“Real Flight and Dreams of Flight Go Together”: High Technology and Imaginary Heights in Early Modern and Postmodern Science Fiction

Abstract

This article examines how science fiction literature illustrates that exploring the “space above” and journeys toward it necessitates engaging with different types of knowledge, not least scientific-technological and imaginative ones. Scholarship in geography and urban and social studies has recently experienced what has been called a “vertical turn,” that is, a growing attention to the third dimension of space, and researchers call for more interdisciplinary experiments and commitment. This article argues that fictional literature is a valuable source of inquiry and, moreover, that it is precisely science fiction itself that illustrates the need to draw on various types of knowledge in order to explore issues of verticality and the space above. It examines an early modern text from a period before technological ascent into space became possible and a 20th-century novel set at the beginning of the rocket age: Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone; or a Voyage Thither, written sometime after 1628 and published in 1638, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Both texts illustrate that scientific-technological and imaginative investigations of “the above” are inseparable and emphasize the role of the imagination in fictional as well as in technological ascents. Moreover, in these texts, travelling into the space above involves complex ethical and moral dimensions. Exploring these in relation to the inseparability of scientific-technological and imaginative investigations, the analysis of the science fiction texts also develops the ethical and cognitive value of making scholarly analysis of verticality an interdisciplinary endeavor.

Keywords

Francis Godwin Thomas Pynchon science fiction vertical turn flight

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