How would I place Rytius Records, if I were to look at it genre-critically?
No matter how far out, intergalactic, future primitive, medieval, fantastic, or high-tech the story, science fiction is always about the present. The world of the author. So, no one can write any story without writing about the present, and the choice of genre indicates something about the author’s own perspective.
I believe that we are living in a post-apocalypse, right now, in ℝeality. That’s the only thing Rytius Records can be about.
But what is the nature of that apocalypse?
I can definitely pretend to begin to answer this question. I am a left communist, a libertarian Marxist, and I believe the world working class will and must liberate itself from capital accumulation. I absolutely sort of know what I think the apocalypse must have been made of.
And yet I can’t quite grasp it to speak it directly, precisely.
So instead of throwing historical facts and figures in its general direction, hoping to build up some sort of silhouette where they stick, I think it’s more useful creatively, emotionally and therefore intellectually to use the landscape of existing literary and artistic attempts to orient the question and thereby illuminate possible answers.
I think science fiction has come to be either premonitory of apocalypse, or post-apocalyptic.
(There is a utopian science fiction, but examples are few and far between, and thinking about what I know, it seems like most utopian sci-fi is from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before World War II. I know something about, but I have not read, Ursula LeGuin’s Dispossessed and Samuel Delany’s Triton, so I can’t say much about them.)
I attempt in the video to line up some premonitory works like Frankenstein, 1984, and Brave New World over against some post-apocalyptic sci-fi works, to see what themes jump out. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I feel like the themes really only jump out if one expands the field beyond sci-fi.