Bowie and Science Fiction / Bowie as Science Fiction

On July 11, 1969—nine days before the Apollo 11 moon landing—David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” was released, and history changed. When news presenter Cliff Michelmore announced during the BBC’s coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, “This was the most historic journey in the history of Man [sic],” another historic journey was also in the making.¹ The journey, of course, was that of David Bowie, rock icon, who would leave his mark on the music, ideology, and identity of many generations to follow. The London BBC “studio set consisted of a long, angled desk, large models of the moon and earth, and a large picture of a rocket against a dark, ‘cosmic’-type background.”² To add to the science fiction–like mood of the set, Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was chosen by the BBC as the theme song to accompany its coverage of this transformational event that officially ended the so-called Space Race. Unfortunately, most of the BBC coverage between July 16 and 24 of the Apollo 11 mission has been lost (most likely destroyed), but the play and replay of Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a song (ironically) about the astronaut Major Tom whose failed mission sets him afloat in his capsule into the vastness of outer space, was the beginning of a journey that would establish Bowie as an icon of science fiction.³ The key premise of the song’s narrative, its music video, and its title were clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), which Bowie had watched three times on its release at the Casino Cinerama in London.⁴ Like Frank Poole in 2001, Major Tom drifts aimlessly into empty space. The video clip, released as part of the publicity film Love You till Tuesday (Malcolm J. Thomson, 1969), drives home the science-fiction elements further still (albeit an extremely low-budget rendition when compared to Kubrick’s megaspectacle). Bowie as Major Tom is dressed in a silver space suit and boots, and as “his sanity collapses when confronted with the vastness of space,” he becomes divorced from his capsule, floating in space flanked by two alien space nymphs.⁵

From the 1960s, Bowie’s stage, film, and music personae—Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, Thomas Newton—reflect his fascination with science fiction. This essay focuses on how Bowie drew creatively on themes and images of science fiction (e.g., aliens, dystopian and apocalyptic futures, space exploration) as well as the works of directors and writers like Stanley Kubrick, George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and writers and artists from Marvel Comics and translated them into his music, rock performances, and music videos. Not only does science fiction’s examination of the meaning of human existence and identity enter his creative output and inform his fluid identity as a performer; it stretched and broke the boundaries of what defined pop music in the process. In what follows I argue that David Bowie embodies a recognizable “science fictionality.” Bowie’s relationship with and embodiment of science fiction is explored through Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme: a semiotic unit of information that, like genes, has the capacity to replicate, evolve, and spread contagiously across culture.⁶ Through various examples of screen media, I follow the ways in which his output contagiously filtered into popular culture, forming a logic of its own. In the process, Bowie as science fiction has become a stable memetic complex, spreading its memes and becoming its own distinctive form of sciencefiction thinking.

In his book Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars, Brooks Landon argues that science-fiction themes have begun to slip outside the boundaries of science fiction and have entered the immediate social realm, producing a form of “science fiction thinking”:

Perhaps most singularly, science fiction thinking refers to the process by which science fiction is read, for twentieth-century science fiction has become an extratextual phenomenon as well as a body of texts sharing similar characteristics. Whether in the form of organized “fandom...