game kings

Monday, January 26, 2015

"A study on science fiction would be worthwhile. This widespread fad may owe its tremendous popularity to its ingenious solution to the conflict between irrationality and common sense. The science fiction reader need no longer feel ashamed of being a superstitious and gullible person. The fantasies of his own making, no matter how irrational they are, and how much projective content of either individual or collective nature may be implied, appear no longer as irreconcilable to reality. Thus, the term ‘another world’ which once had a metaphysical meaning, is here brought down to the level of astronomy and obtains an empirical ring. Ghosts and horrible threats often reviving repulsive freakish entities of olden times, are treated as natural and scientific objects coming out of space from another star and preferably from another galaxy although to the best of today’s biological knowledge, the ‘law of convergence’ would probably lead even on distant stars to developments much more similar to those on earth than it appears in the secularizations of demonology enjoyed by the science fiction reader. Man’s own reification and mechanization is projected back upon reality in the very widespread robot literature. Incidentally, science fiction consummates a long tradition of American literature dealing with the irrational while at the same time denying its irrationality. Edgar Allen Poe is in various respects the inventor of science fiction, no less than of the detective story."

Adorno, 34th footnote of “The Stars Down to Earth: The LA Times Astrology Column.”