrical excursions into SF, as a solo artist and as a member of Jefferson Airplane, are characterized by extensive borrowings of both themes and actual text from writers such as John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and others. Important intellectual fields addressed by sf and West Coast rock thematize unorthodox approaches to evolution. From Darwinian dissenters in the nineteenth century through philosophies of expanded consciousness and experimentation with psychoactive drugs in the 1960s, it seemed possible that the psychedelic youth movements of the period, and their utopian visions, were part of an evolutionary "mutation" in culture and consciousness. Science fiction seemed to have predicted this by popularizing "precognitive myths" of telepathy, gestalt consciousness, and ways of being that rock musicians thematized and to some extent sought to realize. Blows Against the Empire emerges as a compendium of sf and countercultural intertexts that celebrate such evolutionary ideals, and despite a lot of its ideas entering the mainstream, it remains a cult album and a unique record of late 1960s countercultural speculation.