TIME OF THE HAWKLORDS: The science fiction classic - based on an idea by MICHAEL MOORCOCK

By Michael Butterworth

Deep at the Earth's Centre lay the Death Generator. Buried there from time immemorial by a long-dead race of aliens, it had at last been triggered into action...

For among the ruins of London, surrounded by the survivors of the recent holocaust, Hawkwind rock, their music catalysing the attacking Death Ray - a lethal concoction of high energy that insinuates its way into the mind, tormenting every sense with demonic psychic visions. With the breakdown of the barriers between nightmare and reality, Hawkwind find themselves re-enacting the stages of a war that took place thousands of years before, in which they take the role of the Hawklords - the only potential saviours of the human race otherwise doomed to extermination in an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil...

 

Time of the Hawklords by Michael Butterworth (born 24 April 1947 in Manchester) - based on an idea by Michael Moorcock - was first published in 1976: an echo of New Wave SF, an incomparable psychedelic rock fantasy - and a definitive cult novel!

Time of the Hawklords is published in a new edition by Apex-Verlag, reviewed by the author (and supplemented by a preface).

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9783748785217

Book preview

The Book

Deep at the Earth's Centre lay the Death Generator. Buried there from time immemorial by a long-dead race of aliens, it had at last been triggered into action...

For among the ruins of London, surrounded by the survivors of the recent holocaust, Hawkwind rock, their music catalysing the attacking Death Ray - a lethal concoction of high energy that insinuates its way into the mind, tormenting every sense with demonic psychic visions. With the breakdown of the barriers between nightmare and reality, Hawkwind find themselves re-enacting the stages of a war that took place thousands of years before, in which they take the role of the Hawklords - the only potential saviours of the human race otherwise doomed to extermination in an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil...

Time of the Hawklords by Michael Butterworth (born 24 April 1947 in Manchester) - based on an idea by Michael Moorcock - was first published in 1976: an echo of New Wave SF, an incomparable psychedelic rock fantasy - and a definitive cult novel!

Time of the Hawklords is published in a new edition by Apex-Verlag, reviewed by the author (and supplemented by a preface).

Copyright

Copyright © 1976, 1995, 2021 Michael Butterworth

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.

By the same author

Novels

The Time of the Hawklords

Queens of Deliria (Hawklords 2)

My Servant the Wind

Collections

Butterworth

Non-fiction

The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order

AC/DC: Hell Ain’t No Bad Place to Be (as by Richard Bunton)

Poetry

Complete Poems: 1965–2000

Novelisations

Space: 1999 Series Two:

Planets of Peril

Mind-Breaks of Space (with J Jeff Jones)

The Space-Jackers

The Psychomorph

The Time Fighters

The Edge of the Infinite

Space: 1999 Year Two Omnibus

Co-authored and Co-originated Works

Lord Horror (novel, main author David Britton)

Brion Gysin: Here to Go: Planet R101 (non-fiction, main author Terry Wilson)

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (graphic novel, main authors David Britton & John Coulthart)

68 Cantos (prose-poems, main author William Weiss)

Ledge of Darkness (graphic novel, Hawklords 3, main author Bob Walker)

Return from the Wild (the story of Lassie the fox-dog, main author John Roberts Warren)

Anthologies

The Savoy Book (ed., with David Britton)

Savoy Dreams (ed., with David Britton)

Works Edited

All novels in the Lord Horror sequence:

Lord Horror

Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz

Baptised in the Blood of Millions

La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz

Invictus Horror

Razor King

Old Death

For DikMik, Terry, Del and Bob Calvert

  Note

  While the characters in this story are based on actual people the descriptions of these characters are entirely fictitious and based on rôles used by members of Hawkwind on stage and recorded performances.

  Legend

 "And in the fullness of time, the prophecy must be fulfilled and the HAWKLORDS shall return to smite the land. And the Dark Forces shall be scourged, the cities razed and made into parks. Peace shall come to everyone. For is it not written that the Sword is the key to Hell and Heaven?"

