It was this simple cyclical plot of a horror film which inspired Hoyle and his Cambridge colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold to propose an ageless universe with no beginning and no end, forever repeating on itself for infinity. Hoyle used his March 1949 BBC broadcast to promote this same ‘steady state theory’ while taking meticulous care to debunk rival ideas about cosmic origins. The most popular alternative was one supported by America’s Edwin Hubble, whose study of light spectra from distant galaxies revealed convincing evidence of an expanding universe – one which must, if still expanding, have logically once started from a finite point of nothingness.
‘These theories,’ Hoyle scoffed, ‘were based on the hypothesis that all matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.’
Hoyle chose the childlike phrase ‘big bang’ to belittle the expanding universe argument as naïve. Except by doing so he coined a metaphor so simple and accessible it very quickly became the century’s standard model of cosmology. One he’d detonated, by mistake, through nothing more than Yorkshire sarcasm.
So it was that Yorkshire gave the universe the genes of Ziggy, the Spiders From Mars and the big bang. And so it was that the big bang gave the universe Yorkshire, the Spiders From Mars, the genes of Ziggy and the universe itself.
Nearly 14 billion years ago an unfathomable void of nothingness erupted in an unstoppable spewing of light and heat. An edgeless maelstrom of fire and ash. A fullness as unimaginable as the emptiness that preceded it. A raging intergalactic blizzard which cooled for an eternity to form the first stars, living and dying billions of years before our sun existed. Stars which vanished in supernovas hurricaning more stardust back into space, taking new eternities to form new stars, new planets and, eventually, new life.
The same stardust that created the enveloping sphere of the world now surrounding you including the eyes you use to read this page and the tips of the fingers that turn them. The page itself, whether paper or liquid crystal. The fabric against your skin and the floor beneath you. The bricks and glass that house you and the streets, hillocks and estuaries beyond them, from the sands of Ibiza to the marshes of the Norfolk Broads. The atoms of everything and everyone that has ever existed or ever will exist. Beethoven’s tuning fork. The spokes of H. G. Wells’ bicycle. Gustav Holst’s baton. The brylcreem in the hair of Elvis Presley and Vince Taylor. The black plastic shading Andy Warhol’s eyes from the Manhattan daylight. The lens of Stanley Kubrick. The blood trickling from the slashed torso of Iggy Pop. The tree hacked down to make Ronno’s white Les Paul. The coat of red paint on a model K2 phonebox in Mayfair. The first bass drum on ‘Five Years’ and the last violin on ‘Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide’. All of it. Every molecule. Made of stardust.
THE WORD ‘STARDUST’ has been in our vocabulary for less than two hundred years. It appears neither in the Bible nor any of the works of Shakespeare. The Oxford English Dictionary records its entry into the language in the year 1844, meaning ‘lots of small stars that look like dust through a telescope’. By 1879 the definition was added of ‘dust that supposedly falls from outer space to the earth’. But even then, in the late Victorian age, as H. G. Wells wrote in The War Of The Worlds of ‘an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it’, humans remained largely oblivious to this wonder of their origins and that of the cosmos itself.
The history of Ziggy Stardust is the history of that stardust which became the human race. As soon as the first humans had dragged themselves upright to gaze at the night sky they started to wonder whether there might be something out there. Mystified by the heavens, early man succumbed to pagan impulses of gods and monsters, worship and sacrifice, mumbo and jumbo. Their primitive minds didn’t see Starmen in the sky but apocalyptic space dragons which tried to gobble up the sun, plunging the world into permanent darkness; or, as we’d call the phenomenon today, a solar eclipse.
In what was once Mesopotamia they imagined the Earth to be a flat strip beneath a domed heaven, with hidden doorways either side to allow the sun to creep in at dawn and slither out at twilight. The Sumerians and Babylonians believed in the power of stars and the creatures within them, constructing humongous layered temples flanked by stairways climbing straight to heaven. From here they would survey the cosmos, chart its movements and convert their findings into a mathematical framework of the first known astronomical data. At the summit of these temples lay a dedicated shrine to the god of their city, placed there like a divine helicopter pad beckoning him to step from heaven and descend into their midst. Using sun-baked bricks made from the dust beneath their feet, the Babylonians were the first civilisation in human history to erect a welcome mat for the Starman. Such temples had a special name meaning ‘the highest place’. Ziggurats.
