*LOCAL AUTHOR* Reading Event, TONIGHT!

Peter Paik, author of From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

Boswell Book Company @ 7pm

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 using 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. 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.

Author bio: Peter Y. Paik is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.