HAWKCRAFT INVENTORY

At the time of the events presented in this book, the ever-changing crew of the Hawkwind Spacecraft are:

Baron Brock – (David Brock, lead guitar, 12-string guitar, synthesizer, organ and vocals)

The Thunder Rider – (Nik Turner, sax, oboe, flute and vocals).

Count Motorhead – (Lemmy, bass and vocals)

Lord Rudolph the Black – (Paul Rudolph, bass and guitars)

The Hound Master – (Simon King, drums and percussion)

The Sonic Prince – (Simon House, keyboards, mellotron and violin)

Stacia … The Earth Mother – (Stacia, dance)

Astral Al – (Alan Powell, drums and percussion)

Liquid Len – (Jonathan Smeeton, lights)

Captain Calvert – (Bob Calvert, with Lucky Leif and The Longships)

Moorlock … The Acid Sorcerer – (Mike Moorcock, with The Deep Fix)

Actonium Doug – (Doug Smith, Manager)

INTRODUCTION

When I accepted an offer from Michael Moorcock to co-write the Hawklords novels I had reached a not very happy crossroads in my life. It was 1974, and the period known as the New Wave of Science Fiction, which had harboured my output from my first published story in New Worlds in 1966, had rolled its last, leaving me with a reputation but no market for the kind of work I was producing.

My marriage had also failed. This tragedy had unexpectedly left me with two young children to raise. Their wellbeing and my sanity were the reasons I was looking around for better-paid work. I first tried copywriting, taking on two positions at different Manchester ad agencies, but found I was not good at teamwork, an essential quality if one is to succeed in this kind of business. While waiting for a new job to turn up I tried my hand at freelance writing. Jim Cawthorn very kindly walked me round London introducing me to his hard-won contacts. For a while I sold articles to the children’s magazine Look and Learn, the soft-core Blade and others, but it did not take long until it became clear that I would need more time than I had to establish myself this way. Not caring to return to my old job as a laboratory technician, an occupation I had done ever since leaving school, and with no other job in sight, I was beginning to get desperate. It was at this point that Mike, hearing of the plight I was in with my children, made his offer.

He had signed for a three-book deal with Star Books. Did I want to write them in his stead? The arrangement would suit him, because other work had come along that he hadn’t anticipated. The books were to be about "Hawkwind rocking in the ruins of London". I could keep all the money.

Well, yes. I couldn’t think of a better way of being a single parent. The only problem was, I had never written a novel before, let alone three. A small detail like this did not deter me. I could foresee two years’ reliable income working from home. One of my children was then aged almost five, and the other nearly three. They would need a lot of attention.

I signed contracts in May 1975 and, from Mike’s one-line brief about Hawkwind rocking in the ruins, I started writing The Time of the Hawklords. I began at my mother’s house at 10 Charter Rd, Altrincham, Manchester, and put the finishing touches to it early one sunny morning perched atop a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery on the Harrow Road, London.

To take the pressure off my mother I had moved together with my children to live with friends at 804 Harrow Rd. The bulk of the novel was written there, in the scant period each day after dropping Nicky off at school and taking Damon to his nursery, and in the small hours at night after they had both been put to bed. In no small way my ordeal was brightened by the friendship of Hilary Bailey, a walk down the Ladbroke Grove to Number 87a, where she lived with Mike’s and her kids – Max, their youngest child, and Sophie and Kate, both young teenagers of similar ages to one another. There was always a welcome for me, with my shopping bags and my pushchair for Damon, for a cup of tea and a natter. Hilary had her own writing to do, so it was not always convenient for her. Nevertheless, on my arrival it was usual to find a sign on her front door warning visitors, WHOEVER YOU ARE FUCK OFF EXCEPT FOR MIKE BUTTERWORTH AND HIS CHILDREN.

Mike and Hilary had separated by then, and their children were growing up, but the large flat still had the feeling of being a family home, and was nirvana for Nicky and Damon who were able to play with Max when he was there, and the mountain of toys belonging to all three of the children when he wasn’t, as well as an enclosed garden to explore at the back. The respite at Hilary’s was exactly what was needed for the three of us. While Nicky and Damon entertained themselves she and I sat in the kitchen and talked, sometimes accompanied by Jim Cawthorn (who lived nearby on Oxford Gardens) who had dreamt up the idea of music warfare in a strip in Frendz.

