Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary

John Timberlake

Description

There has been plenty of scholarship on science fiction over the decades, but it has left one crucial aspect of the genre all but unanalysed: the visual. Ambitious and original, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary corrects that oversight, making a powerful argument for science fiction as a visual cultural discourse. Taking influential historical works of visual art as starting points, along with illustrations, movie matte paintings, documentaries, artist’s impressions and digital environments, John Timberlake focuses on the notion of science fiction as an “imaginary topos,” one that draws principally on the intersection between landscape and historical/prehistorical time. Richly illustrated, this book will appeal to scholars, students and fans of science fiction and the remarkable visual culture that surrounds it.

Land of Giants: Size and Scale, Mascroscopy and MicroScopy in the Landscapes of Science Fiction

John Timberlake

 

A Game in the Ruins: Landscape and Virtual Realities

John Timberlake

 

Blasted Heaths and Turbulent Energies: Chris Foss's Accelerated Dream of Wessex

John Timberlake

 

An Unforgivable Composure: The Apocalyptic Imaginary Since Yosuke Yamahata's Nagasaki

John Timberlake

 

'Suppositional Realism' and the Fictions of Science: THe Astronomical Landscapes of Pavel Klushantsev and Chesley Bonestell

John Timberlake

 

Beyond the Periphery: Desert and Darkness

John Timberlake

 

Conclusion: Otherwise Nothing Has Changed

John Timberlake

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Popular Culture
• Película fotográfica
• History of art
• General officer
• Performing arts
• Art
• General
• Cultural Studies
• History
• Film
• Histoire des arts visuels

