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

to want it too), but also relations with things, and perhaps
more importantly the relations that constitute the natural
world, and our experience of it. As a result; ‘if [man] lives
among such individuals as agree with his nature, his power
of acting will thereby be aided and encouraged’ (EIV, App.
VII, see also XII). Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
is therefore utopian in both a practical and cosmic sense,
precisely because these two terms define the immanent
extremes of a single, living plane of ethical existence; now
here but also nowhere, a future whose method is known
but whose reality remains to be constructed... This is what
makes the utopian aspect of the novel so interesting, it
insists that utopia is not achieved or even defined by the
social forms or institutions that constitute it, but rather it is
a method, a means, a type of relation that seeks to enhance
rather than determine. Utopia is a way of living, a mode of
life, and a utopian society can only be constituted on this
basis.
As the novel progresses, and Eric slowly understands
‘his’ book, the Ethics, he seeks to ‘do good’ outside the
immediacy of his sexual circle. This means applying
the ethics of sex to the wider relations constituting his
community, and thereby elaborating the experience of ‘joy’
into the offering of ‘help’. The most obvious example of this
is the large mobile cooker, ‘The Dynamite Memorial Free
Feed-All’ he builds at the Opera, which supplies free food
four times a year for any who wish to eat it. Eric got this
idea, he explains to Shit, through the experience of feeding
people in their cabin during the severe storm of 2009 and
through reading Spinoza (608). By the end of the book this
link is made explicit, as Eric realises;
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