Cold War ‘Astrofuturism’ and ‘Energy-Angst’ in Destination Moon and Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky

Abstract

By situating De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s understanding of ‘astrofuturist’ American SF within the context of the postwar ‘Great Acceleration’ and petromodernity, this article reads astrofuturism’s extraterrestrial frontier as an energy frontier. Building on Jason Moore’s world-ecological understanding of the history of capitalism’s recurrent expansions as being dialectically tied to its demand for new sources of energy, the article suggests that a pervasive sense of ‘energy-angst’ underlies the more obvious tensions mobilising Cold War astrofuturism. This angst, prior to the emergence of ‘peak oil’ discourse by the mid-1970s, proleptically recognises the finitude of the ‘American Century’s’ petroculture. By imagining the exploration and colonization of extraterrestrial planets upon which crude has never formed, and travel through outer space in which internal combustion engines do not work, astrofuturism is, of necessity, a post-oil imaginary. Tracing the fissures and slippages within and between the optimistic imaginaries of two key texts, Farmer in the Sky (1950) and Destination Moon (1950), the article argues that astrofuturism’s energy frontiers contain as much potential for powered-down imaginaries as the more obvious powered-up visions suggested by high-energy rocket and terraforming technologies. Read in the context of today’s precarious petroculture, these texts, in their static perfectionism, invite us to consider how post-oil imaginaries can assist the project of sustainable and equitable energy transition.