The Most Epic Sci-Fi Tale Ever Told
In a Rock and Roll Time Loop, Major Tom is Iron Man
What an obnoxious title.
But it’s true. The greatest sci-fi tale ever told has already been written. It was written by several of the 20th century’s greatest storytellers, and you’ve heard it countless times…but never like this.
For over 30 years now, I’ve been holding on to this convergent timeline theory about two of the greatest character pieces in rock and roll history. At some point, I thought it would make an excellent comic book…maybe a screenplay. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Until now, I’ve never really taken the time to sit down and write out the specifics, or tell more than two or three people about my theory, but here it is:
David Bowie’s Major Tom is Black Sabbath’s Iron Man.
If those words don’t make any sense to you, and they may well not, here’s a quick primer. If you’re over thirty, feel free to skim ahead.
Ground Control to Major Tom
In July of 1969, five days before the American moon landing, David Bowie released the song, “Space Oddity”. “Space Oddity” was a psychedelic folk opera. The uncut version was over five minutes long and included several distinct movements over eleven parts. It was weird. It was brilliantly composed, arranged and mixed. It told a complete, timely, timeless, touching story. And it made Bowie’s career at a time that was pretty much make-or-break.
Sonically and lyrically, Space Oddity tells the story of “Major Tom”, an astronaut who is launched into, and forever lost in outer space. The lyrics deal with Major Tom’s loss of communication, the loneliness and desolation of space, and the process of a man coming to grips with the fact that he is going to die in silent isolation. The song seamlessly weaves an epic external plot with an equally grand internal plot. Bowie said of Major Tom’s arc over the course of the song: “he’s fragmenting”.
And in sort of a B-plot, the song also touches on the cynicism of celebrity, and the role that society plays in isolation. We’ll come back to that.
I Am Iron Man
Almost exactly one year after the release of “Space Oddity”, Black Sabbath released “Iron Man” as part of their album, “Paranoid”. Sabbath, on the whole, and “Iron Man” in particular, singlehandedly introduced the world to Heavy Metal. Even fans who were well versed in proto-metal, hard rock, and the dark, heavy electric blues of the late sixties had never heard anything like Iron Man. No one had.
If it were a modern song, “Iron Man” might be sonically described as doom metal, or garage metal. And the lyrics and themes would fit those descriptors too. Iron Man tells the vague, but highly impactful tale of an astronaut who, in the course of his service, tears the fabric of spacetime and foresees the apocalypse. He plans his return to earth with the intention of warning humanity of its impending doom.
During his his return, however, Iron Man is turned to steel. So the seemingly lifeless statue of a man that crashes back to earth is ignored and ridiculed. And then, in true sci-fi fashion, Iron Man returns to life and initiates a violent rampage, paradoxically becoming the armageddon he foresaw. The classic causal loop.
Let’s Do The Timewarp Again
Both of these songs are phenomenal on their own. But, as a cosmic horror fan, I can’t help but believe in a convergent timeline where the two songs are chapters of the same tale. And, as a cosmic horror writer, I’m going to give away the plot of that tale.
But before we get to that, let me answer one more question: What is it, thematically, that makes these two very different songs so compatible?
A lot of the similarities probably have to do with era. Growing up in the 50's and 60's meant growing up in the golden age of both budget science fiction and arthouse science fiction. It meant growing up with the space race, the new possibility of reaching the stars, and all of the excitement and terror that accompanied that prospect. As mentioned, the American moon landing happened in July 1969. There was, by all accounts, space fever. There was also space anxiety. There were so many questions:
“What’s up there?”
“What if you get lost?”
“What if the calculations were all wrong”
“Why are we going?”
And in the cold war years before space defense there was looming global fear, not only of threats from space itself, but of threats from each other. Here in the West, there were questions like: “Will Sputnik kill us all?”
Also, in 1969, everyone had just seen “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Bowie cited the film, particularly the calling home sequence as his key inspiration. And that being the case, I think the loneliness, emptiness and terror specific to cosmic horror was also instrumental in crafting both Major Tom and Iron Man. Both characters are national heroes, important men in their time, pioneers, risk takers, and by all accounts, high functioning individuals who are driven mad by isolation.
Of course, Bowie revisited Major Tom several times through his career, most notably in 1980's brilliant and desolate “Ashes to Ashes”. “Ashes to Ashes” revisits a sad and broken Major Tom, ten years after being marooned. As Bowie puts it:
“Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space, but once he gets there he’s not quite sure why he’s there. And that’s where I left him.”
And the same can be said for Iron Man. In describing his lyrics for the song, Geezer Butler is always nonchalant and reductive, but displays a phenomenal ability for complex storytelling and a very advanced understanding of the theories of time travel. To quote the lyricist himself:
“I was heavily into science fiction at the time. Remember, this was the era of the space race. A lot of the stuff I was writing about was inspired by those sorts of stories. I was fascinated by what might happen to a man who’s suddenly transformed into a metal being. He still has a human brain, and wants to do the right thing, but eventually his own frustrations at the way humanity treats him drives this creature to taking extreme action. It’s almost a cry for help.”
This Is The Sound Of Someone Losing The Plot
So here we go! This is my convergent timeline theory wherein Major Tom becomes Iron Man.
In my mind, “Space Oddity” is the perfect Act I for the greatest cosmic horror story ever told. Major Tom, hero of his country, humanity, and the planet as a whole, boldly going where no man has gone before…all of the ingredients for an epic adventure are there.
But “Space Oddity” is not what it seems at first. Even in the early verses, there are hints that the general population and Major Tom’s crew at large aren’t really too concerned with his well being so much as what he represents. In a sense, this perfectly foreshadows the themes of dismissal that come into play later.
