Science Fiction — Volume 2: Enormous devices, tiny decisions
The big idea put at the service of one decision of the heart.
Your ebooks, ready now and whenever you want
- Download right after payment
- A copy by email, easy to find later
- Your personal library: sign in with your email and download again whenever you want
- PDF and EPUB for common devices, available from your library
The volume
A simulated reality, a visitor left behind, a dream nested inside another dream, a black hole, a language written in a circle. None of these devices exists in order to explain the universe: each one exists to bring a single person in front of a decision of the heart they would otherwise never have had to make. Accept a truth that hurts. Let the person you love go. Stop demanding proof. Keep a promise across time. Say yes to a life whose ending you already know. Five times the largest machine the genre knows how to build is there to force somebody into a tiny gesture, and the gesture has a price. This is the volume of high concept with a heartbeat: how to make an abstraction concrete, and how to make it hand you the bill in domestic currency.
The five films, and why they are here
The Matrix
A vertiginous idea handed to an object that fits in one hand: the choice made without knowing what waits on the other side.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Tenderness planted early and collected late, with a bond built so that holding on becomes the surest way to lose each other.
Inception
The heist blueprint with the vault inside a skull: a plan laid out in detail for the pleasure of watching it blow up.
Interstellar
An object left in a daughter's hands, and two hours of silence before that setup is collected.
Arrival
How a non-linear structure can be the theme of the film itself, and not a device put on display.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.