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

The growing awareness of the decay of bodies – human
and objects – is part of Eric and Shit getting older, a
process the novel lovingly depicts in all its sadness and
humour. Eric finds it increasingly harder to remember
things, and to keep his thoughts clear and coherent. ‘The
mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things,
except while the body endures.’ (EV, P21) The third kind of
knowledge – beatitude – seems increasingly elusive. In
this sense, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is an
inherently conservative book because it tragically describes
the way that time inexorably swallows the truths of today,
submerging our eternal ideas and their mystical experience
in the entropic tick-tock of time slowly dissolving our body.
Finally Eric succumbs to the same anxiety and melancholy,
noting just after Shit’s death that people ‘did not seem to
understand what a great part of the world the dead actually
were…’ (797). Nevertheless there is an important lesson
here, even if Eric cannot quite grasp it. At the end of the
book Ann’s research into the Dump marks Eric and Shit’s
lives as historical, but rewrites them in the image of her
own prejudice (she is against ‘science’, BDSM, child sex),
and with the partial insights of its distanced perspective.
This obviously irritates Eric, but it is precisely the nature
of the utopian life he has led – one embodied in its living
relations – that means it cannot be retained or contained
within any historical knowledge.
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is a book as
modest (but at the same time as ambitious) as its characters,
describing both the pleasure and the cosmic moments
their relations have generated. It has simply followed
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