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

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Eric’s desire, a desire that led to a life almost completelycontained in a small beachside town in the deep south ofAmerica. But this town, this life, it contained everything,because all of its moments were lived the right way, andso revealed the face of God/Nature, and the eternal ethicaltruths that bless our existence. Eric’s wisdom is based ona utopian desire for a better life, but one enacted throughthe most everyday actions. To do good, to understand theuniverse, these difficult but always possible things bringEric happiness and insight.The cycles of Eric’s life took in stony beaches and pineforests where you could walk in a daylight all but nightblack and fields where there was no grass, only stonesand moss, alongside tar and macadam measured atits edge with poles and wires and solar panels, andwater, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water– salt and silver – as there was sky, enough to makeyou scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swellingwithin until Eric became his self exploding throughtoday toward tomorrow, water green as glass fallingbetween rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust anddocks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped upand took Eric’s rough hand in his rough hand. (761)The simplicity of a touch, the vastness of the universe.These two things together forms the framework of Throughthe Valley of the Nest of Spiders and the scope of its wisdom.It is a simple message, but at once an utterly cosmic one,and necessarily at once – which is the complicated part,220
the part inscribed in Book V of the Ethics and constitutingthe third kind of knowledge. This is the final lesson ofimmanence, a lesson Eric grasps – and therefore lives –from the beginning to the end of the book. This is theeternal nature of its truth, Eric lives through a long lifefull of everyday incident, but the ethical impetus for thislife remains the same from his teen-age exclamation that ‘Iwanna be a good person’ (203) to his summary, at the veryend of the book, of Spinoza’s Ethics; ‘Hurt others and youhurt a part of yourself because you hurt a part of Natureor God. Help others and you help a part of Nature or …’(801). It is an understanding of Spinoza whose self-evidenceis both inspiring and an indictment, available to everyoneand scorned by most, its effect illuminating the universe inthe perfection of its moment, its perfection scorned in thepettiness of selfish acts that negate the generous relationsconstituting a utopian community. For utopia is not animpossible future, but one that can only be lived in thepresence of its emergence.221
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Stephen ZepkeStephen ZepkeHead in t
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Stephen ZepkeHead inthe StarsEssays
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‘I hold out my hand to the future
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Acknowledgments
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‘Towards an Ethics of the Alien:
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IntroductionScience Fiction, Prelud
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estrangement’ that seek to reflec
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simply destroying the results. To i
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new’ (2008 53). So although scien
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(dialectically) connected to today,
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Science fiction is about the future
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The novum’s difference from reali
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even say “transhistorical” impe
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structure of what he calls ‘criti
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But, according to Suvin, there is a
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(in its autonomous and insect-like
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‘sanity’ with the defeat of the
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fiction’s politics. While this su
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in doing so they turn this individu
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The problem here is that when scien
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We need, Nietzsche says, a ‘criti
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the criteria of creation, and by so
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disappearing, but one which is not
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setting seems devoid of time itself
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instead a mysterious refusal of it.
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a strange coupling around a half ab
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Real hallucinations - Videodrome
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The great achievement of the film i
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‘Long live the new flesh’ - bey
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Chapter TwoInterface Aesthetics,Sci
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Virtual pathologies - The Lawnmower
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capital. This is clearly illustrate
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total war into an economy of (non)
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in order to instrumentalise and exp
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someone else’s entertainment. Snu
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Johnny uploads the info (with memor
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fragmented experiences of the infos
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Corporate brainwashing - Cypher
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‘Reality’ returns - the end of
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new sensation has not been destroye
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to this, in order to instead set up
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contemporary capitalism, but to emb
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(ie., parasites) that can reconstit
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Unfortunately perhaps, the interfac
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war imagery and porn to the social
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[...], destructions in relation to
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We do not fundamentally need a phil
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beyond? 42 The problem for Badiou a
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truth, and in the second it provoke
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appearance of the alien as a monste
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Consequently, the verified terms co
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the point of the indiscernible, an
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universal address is explicitly fig
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time big, dwarfing John. The door i
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who are against - on principle - bo
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event. This fidelity is what can fo
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Every invocation of blood and soil,
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but the alien goes on to articulate
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length backing away, then CUT to th
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point-of-view frame, it is no diffe
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all’ (2001 27). This point is fin
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Chapter FourAgainst Nihilism,Nietzs
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Nietzschean inspiration rather than
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birth to consciousness, and the ape
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overcomes the natural cycle of life
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In 1887-88 Nietzsche explains the c
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To see others suffer does one good,
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day. But on the other hand, everyth
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develop their own techniques except
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Council has “requested formal sec
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Excavating their future - 2001
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mission. This is, the announcer tel
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reliable computer ever made, no 900
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Does HAL resent man’s body and in
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an end to the reign and realm of as
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The manual airlock - 2001
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The body, the corpo-real, is the ob
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jupiter and beyond the infiniteHavi
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untroubled by any sentimental retur
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Page 176 and 177: Bowman emerges from the Star Gate i
Page 178 and 179: Bowman however, forever unflappable
Page 180 and 181: monolith and what has become of man
Page 183: Chapter FivePeace and Love (and Fuc
Page 186 and 187: was the only way I ever learned any
Page 188 and 189: Spinoza’s fundamental insight tha
Page 190 and 191: of ‘networking’, a form of comm
Page 192 and 193: This added luminosity is the light
Page 194 and 195: (440) This is an intense infinity t
Page 196 and 197: depends on the nature of the experi
Page 198 and 199: In the reconstructed spider-pit seq
Page 200 and 201: Eric finds happiness where Bill saw
Page 202 and 203: look less like a valley ... than an
Page 204 and 205: could not effect matter directly, w
Page 206 and 207: Eric has clearly ‘got’ the Ethi
Page 208 and 209: simplest thing can reveal infinity.
Page 210 and 211: one of only two unsympathetic chara
Page 212 and 213: run by the Kyle foundation, ‘an i
Page 214 and 215: Yes, help was what it was all about
Page 216 and 217: Fred Moten has argued that Delany
Page 218 and 219: formed from tradition and learning,
Page 223 and 224: BibliographyJerold J. Abrams (2007)
Page 225 and 226: Gilles Deleuze (1978). Third lesson
Page 227 and 228: H. P. Lovecraft (2001). The Thing o
Page 229 and 230: Leonard F. Wheat (2000). Kubrick’
Page 231 and 232: Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)Equil
Page 233 and 234: Notes1 Reddell’s genealogy of the
Page 235 and 236: yond’. As such it is perpetuated
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Page 239 and 240: to the Italian political movement o
Page 241 and 242: 41 This understanding of the alien
Page 243 and 244: (but also nothing more) than the de
Page 245 and 246: that they amount to nothing more th
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Page 249 and 250: emphasises 2000 year historical cyc
Page 251 and 252: Unsurprisingly she hardly deals wit
Page 253 and 254: 87 In this sense 2001 seems to acco
Page 255 and 256: 97 All page references now given in
Page 257 and 258: limited by another thought. But a b
Page 259: This book is published within the p
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