SFitze Substack (migratory) l.a.s.t. issue
-newSFplatter by ST-
So good to have you around in this year of 2024, dear patient recipients of these nerdy newsplatters in times of tribulation, great suffering, and war profiteering. For some time I have been planning the BIG move to another platform (sheesh - other worlds, other utopias). Not even worth mentioning how toxic life on Substack or Twitter/X has become for many of its regular users. I was entreated to follow the example of bold others (like Charlie Jane Anders), whom I enjoy reading and respect as human beings, nerds, interplanetary critters and SF groundbreaking authors. Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You also played a role.
Yeah, the Splinternet cannot save you, but what can you do? Since the 90s there has been talk about cyber-balkanization. Now we’re stuck with blooming techno-nationalism and strategic friendshoring. But isn’t that just an amplification of structural internal divisions and centrifugal forces inherent to late capitalism turbo-charged by algo-capitalistic means? If it wasn’t clear till now, the fate of the peones/users now seems fully at the mercy of Big Tech. Corporation Wars impact everyone - and just because Substack has had an argument with TW/X in April 2023 the tweet embedding feature is not available any longer.
Maybe we should ban the use of “cyber-balkanization” labels as well as filter out all the tired (frontier thesis) Wild West Internet metaphors (from the barbed wire “frontier West” to the “guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace”) from the 90s. Currently, one is made to feel like chaff to the whims of tech billionaires. So how is the butterfly anti-social platform effect affecting you and others?
Will you go seek a temporary shelter from the hurricane of billionaire takeovers - on Bluesky or Mastodon, or elsewhere in this ever-narrowing wide web Mmm!?
So, if Substack was in tune with the Bitcoinization of Solarpunk & everything else, then good riddance and Bonjour Buttondown! If you are still interested, you will continue to receive this newsletter from my new innocuously looking buttondown SFitze account whenever the last batch of SF links, videos, comments, and suggestions starts spilling over into your inbox.
No matter how you take it, Jordan S Caroll’s (author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and The Class Politics of US Editors and forthcoming Speculative Whiteness: Race, Science Fiction, and the Alt-Right) comment nails it. Tyler Austin Harper TW certainly railed up everyone (is it a surprise?) - and sometimes shock tactics are needed to articulate an unspoken consensus or question entrenched presuppositions about what SF as a genre does or can do. What future solidarity can garner SF and how is it still shaped by its Marxist and historical materialist roots? Thinking here of Jameson and Suvin of course. We cannot disentangle this commercially successful and popular genre from other historical struggles and turning points in history and we cannot abstract it from the disastrous associations with tech billionaires and US post-Cold War technological hegemony.
VIDEOS
Star Dust (1973) by Proiko Proikov
Here is a marvelous dreamy and mysterious Boyana Film SF animation Star Dust from 1973 by Bulgarian cartoonist Proiko Proikov (1927-2000), one of the masters of East Bloc animation who graduated in the "painting" department in the class of Professor Iliya Petrov at National Art Academy "Nikolay Pavlovich", Sofia, Bulgaria in 1951. The Cosmos behind the adventures of this little cosmonaut functions like a gigantic series of paintings that you can get lost in. With each sequence, the tiny cosmonaut in his little UFO is traveling deeper along the spiraling blues of increasing depth and pulsating orbs. His planetary landings and mishaps are all about color and resonance. We could even say that this was psychedelia in the Socialist bloc, where no psychedelia was supposed to exist because building Socialism was supposed to be psychedelic enough. This type of animation blends very easily with the well-known monumental mosaics that used to grace neighborhood complexes, Mathematics Institutes or Houses of Pioneers - but because of its medium and original destination it is set apart from those public artworks. This animation is an audio-visual expression of the aims and visions of that Socialist time in outer space. What I like about Proikov’s delicate and full-of-wonder Bulgarian Star Dust animation is that it lacks the heroic or Promethean quality as well as the underlying agonistic message of the “Man against Nature” monumental art (and much of cosmist thought) that we are generally used to. One can say here that the entire universe expresses a certain animatedness and responsiveness (Socialist panpsychism?). This is fully expressed in a smaller artwork, one could say in the ‘minor’ genre of animation - specifically made for a youthful audience or festivals. The adventures it depicts are much less grandiose in terms of achievements or expected results. The content is completely playful, willfully naive, fragile and entrancing. Nevertheless, the majority of these mosaics are under constant threat - as exemplified by the “Man Conquers Cosmos” by the East German artist Fritz Eisel made in Potsdam in 1972 (almost contemporary with Proikov’s animation) that graces the Künstlerhaus (House of the Arts) Rechenzentrum (Computing Center) Socialist era building. Because they are rebuilding a tower of the Prussian Garrison Church next door his mosaic risks destruction. The city council has decided that you have still time to see it till 2026. As for Proiko Proikov, I really appreciate the fact that his works are now archived online, and if you are interested you can check out more of his filmography on IMDB (more biographical notes) and YT.
