Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction
Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story […]. But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that produces them. [from the Introduction] Layout: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta 260 pages [Paperback : 13,5 x 19 cm] Publisher: Multimedijalni institut [Zagreb, Croatia] ISBN: 978-953-7372-67-5 — the book is available via Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/dp/9537372677/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story […].
But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that produces them. [from the Introduction]
Layout: Dejan Dragosavac Ruta
260 pages [Paperback : 13,5 x 19 cm]
Publisher: Multimedijalni institut [Zagreb, Croatia]
ISBN: 978-953-7372-67-5
— the book is available via Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/dp/9537372677/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
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Finally, Foucault writes, genealogy is ‘a use of history that
severs its connections to memory, its metaphysics and
anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory
– a transformation of history into a totally different form
of time’ (1977 160). This new form of time is the future,
but now unleashed from the present. In this Nietzsche
and Foucault offer us an ontological understanding of the
future rather than an epistemological one. For them the
problem of creating something new is not located at the
epistemological limits of human knowledge and history,
but at the edge of being, where the future emerges as
the inhuman horizon of becoming that takes the human
beyond itself.
abstraction and the aesthetics of the future
So, once more, how does this untimely event of the future
emerge in dystopian science fiction films? Unlike cognitive
estrangement and its aesthetics of alienation, the event
operates through an aesthetic of abstraction. By abstraction
I do not mean the formal abstraction associated with
abstract painting, although, as it does in 2001, this may
play a part. 14 What I mean instead is a process by which
a film does not simply alienate the viewer from their
present, but forces them to revalue their epistemological
and ontological framework. But the question remains, how?
Deleuze’s books on cinema offer many examples, one of
which he calls ‘any-space-whatevers’. This is a space that is
not identifiable as an actual space, because it ‘has eliminated
that which happened and acted in it. It is an extinction or a
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