Once I proved I was capable of delivering a book on time, a small writing snowball started. After handing in The Time of the Hawklords my editor at Star, Piers Dudgeon, asked me whether I wanted to do six novelisations of the Space: 1999 Year Two television series, which was about to air. Seeing in my mind’s eye two more years of paying work, I agreed to this as well. Now I really was in the deep end. To keep pace with the broadcast episodes, finish-typed manuscripts of these tie-ins had to be delivered at the rate of one book per four weeks, or five books in six calendar months. And somewhere in the same period the second Hawklords novel, Queens of Deliria, also had to be delivered… I hadn’t even started on this novel!

To meet the deadlines for seven books I bought a golfball typewriter and an office photocopier, arranged for typist Sherry Gold to be on 24-hour call, farmed out one of the Space: 1999 titles to J Jeff Jones and paid for more than one sleeper train to London. In the quiet of my train cabin I was still typing away when the train docked, completing the first drafts that I then rushed across to Sherry in North London for finished typing – and breakfast.

I was now living back in Manchester, a single parent, in my former matrimonial home at 61 Seymour Street, one of the houses in a small terrace of two-up and two-downs near St Thomas’ Church in Radcliffe. The house had stubbornly resisted being sold, which gad unintentionally worked out to my advantage. Queens of Deliria was written there.

Whacked out after writing seven books I decided I would take a rest before tackling the third Hawklords volume, Ledge of Darkness. But a month became two months, and the months became a year, life intervened, and as there was no great pressure from the publishers, sadly the book never got written. A version eventually appeared as a graphic novel by Bob Walker. Idea, plot and script Bob self-confessedly ‘hi-jacked’ from a treatment by me, but added story of his own, including strikingly atmospheric scenes set at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Battle of the Beanfield.

Bob’s version has a more hardcore anarcho-punk realism than the novels, heavily coloured by his on-the-road living experiences with travellers. But it had no conclusive ending, as it was meant to have in the three-book contract I signed for. Instead, it meanders off into spectacular visual abstraction. I can remember us throwing up our hands, saying to one another, oh well, it’s an ending.

Many years later I wrote a long treatment for a fourth book for Dave Brock, with the provisional title Death to the Death Generator. Dave was looking for ideas for a new Hawkwind stage show, but he never got back to me about it. That one did have an ending, as the title implies.

My life as a paperback writer lasted shy of two years. The money it paid kept my little family going for about four years, but in the end I decided that a career writing fantasy novels wasn’t really me, any more than copywriting had been, and for similar reasons. Instead of ‘teamwork’ it was fictional characters and their motives, and providing plots for them, essential to commercial novel writing, which did not come easily to me. For a while I became Editor of New Vegetarian. Then I hooked up with David Britton and started Savoy Books. Together, Dave and I built a platform that, for our purposes, would replace New Worlds. For me, it meant I got back my ‘New Wave’ writing platform, from which I proceeded to take the New Wave in a quite different direction…

Are Hawkwind New Wave SF, and are the Hawklords novels New Wave? I am asked these questions from time to time, and my answer is usually that they are… in a way. Bob Calvert’s literary interests in writers like Ballard, Burroughs and Moorcock, who either appeared in New Worlds or, in Burroughs’ case, were championed by the magazine, meant New Wave ideas found their way into Hawkwind’s ever-evolving mythos, and ideas from my own earlier writing were recycled in The Time of the Hawklords, for instance the ‘virtual reality’ scenes inside the giant computer came from a short story unpublished at the time but later published as ‘Hey, Mr Pressman’, and original ideas like the ‘ledge’ in Ledge of Darkness built on an idea Geoff Cowie and I came up with one night – if a part of Earth goes back in time then theoretically a ledge-like ring of Earth’s mass builds up around it, because Earth was smaller in the past than it is now. If there was any feedback going on between my books and the band, then ideas like these could also have influenced them. When Dave Brock was looking about for themes, a Ledge of Darkness tour was seriously considered. An announcement was even made, which got out in the press, but it didn’t actually go ahead…

Inner-space exploration and the then-emerging media landscape were both concerns of the New Wave writers and artists in New Worlds and elsewhere. Hawkwind’s science fiction is about inner space as much as outer. Their lyrics verge towards cyberpunk, a literary genre that grew directly out of the New Wave and, who knows, their music may have helped influenced its gestation in William Gibson’s Neuromancer?

