Spoons: Nova Heart (Canada, 1982)

At ease with the thought
That this nova won’t burn out

Spoons are a Canadian New Wave band based around the duo of Gordon Deppe and Sandy Horne, who have remained intermittently active from 1980 to today. Like many such bands, they have a website and are releasing remastered editions of their early albums as well as new material. (2011’s Static in Transmission).

From their second and breakthrough album, 1982’s Arias and Symphonies, the hit track was Nova Heart. Ominous, minimalist and yet anthemic and hopeful, it has a pulsing science fiction energy foreboding a world in the process of unimaginable transformation.  And the children for which constant change would become normal.

It’s really a song about the Singularity, in other words. The word didn’t really exist in 1982 – although only just, as Vernor Vinge was to introduce it in a January 1983 Omni Magazine editorial .  But the concept was certainly there, especially in the early years of the 1980s, very close under the skin of popular culture. They were years of extreme change both socially and technologically, and a sudden cultural shift to a “head first into the future” attitude which… well, was honestly both thrilling and terrifying at once. A kind of optipessimism I think, describes the early 1980s best. We felt were were on the verge of shattering change. It wasn’t just going to be better or worse: it was going to be all better or all worse. Or – as in Gibson’s cyberpunk – both at once, “just not evenly distributed”.

There was especially a lot of optipessimism about artificial intelligence; more than we have now in the Internet-connected world we could only dream about with our 8-bit micros. The fears usually revolved around either automation causing mass unemployment (which is coming back on the radar again in the 2010s), or automated war machines starting World War III or hunting humans (also coming back).

You can trace the shape of some of these AI ideas as an argument evolving through pop culture: Knight Rider (1982), WarGames  (1983), Terminator (1984), Short Circuit (1986). Robots would save us or destroy us, or maybe both. By the mid-80s, though, computers (and especially videogames) had become a little less novel, less scary, and the shape of the stories shifted from computer-as-God to computer-as-business-tool.

Were we just ahead of our time, or on the edge of a wave that hasn’t yet crested?

Either way, we were sure that the future was going to be way different; and now that we’re in it, a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and scared that it might yet all come true just as we imagined it.