Around the world in a time machine

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Edited by Mssrs. BOTTENBERG & SLUTSKY, esqs.

The following document was discovered by historical researchers in London this past week. It is taken from the Dec. 6, 1901 edition of the Pan-European Journal of Dignified and Well-thinking Gentlemen, and it consists of a transcribed conversation between H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, two writers regarded as the founders of science fiction literature. While intended as mere Cognac-fuelled flights of fancy, it is eerily accurate in its prescience.



H. G. Wells: My dear friend Jules, I must tell you about the wonderful notion that came to me the other night as I attended a musical performance. I mused to myself that one might greatly enjoy the privilege of hearing such a performance in one's own home. My extrapolative faculties led me to envision a day when music might be captured on silver discus, read by way of concentrated beams of light particles and expelled through conical sound projectors into one's own parlour.

Jules Verne: A delightful if far-fetched idea, mon ami. Not, however, beyond the realm of possibility. In fact, I foresee a time when the international adventures of my fictional hero Phineas Fogg need not take 80 days, but merely the 80 minutes required to visit one's local disquaire. There, one might procure a journey around the world in recorded audio form.

HGW: Do you care to entertain some imaginings of what these recordings might entail?

JV: Well, it's clear that the human animal is well on its way to an era of peace and enlightenment, where war and tribal hostility are relics of an ugly past. Indeed, 100 years from now, young people might enjoy musical anthologies with titles like Geosonic Grooves or Swaraj: Future Asian Beat. Therein, artists with such exotic names as Bebel Gilberto, Natacha Atlas and Badmarsh & Shri use the most advanced technology available to fuse the traditional music of their own cultures with that of the European elite.

HGW: Just as long as they're not off fighting pointless wars! I doubt that activities of a military nature will simply disappear. No, before that, I suspect a clash on a previously unforseen scale, somewhere around the middle of our infant century, will have to unfold before people recognize its folly.

JV: Perhaps even two such wars! Do you think the Germans might try to get involved in some way? Of course, in such times, people will seek solace in merriment. Thus, in the year 2001 we might find a retrospective disc entitled Those Were Our Songs: Music of World War II, with the likes of, oh, Spike Jones & His City Slickers or the Andrews Sisters, serenading us with "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," "Shoo-Shoo Baby" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo."

HGW: (snorting derisively) If you say so. Who might indulge in a boogie-woogie quadrille at such a time is beyond me. Anyhow, I was considering another mechanical marvel the other night, the recently invented motion-picture camera and auxiliary projection device. You are, I assume, familiar?

JV: Indeed. In fact, sir, I regard this fantastical light-bender as the very future of refined, superior entertainment. Such coarse forms as opera and the theatre shall certainly vanish once the far more edifying motion picture is properly exploited.

HGW: Likewise, the musical accompaniment shall no doubt be equally scintillating and substantial. I see a fellow, an Englishman I shouldn't doubt, name of perhaps Michael Nyman, regarding his career in the musical aspect of motion pictures. This particular disc would be called, say, The Very Best of Michael Nyman: Film Music 1980-2001, and it would offer the choicest selections of Mr. Nyman's thoroughly modern approach to the baroque music the two of us are so fond of.

JV: What a profoundly delightful proposition, mon ami! Were it that I might embark in the time machine, of which you so illustriously wrote--

HGW: Thank you, sir. I thank you.

JV: You are most graciously welcome. Ah, to visit the world of tomorrow, breathing in the clean, post-industrial air while procuring these magnificent silver disci--

HGW: I dare say, Jules, that those disci might actually serve as time machines themselves.

JV: In what fashion, sir?

HGW: Well, it is conceivable that in the future, artists will employ technology and specific research to replicate the far-flung past. Being artists rather than historians, of course, they are welcome to take creative liberties, in fact reinterpreting the past as they might have liked it to be.

JV: Indeed, sir, bravo! I'm picturing an Australian duo, a man and woman, who answer to the name of Dead Can Dance. I see they, like your Nyman character, looking back over two decades of reconstituted medievalism. The title? Simply Dead Can Dance 1981-1998, with an appropriately minimalist packaging.

And can we not perhaps envision alchemical fusions of the archaic and the very au courant?

HGW: Certainly. I must note at this time that it is my opinion that the single most important musical ensemble of the coming century will without question be Englishmen, a group with some outlandish moniker like the Beatles or some such thing.

JV: (in a fit of pique) Chauviniste!

HGW: Sit down, you silly frog. Now furthermore, I can conceive of a disc of songs by these Beatles fellows, reinterpreted as Gregorian chants by the Schola Musica choir, entitled The Liverpool Manuscripts. A novel notion, no?

JV: I put it to you, sir, that France, too, will be the cradle of outstanding popular music in its own right.

HGW: (rolling eyes and arching eyebrows suggestively) Humour me.

JV: I propose a duo named les Rita Mitsouko, manufacturing a discus entitled Bestov, wherein one might enjoy such formidable ditties as "C'est comme ça" or "Nuit d'ivresse."

HGW: The latter sounds like one you might write.

JV: Stuffy Englishman. I must say, though, I feel inspired. The possibilities! Why, I'd like to imagine that there might some day be an anthology discus entitled Harlem World: The Sound of the Big Apple Rappin', wherein one might hear groupings of American Negroes, employing fanciful devices that replicate the sounds of drums, and perhaps even gramophones--as instruments themselves!--to generate what they might call hip hop music--

HGW: Hip hop rappin' chaps? That is about as reasonable as your boogie-woogie choo-choo nonsense.

JV: Restrain yourself, my good man! Yes, hip hop music! Performed by the likes of, oh, Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Romantic 5, or perhaps Afrika Bambaataa Zulu Nation Cosmic Force.

HGW: (coughing and sputtering in frustration) Cosmic Zulu wizards?! Harumph!

JV: Well, since we've broached the topic of the cosmic and therefore the extraterrestrial, we should at least agree on the relevance of travel into outer space, as we've both proposed in our respective novels on the theme.

HGW: This, I must admit, is true.

JV: So imagine this, mon ami. A group of musicians calling themselves something simply outlandish like Pink Floyd. They too offer a career retrospective in disc form, entitled Echoes. There one might find such odes to the majesty of the cosmos as "Astronomy Domine"--

HGW: This I can see.

JV: Or perhaps "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun."

HGW: (getting all mad again) Set the controls--now see here, you Gallic rascal! Who in their right mind would direct their astrocraft into the sun, meaning certain death? Unless, of course, these Plaid Finks or whomever are inspired by the intoxicating fumes of the devilish hemp plant!

JV: (pausing in confusion) But that's where I get all of my ideas.