In the last essay in this series I mentioned Roadside Picnic and The Doomed City by the Sturgatsk...

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In the last essay in this series I mentioned Roadside Picnic and The Doomed City by the Sturgatsky Brothers (Arkady and Boris) as a model for the transition to the Heterochronic Era. With this might be included the Stalker film by Tarkovsky which is an extension of the Roadside Picnic book. We are interested in The Doomed City (TDC) because it was kept hidden for quite a few years by the brothers before it was felt safe to publish it. It was produced in an Ideological nightmare of Soviet times where the state supported fantasy hand departed sharply from the reality on the ground for most Russians due to official censorship and was written as a reaction to that situation and thus it is relevant to Zizek’s theorizing about Ideology. The brothers supported the official ideology and wrote a series of books set in the Noon Universe set in 2200 that projected an ideal picture of the universe in which Communism had become the norm in the future. But as the brothers work developed they produced rather gritty views of what life was like within the ideological system on the ground dealing with its reality an example of which was Roadside Picnic (RP) which took them eight years to get published and then with only many changes demanded by the censors. The ideology of the brother’s work was never questioned, only whether the realistic depiction of characters would have on Russian Youth. We can now read an unchanged version of that book in the net translation by Olena Bormashenko . Because Roadside Picnic was made into a movie by Tarkovsky called Stalker it is the most famous book of the brothers. But I was intrigued when I read about TDC being a hidden book during Soviet times. A history of the production of TDC is given in the afterword. It was basically written in secret and kept secret by the brothers. It is explained what in the book made them sure that it was not publishable and why they feared for themselves if it were found by the authorities. What we want to do here is explain in greater detail why these two books make a good as any model for the Heterochronic and generally connect these books to Zizek’s work, based on Lacan, concerning Ideology.



Key Words: Time, Multidimensionality of Time, Aspects of Being, Heterochonic, Mythopoietic, Metaphysical, Eras, Epochs, Four-Dimensional Time, Roadside Picnic, The Doomed City, Sturgatsky, Embedding