Meow or Never | A Musical Stop-Motion Following a Catstronaut's Search for the Meaning of Life directed by Neeraja Raj
“Depending on your outlook, upbringing and thoughts on religion, the meaning of life will have various interpretations. Purpose in our existence is something we’re all searching for and despite the diverse conclusions on how we should spend our time, many seem to agree that kindness, compassion and companionship is the best route to contentment. For the protagonist – a planet-hopping catstronaut – in Neeraja Raj’s energetic stop-motion musical, Meow or Never, she’s also on the hunt for meaning and as is often the case, she finds it in the most-unexpected of places.” (YouTube description)
[Sheryl Hamilton's presentation on the Medical SF panel amongst other examples of disease-positive art - including the ongoing work of Pei-Ying Lin aptly named VIROPHILIA performance exhibition & cookbook]
DRESDEN August 2023 SF Conference DISRUPTIVE IMAGINATIONS
All in all 2023 was an incredibly busy year. Starting with the summer of 2023 in Dresden when I had the unique chance to meet in person some incredible people - Steven Shaviro (who got a well-earned SFRA lifetime award), Sheryl Vint, and none the least Ali Sperling (who also curated the excellent performance art side-events to the conference).
I owe it all to Ali and to Irina Gheorghe who was invited as part of the performative program at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden which by the way - is my favorite technology & computing (check the section on SC history!) museum in the whole wide world! I was able to attend the Disruptive Imagination conference of young, emerging, and established acafans, some of them legendary or soon to become legendary in the hot SF studies area of research. It was organized under the aegis of TU Dresden (Technical University Dresden) who merged two meetings in one: the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) and the German Association for Research in the Fantastic (GfF). I have been tweeting about the various speakers and the presentations that I have been able to attend. Of course, there were so many excellent panels that you felt like cloning yourself to be able to attend them all. it’s a promise: my next SFitze will deal with the DI conference at some length. It was such a great delight to be in the midst of it and exchange ideas with all these wonderful people - but also to celebrate the location - which was Dresden, a town in the former East, and a city that has so much to offer in terms of Science museums (not only the Technische Sammlungen bit also the biomedical Hygiene Museum which is truly one of a kind and that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest in the history of biomedical science or biology or STEM education).
REVIEWS
Scavengers Reign
For me, THE SF movie & animation event of 2023 was the launch of this incredible Max miniseries titled Scavengers Reign. If you have not seen you might have missed the most important piece of SF of the last couple of years. And HERE is why.
Journey to the West (宇宙探索编辑部)
I finally got to see the directorial debut of Dashan Kong, after my new friend Zixuan a 25 year old translator and SF studies scholar at the SFW (Science Fiction World) – the largest circulation prozine in China told me that he watched it 3 times.
He recommended watching it with some good tea or some good booze in a warm, cozy place. And this I did. I do not pretend to know why this small-budget funny, melodramatic, nostalgic ‘first contact’ weird movie made such a big impact on him or his peers or why he scored 8.4 out of 10 score on the Chinese movie/book/music recommendation network Douban. But I will try to say why you should watch and search for a subbed version of this small serendipitous gem. For more check my review here and the gorgeous poster art.
More reviews:
Murder At the End of the World (Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij miniseries)
ARTICLES
I wrote an article for BG about reading Georges Corson’s “Les Seigneurs de la guerre” during the Pershing missile crisis, current war-mongering, and the fractalization of mercenary neoliberalism. Click here for more.
“Today, one can believe the doubts expressed by the well-known critic of techno-solutionism, Evgeny Morozov, in Le Monde diplomatique May 2023 German edition, that instead of a return to “military Keynesianism,” we might get a full-blown “military neoliberalism.” In Cold War 2.0, we are bombarded with examples from a growing military-industrial-entertainment menu. The AI hype and the promise of AI supremacy, achievable or not, is already instrumental in securing capital for Big Tech investments and strategic funds. Even as we empathize with the thousands of Hollywood strikers who are protesting against a future controlled by proprietary AI and suffocating inequality in the midst of a terrible heat wave, let’s not empathize with an industry built on cultural imperialism and military-industrial-entertainment deals. Let’s take this opportunity to decouple the dream industry from the commercial and strategic interests it serves on the home front and beyond.”