Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction
Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story […]. But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that produces them. [from the Introduction] Layout: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta 260 pages [Paperback : 13,5 x 19 cm] Publisher: Multimedijalni institut [Zagreb, Croatia] ISBN: 978-953-7372-67-5 — the book is available via Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/dp/9537372677/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story […].
But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that produces them. [from the Introduction]
Layout: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta
260 pages [Paperback : 13,5 x 19 cm]
Publisher: Multimedijalni institut [Zagreb, Croatia]
ISBN: 978-953-7372-67-5
— the book is available via Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/dp/9537372677/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
beyond? 42 The problem for Badiou and for alien arrival
films then, is not what we know of this event – nothing
– but how it can be thought. How, in other words, can we
think the truth of the alien itself? ‘If a truth is something
new’, Badiou asks, ‘what is the essential philosophical
problem concerning truth? It is the problem of its
appearance and its ‘becoming’. A truth must be submitted
to thought, not as a judgement, but as a process in the real.’
(2004 61) The event, for Badiou, cannot be thought in itself,
for by definition it is the irruption of the outside as such.
But thought can bear witness to this event by producing
a new truth, a truth that is adequate to the event’s radical
exteriority, and marks its obscure appearance.
How then, does truth emerge through a ‘process of
the real’? Here we can turn to those alien arrival films that
explicitly figure this process in a protagonist who must,
in the face of knowledgeable disbelief, proclaim the truth
of the alien event. Steve in The Blob (Yeaworth, 1958), John
Putnam in It Came from Outer Space (Arnold, 1953), Dr.
Bennell in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) and
the boy David in Invaders from Mars (Menzies, 1953) must
all announce the truth of the aliens’ arrival, without – as
yet – being able to prove it. Even in those films where such
a character does not appear, the problem subsists in the
impenetrability of the alien to scientific analysis, from the
incomprehensible metal of the spaceship in The Day the
Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951) to the immortal line of Dr.
McCoy; “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.”
‘The undecidability of the event,’ Badiou writes,
‘induces the appearance of a subject of the event. Such
105
Change language