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

on invention and impossibility (possibility always implying
conditions) are utterly modernist. In fact, the science fiction
narrative of a new age powered by new technology seems to
belong to Modernism, which understood itself as a worldhistorical
force in precisely these terms. Indeed, whenever
you date the beginning of science fiction, it really came to
life when Modernism crawled from the wreckage of history
and inaugurated an entirely new age of the machine. This
is the ‘new’ history of a Militant Modernism that proceeds
as a series of explosions that echo its own birth, each
avant-garde reseting the clock as the future arrives again. 2
Unlike this heroic history of Modernism, however, which
is often focussed on fine art, our heroes will be ‘popular’
figures, folk heroes perhaps, films and books from an
unapologetically ‘low’ culture whose brilliance illuminates
the masses. The democratic distribution of these texts is
perhaps the only thing they share with our contemporary
and ‘post-modern’ experience of the ‘new’, which is utterly
ironised in its cut ‘n’ paste quotation, and inextricable
from the accelerated economies of late-capitalism. Today,
the ‘new’ finds its most compelling logic in the ambiguous
temporality of the commodity, a product that must be
different enough to distinguish itself against competitors,
while remaining identifiable according to the categories
defining the market. Science fiction’s temporal limits (as
described by Jameson and Suvin) obviously reflect this
economy perfectly, allowing it to constantly contort itself
into new versions of what we already have. Rebooted –
the logic of the franchise. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.
succinctly puts it, ‘it may represent newness, but it is never
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