Nice bit of juxtaposition in my Saturday morning reading:
it’s hard not to feel the Zone as a simulacrum for the internet itself in these late days of humanity: an increasingly cursed realm through which we willingly stalk, despite our certain knowledge of its very unreality. We know that, say, our Facebook friends are not our real friends, that “Like” doesn’t mean like, that an Instagram vacation doesn’t reflect the vacation had, that any video we see might be an algorithmic fake, that news sources have been bled free of their staff, and that the few fact-checkers left alive have become the last scattered acolytes of a dying cult.
[AVClub: A brief history of The Zone]
All sci-fi allows its creator a certain aesthetic free reign, but the Zone focuses it on a certain melancholy stretch of the subconscious mind. It’s proven alchemical; with each new adaptation, it transforms again, the pieces moving into new positions. It’s hard to grow tired of a place that’s impossible to map.
Towards a view of SFF as the pulp twin of surrealism.
the Budafoki amended 