ABSTRACT
The transcendence of the spectacle can sooth the viewer to sleep, but can also wake them up to the artificial nature of the industrial world and aid perception of how an alternate reality could be substituted. This chapter links various notions of the sublime as evoked by special effects to science fiction as 'cognitive estrangement' and note some of the political implications of special effects. The assumption by many science fiction readers is that Hollywood films are products that are inferior to the personal statements made in the work of European directors such as Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. With the replacement of a barter system with monetary exchange system, the worker becomes exposed to something alien, a word with connotations within science fiction. The rest of twentieth-century pulp science fiction is lumped together and he dismisses the efforts of editors such as Hugo Gernsback that keep science fiction alive at cost of starving, stunting, and deforming it.
