Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

178 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
preserve of white males, but imagined forays into space often provided a forum
for envisioning and confronting assorted futures.
Stories about interplanetary space travel often featured encounters with
alien “others.” as U.S. leaders and experts projected their nation’s power into
areas of the world that required dealing with the dilemmas of cultural and racial
diferences, imagined encounters with aliens living outside of the planet earth
could mirror the complexities of addressing the problem of “otherness.” The
Thing, The Blob, Invaders from Mars, and War of the Worlds, among many others,
presented aliens as monsters. But Forbidden Planet, one of the most acclaimed flms
in the space genre, went beyond the simplistic formula, probing the monstrous
inefectiveness of good intensions and of presumably benevolent interventions.
the flm features a protagonist (Walter pidgeon) who tries to understand the
alien Krell but, despite his high-minded motives, ultimately fails.
Moreover, the interrelationships within groups of people on small
crafts hurtling through space raised issues of gender, race, and class, allowing
discussions related to the contemporaneous civil rights and feminist movements.
In the much analyzed Star Trek, for example, the Enterprise has a multiracial
crew of women and men and aliens (the half-human First Ofcer Mr. Spock,
leonard Nimoy) who live and work in a spirit of (mostly) cooperation. the
program literally took its crew into new territory when it ofered audiences
a highly controversial, if compelled, interracial kiss. Star Trek, of course,
has attracted an enormous amount of analysis and commentary, and some
commentators have seen the centrality of white men and the marginality of
others as a reinforcement of existing hierarchies. deWitt douglas Kilgore,
however, makes a compelling argument that Star Trek, like other astrofuturist
imaginings of life in space, invites “speculation about alternatives” and can
operate as a “liberatory resource” for those who wish to stake a claim in a
more egalitarian future. astrofuturist narratives, he argues, are multivalent and
“unusually porous, with consumers regularly seizing the reigns of production.”
Star Trek both refected and also scrutinized contemporary issues of gender,
race, and class by safely projecting them into an imagined future. 54
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In america’s Space age imaginings, the present seemed poised to
make an unprecedented leap, and the future came in many styles. the terms
Technocracy and Spaceship Earth, appearing and reappearing in diverse contexts,
raised seemingly urgent moral and practical questions that revolved around
three interrelated concerns: the political and moral impact of technocracy; the
54. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, pp. 28-29. In making this argument he draws efectively on the racial
politics that surrounded george takei’s and Nichelle Nichols’s participation in the show and an
analysis of class in homer h. hickam, Jr.’s Rocket Boys and the flm October Sky.