In Which I Explore the Phenomenon of Women in Tubes

Filed under Works in Progress

Retropolis offers a wide variety of accommodations to the tourist or traveler: from five star suites in the floating Galacticon hotel, through the more utilitarian, blastproof rooms made available to the conventioneers of The Society of Demented Research Technicians – and finally, to these modern and streamlined sleeping tubes at hotels like downtown’s "Tubular Belle’s".

Sleek and affordable, these tubes bathe the guest in a sonic shower that cleans both sleeper and clothing. Visitors awake refreshed and ready for a new tomorrow – helped along by the hot, strong coffee that tops off the hotel’s complimentary breakfast.

This all happened because of a series of blog posts at the Posthuman Blues blog …there, for example.

Though I’d never spent a lot of time thinking about Women In Tubes – and really, I haven’t, at least not since the seventies – once I did think about them, I realized that they’re all over the covers of pulp science fiction magazines from the Golden Age of, well, pulp science fiction magazines.

And I started to feel like less of a man because I’d never put women in tubes into my own pictures. I mean, obviously, it’s fundamental, right?

But it’s not enough to just stick a women in a tube. Not even if it were the seventies. What the heck are they doing in there? How did they get into a freaking tube, in the first place? It can’t be like that ship in a bottle thing: that would be disgusting. How do they get out? And, as always, who stands to benefit from keeping all these women in tubes?

So I’ve tried to answer these questions, and while in the act, I made the tubes coeducational. Because that’s how I roll.

The title’s from a song of 1933, by Olive Levine & Beany Miller. Because that’s also how I roll.

Available on posters, archival prints, and postcards.