‘It is virtually impossible’, notes Alexander Geppert, ‘to experience outer space in a direct, unmediated manner’ (p. 13). Before the space programmes of the twentieth century, humans could only observe at a distance or imagine the extraterrestrial. Even the handful of people who have been in space, from Yuri Gagarin to the twelve men who walked on the Moon, or the astronauts of the International Space Station, have been cocooned in spacesuits and spacecraft, peering out from small reservations of the terrestrial environment, never touching the alien environments to which they were so close. For everyone back at home, of course, the experience of outer space was even more mediated, relayed through radio, television and print. The consequence is that understanding ‘culture’ is especially important for the historiography of outer space.
This is an eclectic, detailed, sometimes uneven, and occasionally revelatory set of essays that delve into how (mostly Western) Europeans portrayed outer space, spaceflight and space exploration. It certainly fills a gap. Most historical writing on space has focused on the technological achievements and political contexts of the superpower space programmes, or has taken the form of literary commentaries on the genre of science fiction with little engagement with history of science and technology. However, as Geppert points out, (Western) Europe is in fact particularly interesting because of a ‘paradox of overwhelming space enthusiasm simultaneous with … an extended period of abstinence from independent manned spaceflight activities’ (p. 11). Abstinence makes the astroculture grow stronger, it seems.
There are some space oddities among the essays. Claudia Schmölders analyses the Tunguska event as a symbol for the meeting of Heaven and Earth within a tradition of ‘astronöetic’ writing. Thore Bjørnvig identifies a persistent religious and apocalyptic strand in Arthur C. Clarke's fiction: Earth, at the bottom of its gravity well, was what needed to be transcended. Bjørnvig's essay contains the superb factoid that ‘Clarke's predilection for scuba diving’, with its escape from gravity, was one reason he relocated in 1956 to Sri Lanka (p. 135). Elsewhere, Guillaume de Syon reveals how Hergé's Tintin cartoons, with their V-2-style moon rockets, were influenced by French comic book censorship: children had to be protected from overly speculative stories about space exploration; while Debora Battaglia briefly dips into the extraordinary world of the International Raëlian Movement, a creationist alien religion also born in France.
While there are sound essays by old space history hands, such as Steven J. Dick (on aliens, world views and Big History) and Michael J. Neufeld (on East German cultural propaganda against Wernher von Braun), I was particularly taken by the contributions by Thomas Brandsetter, Pierre Lagrange, James Miller, William Macauley and Tristan Weddigen. Brandsetter traces the surprisingly long history of the idea of crystalline life, in fiction and science. French author Joseph Henri Böex (pen name Rosny) imagined mineral creatures as rivals of humans in the evolutionary race in 1888. Already, by then, physiologist William T. Preyer, in the context of the debate over Huxley's protoplasm, had speculated about silicon-based life forms. By 1894 H.G. Wells was picturing “silicon–aluminium organisms … wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur … by the shores of a sea of liquid iron’ (p. 71). There are two interesting claims made by Brandsetter. The first is that the imagining of crystalline life forms can be seen as the invention of exobiology, the science of alien life forms. The second is that the early twentieth-century investigations that followed, along with contemporary research into liquid crystals, traded under the name ‘synthetic biology’. Like ‘biotechnology’, ‘synthetic biology’ has early twentieth-century roots, at least in name.
Lagrange and Miller both offer serious and thoughtful studies of the UFO phenomenon. Lagrange compares in detail the first responses to saucer sightings in the north-west United States, in which incredulity was the common reaction, to the reception of reports of ‘ghost rockets’ over Sweden and Norway. While the latter were believed, and attributed to Cold War enemy weapons tests, Lagrange insists that a Cold War context should not be invoked to explain American UFO witnesses. Miller, on the other hand, examines the context of French UFO sightings, for which the key witness was Marius Dewilde, a rather socially marginalized Parisian living in a shack in Quarouble in northern France, who from 1954 met visiting aliens. Miller weaves a plausible social history of isolation and retold imperial violence.
Two other papers, by Ray Macauley and Tristan Weddigen, in contrast, concern spacecraft sent from Earth to other planets, and, indeed, beyond. Macauley analyses, in a comparative foray into American astroculture, how the famous plaque attached to the Pioneer probes was negotiated. Designed by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and Linda Salzman Sagan, the plaque pictured two naked human beings against the background of a map of pulsars. The scientists argued that science, as universal knowledge, would be a language understood by any alien sophisticated enough to find the probes. Macauley, however, teases out the plaque's earthbound cultural specificities. Weddigen's short paper is a drily comic reading of the art and music carried by the Beagle 2 mission to Mars. Given that the lander was lost, perhaps smeared over the planet's surface, it is a moot point whether a Martian would consider their lost chance to hear Blur or see Damien Hirst's spot paintings to be a blessing or a curse. ‘Historically, aliens have been the mirror image of humanity's fears and hopes by surpassing us in intelligence or wickedness’, notes Weddigen; ‘In 2003, Martians were imagined as late consumers of mainstream Britpop’ (p. 306).
