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

Eric finds happiness where Bill saw it, tasted it, but
couldn’t let himself accept the perfection and truth of it, at
the bottom, a place where sex and its pleasures are taken
and offered without ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, and more disturbingly,
without any kind of moral (let alone legal) sense as to what
is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Bill saw it but ran, while Eric lives
exactly in that Spinozian place: ‘That thing is called free
which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and
is determined to act by itself alone.’ (EI, D7) As a result,
the book offers a beautiful transformation of the ‘nest
of spiders’; no longer a metaphor for repressed (because
immoral) pleasure it returns as Eric, Shit and Dynamite’s
shared experience, an empirical reality blazing pure and
brilliant in the sun, a vision of the beautiful geometric
order of Nature itself:
Two tall fronds leaned widely apart. Between scalloped
threads, a grand web rayed silvery lines from its
center. Toward the middle, the dozen strands lost
their precision. Hundreds of dewdrops caught along
its lines, a third like diamonds in direct sun, another
third in shadow became pearls, and still others, where
reflected sunlight from the window behind them
poured through its lattice, became prisms. [...] most
of the matrix was symmetrical perfection – or, better,
symmetrical perfection adapted to its asymmetrical
firmament. Eric shifted his weight – and dozens of
dewdrops all over the morning web flickered and
flashed. Prisms shock myriad colors.
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