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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institution, political party or museum’ (2008 24). As a result,
creation means sabotaging capitalist parasites in order to
redistribute their libidinal energy – and hence value. This
is what he calls ‘productive sabotage’ or ‘creative sabotage’
(2008 147), a ‘positive sabotage’ which ‘is productive of value
and creative, not simply destructive’ (2008 151). 39 Pasquinelli
does not want to reject the machine in favour of the human
(like Bifo) nor destroy the human in the apotheosis of the
machine (á la Land), but instead seeks to wage a perpetual
war (perpetual because negation as a strategy is meaningless
without an opponent) for control of the parasites.
Pasquinelli proposes the work of the science fiction
writer J. G. Ballard as an example, because its Atrocity
Exhibition offers, he says, ‘a joyful and just psychopathology
[…] immersed in the dark waters of the unconscious’ (2008
166). In this sense Ballard was a forerunner of Pasquinelli’s
own affirmation of the ‘animal spirits’ of new capitalism
crawling from the ‘abyss of the immaterial’ and ‘incarnated
in the forms of Internet pornography, war imagery and
video terrorism’ (2008 156). These demonic figures of
the digital unconscious constitute a collective imaginary
plugged into our libidinal drives, and while our existing
interface instrumentalises and exploits their energy they
also contain, Pasquinelli argues, an excess that can turn
against their masters. This ‘internet underground’, this
‘biomorphic horror’ of the ‘subterranean libido’, these
‘monsters emerging from the collective Id’ (2008 158, 165,
167, 159) Pasquinelli cries, must be unleashed. A ‘perverse
polymorphism’ could then become the model for an
excessive libidinal mediascape, one that would return
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