Description
Book SynopsisScience fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what
are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture?If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone's headthe
Millennium Falcon would be it. Springing from this infamous
Star Wars vehicle,
Spacecraft takes readers on an intergalactic journey through science fiction and speculative philosophy, revealing real-world political and ecological lessons along the way. In this book Timothy Morton shows how spacecraft are never mere flights of fancy.
Trade ReviewAs I read Morton’s account of his childhood engagement with space flight, I thought of my own, when my personal imaginary met world history, though I certainly didn’t think in those terms at the time. In pursuing Morton’s childhood, I’m not attempting to shoehorn
Spacecraft into old-fashioned biographical criticism whereby one seeks to explain a text by finding its secrets in the author’s autobiography. It’s part of the story he’s telling, one common to many children whose imagination has been fired with visions of space travel. It’s a story born of a specific cultural imaginary common among children of the last decades of the previous century …
Spacecraft, then, is a vehicle in which Morton meditates on futurality. The
Millennium Falcon, along with hyperspace, is at the center of this meditation. * 3 Quarks Daily *
Morton is the punk rock sci-fi geek artist philosopher of Now. In prose as precise and freewheeling as one of their flights-of-fancy spacecraft, this book takes us on a journey of the mind through the hyperspace of pop-culture and high thought, because It Is All Connected Can’t You See? I started reading this and lost a day but gained a light year. * Max Borenstein, screenwriter of Godzilla vs. Kong *
This is a brilliantly provoking book about why spacecraft are not at all the same as spaceships, and how imaginary objects can transform our thinking. Morton offers an exuberant, acute, compact, and luminously uplifting guide to the ways in which human society might become a whole lot more progressive in the coming centuries. * Nicholas Royle, author of Veering: A Theory of Literature *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ships and Craft 1. Garbage 2. Winnings 3. Luck 4. Lounge 5. Hyperspace 6. Anyone Index
