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Space has agelong been a frontier story rewritten successful the connection of rockets and nationalist dreams. But lately, it’s gotten progressively tangled up with the priorities of American billionaires. From asteroid mining to atomic discarded retention and abstraction hotels, our billionaire people promises america ways to transport task capitalism to caller worlds, albeit leaving this 1 successful ruin. Companies representation retired interplanetary borders and imaginable the satellite for water.
Meanwhile, we’re nary longer successful the property of Big Government abstraction projects. The Cold War era’s abstraction contention has travel and gone, and whispers constituent to an impending slashing of NASA’s budget, which was already facing large heavy cuts with a alteration successful US leadership. With the US abstraction programme connected shaky ground, are we conscionable near with the billionaires up successful the stars, bidding for defence contracts and humming Katy Perry?
The Kármán Line, my hybrid-genre publication of prose and poetry, asks whether we tin ideate caller relationships to the literal cosmos. I travel to Spaceport America, a commercialized abstraction motorboat tract successful Truth oregon Consequences, New Mexico, wherever I find myself tracing fantasies of abstraction and queer beingness done a quality who asks wherefore we tendency distance—from ourselves, from our histories, and adjacent from the Earth itself. The Kármán line, a 1950s mathematical equation by Hungarian aerospace idiosyncratic Theodore von Kármán, is our lone existent notation for immoderate benignant of jurisdictional bound betwixt the Earth and space, a spot astatine the borderline of earth’s ambiance wherever nationalist borders cease to exist. What’s beyond it is known arsenic “free space”: a threshold of possibility. In penning The Kármán Line I recovered myself asking, what is escaped space?
Literature, similar abstraction travel, offers an escape, but besides a mode to reimagine what it means to beryllium tethered to this planet, to each other, to the futures we whitethorn oregon whitethorn not reach. A multi-genre people of experimental writers challenged maine to deliberation against the dependable gravitational propulsion of capitalist orientations to space. Space belongs not to the empire, but to the storytellers, the poets, the dreamers who garbage the logic of extraction and conquest. Each of these books punctual america that different satellite is ever possible, whether here, “out there,” oregon determination between.
Fires Seen From Space by Betsy Fagin
I work Fires Seen From Space in 1 fell swoop aft proceeding Betsy Fagin work successful idiosyncratic astatine The Poetry Project successful New York City. It’s a blazing poesy postulation that inhabits what immoderate anthropologists telephone the “pyrocene,” a caller geologic word describing an property characterized by human‑driven occurrence activity, oregon what Fagin paints arsenic our clip of the titular “fires… seen from space.” Elegiac and revolutionary successful the aforesaid breath, Fagin weaves unneurotic meditations connected ecological collapse, lives lived successful “careless possession,” and afrofuturist visions of resistance. The extremist attraction and patience required for resisting oppressive systems, an ethos that Fagin whitethorn person drawn from her clip helping to physique The People’s Library astatine Occupy Wall Street oregon wearing different activistic hats, is depicted beautifully, successful fragmented imagery sourcing itself from life, affect, and ontologies beyond the terrestrial.
Dark Matter by Aase Berg (translated by Johannes Göransson)
A surreal, unsettling publication of poesy that deforms connection itself, Dark Matter reads similar a transmission from an other-than-human consciousness successful an other-than-Earth setting. Berg’s poesy moves done alien ecologies and dystopian transformations. It makes worldly matter, adjacent wherever signifier is unrecognizable, cyborgian, and other-wordly. Where worldly is simply a assemblage successful Dark Matter, it is hybrid oregon mutant. It coalesces oregon disintegrates according to obscure logics.. What feels urgent astir these poems is their refusal to inhabit a signifier we recognize, bringing alternatively energies hostile to states of being (and bodying) wrong our rigid Earthly frameworks.
After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions by Eva Díaz
Eva Díaz’s superb rethinking of R. Buckminster Fuller’s utopian imaginativeness of our satellite arsenic a shared spaceship, “Spaceship Earth,” is simply a concealed mode to dive into a captious past of creation astir space. But After Spaceship Earth is not a survey—it comes with its ain chiseled lens that is itself a politics. I was struck by however Díaz weaves Fuller’s geodesic domes and techno-optimism into the enactment of implicit 30 modern artists who dismantle the imperialist, corporate, and patriarchal myths of abstraction exploration. Through artists similar John Akomfrah, Mary Mattingly, and Farhiya Jama, Díaz reveals that outer abstraction is not conscionable a playground for billionaires but a contested tract wherever histories of colonialism, radical injustice, and sex exclusion are reimagined. I appreciated however she connects Afrofuturism and ecofeminism to Fuller’s experimental spirit, yet exposes his unsighted spots. This publication is simply a counter-narrative to the exploitative dreams of SpaceX and Blue Origin, insisting that just, sustainable, and plural futures are possible.
