timespace coodinates: The series depicts the aftermath of the Great War of 2077, an apocalyptic nuclear exchange in an alternate history of Earth where advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retrofuturistic society and a subsequent resource war. Many survivors took refuge in falloutbunkers known as Vaults. More than 200 years later in 2296, a young woman named Lucy leaves behind her home in Vault 33 to venture out into the dangerously unforgiving wasteland of a devastated Los Angeles to look for her father, who had been kidnapped. Along the way, she meets a Brotherhood of Steel squire and a ghoul bounty hunter, each has their own mysterious pasts and agendas to settle.
Darko Suvin needs no introduction probably. Altough SF authors and writers in general (no intention of dissing them as a group) tend to ignore the theory of SF studies, Darko Suvin, an ex-Yugoslav who emigrated in 1967 has been probably the single most important person responsible for getting Science Fiction recognized in Academia. After he started teaching at McGill University in Canada – others like Frederic Jameson also started taking a vivid theoretical interest in a previously disdained and minor literature (in Deleuze’s sense), so much so that the entire academic field of Utopia Studies and SF was more or less shaped by these two important Marxist critics and theoreticians. I appreciate Professor Darko Suvin’s position since he is straddling both Western and Eastern Marxist traditions in a way and also because Yugoslavia was such a special case being actually open to various directions of thought. In a sense this valuable bibliography of Soviet SF, of cosmicity starting with the post-Stalinist era and ending with the onset of the long decline and disenchantment of the 1970s and 1980s is a twilight full of starry sky and extra-planetary possibilities. Maybe even the possibility that the most precious things such as communism or socialism might be temporary, exceptional moments and that all that was more fragile than its capitalist opponents presupposed, a transient system that in our part of the world gave way to today’s “contemporary political subject is plunged into a miserable combination of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism (not to say neofascism)” in the words of philosopher Max Penzin, and maybe “able to produce both a calming and an invigorating effect” like Evald Ilyenkov’s speculative cosmology. Some are probably not yet translated but I hope they will find a way to future readers.
There is a sense in which we are still catching up to the various deletions – schools of critical thinking and what used to be Eastern European Marxism (from the former East bloc, especially the particularly neglected array of SF authors from the former Soviet Union, that would help us explore other venues taken than the usual liberal Western canon (see the emergence of an alternative epistemology).
On July 2, 1996, an extraterrestrial mothership enters Earth’s orbit and deploys saucers (each 15 mi (24 km) in diameter) over major cities worldwide, including New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The film focuses on disparate groups of people who converge in the Nevada desert in the aftermath of a worldwide attack by a powerful extraterrestrial race. With the other people of the world, they launch a counterattack on July 4—Independence Day in the United States.
Considered a significant turning point in the history of the Hollywoodblockbuster, Independence Day was at the forefront of the large-scale disaster film and sci-fi resurgence of the mid-late 1990s. (wiki)
Twenty years after the War of 1996, the United Nations has founded the Earth Space Defense (ESD), a global defense advanced research program that reverse-engineers alien technology and serves as Earth’s alert system against extraterrestrial threats. Civilization has been restored and relative peace among nations exists following the human race’s victory over the aliens’ attacks, and major cities around the world including Washington D.C. were rebuilt and modernized with amalgamated technologies. After establishing Area 51 as its headquarters, the ESD set up bases on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea, a moon of Saturn, and orbital defense satellites above Earth, as fortifications against future invasions.
Although the film is set in a place described only as “Victory Town” onscreen, it’s very clearly set – and its exteriors were filmed – in Palm Springs, California, from which most of its interior design is directly derived. The city has one of the largest caches of mid-century-modern (MCM) architecture and design in the world, and nearly every single visual element in the film draws heavily from the MCM aesthetic.
Frank, the Victory Project’s leader, is shown living in Kaufmann House, one of the most well-known mid-century homes in the world. Although the Kaufmann House’s exterior has been shown at various times over the years in both film and TV, “Don’t Worry Darling” is the first film to feature scenes shot on the property itself, including several peeks at its rarely seen interiors.
