The weblog of Nate Cull
(previously in Program Eleven/II: Novas 0.01)
It is 1979. Susan and the other children of SKYWATCH, now calling themselves the Novas, have been on the run in the city underground, building a tentative career as punk musicians while dodging the attentions of the Center for Scientific Progress.
BEGIN PROGRAM ELEVEN/II MODULE FIVE.
(previously, as rationale )
(previously, as overture: Novas 0 )
(previously in Program Eleven/I: Novas 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 )
(previously in Program Eleven/II: Novas 1.1 2.2 3.3 )
So far there are nine entries in the “Program Eleven” series, each a playlist of eleven songs, and kicked off a year ago in honour of the Apollo 11 anniversary. Because I like big round numbers, naturally there would be two more, though I didn’t know what they’d be.
These final two entries turned out to be prequels filling in the story years 1978 and 1979, explaining how Susan ended up in the situation we find her in in Novas 5.3 – a singer alone, on the run from the sinister Company, haunted, and with mysterious memory gaps.
(A guiding image that came to me from the songs “Gloria” and “Shadows of the Night”, and which itself was part of finding a backstory to “Danseparc (Every Day It’s Tomorrow)”, where Susan just sort of appeared my head as an avatar of the 80s, *my* 80s, the decade as seen through wide preteen eyes, who’d been there all along… the New Wave singer with a kind of electrical halo of big-science strangeness about her. Was she an alien or a robot or a clone? Was she a spy or in space or in a nuclear war or in love or trapped inside a computer or leading a punk revolution? Why not all of those! What’s a story that can maximise all the sci-fi potentials? And there it began.)
(Look, it’s hard to explain my process here. I just go where my instinct seems to be pointing and then I stop when the songs seem to be the right ones. The music comes first. Then I play around with backstage story parameters until everything fits. Using songs as story modules is a randomiser, a bit like drawing cards, but it’s not completely random because they have to be songs I like.)
So now it’s the years 1960 to 1978, in that rock-opera continuum slightly ahead of ours where everything is a bit faster and neon-brighter and more Jim Steinman. But now it’s also sort of the Young Adult book version of that.
(You’ve also probably noticed by now that albums in the Eleven series with titles that start with “The” are inside the “System”, which is not quite strictly speaking always a VR simulation but more like a sort of Dollhouse kind of setup with both a simulated reality and a kind of cyborg-agent mode. And titles that start with “A” are fully outside the System, in the Real World of Novas. If not, then heads up, that’s a thing. I’ll explain later. There’ll be a little bit of retconning to do but not too much. The point is that spy adventure happens because there is spy music, and sometimes it works best for the story as simulated and sometimes it works best as real. The nuclear war happens in a simulation; the visit to the USSR happens for real, but it’s also kind of unreal because Susan (and later, Jack) keeps getting memory-wiped, because, cyborg. Except for The Day After Tomorrow. That one’s about the actual real world, popping a level up the stack. And The Earth Forever Turning is clearly Susan’s dream while she’s inside the System, but it’s actually also about the real Apollo 50th anniversary in 2019. It made sense at the time. Long story short, the Eleven series is broken into two sub-series, The and A. The A series happens outside of the computer. We are now in the A series at this point in time.)
BEGIN PROGRAM ELEVEN/II MODULE FOUR.
(previously in Program Eleven/II: Novas 2.2)
(previously in story time: Novas 2.7)
(previously in story time: Novas 5.1)
(previously in story time: Novas 2.8)
(previously in story time: Novas 2.9)
(previously in story time: Novas 3)
(previously in story time: Novas 5.5 Act 1)
Honestly, I was happy with Novas 2.2 being the second of a pair. But then I stumbled on ELO’s “I’m Alive” and it needed a home. So it found some friends. This third part of a trilogy fits in the act gap of Novas 5.5, in the aftermath of Jack’s return to Earth and his strange new relationship with Susan… whatever she’s become.
Yes, there’s also subtext. (Novas is nothing but subtext). I began assembling 1.1 in the first days of COVID-19, when the monster hadn’t yet left China, not quite sure what the tea leaves were telling me. 3.3 was assembled in lockdown. This one is about what comes after the end, about how fearful things can reveal themselves as friends, and how above all in a time of crisis we need to choose what we want to dream.
BEGIN PROGRAM ELEVEN/II MODULE THREE.
(previously in Program Eleven/II: Novas 1.1)
(previously in story time: Novas 2)
While Novas 1.1 is a bridge between Novas 1 and Novas 2, it’s very much unresolved and needed a counterpart. The obvious place for that story was the gap between Novas 2 and 3.
BEGIN PROGRAM ELEVEN/II MODULE TWO.
Novas 2.2: A Billion Candles Burning
(previously in release time: Novas 0.6, last module of Program Eleven/I)
(previously in story time: Novas 1)
Novas 0.x was complete. I wasn’t planning on any more in the Eleven series except that I stumbled on the 1984 Spoons film project Listen To The City. And the song Sundown called to me. I felt that it fitted perfectly for mood and tone in 1983, the gap between Novas 1 and 2.
BEGIN PROGRAM ELEVEN/II MODULE ONE.
Novas 1.1: A Silence Over Cities