Apocryphally, in 1968, David Bowie conceived of Ziggy Stardust, his androgynous alien alter ego, after attending a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick’s film, science-fiction is an existential meditation on the limits of reason and experience, a journey to the outermost reaches of the universe in which we find ourselves confronted with the alien irrationality of our own orienting contradictions.  Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust gives these existential conflicts a throbbing pulse, marrying the cosmic ruminations in Kubrick’s film to the subversive power and alien strangeness of adolescent sexuality in Rock and Roll: as an uncanny figure of the future, an avatar of what’s to come.