Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

and conditions of existence’ (1967a 85). Despite the languid
beauty of the sudden appearance of space flight, it is from
the moment when the ape turned the weapon on himself
that this future has been born. This violence, for Kubrick as
much as for Nietzsche, is both horrifying and magnificent.
Nietzsche writes:
the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against
itself, taking sides against itself, was something so
new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory,
and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth
was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were
needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus begun
and the end of which is not yet in sight. (1967a 85)
The birth of self-hatred is magnificent, Nietzsche (and
Kubrick) continues, because from it is born the man
who ‘gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a
certainty, as if with him something were announcing and
preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way,
an episode, a bridge, a great promise.’ Man, and these are
Nietzsche’s words, is going to produce a ‘great child’
(1967a 85).
That man has not yet been introduced. Meanwhile the
soft notes of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube accompanies the
utter disjunction of the bone become a spaceship. What is
the meaning of this cut? There seems two possible answers.
Perhaps it is that between then and now nothing has
changed, the weapon of self-hatred remains, only now in
the form of orbiting nuclear bombs. 67 Same shit, different
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