Another hallmark of the New Wave was the anxiety felt about what we were doing to the environment. My own writing grew from this, as well as my fear of atomic war, and it’s true to say environmental collapse of some kind seems to be a theme in Hawkwind’s music.

Ever since Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring – her book warning about the too-liberal use of insecticide – the thinking world has been aware of what we were doing to our ‘Blue Planet’. In the mid-to-late seventies when the Hawklords books were written, I was no exception.

Attempting to write books of entertainment I had to avoid rhetoric, and was content to express these ills through the Hawkwind Legend, which is the utopic Hippy ideal, the nirvana that all who saw themselves as ‘Children of the Sun’ aspired to in the sixties. But there are a couple of explicit moments where I state that the way forward for humanity is to rise above dualism, which has for too long predisposed us to a way of behaviour that is detrimental. After showing Hound Master how the Death Generator came to be implanted in Earth, the Hawk God tells him to find ways of transcending the tribal coding of ‘us and them’ that imprisons humanity in senseless war. In the closing paragraph of Queens of Deliria the same message is even more pronounced, this time spoken directly to the reader by the narrator.

To my shock, the books were very badly received – by critics. The Time of the Hawklords was reviewed as though it was a new Michael Moorcock novel, rather than the first novel of young writer. This unwanted baptism of fire was doubly alarming because I had achieved fame – and respect – young, as an exemplar of the New Wave. Suddenly, it seemed, this mantle had been snatched away. I had set out to write a fun but dark fantasy, with at core a serious theme. But no-one saw the qualities I had laboured long and hard over. What had I done? Was it that bad? Apparently it was.

In a two-thirds page review in the then ‘make-or-break-you’ music paper NME, Charles Shaar Murray called it the absolute nadir. It was fantastically uncool, incompetent and he didn’t have a good word to say for it. Brian Aldiss, in a round-up entitled ‘Astounding, but is it SF?’, in The Guardian, caught the spirit, but his review seemed like an ‘I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine’ kind of thing, addressed over my head to Mike. Missing the novel’s intentions entirely, the Science Fiction Association’s prudish Vector reviewer worried that "… some younger readers might take it seriously, swallowing the ‘Us verses Them’ propaganda wholesale." Only one mainstream critic, writing in Time Out, bothered to read the book properly and review it for what it was. He captured my intentions. As it is only short, I will quote Steve Pinder’s review in full:

A strange novel, on the face of it a science fiction story along the normal lines, yet the underlying themes of the battle between the music of Hawkwind and the plastic pop that is the weapon of the Dark Forces, as well as the claustrophobic feel of the ever impending end, single it out.

The book is redolent with the ‘Ladbroke Grove’ feel of Moorcock’s ‘Jerry Cornelius’ works, the tackiness of the flower power that he clings to, yet this is more doom-laden and pessimistic. Certainly, if you read it, play early Hawkwind at top volume. It’s the only way to really understand.

Time Out, October 22nd–28th, 1976

I clung on to this.

Only gradually did I come to see that these voices, greatly exaggerated by their volume, appearing as they did in the national press, were not entirely representative of how the book was being received. There were others more in line with Steve Pinder’s, and these were from the legions of the novels’ many readers. Personal responses have always been savvy and appreciative, and Rick Evans, a music critic who is currently CEO at the University Corporation at CSU Northridge in Los Angeles, is no exception, emailing me as I was writing this Postscript: "I’m a huge music fan, and recently tracked down The Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria. I have never seen (nor read) any thing like what you did [back in the day]; sort of companion readers to accompany listening to the music.  So as I read the books, I was playing Hawkwind, thoroughly immersed in the mythology you were expanding upon."

Reviewers for the various Hawkwind fan sites, if at times critical of a young author’s attempts at the Novel, also mostly ‘get’ the books.

