Imagining Outer Space

Imagining Outer Space PDF

Author: Alexander C.T. Geppert

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-25

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1349953393

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Imagining Outer Space makes a captivating advance into the cultural history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the European imagination. How was outer space conceived and communicated? What promises of interplanetary expansion and cosmic colonization propelled the project of human spaceflight to the forefront of twentieth-century modernity? In what way has West-European astroculture been affected by the continuous exploration of outer space? Tracing the thriving interest in spatiality to early attempts at exploring imaginary worlds beyond our own, the book analyzes contact points between science and fiction from a transdisciplinary perspective and examines sites and situations where utopian images and futuristic technologies contributed to the omnipresence of fantasmatic thought. Bringing together state-of-the-art work in this emerging field of historical research, the volume breaks new ground in the historicization of the Space Age.

Imagining Outer Space

Imagining Outer Space PDF

Author: Alexander C.T. Geppert

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 9781349312153

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Imagining Outer Space makes a captivating advance into the cultural history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the twentieth-century imagination. Bringing together seventeen state-of-the-art essays, the volume explores the complexities of West-European astroculture and breaks new ground in the historicization of the Space Age.

Space and the American Imagination

Space and the American Imagination PDF

Author: Howard E. McCurdy

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-03

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0801898684

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People dreamed of cosmic exploration—winged spaceships and lunar voyages; space stations and robot astronauts—long before it actually happened. Space and the American Imagination traces the emergence of space travel in the popular mind, its expression in science fiction, and its influence on national space programs. Space exploration dramatically illustrates the power of imagination. Howard E. McCurdy shows how that power inspired people to attempt what they once deemed impossible. In a mere half-century since the launch of the first Earth-orbiting satellite in 1957, humans achieved much of what they had once only read about in the fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and the nonfiction of Willy Ley. Reaching these goals, however, required broad-based support, and McCurdy examines how advocates employed familiar metaphors to excite interest (promising, for example, that space exploration would recreate the American frontier experience) and prepare the public for daring missions into space. When unexpected realities and harsh obstacles threatened their progress, the space community intensified efforts to make their wildest dreams come true. This lively and important work remains relevant given contemporary questions about future plans at NASA. Fully revised and updated since its original publication in 1997, Space and the American Imagination includes a reworked introduction and conclusion and new chapters on robotics and space commerce.

Black Space

Black Space PDF

Author: Adilifu Nama

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0292778767

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Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2008 Science fiction film offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films, including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the issue of race and specifically with the representation of blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories, Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film; racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and "otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of African American representation in science fiction film, Black Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.

Placing Outer Space

Placing Outer Space PDF

Author: Lisa Messeri

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-09-22

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0822373912

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In Placing Outer Space Lisa Messeri traces how the place-making practices of planetary scientists transform the void of space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known and explored. Making planets into places is central to the daily practices and professional identities of the astronomers, geologists, and computer scientists Messeri studies. She takes readers to the Mars Desert Research Station and a NASA research center to discuss ways scientists experience and map Mars. At a Chilean observatory and in MIT's labs she describes how they discover exoplanets and envision what it would be like to inhabit them. Today’s planetary science reveals the universe as densely inhabited by evocative worlds, which in turn tells us more about Earth, ourselves, and our place in the universe.

Limiting Outer Space

Limiting Outer Space PDF

Author: Alexander C.T. Geppert

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-18

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1137369167

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Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of space fatigue and planetized limits. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period.

How Outer Space Made America

How Outer Space Made America PDF

Author: Dr Daniel Sage

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-11-28

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1472423666

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In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.

Imagining Earth

Imagining Earth PDF

Author: Solvejg Nitzke

Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9783837639568

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While concepts of Earth have a rich tradition, more recent examples show a distinct quality: though ideas of wholeness might still be related to mythical, religious, or utopian visions of the past, "Earth" itself has become available as a whole. This raises several questions: How are the notions of one Earth or our planet imagined and distributed? What is the role of cultural imagination and practices of signification in the imagination of "the Earth"? Which theoretical models can be used or need to be developed to describe processes of imagining planet Earth? This collection invites a wide range of perspectives from different fields of the humanities to explore the means of imagining Earth.

Imagining Space

Imagining Space PDF

Author: Mike Downs

Publisher: Carson-Dellosa Publishing

Published: 2021-08-11

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 1731650388

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Book Features: • Ages 9-15, Grades 4-9 • 32 pages, 7 inches x 9 inches • Simple, easy-to-read pages with full-color pictures • Includes post-reading questions and activities • Reading/teaching tips and glossary included Beyond The Stars: In Reaching for the Stars: Imagining Space, 4th—9th graders learn all the amazing facts about past societies’ views on space, astrology, astronomy, and how science has taken us to where we are today. Then And Now: Ancient civilizations had a much different understanding of what space was. Young readers learn about the historic views of space, astronomy, astrology, and how science has changed our perspective and abilities to travel to space! Build Reading Skills: This engaging 32-page children’s book will help your child improve comprehension and build confidence with guided post-reading questions and fun activities. Leveled Books: Part of the Reaching for the Stars series, the high interest text and full-color pictures make this children’s book an engaging read with fun and interesting facts about historical views on space and where we are today. Why Rourke Educational Media: Since 1980, Rourke Publishing Company has specialized in publishing engaging and diverse non-fiction and fiction books for children in a wide range of subjects that support reading success on a level that has no limits.