“The papers want to know whose shirts you wear.”
And of course, as soon as something can go wrong, something goes wrong. Though Ground Control continues to look for and monitor Major Tom, their actions seem, at best, a fumbling attempt at contingency management, and at worst, an exercise in keeping up appearances.
And Tom is left, forever, alone and incommunicado, to grapple with the big questions.
“Can you hear me, Major Tom?”
At this point, we have to talk about Peter Schilling.
In 1983, Peter Schilling released “Major Tom (Coming Home)” as a direct sequel to Space Oddity. Schilling made a career of sci-fi themed synth pop, and was really the perfect person to write a sequel. I don’t know what Bowie thought of the sequel, but it had an excellent tone and plot and the twist at the end fits perfectly into the convergent timeline we’re crafting here.
“Give my wife my Love. Then nothing more.”
I love the Peter Schilling chapter. There’s a glimmer of hope, a continued efforts to bring Major Tom home, but there is also the introduction of mystery. Major Tom knows more than he’s letting on, and when finally given the mechanical assistance needed to return home, he instead chooses to fling his capsule into space.
There are a lot of ways to interpret this decision. Did Major Tom discover some important new information during his time stranded in space? Has he gone rogue and changed the scope of his own mission? Has he tasked himself with saving humanity? Has he simply gone mad?
Regardless, this is the catalyst for the second act, and the decision that will ultimately turn Major Tom into Iron Man.
“Has He Lost His Mind? Can He See Or Is He Blind?”
And this brings us to the thrilling conclusion! I almost feel like there is no need to explain the end of the plot, as Geezer Butler’s lyrics, Ozzy’s voice and Tony Iommi’s core riff paint the perfect picture of this tale’s third act.
At this point in the tale, I do take a creative liberty or two. In my telling, Major Tom has flung himself into a wormhole. He has come unstuck in time and exists, for unknown lifetimes, in a dimension of non-linear time. He sees divergent timelines. He sees other worlds. He sees the past, the present and, most troublingly, the future of his own world. And eventually, he does find a solution for the apocalypse, or at least a way to return to his own world with a warning that he believes may avert the disaster. So the hero returns.
“Why should they even care?”
But of course, Major Tom’s return home doesn’t go as planned. Running afoul of the “great magnetic field”, he is transformed into Iron Man. Sentient, but trapped in his metal body, mute and unmoving, Iron Man is unable to express to the world the things he knows and has seen. Though he has returned home, mentally capable of saving the planet, he is still trapped and isolated. And most importantly, he is forgotten. The world he returns to sees him simply as a novelty from space, not as a real human, certainly not as Major Tom, the forgotten hero.
“Now he has his revenge.”
One could only imagine the frustration, the disappointment and the anger that spawns Iron Man’s revenge, BUT there seems to be a hole in this plot. In my version, Major Tom has been gone for an eternity. And he returns not exactly to his own time, but to a later date. In infinite terms, his late return is a rounding error, but in human terms it is an era…long enough for Major Tom to be completely forgotten.
So what did Major Tom do during his unquantifiable time in space? What was it that drove him mad enough to opt for revenge upon his return? That’s where I come in.
I Burned A Lot of Pages in the Book of Love.
In 2016, nearly twenty five years after first thinking about connecting these two stories, I was busy writing and recording a bunch of synthpop demos. And since nobody was listening, I though I might as well get real audacious with it and write a fan-fiction song that filled in the blanks in my imagined Major Tom-is-Iron Man tale. So I did. The working title for the resulting song was “Motor Jam” which is, of course, an anagram of Major Tom, and also a terrible title. But I haven’t thought of anything good yet, so we’ll just cal it “Conqueror”.
In the “Conqueror” sequence, Major Tom becomes a conqueror of worlds. Living in non-linear time for literally thousands of lifetimes, he does horrible things, he searches, he battles, he crusades, and he burns through space and time, looking for a new home, or a new past, or anything that can save humanity and the version of Earth that he knows and still views as his own. And when he finally finds a route home with the information he needs, and sets his course for the appropriate spacetime coordinates, it all goes wrong.
Major Tom lands too far in Earth’s future, and more importantly, he passes through a field that entirely changes his chemical composition, merging him with the mech suit he has has developed over the years, and freezes him, for a time, in a metal prison. By the time he returns to Earth, not only are he and his mission long forgotten, but he is trapped in his body. Sort of a “Johnny Got his Gun” situation.
It’s maybe the worst possible scenario. Everything that he’s done for eons, all of his suffering, his efforts, his pure, godless isolation, has been endured with the fate of Earth in mind. And when he returns to Earth wit a solution? Nothing. Nothing but dismissal and mockery.
I guess in this light, it makes sense that Iron Man destroys humanity. All of the rage, the perceived betrayal, the unavoidable insanity seem to point to this conclusion. In possibly the greatest causal loop ever, Major Tom becomes the Iron Man that he foresaw ending the world.
And the moral? Well there rarely is one in cosmic horror. If there is one, it’s usually this:
You should have known better. OF COURSE the vision of ultimate disaster that you foresee ends up being a disaster of your own making. Because this was always the timeline. This is the same thread you’ve been pulling since the beginning. Free will is a beautiful concept, but we’ll never know if it’s real. Perhaps Bowie said it best:
“Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.”
If you liked this post, you can click HERE for a playlist of the songs mentioned (and a couple bonus tracks that might add color to the story). They’re ordered by sequence of events, so as you listen, see if you agree with this telling of the Major Tom/Iron Man saga.
