Late for the sky

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"Heeding the metaphors rife among contemporary voices, David Lavery finds in this compelling probe of the tacit messages of the age a preoccupation with space so pervasive that he can only conclude that many--anxious to flee the Earth and conquer space--speak and act as if even now they are "late for the sky."" "Lavery's goal is "to hear us talk in the Space Age, to listen to how we are beginning to think about a possible extraterrestrial future, and by so doing to foreground the extreme spaciness of the era." He terms his effort a "deep questioning of the extraterrestrial urge by a conscientious objector."" "Lavery argues persuasively that those intrigued by the challenge of perfecting a world ruled solely by human artifice are increasingly committed to abandoning the Earth. Writers ranging from physicists to rock stars salt their works with references to leaving the Earth. Lavery calls these references "evolutionary Freudian slips" that reveal genuine "extraterrestrial urges." Because metaphors of space are now ubiquitous, Lavery rejects C. P. Snow's dichotomy separating science from the humanities; the true split now is between Earthkind and Spacekind.". "Firmly committing himself to the Earth--humanity's last link to nature--he notes that "for those who now insist upon the necessity and calculate the means of escape from this planet, the Earth itself is often left out of the equation." Those who are "late for the sky," those who with "infinite presumption" have "persuaded themselves (and seek to convince us all) that human longing for the stars is not a betrayal of human destiny but in reality its apotheosis; their conviction that the species has been given a cosmic mandate to inseminate the universe with the human ... all testify to minds seldom any longer on the Earth."" "At the beginning of the Space Age thirty years ago, Hannah Arendt warned us, in The Human Condition, "to think what we are doing." Now Lavery raises his voice in the same cause, eloquently making his case for the Earth through a series of interrelated essays or reflections, each of which is followed by a "Probe," a concentrated, sometimes experimental "interlocutory exploration of/further reflection on the subject" and on themes dealing with various facets of the "science fiction" culture of the Space Age.". "The chapter titles are intriguing: "To Hear Us Talk"; "Due Back on the Planet Earth: Toward a Definition of Spaciness"; "Departure of the Body Snatchers; or, the Confessions of a Carbon Chauvinist"; "Infinite Presumption"; "The Simulator"; and "The Abandoned Earth." Through these chapters and through "Probes" with titles such as "Gnosticism in the Cult Film" and "Space Boosters: The Marketing of Unearthliness," Lavery seeks to track the path of what Arendt calls the "twofold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into self"--a flight that in our time, and especially in America, would seem to have attained escape velocity."--BOOK JACKET.

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