File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Dec1.95, message 11


From: jyacc!sparks!hleung-AT-uunet.uu.net (H. Curtiss Leung)
Subject: Nietzsche and SF
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 95 13:20:05 EST


John Morgan writes:

> 
> I find it curious that, more often unconsciously than deliberately (although
> not always), so much science fiction in the 20th century has contained
> Nietzschean ideas or themes. Probably more of a credit to Nietzsche's 
> understanding of modernity than to most SF writers. The idea of an 
> "uebermensch" in one form or another has haunted SF from the beginning of 
> the century to this day. More recently, Nietzschean concepts such as the 
> "last man" and the end of history have been cropping up, 

	Just to pick nits: I thought the 'end of history' thesis was
something out of Hegel and Kojeve.  Anyway...

>	...and SF has ALWAYS
> insisted on the subjectivity of truth and the impossibility of definition. 

	Always?  Funny ... most of the science fiction I know seems to be 
nothing but technocratic, militaristic propaganda.

> It certainly was no accident that Stanley Kubrick used Strauss' "Also Sprach 
> Zarathustra" to open "2001: A Space Odyssey", perhaps the most Nietzschean 
> film ever made. 

	Most Wagnerian film ever made is probably more like it.  The sonic
bombast of Strauss' _Zarathustra_ is a perfect complement to Kubrick's
visual bombast.  And speaking of Strauss' _Zarathustra_, does anybody else
find the opening overpowering and completely out of proportion to the opening 
of N.'s _Zarathustra_?  "For no sunrise, even in mountains, is pompous,
triumphal, imperial; each one is faint and timorous, like a hope that 
all may yet be well, and it is this very unobtrusiveness of the mightiest
light that is moving and overpowering." -- Th. Adorno, writing of Strauss'
_Alpine Symphony_, but I think it applies to his _Zarathustra_ as well.

> <stuff deleted>
> ...How might he have imagined the future? Would he have seen a
> Gernsbackian utopia of glittering chrome and art deco? I sincerely doubt it. A
> race of super-beings who have abandoned their physical forms in favor of a new
> state of existence, as in Olaf Stapledon or Arthur C. Clarke?
> <more stuff deleted>
> So let's speculate: what would Nietzsche's science fiction novel be like?
> 

	Why speculate?  This is from _Human, All Too Human_, 
"Assorted Opinions and Maxims":

	_A Vision_: Lectures and hours of meditation for adults, for the 
	mature  and maturest, and these daily, without compulsion but 
	attended by everyone as a command of custom: the churches as the 
	worthiest venues for them because richest in memories: every day as 
	it were a festival of attained and attainable dignity of human
	reason: a new and fuller efflorescence of the ideal of the teacher,
	in which the priest, the artist and the physician, the man of
	knowledge and the man of wisdom, are fused with one another, 
	with a resultant fusion of their separate virtues into a single
	total virtue which would be expressed in their teaching itself,
	in their delivery and their methods -- this is my vision: it returns
	to me again and again, and I firmly believe the it lifts a corner of
	the veil of the future.
-- 
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