The hilltop headquarters of the Victory Corporation is the iconic “volcano house” in the Mojave Desert community of Newberry Springs, California.
The geometric dancers featured in the film are based on the choreography of Busby Berkeley, most known for his film musicals released in the 1930s.
spacetime coordinates: centuries in the future after robots of Panga gained self-awareness laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.
There should always be room for works that inspire a glimmer of hope in dark times and also philosophical works that work out an important distance from the usual collapsology that radically compresses everything into an endless present.
That said, there is nothing more obnoxious than the constant appeals to some overrated kind of ‘hope’ as a panacea for all the world’s troublesor the on the thing that saves the day. The recent Star Wars movies have been constantly bombarding everything with ‘keeping up the hope’ and keeping hopeful no matter what. The inverse of suffering under this imposed hopefulness (Laurent Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’) is also allowing the thought that things might go awfully wrong. Being hopeless is almost like a double blow – it stigmatizes and blames those that do not jump or do not give full support in the name of cause (any cause) plus they get labeled as hopeless themselves. Your no hope is responsible for your own ensuing failures – according to a logic that also blames the poor for being poor. Relentless and required hope animates much of ‘positive thinking’ mind over matter dualism in the US. Initially, a very important movement of the 19th and 20th century that was associated with many other good ideas actionist, a motivational credo (without the toxic baggage of today) is meant self-improvment, self-determination, the example, propaganda of the deed, women’s rights, the self-education of workers clubs into the new natural sciences and a new body and new health consciousness and imminent liberation. Some of these visions also came pre-packaged with fears of a ‘degenerationist’ Western imaginary that somehow railed under the ills of civilisation and the fear of assertive others, mostly of non-white, non-European, formerly subjugated or colonial. This belief in a hopeful, more humane world was not reserved or limited to the Western world in any sense. The voluntaristic strain of the 20th c took many forms and we could even include the mid- century Maoist momentum during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. A history that is not over. Even if some of the Maoist excess took the form of a so-called war on nature – with disastrous effects, while it persecuted and killed many and while have horrific experiences – even in its failures it mediated a a re-calibrated China, it was historically shaped its aversions, debates and future gradual te ‘opening’ towards.
It is essential that many important critics and theoreticians of capital – such as Ernst Bloch have carefully elaborated all their lives around concepts of utopia, of the not-yet-here, of the unfinished, the still-to-be-achieved emancipatory reality. This is because in some fundamental way – in the major works of Marx and Engels there is no detailed description (other than classless society). Some of the most important theoreticians of science fiction (Frederic Jameson and Darko Suvin) always returned to Utopia in their theorizations of this genre, and how that is bound to a liveable and better world. Others have taken other paths (such a as Guy Lardreau which I am currently reading).
One should consider Becky Chamber and the hopepunk subgenre as an interesting and important addition to this continuing dialogue that builds on an already existing utopian corpus, one that is not just about technophile visions and ‘rapture of the nerds‘ (as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross put it). At the same time as good friend Otaku Bogdan told me – there is Kogonada’s film After Yang (adapted from a story by A Weinstein) about technobeings and cloning, and and its subtle way of embedding ‘beauty’ everywhere and even a hint of techno-fascism. In complete contrast with how Terminator movies imagined our future, the fact is that today’s techno-capitalism does not show its horrific face but is bending, mutating oppression with a streamlined smooth ‘smart’ wireless coating. At the same time – in spite of this eternal present IKEA anti-utopia (it can never get better than this), one should understand that every age and every culture on the planet had its dreams of a better world, and that includes the world of plenty in Neolithic peasant utopias, or the religious schismatic and urban philosophical utopias and eventually the social utopias. So it is no wonder Becky Chamber dwelves with great care into the Zen tradition and particularly the highly developed and ritualized tea ceremony as this also speaks to a certain way about today’s cracked and fragile world (she is also a lover of all sorts of teas from what I understand and this is reflected in her books). I also appreciate the fact that she published her work with no DRM restrictions.
TimeSpace Warps 