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208616
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Alex Szumlas and John Timberlake
Indexer: Silvia Benvenuto
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-860-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-862-3
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-861-6
Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.
To my father, George Timberlake, who built jet engines, read science fiction and walks the moors.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Land of the Giants: Size and Scale, Macroscopy and Microscopy in the Landscapes of Science Fiction
Chapter 2: A Game in the Ruins: Landscape and Virtual Realities
Chapter 3: Blasted Heaths and Turbulent Energies: Chris Foss’s Accelerated Dream of Wessex
Chapter 4: An Unforgiveable Composure: The Apocalyptic Imaginary Since Yosuke Yamahata’s Nagasaki
Chapter 5: ‘Suppositional Realism’ and the Fictions of Science: The Astronomical Landscapes of Pavel Klushantsev and Chesley Bonestell
Chapter 6: Beyond the Periphery: Desert and Darkness
Conclusion: Where Otherwise Nothing Has Changed
References
Illustration Copyright Acknowledgements
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alex Charnley, Matthew Cornford, Valeria Graziano and Juliet Steyn, all of whom gave invaluable feedback on either individual draft outlines or chapters of this book; Mark Bould and my two anonymous peer reviewers who read drafts of the book in their entirety.
I am grateful for the generous assistance of the astronomical artist Ron Miller; Mariecris Batlabayan, archivist at Bonestell LLC; Jeremy Cox at the Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation, Arizona; Imogene Foss; Tasha Lutek, photography collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Debbie Walters, archivist at the White Sands Missile Base Museum, and Shogo Yamahata.
I would also like to thank Giles Bunch, Sonya Dyer, Keith Piper and Ben Wheele of the Middlesex University Science Fiction Research Cluster; Phil Healey, Eve Sevume Kauma and Kate Vasili for their support, help and advice respectively.
I am indebted, as ever, to Rachel Garfield for love and arguments, and Isaac Timberlake for his insights, filial devotion and ability to listen ad tedium .
One of the themes of Chapter 5, dealing with ‘Nuclear war as false memory’ was first presented as a paper discussing themes in my Another Country constructed photographs and my experience of the 9/11 attacks at the Disturbing Pasts Conference at the Museum für Völke Kunde, Vienna, in November 2012. That paper appears in the book Disturbing Pasts (Manchester University Press, 2017). The concept appears here in a reworked and expanded form; I am nevertheless indebted to Leon Wainwright of the Open University, Uilleam Blacker and the other conference organisers for that opportunity. Stimulating conversations with Joy Sleeman, Martin Myrone, Matthew Beaumont, Richard Misrach and Luke White in the course of preparing the Landscape and Eschatology conference at Tate Britain in 2012 (at which I presented a paper on Frederick Sommer) also provided early inspiration, and I thank all accordingly. I first started thinking about ‘ocularity’ when reviewing Mark Bould and China Miéville’s edited collection Red Planets (Pluto, 2009) for the journal Radical Philosophy Issue 160. Again, I am grateful to the RP editorial collective, and in particular David Cunningham, Stewart Martin and Peter Osborne for that opportunity. I would also like to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Art & Creative Industries Faculty Research Funding Group at Middlesex University, and Tim Mitchell and all at Intellect Books for their enthusiasm for this project.
Introduction
Uneven Distribution and Terrifying Objects: The Science Fiction Imaginary and the Act of Landscaping
What might constitute a specifically ‘science fiction imaginary’?
If, beyond any bald definition of narratives or visualizations constituted around scientism, ‘science fiction’ is a responsive montaging of scientific, social and technological development combined with a sense of historical agency, then Philip K. Dick might seem to have described the science fiction imaginary very well – and in an appropriately febrile manner – in these select lines from his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle :
Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction […] the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them […] It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick […] They want to be the agents, not the victims of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike […] their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off.
(2001: 45–46, original emphasis)
Of course, in these lines, Dick was not describing the science fiction imaginary per se – hence my imposition of opportune elisions – but rather the rocket-powered Nazi conquerors of his alternative 1960s, as seen through the eyes of an understandably disgusted Swedish envoy.
Nevertheless, I would plead that the reader allow my admittedly mischievous substitution on the following grounds: firstly, Dick’s emphasis upon a sensibility led by visualization: Dick’s Nazis ‘view’ and ‘see’ their relationship to the cosmos, and disregard that which is invisible; secondly, their mental state is characterized by an overblown anthropocentrist sense of outward self-importance, entangled with an inward desolation in the face of the realities of deep time and space; and, thirdly, as a result of this conflicted state, their collective ego (that category which Lacanian Psychoanalysis describes as the Imaginary) is destabilized by persistent attempts to correlate perpetually fugitive senses of self, place, and of course, history. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has argued that science fiction’s ‘historical situation’ is key to differentiating it from other forms of fantasy (2005: 59). If twentieth-century Nazism can be viewed as the hysterical, obscene culmination of nineteenth-century European discourses on land, nation, eugenics, militarized imperialism and historical ends, then Dick’s achievement lies in his successful re-visioning of those tenets beyond the technologies of the 1940s to the landscape of the 1960s. Of course, all of the above is certainly not to invoke some variant of Godwin’s Law and proclaim all science fiction to be ultimately the result of febrile crypto-fascist imaginings. I invoke Dick’s rocketship Nazis as an example of the contradictions of the science fiction imaginary, presented in extremis . Dick, I would suggest, outlines a certain complex that afflicts all of us who are prone to the fever dreams of speculation and conjecture around science, its evolution and its ends.
There are other, less distasteful ways of thinking of this issue of course. For example, in William Morris’s romance The House of the Wolfings , we find a compelling image of history as landscape, which, as Tom Shippey (Morris 1980) has remarked, offers an image of ‘a note of baffled yearning, even of homesickness, which many writers have drawn on since. This is especially true of science fiction’ (introduction in Morris 1980: xvii–xviii). Morris’s lines on the title page of the House of the Wolfings (1979) read as follows:
As still the dark road drives us on. / E’en so the world of men may turn
At even of some hurried day / And see the ancient glimmer burn / Across the waste that hath no way
As Shippey suggests, ‘Morris was talking about history […] whilst writers of science fiction look to the future. Still, “the waste that has no way” has meaning for fantasists of either kind’ (Morris 1980: xvii–xviii). Shippey’s poignant example suggests an inward doubt and devastation as the obverse of that outward, overblown sense of historical agency Dick gives his Nazis: indeed, we might begin by thinking of the science fiction imaginary as an unstable one, vacillating between these two extremes.
Thus, the present book is about the way we might consider the interplay between the science fiction imaginary and landscape, specifically in relation to visualization: if we think of the imaginary spatially, located ‘geographically’ as a gap between the Real and the Symbolic; if, at the same time, we also consider, in the manner of a remark attributed to William Gibson, 1 namely that the ‘future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed’, then it is through the act of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called ‘landscaping’ (1994: 1) that fragments of the future are encountered, assimilated and historicized into the viewing subject’s experience: ‘What I have seen, with your eyes!’ exclaims the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) to Mr Chew, the ocularist, in Ridley Scott’s film Bladerunner (1982), an adaptation of another novel of Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
In this book, I propose a neologism to talk about science fiction’s particular relationship with landscape and its preoccupations with the visual: ocularity . What I mean by this is viewership that affects a relational artifice: relational in that it is shaped by a f