Heavy metal's science fiction was never about the future. Dig the records up now and they open like a time capsule a school sealed into the playground in 1976 under a brass plaque promising jetpacks: the pickaxe splits the rusted lid, the rainwater has been in, and what lies inside, curled and yellow, is the newspaper of the year it went into the ground, the draft board, the reactor, the mainframe and the fear of all three.
The sci fi themes heavy metal kept returning to were the evening news in a spacesuit. The drummer who wrote the story that proves it, a guitar found in a cave in the year 2112 and smashed to splinters by priests who run every note of music through their computers, was Neil Peart of Rush. The guitar was the heresy. The computers were already on the desk.
Space and the machine sit beside war, myth and madness in the wider story of what the style sings about, and they have always been its most honest branch about the year on the calendar.
The sci fi themes heavy metal took off the paperback rack
The rocket went up early. On "Into the Void", from Black Sabbath's Master of Reality in 1971, the last free people strap themselves into a ship and burn off a polluted, ruined planet in search of a world where freedom waits, leaving the desolation to the men who made it. Nobody on board expects to come back. Nobody on the ground is sorry to see them go.
Seven years later the visitors came the other way. "Invader", on Judas Priest's Stained Class in 1978, watches a searing flash over the horizon turn into an attack from space, and the song answers with a call to arms, a whole planet lining up behind its guns against an enemy nobody has seen. The enemy has no face. In 1978 it did not need one.
The London collective that turned science fiction into a light show and a live ritual, the vanguard of everything the heavy bands later did with a star chart, was Hawkwind. Its single "Silver Machine", released on 9 June 1972, went to number three in Britain, and Space Ritual, the double live album of 1973, put Robert Calvert on stage reciting "Sonic Attack", a civil defence broadcast written by Michael Moorcock that orders the listener to abandon the weak and save himself.
2112 and the priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Released in the spring of 1976, the date given variously as March and as 1 April, and credited on its sleeve to the genius of Ayn Rand, whose novella Anthem gave it its skeleton, the title suite of 2112 fills a whole side with one dystopia. There is a Solar Federation born out of a galactic war, a priesthood in the Temples of Syrinx that decides what music may exist, and one man who finds a guitar in a cave by a waterfall, teaches himself to play it and carries it to the temple.
The priests break it. He does not outlive the loss. The last voice on the side belongs to an unnamed fleet announcing that it has assumed control, and nothing on the record says whether that is rescue or conquest.
The Toronto trio was a hard rock band, not a heavy metal one, and the heavy metal bands of the next decade learned the long form and the dystopia off that single side all the same. The record was certified gold in America on 16 November 1977, one of three Rush albums stamped the same day, proof enough that the priests had lost. A year later "Cygnus X-1", on A Farewell to Kings, flew a lone pilot into a black hole and left him there until the next album pulled him out the other side.
Voivod builds a planet of its own
The Quebec four who drew their own dystopia, gave it a hero and scored it one album at a time answered to the name Voivod. Their hero is a cyborg warrior drawn by the drummer Michel Langevin, known as Away, who painted every sleeve, and across Killing Technology in 1987 he wakes from a plague already loosed on his own world and is driven out into space, the story the next record picks up and pushes further.
Dimension Hatröss, released by Noise in 1988, is laid out like a screenplay. The hero builds a miniature universe inside a particle accelerator, travels into it, meets its societies and their wars, and in "Cosmic Drama", the last track, watches another galaxy swallow the whole creation before he walks back into the laboratory. Critics have called it since a landmark of early progressive thrash, the record on which the thrash the band had played turned into something with no name yet.
The guitarist who gave that universe its sound was Denis D'Amour, known to everyone as Piggy, whose chords stacked dissonant intervals most metal players of 1988 would not touch; the guitarist who inherited his chair after his death called them the most dissonant voicings anyone could play, thrown everywhere across the record like cutlery tipped onto a stone floor. "Tribal Convictions", track two on the same record and released with a video, sounds like a machine trying to remember a folk song.
Aliens in the hangar, and dystopias after the Cold War
The Californian thrash band that dragged the flying saucer out of the tabloids and bolted it to a heavy metal riff was Megadeth. On "Hangar 18", from Rust in Peace in 1990, bodies pulled from a crashed craft lie frozen in a military hangar while the officers in charge lie about them, and Dave Mustaine explained on release that the song was about military intelligence, two words that do not belong together. Eleven separate solo trades between Mustaine and Friedman carve up most of the song's second half.
Twenty-six years later the band called an album Dystopia outright, and its title song won Megadeth the Grammy for Best Metal Performance in February 2017, the band's first win after twelve nominations. The ceremony's house band played a Metallica riff as they collected it. It was the wrong band's riff.
The Los Angeles band that set the man against the machine on two albums running was Fear Factory. Demanufacture, in 1995, follows one man's fight against a government run by machines, with the band naming The Terminator among its sources, and Obsolete, in 1998, pushes the same war forward to 2076, when the machines have already taken over and the humans left are spare parts. Nobody in either story gets the planet back.
The cyberpunk novelist who wrote the words to all but two songs on Blue Öyster Cult's Heaven Forbid in 1998 was John Shirley, introduced to the band by their old producer Sandy Pearlman, and the record hands the old space fantasy over to a writer who had spent two decades imagining cities run by corporations and wired into the skull.
The longest dystopia in the style took Iced Earth a decade to finish. It began as the trilogy of songs closing Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1998 and ran on through Framing Armageddon in 2007 and The Crucible of Man in 2008, the history of the Setians, the first inhabitants of Earth, nearly wiped out, hiding for thousands of years inside humanity's own seats of power until the day they can bring the whole species down.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895
The Dutch multi-instrumentalist who ran the future and the past through the same record was Arjen Lucassen. His project Ayreon opened in 1995 with The Final Experiment, in which scientists on a ruined Earth in 2084 send warnings back through time into the mind of a blind minstrel in sixth-century Britain. Nobody in the sixth century believes him. Lucassen went back to the same stars in 2008 with 01011001, a race of aliens so dependent on their machines that they seed life on Earth to feel something again.
The evening news in a spacesuit.
The fear underneath all of it, a mind that can no longer trust the machine it lives in, has a ward of its own in madness and asylums in metal lyrics. Lucassen has gone back to space on almost every record since. The warnings keep arriving.
