Alexander C.T. Geppert Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo

Abstract

620 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) will also be appreciated by anyone hoping to gain fresh perspectives on the works discussed within. The book is weakest in its overly ambitious and unwieldy scope. While the chapters are all individually creative and unique, it can be challenging to see their relationship beyond the very general use of the key terms, “paranoia,” “fear,” and “alienation,” and some chapters do a better job of addressing those terms than others. While Drake clearly outlines these key terms in her introduction, in several chapters it becomes difficult to discern whether the author is addressing paranoia, fear, alienation, or some combination of the three, and the distinctiveness of each term becomes muddled, sometimes giving the impression that these terms have been inserted into the chapters as an afterthought. Moreover, while the chapters on film were particularly original and thoughtprovoking , they felt a bit out of place within the larger scope of the project, which predominantly focuses on literary works. Overall, the book could benefit from a conclusion showing how each of the chapters works in conversation with the others, and better attention could be given to explaining why these different chapters were selected to produce a coherent volume. The book is strongest in its emphasis on the psychological, political, and/or social work being done by the various authors and directors discussed in the various chapters. That is, each chapter offers a strong grasp of how paranoia, fear, and alienation work within specific historical and cultural contexts to produce an emotive and visceral affect. By carefully examining how fear is (re)created in readers and viewers, and by looking closely at how authors and directors immerse their audiences into these visceral experiences and emotions, each chapter advances a strong argument for how and why we are drawn to stories that invite us to feel paranoid, alienated, and afraid.—Laura Thursby, University of Ontario Institute of Technology Scaling Back Astroculture. Alexander C.T. Geppert, ed. Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xxiv+367 pp. $84.99 hc. Limiting Outer Space is the second of a three-volume sequence edited by Alexander Geppert, the historian of science and technology who has championed “astroculture” as a distinct field of inquiry. It follows Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2014), the collection that first brought together scholars recovering how the peoples of Europe participated in making space-age culture. A third volume, Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War, is planned. This ambitious publication program opens up new vistas in the cultural history of the space age, moving outward from accounts that prioritize the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the book’s conclusion, David A. Kirby offers a strong definition of astroculture: that cornucopia of “persuasive fictions” which model human occupation of outer space. Limiting Outer Space seeks to move outer-space historiography beyond its emphasis on the rocketry and space programs of the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on how various figures extended outer-space culture in the post-Apollo 1970s. In 621 BOOKS IN REVIEW that decade, the grand rhetoric around the Apollo program was undermined by both what it achieved and how it ended. As a result, as Geppert notes in his introduction, the 1970s has been seen as a “dispiriting” decade, a mere caesura between the heroic 1960s and low-earth-orbit limits of the decades that follow (2). This book does not overturn that reading but its chapters do offer more nuance and focus on tracking how Europe’s writers, philosophers, toymakers, lawyers, and aerospace advocates operated as the superpowers scaled back human spaceflight. The book is organized into three parts, bracketed by Geppert’s introductory chapter, “The Post-Apollo Paradox: Envisioning Limits During the Planetized 1970s” and “Final Frontiers?: Envisioning Utopia in the Era of Limits,” an epilogue by David A. Kirby. The first part, “Navigating the 1970s,” presents ways of recovering outer-space culture between the heroic man-in-space programs of the 1960s and the Shuttle era that began in 1981. The following section, “Reconfiguring Imaginaries,” contains articles that describe how the actual experience of outer...