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

new’ (2008 53). So although science fiction is a ‘popular’
genre, the ‘new’ we are looking for, this ‘new novum’
created by certain texts, is nevertheless exceptional, and
so approaches the paradigm of fine art. Like the best art,
these texts refuse the clichés and lazy sentiments of the
mainstream, evading our expectations to create something
undecidable and strange. These texts give us, as Csicsery-
Ronay writes, ‘a vertiginous pleasure, more ludic than
cognitive, more ecstatic than disciplinary’ (2008 55). Perhaps
it is because this experience is so unusual that most of
what follows concerns specific texts, and requires a close
reading of them. This book has relatively little to say about
science fiction in general, about the genre, its development,
or meaning. I am writing instead about those wonderful
exceptions, when the rules gets broken.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers a good
description of the ‘new novum’ this book is seeking, which
emphasises its break with the existent:
The new, with its power of beginning and beginning
again, remains forever new, just as the established was
always established from the outset, even if a certain
amount of empirical time was necessary for this to
be recognised. What became established with the
new is precisely not the new. For the new – in other
words difference – calls forth forces in thought which
are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow,
but the powers of a completely other model, from an
unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita.
(1994 136)
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