The ancient Greeks also made gods of constellations, paying special attention to those non-twinkling bodies which roamed the sky of their own free will: these wandering stars they named the planets. In the vast cloudy streak dissecting the night sky they saw a shower of milk spurting from the breast of the goddess Hera; thousands of years later, because of the Greeks we still refer to that starry haze as the Milky Way. But like the Babylonians before them who invented writing, geometry, the seven-day week, the twelve-month calendar and the sixty-minute hour, the Greeks gave us infinitely more than urns and fables: the concept of atoms; the deduction that the sun must be a ball of hot rock; and that the Earth wasn’t flat but a sphere. And, in minds as keen as the scholar Epicurus, the first idle daydreams of Ziggy. ‘We must believe,’ wrote Epicurus, around 400 BC, ‘that in all worlds there are living creatures.’
The mathematician Pythagoras, an early Greek superstar who played a one-string guitar called a ‘Cosmic Monocord’ and cultivated his own simpering fan club, was the first to suggest there were tunes to be heard among the orbits of the planets – a ‘music of the spheres’. Yet Pythagoras also typified the worst conceits of Greek intellectualism. He alone set about dismantling the stairways to heaven, as dreamed by the Babylonians, with an idealised geometric model of space. One where there could be no transit of life between the Earth, the planets and the stars, each contained in a conglomeration of sealed crystal spheres spinning in perfect harmony. Such was the ‘cosmos’, a word he’d invented, according to Pythagoras. Literally, a load of balls.
The influence of Pythagorean arrogance rattled in the bones of successors such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, who between them established a widespread faith in geocentricism: the belief that we, on Earth, must be the centre of the universe, with the sun spinning around us. When Greek and Roman myth and superstition were eventually devoured by the God-fearing terror of Christianity, the church upheld Aristotle’s geocentric system as sacrosanct. It wasn’t that an alien visitor like Ziggy Stardust had become unthinkable in the human brain. Worse, he’d become undiscussable. The Christians only had room in their pious imagination for one Starman, sent to Earth from the heavens to attract apostles and spread joy before being ritually crucified. To look for or even suggest there might be others was to invite disembowelment, death and eternal hellfire.
And so the stars, and its Starman, continued to shine for over another thousand years of human fear and holy ignorance. Unobserved and undisturbed.
THE POST-MEDIEVAL DUNCE age lobotomising northern Europe was finally shattered by a handful of deliberating heroes, restless of mind, courageous of soul, who between them stripped the world of its geocentric blindfold and re-ignited the flames of cosmic fancy. The first murmur of truth came from Nicolaus Copernicus, author of the 1543 page-turner On The Revolutions Of The Heavenly Spheres, which dared to imply the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Tragically for its author, as the book’s presses rolled Copernicus lay comatose on his deathbed, waking just the once to feel a first edition pressed into his hands before giving up the ghost. If the relief of seeing his life’s work in print didn’t finish him off it could have been the shock of discovering the anonymous preface inserted without
his consent by its German publisher. Hoping to dodge any blasphemous controversy, it feebly informed the reader that the theories within ‘need not be true’.
Of the brave papal cage-rattlers who followed Copernicus, none were more heedless of harm than late-sixteenth-century Neapolitan monk and occupational bother-magnet Giordano Bruno. A devout Copernican, he went one further by suggesting the sun was a star exactly like all other stars, and spoke openly of his belief that life existed somewhere among them. For which the Catholic Church dragged him into a market square in Rome, tied him to a stake, buried him up to his chin in kindling and barbecued him alive.
