Imagining Outer Space

1. European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age
Alexander C. T. Geppert

Part I. Narrating Outer Space

2. Space, Time and Aliens: The Role of Imagination in Outer Space
Steven J. Dick

3. Heaven on Earth: Tunguska, 30 June 1908
Claudia Schmölders

4. Imagining Inorganic Life: Crystalline Aliens in Science and Fiction
Thomas Brandstetter

Part II. Projecting Outer Space

5. Projecting Landscapes of the Human Mind onto Another World: Changing Faces of an Imaginary Mars
Rainer Eisfeld

6. ‘Smash the Myth of the Fascist Rocket Baron’: East German Attacks on Wernher von Braun in the 1960s
Michael J. Neufeld

7. Transcendence of Gravity: Arthur C. Clarke and the Apocalypse of Weightlessness
Thore Bjørnvig

Part III. Visualizing Outer Space

8. Per Media Ad Astra? Outer Space in West Germany’s Media, 1957–1987
Bernd Mütter

9. Balloons on the Moon: Visions of Space Travel in Francophone Comic Strips
Guillaume Syon

10. A Stumble in the Dark: Contextualizing Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Space: 1999
Henry Keazor

Part IV. Encountering Outer Space

11. Life as We Don’t Yet Know It: An Anthropologist’s First Contact with the Science of ‘Weird Life’
Debbora Battaglia

12. A Ghost in the Machine: How Sociology Tried to Explain (Away) American Flying Saucers and European Ghost Rockets, 1946–1947
Pierre Lagrange

13. Seeing the Future of Civilization in the Skies of Quarouble: UFO Encounters and the Problem of Empire in Postwar France
James Miller

Part V. Inscribing Outer Space

14. Self-Reproducing Automata and the Impossibility of SETI
Gonzalo Munévar

15. Inscribing Scientific Knowledge: Interstellar Communication, NASA’s Pioneer Plaque, and Contact with Cultures of the Imagination, 1971–1972
William R. Macauley

16. Alien Spotting: Damien Hirst’s Beagle 2 Mars Lander Calibration Target and the Exploitation of Outer Space
Tristan Weddigen

17. Look Up! Art in the Age of Orbitization
Philip Pocock

Keywords: History, History of Science, European History, Social History, European Literature, Modern History, Fiction