The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Science Fiction”
Edges of Forever: Time Travel and the Stories That Might Have Been
“We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”—Adam Phillips, Missing Out Ship’s Log: star-date 3139.0. Having tracked unusual spacetime ripples to their source, the Starship Enterprise now threatens to be ripped apart as it struggles to maintain its orbit over an uncharted, weirdly time-disturbing planet. There is chaos on the bridge. Mr. […]
Time Loop at Hanging Rock
Valentine’s Day, 1900. A group of Australian schoolgirls, all clad in white dresses, are driven by coach to Hanging Rock, an enormous volcanic formation in central Victoria, Australia, for an afternoon picnic. Four girls, including the most popular, Botticelli Venus-looking Miranda (played by Anne-Louise Lambert), defying the orders of the school’s stern headmistress, venture off […]
Altered States of Reading (5): Kirk Allen of Barsoom
What could any Other know of the up-and-out? What Other could look at the biting acid beauty of the stars in open space? What could they tell of the great pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint […]
Altered States of Reading (Part 3): A Private Part of Time’s Anatomy
A couple weeks ago, Twitter etc. went wild when a new book revealed allegations that UK Prime Minister David Cameron had, during an initiation ritual while at Oxford, inserted “a private part of his anatomy” in the mouth of a dead pig. To an entire nation, it was a hilariously obvious permutation of Charlie Brooker’s […]
The Vicinity of the Real (Tarkovsky’s Stalker)
The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s late sci-fi masterpiece Stalker is one of my favorite places, real or imagined. It is a landscape of overgrown ruins, where spacetime itself is uncertain and only the experienced can guide you through. It is not that the guide (the “Stalker” of the title) knows the way—because the way is […]
Martian Holocausts, Cosmic Paranoia, and the Surveillance Universe
Ever since the Viking orbiters photographed a curiously face-like mountain and oddly pyramidal features in the Cydonia Mensae region of Mars in 1976, many have liked to speculate that the Red Planet was once inhabited, either by human settlers in the distant past—the argument made by Richard Hoagland—or by an indigenous civilization that flourished many […]
Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual
I’ve mentioned several times the debt I owe to J.W. Dunne and his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. Dunne was not a scientific researcher or a parapsychologist by training, but a military man and aeronautical engineer who became interested in questions of time and its structure after becoming aware of uncanny examples of apparent […]
Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice
If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, […]
The Solaris Mind: Hypnagogia, Meditation, and Insight
A classic motif in science fiction is that humanity ventures to the farthest reaches of space only to find, impossibly, something of our own that we had forgotten. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, about a planet covered by a viscous ocean that manufactures simulacra from its observers’ unconscious, is probably the purest expression of this […]
When Is It Hyperfootball Season?—Rethinking Eternalism
There are rumblings from the Internet that graphic novelist and magus Alan Moore is soon to drop a million-word novel on the world, called Jerusalem. It shows great courage and faith, in a world that no longer reads books, that Moore has stretched out his text as much as possible instead of compressing his ideas […]
