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=
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we’re gonna make people believe us.” The kids then rush off
to try to awaken the town to this as yet invisible threat. This
fails to work because people either find their claims of a
monster ludicrous, or banal: “Look, I have monsters in here
all the time, so beat it” the barman tells them. People laugh.
This situation leads to one of the best lines in the film;
“How,” Steve asks, “can you protect people from something
they don’t believe in?” The kids start blowing the horns of
their cars in order to bring people to an impromptu town
meeting. Steve announces the presence of a “monster” and
the danger it presents to the town, a claim the police chief
finally accepts. Steve has successfully managed to name the
alien as an appearance of the generic truth of the monster
and the town unites behind him. After vacillations of
fortune they get rid of it.
According to Badiou this killing of an alien truth is
a symptom of totalitarian politics. The American small
town violently suppresses the fact ‘that there is always,
in any situation, a real point that resists’. This is the alien
unnameable. ‘The unnameable is something like the
inexpressible real of everything a truth authorizes to be
said.’ (Badiou, 2004 66) This would be the real of the alien
itself, the otherness that appears in the event. Once we
name this singularity within an axiom of opposition, we
slip into a totalitarian attempt to measure the infinite.
This, Badiou provocatively claims, is the appearance of
evil. ‘Usually it is said that Evil is lies, ignorance, or deadly
stupidity. The condition of Evil is much rather the process
of a truth. There is Evil only insofar as there is an axiom
of truth at the point of the undecidable, a path of truth at
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