A key contributor to the dissemination of Drexciyan lore was British writer Kodwo Eshun, who wrote a hugely influential 1997 article on The Quest in The Wire entitled “Fear of a Wet Planet.” “They seemed so far ahead of everybody else and so out on their own, I just totally fell under their spell,” says Eshun, who would also write about Drexciya in his 1998 book More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction. “They just seemed to epitomize everything I wanted from techno at that moment in time. A lot of the Detroit people who were more popular, for example Kenny Larkin and Carl Craig, they were fine, but they didn’t have the kind of remoteness and the distance and the foreboding, intimidating quality that Drexciya had. They were more approachable, and all too human, whereas because Drexciya weren’t around, I could project all kinds of extra-human desires onto them – I could imbue them with so much fantasy, so much longing, so much feeling – so that they became really an epitome of what I wanted, which was this notion of sonic fiction, that relation between science fiction and the organization of sound.”

Eshun was particularly struck by Drexciya’s song titles, which alluded to bizarre characters like Darthouven Fish Men, Mutant Gillmen and Dr. Blowfin; unfamiliar phenomena like Hydro Cubes, Aqua Worm Holes and Aquatic Bata Particles; and strange places like the Red Hills of Lardossa, Positron Island and Danger Bay. “It’s a super-evocative, imaginative geography, the actual fiction of the names, the map being created and being filled in from record to record,” says Eshun. “It was a world that was only being filled in partially, track by track, and you were doing a lot of that navigating, with the help of the music and the track titles. In a sense, to be a Drexciya fan was to build the mythos by yourself.”

“When The Quest came out,” Eshun continues, “it was a kind of magnificent monumental mythology and then the map, which gave it this epic, world historical sequence of evolution. When you look at it now, it’s just one page of one CD, an insert, but it was a lot. It was enough to just in a way take the fantasies that you projected and then scale them up to give them this kind of world historical dimension, and the effect was to really take over your head and just occupy the map that the music had built.”

For Eshun, the science fiction aspect is a key component of Drexciya’s mythology. “In an American context, questions of futurity are absolutely critical: for African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans and all diasporic subjectivities, science fiction is by no means escapism. It’s the reverse: science fiction is a kind of theory of escapology which enables you to diagnose the traps that society, especially a society based around police power, based around white supremacy and based around a kind of aesthetic hierarchy which continually refuses to accept African-American aesthetic projects, refuses to give them their due. Under these conditions, science fiction takes on a critical and political role.”

Sci-fi had already potentially been a key influence on the members of Drexciya. One probable antecedent was Parliament’s 1978 album Motor Booty Affair, whose vinyl gatefold edition came complete with Overton Loyd-illustrated pop-up cardboard figures of mutant characters hailing from an undersea kingdom of funk; in one image, the banner “We Gotta Raise Atlantis To The Top!” is waved from the ocean floor. As adolescents in the early 1980s, Stinson and Donald would likely have come across Marvel’s 1966 animated series Prince Namor the Submariner on the Detroit area UHF station WXON after school on weekday afternoons, as well as syndicated reruns of the mid-’60s sci-fi series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where an all-white cast traversed the ocean depths in the nuclear submarine Seaview. More contemporaneously to Drexciya’s conception, James Cameron’s 1989 film The Abyss floated the concept of a liquid-breathing apparatus using oxygenated perfluorocarbon fluid, itself perhaps based on the actual news that doctors at Temple University had used a “liquid ventilator” in an attempt to save a premature baby. (Both of these ideas are alluded to in The Quest’s text.)

To Gillen, Drexciya ultimately used sci-fi as a self-empowerment vehicle, much as Juan Atkins had proposed in Model 500’s “No UFOs.” “It’s for a neglected group of people in Detroit that weren’t encouraged to have an imagination, to spur their imagination,” says Gillen. “I think that’s the greatest gift that they’ve given: the message ‘Think beyond your boundaries. Don’t be stuck here.’”

Stinson himself achieved a measure of escape from Detroit during the latter part of Drexciya’s career by working as an interstate truck driver, making music with a MIDI controller in the cab of his rig during long journeys on the road, from which he would often call friends and play his compositions over the phone. Due to Drexciya’s embrace of secrecy, however, biographical info like this was withheld during Stinson’s lifetime, and those who knew the pair are still reluctant to divulge details on-the-record. Gillen, for example, continues to honor Drexciya’s cultivated mystique by keeping the mundane details of their personal existence to himself: “Drexciya is like a music project from the thought plane of existence and it doesn’t matter who is involved and when,” says Gillen. “Drexciya the concept is the project and the two guys that you know of that worked on it all the time were servants of that thought. Until the story of what it is as an idea is fully communicated, then I don’t think it’s important to talk about them as people, because I don’t think that people fully understand what the idea is. Drexciya should be mysterious, like the creation myth of the Dogon. It shouldn’t be a butterfly pinned to a board – it should be a butterfly that you never actually catch.”