FUEL by Rosie Stockton
While this poesy postulation takes spot connected Earth, Stockton’s meditations amid a worsening clime situation and “impossible apocalypse” pulls america done scenes spanning Los Angeles neighborhoods and pumpjack lipid fields. FUEL is a punk polyphony that explores a satellite transformed by h2o scarcity and veiled stars, inhabited by a narrator that wants to emotion and combat successful the breakage. I recovered this publication to beryllium an intimate, speculative meditation connected however humanity faces extinction, grief, and continuation. Poems titled “Dear End,” reason its sections. Stockton refuses didacticism and moves done raw, messy and tender interpersonal moments. The postulation resists techno-imperialist fantasies of escaping Earth, alternatively asking however we transportation emotion and nonaccomplishment crossed generations, successful and done contaminated futures. For me, this became a publication astir abstraction arsenic a fragile continuum of quality longing, insisting that adjacent amid planetary ruin, our capableness to ideate compassion survives, tethering america imperfectly to each other.
How High We Go successful the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Also acceptable connected Earth, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s caller takes spot successful a satellite and clip extracurricular our present, drafting america done interconnected stories spanning centuries. How High We Go successful the Dark is simply a haunting, polyphonic caller that explores a near-future satellite transformed by a precocious thawed, past Arctic microorganism that sets disconnected a devastating planetary plague.Each section introduces characters similar scientists, grieving parents, children, robots, and abstraction explorers whose lives intersect done acts of attraction and resilience. What struck maine astir is however Nagamatsu flips acquainted sci-fi tropes: Space travel, cryogenics, and clime catastrophe go tender sites for mourning alternatively than conquest. This publication insists upon our capableness for compassion, fusing america to each different and the stars.
Alien Weaving by Will Alexander
Will Alexander is simply a radiant, high-intensity surrealist thinker whose connection spirals into an extraterrestrial poetics that is not for everyone, but is surely for some. When I archetypal heard his work, I was captivated by the ways it functioned astir arsenic an architecture structured to execute the infinite penetrability of 1 thought into the next. Alien Weaving was successful hibernation for astir 15 years earlier it was published. Reading the publication again recently, I felt similar I was stepping into a supernova. The novella unfolds wholly wrong the supra-consciousness of Kathrada, an Afro-Indian writer whose enactment births worlds. Rather than charting abstraction arsenic an empire to beryllium mapped oregon mined, Kathrada’s caput is the cosmos. Poltergeists, spectral suns, and hallucinatory verbs constellate into an anti-cartography that dissolves assemblage boundaries. I’ve started to deliberation of Will Alexander’s enactment arsenic annihilating the thought of abstraction arsenic a frontier. It considers abstraction an interior infinitude. Alexander’s ecstatic Surrealism and extremist Black poetics cull linear narration, acquainted sense-making, and different forms of imperial reason. In Kathrada’s blaze of perception, abstraction exists arsenic a magnitude of mind, an ozone of spirit, not a battlefield of domination. Alien Weaving reminds maine that imaginativeness itself tin beryllium a sovereign cosmos, ungoverned and luminously alive.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
No database astir space, power, and alternate possibilities would beryllium implicit without Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which turned 50 past year. (Happy birthday!) If you, similar me, were ever meaning to work it, you whitethorn vaguely cognize that the publication offers a imaginativeness of an anarchist satellite nine struggling against the gravitational propulsion of capitalism and excess. Le Guin’s duplicate planets, Urras and Anarres, widen authorities repression into space, wherever imperial logics spell unchecked. But the novel’s profound counter-narrative centers successful Anarres, the anarchist moon, which embodies a surviving experimentation successful communal aid, corporate decision-making, and state from backstage property. trust. Le Guin’s utopian worlds stay fragile and unfinished, everlastingly susceptible to bureaucratic rigidity and the propulsion of aged hierarchies.
Unlike stories that glorify abstraction colonization arsenic progress, The Dispossessed insists that state indispensable beryllium continually reimagined, not exported similar a commodity. For me, this publication remains a stunning reminder that the societal beingness of abstraction tin reproduce earthly authorities and economics, oregon go a galvanizing constituent for solidarity beyond nationalist (Earth) borders.
Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov
I was introduced to Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik utopian science‑fiction caller by McKenzie Wark done Molecular Red, her scholarly publication that unpacks Bogdanov’s theories of labour and materialism done his aboriginal 20th Century writings. Wark’s instrumentality connected the novel, Red Star, was truthful compelling that I had to spot for myself what it’s similar to beryllium transported from a defeated Russian insurrection to a socialist nine connected Mars. On the reddish planet, the book’s main quality and narrator, Leonid, encounters an organized, technocratic commune with rotating labour assignments, an experimentation successful corporate surviving with precocious atomic vigor and adjacent atypical sex norms. The quality intends to larn from this socialist strategy and instrumentality to Earth, specifically his autochthonal St. Petersburg, with caller tools, but mishaps on the way, including a execution plot, permission him questioning overmuch astir his journey. What Bogdanov reveals done Red Star, and what is truthful peculiar to Bogdanov’s reasoning and position aft witnessing the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and clashing with Vladimir Lenin, is that utopia built connected cooperative authorities is fragile, imperfect and ever creating itself. Future quality and extraterrestrial world-making requires an tremendous magnitude of proceedings and error.
The station 8 Books About Space That Reimagine What It Means to Live connected Earth appeared archetypal connected Electric Literature.
