STRANGELOVE COUNTRY – PAPERBACK

STRANGELOVE COUNTRY: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness
March 18, 2025
Paperback, 222 pages
ISBN: 978-1-960451-09-5

D. Harlan Wilson’s Strangelove Country is an original, dynamic study of Stanley Kubrick’s relationship with science fiction that explores how the genre shaped his cinematic identity and how that identity reshaped the genre. Focusing on Kubrick’s futurist trilogy—Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange—as well as his collaboration with Steven Spielberg on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Wilson takes a unique approach that is at once scholarly and defiant of academic stodge. Specifically, he views the “Kubrickian consciousness” through the lens of schizoanalysis and filmosophy, methods of inquiry that he uses to probe how Kubrick’s oeuvre forms a singular, autonomous, interstitial “filmind” distinct from the director, with its own manner of thinking, seeing, and being. Synthesizing film theory, critical analysis, and certain novelistic techniques, Wilson reaffirms Kubrick’s status as one of the twentieth century’s greatest auteurs while casting new light on the filmmaker’s extraordinary contribution to the history of cinema.

“You might feel as though there is no new space to explore in the film of Stanley Kubrick, an artist whose work has fascinated academics and audiences alike for decades. And then you enter Strangelove Country, in which D. Harlan Wilson analyzes Kubrick’s works as a unified system of thought, a filmind that proffers abiding themes, neurotic preoccupations, and existential theses. Wilson treats Kubrick’s filmic body of work as a cogently thinking mind and subjects it to agile and omnivorous analysis; in the process, he paints a vivid portrait of a mind that thinks science fictionally and avidly about how we use technology and how it uses us. Putting film-philosophy (i.e., filmosophy) into practice, Wilson’s writing is both intellectually rigorous and playful, shuttling keenly between the stable structures of the big themes that stabilize the Kubrickian legacy and the digressive minutiae that keep it vitally humane.” —DAN NORTH, author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects, and the Virtual Actor

“D. Harlan Wilson has written a deeply personal, intense, and persuasive reading of Stanley Kubrick’s core science fiction films: Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, with a bonus discussion of Steven Spielberg’s Kubrick-inspired A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The writing throughout is strong and compelling; the ideas and insights remarkable and often startling. Strangelove Country is an important addition to Kubrick literature.” —ROBERT P. KOLKER, author of Kubrick: An Odyssey and The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema

“Wilson has produced one of the very best full-length critical treatments of Kubrick’s work that has yet appeared. This book will help us to understand and appreciate not only Kubrick’s supreme importance for science fiction cinema but also the importance of science fiction for the whole multigeneric Kubrick oeuvre.” —CARL FREEDMAN, author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction

“This feisty, energetic romp through Stanley Kubrick’s futurist oeuvre places the ‘Kubrickian filmind’ at the center of a science fictionalized film history beginning with George Méliès and continuing through the Wachowski sisters. Trading the archival compulsion in favor of a more schizoanalytic approach, Wilson provocatively reminds us that Kubrick was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but a master craftsman whose stories of desensitized posthumans violently smashing their way through alienating technosocial landscapes resonate with the greater sweep of modern Western philosophy and art. A must-read for Kubrick enthusiasts!” —LISA YASZEK, author of Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction and editor of The Future Is Female! Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women