"I read Peter Y. Paik's lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one
single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and
exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible."
--Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science fiction
graphic novels and films compel audiences to reflect on the
politics and societal ills of the day. Through character and story,
science fiction brings theory to life, giving shape to the
motivations behind the action as well as to the consequences they
produce. In "From Utopia to Apocalypse," Peter Y. Paik shows how
science fiction generates intriguing and profound insights into
politics. He reveals that the fantasy of putting annihilating
omnipotence to beneficial effect underlies the revolutionary
projects that have defined the collective upheavals of the modern
age. Paik traces how this political theology is expressed, and
indeed literalized, in popular superhero fiction, examining works
including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel "Watchmen,"
the science fiction cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, the manga of Hayao
Miyazaki, Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta," and the Matrix trilogy.
Superhero fantasies are usually seen as compensations for
individual feelings of weakness, victimization, and vulnerability.
But Paik presents these fantasies as social constructions concerned
with questions of political will and the disintegration of
democracy rather than with the psychology of the personal. What is
urgently at stake, Paik argues, is a critique of the limitations
and deadlocks of the political imagination. The utopias dreamed of
by totalitarianism, which must be imposed through torture,
oppression, and mass imprisonment, nevertheless persist in liberal
political systems. With this reality looming throughout, Paik
demonstrates the uneasy juxtaposition of saintliness and cynically
manipulative realpolitik, of torture and the assertion of human
dignity, of cruelty and benevolence.
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