Sci-fic as rock and roll has to do with temperament, has to do with volume, and I’m thinking Moorcock and Dick and Burroughs, but I’m also thinking the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk point men. That’s when the overlap got really bacterial and immediate and juiced - John Shirley with his ‘City Come A-Walkin,’ Jeff Noon and ‘Needle in the Groove,’ Bruce Sterling’s girl group weirdness ‘Zeitgeist,’ William Gibson’s Zion Dub from ‘Neuromancer’ foretelling the mashup culture, China Mieville, and Jeff Vandermeer, among others. But it’s a scant tribe, these science fiction rock and rollers. The other way around is more profuse - rock and rollers have dabbled in science fiction with a frenzy, not just in etymology (Duran Duran, Icicile Works, Klaatu) but in actual content.

Entire subgenres seem predisposed to it, like postpunk, synthpop, IDM, prog-glam - and much as the lot of it is cheese (Styx’s ‘Mr.Roboto,’ Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown,’ Queen’s beloved ‘Flash Gordon’) there are vital and shiny artifacts in the bog that ought to be upheld by the genre. Ultravox’s first two albums, Bowies’ Berlin trilogy, ‘Diamond Dogs’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’, much of Zappa, Elton John’s ‘Rocketman,’ X-Ray Spex’s ‘Genetic Engineering,’ the Pixies’ ‘Bossanova,’ the B-52’s ‘Planet Claire,’ Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy, Devo, Radiohead, Daft Punk, Parliament, Sun Ra, Klaxons, and Burial’s ‘Untrue.’ In a parallel world, it probably has, along with these:

1. Old Black Dawning by Frank Black

The ex-Pixie’s cuddly, cartoony self -less anguished, more playful, more puckish, more pixie-ish if you will, riding a catchy Tex-Mex new wave that vogues on alien invasion from the Planet Mabel. Alex Cox could make the flying saucer B-movie of my wildest dreams out of this.

2. Space Oddity by David Bowie

‘Ground control to Major Tom…’ A little obvious, but necessary, not only for how it evokes the profound aloneness of being lost in the big empty that is outer space, but for how eerily familiar the feeling is. ‘Though I’m past a hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go… tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.’ Chilling.

3. Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division

It almost doesn’t need its deadened and deadening alternate-world Manchester milieu to gain what Philip K. Dick called the shock of dysrecognition that qualifies it as science fiction. Ian Curtis’ doomy frailty and the sinister beauty of the music is other enough.

4. Warm Leatherette by The Normal

Daniel Miller’s repurposing of Crash was made tastier by Grace Jones, but I tend to go back to the proto-electroclash somnolence of his original for how it captures both the detached tone of the Ballard novel and its deviant perversities more ickily.

5. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
by The Flaming Lips

A retro-futurist cartoon about robot love and evil pink machines - Ozamu Tezuka by way of Naruto by way of Rene Laroux - except it’s all in your head and brought to vibrant, shiny life by the exquisite sound of Wayne Coyne as he, at last, totally succumbs to his shimmering melodic prowess.

- Dodo Dayao