As Bruno’s charred remains were being unceremoniously dumped in the river Tiber, some three hundred miles north in the University of Padua, a 36-year-old geometry teacher called Galileo was busy composing his own troublesome cosmic jive. The Starry Messenger was a jaw-clunking collection of scientific data about the night sky as he’d observed using a brand new invention, the telescope. But it took another book to fully baste Galileo in enough sacrilege to merit his own public roasting. Warned by the Pope not to promote the heretical opinions of Bruno and Copernicus before him, Galileo wrote Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems, convinced he’d found a cunning loophole. It took the form of a fictional conversation between two men: one defending the traditional geocentric view of the church, the other skilfully presenting its author’s contrary evidence that Earth revolved around the sun. At the end a third character, intended as an independent observer, weighs up the arguments of both before choosing to agree with Galileo’s man. Unfortunately, the book wasn’t cunning enough to prevent Galileo’s trial before the Roman Inquisition, who menaced him into renouncing his beliefs under pain of having his elderly limbs yanked from their sockets. While he avoided Bruno’s martyr’s pyre he spent the last eight years of his life under miserable house arrest, the last three of those blind. He died a broken man at the age of 77 on 8 January 1642. Three hundred and five years prior to the day the boy who would be Ziggy was born.
In his early years, long before he’d excited Catholic thumbscrews, the young Galileo received a book out of the blue from a fellow astronomer in Germany. The book was The Cosmic Mystery, a weird mix of space theory and geometric insanity which at its core proposed a Copernican model of the heavens. The author was Johannes Kepler, a luckless maths teacher who claimed to have taken a bath only once in his entire life and, possibly as a result, suffered from such severe haemorrhoids that he often wrote standing up. Kepler asked a friend travelling to Italy to deliver his book to Galileo, hoping to befriend him. Sadly, any camaraderie failed to blossom. Unwilling to indulge his German rival, the Italian ignored most of his letters repeatedly pleading to borrow a telescope, finally palming Kepler off with the weakest of excuses that he did have a spare but he’d ‘lent it to someone else’.
Kepler would nevertheless brand his name upon history without Galileo’s assistance. Like Pythagoras, he also heard melodies in space among the movements of the planets. As early as 1599 he described using musical notation a chord made by ‘strumming’ the solar system like the strings of a guitar. The notes roughly corresponded to a C major chord – the same key as ‘Starman’. Where Galileo had stubbornly held to the classical sanctity of perfect circles and misjudged the planetary orbits along the same lines, Kepler was the genius who calculated that the planets moved in ellipses at a variable speed dependent on how close they were to the sun’s gravity. And where Galileo had thought extraterrestrial life ‘false and damnable’, Kepler was already writing the script for first contact.
As a Protestant caught among Catholic religious upheaval and territorial war in Reformation Europe, Kepler shared Galileo’s caution in writing a mandate for the Copernican model of the solar system. But whereas Galileo’s Dialogue nudged fiction only so far as an imagined conversation, Kepler’s The Dream shoved disbelief into new dimensions of literary wonder. It followed the adventures of Duracotus, the son of an Icelandic witch, who is spirited to the surface of the moon by demons. There he describes space as seen from a new non-terrestrial perspective and paints a vivid portrait of alien life: benign giant lunar inhabitants with legs like camels, those on the dark side confined to an icy life of misery and hardship, so sensitive to the sun that it blisters their frail skin. Kepler’s intention was to present science fact in the guise of fiction. In doing so, this smelly seventeenth-century German romantic with chronic piles gave the world science-fiction.
Kepler’s The Dream took over a decade to write and was never published in his lifetime, though it was circulated in private and copied, badly, with near-fatal consequences for his mother. Frau Kepler was a village gossip who brewed and sold mind-altering homeopathic drugs. Stories began circulating that her ‘cures’ caused blindness. Other witnesses came forward swearing she could walk through locked doors and had once cursed a pig, which cried itself to death. It didn’t help that her own aunt had been burned as a witch years earlier. Second-hand copies of The Dream, with its alarming parallels with the hero’s demon-summoning mother, only added to her woes. Frau Kepler was arrested and confined to a cell where the local witchfinder general spent many hours showing her his instruments of torture in laborious detail. She was eventually released, physically unharmed but mentally ruined, only thanks to her famous son’s intervention.
