ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three of the earliest works of soundtracked fiction produced for the adult market: Michael Nesmith’s The Prison (1974); L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth (1982), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985). While vastly different in their execution and effect, all three rely on alternative spiritualities to imagine other worlds—from Nesmith’s Christian Science to Hubbard’s Scientology to Le Guin’s New Age take on Native American practice. What we find in this fiction, then, is a curious symmetry between the crisis of apprehension endemic to the multimodal form of the soundtracked novel and a series of epistemological crises playing out in contemporary culture, simultaneously rendering the audience’s inevitable question – “How does this work?” –both formal and metaphysical. Moreover, in all three of these experimental works, the schizotemporal nature of the mixed-media form percolates into the narrative content as well. Nesmith, for example, carefully frames The Prison’s asynchronous timelines – the readtime of the printed text and the runtime of the soundtrack – in an effort to help users transcend time itself, to reject the temporal realm, as does the story’s protagonist, for the eternal. Hubbard and Le Guin, meanwhile, repurpose the past in vastly different ways, but to a similar schizotemporal end: a science fictional vision of the far distant future that conflates history and prophecy in an effort to imagine a more perfect present.
