European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age

Abstract

Ubiquitous, limitless and ever-expanding as it may be, outer space has a history too. Over the course of the twentieth century, the dark, infinite and unfamiliar vastness that surrounds us has stimulated the human imagination to an extent hitherto unknown. Numerous ventures to ‘explore,’ ‘conquer’ and ‘colonize’ the depths of the universe in both fact and fiction must be read as attempts to counter the prevailing horror vacui, the fear of empty spaces and voids of infinity felt and explicitly formulated since the sixteenth century. They all aim at overcoming what Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) termed in 1917 humankind’s ‘cosmological mortification,’ the humiliating decentering of the earth effected by Nicolaus Copernicus’s (1473–1543) heliocentric cosmology. Three decades and two world wars after Freud’s observation, influential British futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) identified a related ‘desire to know, whatever the consequences may be, whether or not man is alone in an empty universe’ as the one key motive underlying all human efforts to overcome gravity and reach out beyond humankind’s natural habitat on planet Earth.²

‘Outer Space’ is an expanding subject.

D. J. Gibson, British Foreign Office (26 October 1959)¹