I think now that the novels weren’t that badly received. I didn’t write them for critics, and if some readers perceive them as a little ‘quaint’, provided they take enjoyment from them then that is okay by me.

The new editions from Apex Verlag have given me the chance to remedy some of the perhaps over-enthusiastic descriptions, notions and inexperience of the young would-be novelist of forty-six years ago. I have finally found the time to produce belated finished drafts, denied me during the rush of tight deadlines. But not too much time – I have not re-written the books, and risked spoiling whatever poetry and charm they have. In essence they are the same books. But ones that I hope will deflect some of the harsher critical attention directed at the earlier editions.

Apex Verlag is a publishing house founded on the personal taste of its creator and chairman, Christian Dörge. From the aim of publishing authors close to the heart, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Marion Zimmer Bradley, his company has grown considerably and is broadly positioned thematically to include Westerns and Crime as well as Science Fiction; but the founder’s interest in my books harks back to his very early instincts as a publisher. They are books that he likes.

It was while discussing their recent German editions of The Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria, translated from the English by Alfons Winkelmann, that Christian came to learn the novels were also out of print in the English language, and he offered to do these as well.

They arrive at a time when there is new interest in those far off ‘Days of the Underground’, in Hawkwind in particular as shown both by the recent definitive biography from Strange Attractor Press (2021), Joe Banks’s Hawkwind: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, and by these books – the Space Rock novels of Hawkwind.

Michael Butterworth

The Northern Quarter

Manchester UK

2021

BOOK ONE:

ROCKING ON THE EDGE OF TIME

THE LAST OUTPOST

On the gleaming scarlet surface of the stage, crouching like wide-mouthed methedrine monsters, sat the hulks of the speaker cabinets. Little whisperings and tiny shrieks occasionally issued forth, as if they complained of the silence enforced upon them. Soon they would roar as their power was released. Above, on a platform supported by candy-striped scaffolding, were the four drum kits. All the equipment, including the eight AU516 synthesizers and the newly invented Delatron Processor, was painted with swirling colours and designs: mind-blowing.

Through screwed-up eyes the cat girl watched the shiny, garish dais being completed. It had taken the designer, Barnie Bubbles, and Hawkwind’s roadies the best part of a week so far, working slowly because of the unusually hot summer and the sheer size of the operation. Now it was ready. Now the final great rock concert – the longest-running ever to be held on earth – could start.

The cat girl closed her eyes. She retreated back into her basking slumber where she lay upon the metal roof of the truck. It was real, then, she thought.

She was roused, almost immediately, by a slight feeling of panic. Perhaps it was not panic but simply excitement that flushed through her bronzed body? The prospect of her appearing on stage again after the wasted, horrifying months between gigs suddenly made her feel tense.

All around her she could hear the subdued murmurings of the remaining population of Great Britain, about five thousand people. Like everyone else, they were still not sure if a civilised event was possible. Many of them had waited weeks for this moment. They had travelled half-starved from the northernmost wastes of Scotland, and camped out on the site in makeshift shelters and nearby derelict buildings. They had come cautiously, for the music, but also the promise of companionship with their fellows. She admired them for the faith they had managed to find.

At last the roadies finished their task. And now they jumped down, bringing an expectant hush from the sprawling rim of Children below. Cued by the subsidence of noise around the stage, and by the roar of the extra diesels starting somewhere in the distance, Stacia reluctantly sat up, rubbing her eyes with black paws that might have been polished, they shone so brightly in the sun.

Simon House, the legendary Sonic Prince, was the first of the musicians to mount the stage, moving about his synthesizers in a flashing blue silk gown, checking the links, testing the Master Console. At length, the Sonic Prince came to the shiny, ebony cube of the Delatron, and paused. The complex machine bristled with wires and jacks. With a simple, signified movement, he made his gesture of obeisance to it, then, amidst rising whistles and shouts, he arose and indicated the cube with his hand, drawing a swell of exultation from the Children.

Even as the shouting died, the Prince had vanished behind his keyboards and all that Stacia could see of him was a glint of blue silk, a lock or two of his thick black hair.

She was pulling her fishnet body stocking over