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

one of only two unsympathetic characters in the book), who
doesn’t dislike Eric, ‘He just doesn’t understand you. That’s
all.’ (301) 113 He shares no joyful affects with Eric, and in fact,
Eric’s joy makes him sad. In fact Ron is mostly sad, being
perennially disappointed in others (Eric first of all, who
‘wastes’ his life) and finally himself (654), and as we know,
sadness never made anyone intelligent.
iv – the powers of the affects
Late in the book when Eric is 75 and Shit 77, they pick up
Caleb, a young man in his late twenties, at Turpens. Caleb
is into old men, not to mention the various other kinks
he shares with the two ‘old boys’, and lives with them for
the next three and a half years. Caleb has dropped out of
grad school where he was studying philosophy, and at one
point he and Eric discuss Spinoza, emphasising various
points from the Ethics; the equivalence of God and the
Universe, the parallelism of mind and matter, and ‘the
Spinozan ‘in’’ (714-15). The potentiality of a group being
‘in’ its individuals implies that God/Nature is not an idea
that exists outside its constituent parts and their relations,
and hence not something that could be understood except
through those relations. This is to affirm the absolute
immanence of God/Nature qua substance to the modes
that construct and express it, which as we have seen is an
affirmation that lies at the more ‘atheist’ end of Spinoza
interpretation. But perhaps more interestingly, this feeds
back into another major theme of Through the Valley
of the Nest of Spiders, which is community, and how it
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