TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 461 Ross’s political stance therefore echoes his intellectual one. He is the free-floating interpreter, unfettered by either scholarly or political affiliation, aware of all the subtexts that are hidden from the practi tioners and believers, aware of all the alternatives they are not aware of, holding it all together by force of insight and rhetoric. This could be a scholarly version of the more general modern condition Ken neth J. Gergen has called “the saturated self”: a fundamental confu sion about personal identity caused by a never-ceasing assault of multiple perspectives and representations. If so, this scholarly predic ament is as much in need of cultural criticism as anything it studies. Rosalind Williams Dr. Williams teaches in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Blueprintfor Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact. Edited by Frederick I. Ordway and Randy Liebermann. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Pp. 224; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Much of the value of this new Smithsonian Institution Press publication inheres in its handsomely reproduced and profuse illus trations and in the handful of strong essays that, taken together, provide a useful (if not very critical) survey of the visionary and actual exploration of space that has been a feature of the post—World War II landscape. Nineteen formal essays are clustered around four themes: “From Vision to Reality,” “Rocketry and Space Flight,” “The Golden Age of Space Travel,” and “Where Do We Go From Here?” Freder ick I. Ordway III, Frank H. Winter, Sam Moskowitz, John M. Logs don, Randy Liebermann, and Cargill Hall offer the most informative essays, written with a fair amount of detachment. Those familiar with other writings on space by these authors will find little that is new in the book. Nor are the essays or themes around which they cluster well integrated by a common structure or argu ment, other than that suggested by the title. Indeed, analysis is sparse—unfortunate in a book that offers so much visual data from the history of American popular art and culture. For me the book’s interest lies as much in what it tells us indirectly as what it tells us directly. As much as it galls a historian to say so, past is not always prologue. The visionary past for space exploration claimed by the essays on that subject in this book is only nominally so. The drawings, etchings, and color paintings that illustrate this section reveal a persistence of earthly features in the imagined world of moon and distant planets—exotic flora, fauna, and an earthlike atmosphere producing glorious sunrises and, perhaps most important, air to breathe without entrapment in a “space suit.” 462 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The “outer space” envisioned by pre-20th-century writers and illus trators had more in common with Amerigo Vespucci’s frontier than with Neil Armstrong’s. Space enthusiasts’ reliance on the metaphors of the Adantic and North American reconnaissance betrays more than an ig norance of (or indifference to) the harsher realities ofglobal conquest. It reveals as well an inability to come to terms with the profoundly limited experiences for human touch, sound, smell, movement, and contact with other living things to be had by space voyagers. Second, the rhetorical insistence that “humanity’s destiny” both accounts for and demands more space exploration is highly problem atic. Thus far the vanguard of this “human destiny” has been led by two countries: one in total political and economic disarray, and the other boasting a lower voting rate than France, Portugal, the Neth erlands, Denmark, Italy, and Turkey; more murders per capita than Denmark, France, Spain, Great Britain, and Finland; more rapes per capita than Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan; a lower percentage of middle-class households than Japan, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia; and producing more pounds of garbage per capita than Denmark, Great Britain, Spain, and Austria. Third, no author grapples head-on with the most stubborn challenge to the future exploration ofspace. This next frontieris unlikely to become a “land ofopportunity” for the new world...