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Proust and Science Fiction (crookedtimber.org)
28 points by collapse on July 18, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



A very science-fictional (or anti-science-fictional) passage from Proust is:

> A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

R. A. Lafferty has a delightful short story with this very premise, appropriately titled "Through other eyes": https://archive.org/stream/Future_Science_Fiction_47_1960-02...


For a really hard SF look at this sort of thing take a look at Peter Watts' Blindsight.


So, psychedelics?




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