Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 141

Machines for Ultimate Questions

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this genre we come closer to an understanding of the contemporary individual.
This genre, seen as lowbrow and profane by traditional (and old-fashioned)
opinions, actually develops “high-definition” issues regarding the intimacy and
feelings of the contemporary individual. The aim of the following essay is to stress
those features of science fiction which could be understood as even crucial for
understanding of particular aspects of popular technoculture.
How is it that the novel by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside
Picnic concludes—as a text which indeed has no Burroughs’ Interzone but does
have a Zone, an area as enigmatic and forbidden as it can be, a contaminated
rubbish tip, and, at the same time, also a metaphor for transcendence itself? To put
this with the monologue of the main character, Redrick, a stalker, who, as the last
secret of the Zon e is revealed, becomes aware of how tragic and senseless his
doings are, and also discovers things which are above his life action and stalker’s
fate: “I am an animal, you see that. I don’t have the words, they didn’t teach me
the words. I don’t know how to think, the bastards didn’t let me learn how to
think. But if you really are ... all-powerful... all-knowing ... then you figure it out!
Look into my heart. I know that everything you need is in there. It has to be. I
never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! You take from me what it is
I want... it just can’t be that I would want something bad! Damn it all, I can’t think
of anything, except those words of his: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE,
AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!.” (Strugatsky 145)
These words, which remind one of the monologues of the characters of world
literature’s great texts, perhaps even those of Dostoevsky’s The B ro th e rs
K aram azov, direct one towards the fundamental issues of contemporary science
fiction; its core lies no longer only in the fascination with modern technology and
technosciences, but in the shift to fundamental anthropological, existential and
social themes, as well as to problems which bring into focus the fundamental
issues of individuals—even though what is at issue is no longer the individual in
the sense of the modern-age subject as pondered in Western philosophy, neither
existence in the sense of the philosophical existentialism, but a being with a shaky
and vulnerable identity, set somewhere between the animate and inanimate, or,
indeed, between two deaths (Lacan’s concept). The stalker’s poignant realisation
at the disclosure of the z on e as the transcendental principle of his life’s tragic path
embodies the core of present-day science fiction.
Science fiction is a field where what is at issue—so to speak— is the matters
of life and death; in a concentrated way it establishes a c lea r space from which the
protagonists cannot escape and have to confront the deepest dilemmas of the
individual, the most critical existential issues and answers to them. This is fiction
in which star wars count less and the war within the self has taken over. Often this
is the war for existential self-fulfilment and the battle with the threat of apocalyptic