The trial took its emotional toll on both. His mother died within the year and Kepler within the decade. He left behind his own self-penned epitaph – ‘Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests’ – and an assured place among the pioneering gods of modern astronomy. Among his last books was Harmony Of The Worlds, continuing his fascination with Pythagoras’ ‘music of the spheres’. In the closing pages Kepler allowed himself to slip into a rare cosmic stupor, so stoned on the harmonic beauty of the planets’ song that his thoughts wandered to the existence of extraterrestrial life. What was the point, argued Kepler, of creating other worlds with their own moons if no creatures were there to admire them? Was God so limited in his creativity that he exhausted himself on the Earth and left the other planets bereft? There had to be something, or someone, up there tuning in to the same ecstatic interplanetary song.
TWO
THE STRANGE ONES
AS JOHANNES KEPLER stood at his writing desk near the Czech–Austrian border, buttocks smarting, head lost in a trance of music, space and extraterrestrials, five and a half thousand miles away on the other side of the world a very different band of dreamers began sewing the tentative threads of the Starman’s wardrobe.
Early-seventeenth-century Japan was a land as alien to the West as the camel-legged lunar colony of Kepler’s science fiction. The first European traders arrived there only decades earlier in 1543, the year Copernicus died, discovering an isolated island nation with its own design aesthetic, curious military codes and complex language system. In turn, these first Portuguese visitors were received by locals as ‘southern barbarians’, so named because they ate with their fingers rather than chopsticks and, much like Kepler, reeked to high heaven. Once the merchant sailors opened up trade routes the Christian missionaries followed, hoping to convert a country steeped in Buddhism and ancient Shinto creation myths based upon the belief that all matter originated in a giant egg which burst and separated, as heaven and Earth; a premise not so far away from the big bang.
This new foreign influence upon Japan coincided with the end of feudal war, which had bloodied the soil for centuries. Peace, of sorts, was finally established in the early 1600s by Tokugawa Ieyasu, a warlord who became the country’s central dictator, establishing a new social order bound by strict class divides. Though technically ruled by an emperor, the real power in Japan lay in the hands of the samurai (warrior) class – ruled by the shogun (supreme military commander) and his shogunate (government), consisting of daimyo (local samurai chiefs) and their respective samurai officers.
Becoming a samurai wasn’t a matter of ambition but of inheritance, their power and privilege passed dow
n the family line from father to son. It carried a strict etiquette of conduct, haircut and dress (including the unique right to carry two swords), and a rank-dependent annual allowance of rice, the main measure of wealth. The samurai’s authority was absolute, but only so long as their daimyo chiefs kept them in service. If for any reason they should disgrace their code of honour, or should their master’s estate suddenly collapse, the samurai were immediately stripped of their status, becoming ronin – literally ‘men adrift’, wandering swords for hire.
Below the samurai class were the chonin – everybody else, each with their own caste name according to occupation. The samurai were forbidden to fraternise with the chonin who were denied the privileges of their elite society. This class hierarchy was rigid, leaving no gap for, or hope of, mobility. And it was out of that tense divide between rich and poor, warrior and peasant, that androgynous glamour first ruffled its sleeves.
PEACETIME UNDER THE Tokugawa shogunate was bad news for a large samurai population. With too many warriors and nobody to battle, thousands became unemployed, swelling the number of destitute ronin. At the same time, with the increase in foreign trade, the merchant class rose in wealth, gaining new power. Inevitably, the merchants and ronin united to create the otokodate: gangs recruited from ronin, hired by merchants to supposedly protect towns from any samurai intimidation.
The ruling shogunate were less worried about the mafia-style otokodate than the emergence of another distinct social tribe around the same time: a new generation of flamboyant young ruffians flaunting all social norms of dress and hairstyle. Juvenile delinquents with outrageous beards, sideburns and skinheads, shaved temples and foreheads with taunting ponytails swishing down to their backsides. Street-loitering droogs who fought, bickered and sang boisterously in public, refusing allegiance to any local lord but finding rough brotherhood in the ‘Thorny Group’, the ‘Chinese Dogs’ and similar gangs of cosmic yobs. Brash pretty boys in women’s clothing, scandalously short-hemmed kimonos with velvet collars, whose long scabbards were decorated with bombastic graffiti. ‘I am 23 years-old! I have lived too long! I will never restrain myself!’