Dead kingdoms and caves of gems: ecological anxieties and the modelling of the lunar Other in science fiction landscapes [Presentation]

NASA’s plan to return humans to the Moon in 2024 revives not only Buzz Aldrin’s famous account of ‘magnificent desolation’, but the wider contexts for visualising Moonscapes in an age of terrene ecological crisis. The Moon’s astrological associations of beauty and serenity have never eclipsed the prospect of Earth’s landscapes becoming moonscapes – whether through bombing, ecological disaster or both. Despite their foremost role as facilitators of conflictual action, the visual excesses of the lunar landscapes of science fiction can be read as indices of contemporary ecological anxiety in their own right. As such, science fiction’s visualisations of the Moon are a working through of our futurological picturing of the Earth itself.

This paper takes as its starting point a quote from Pavel Klushantsev’s 1965 film Moon. Klushantsev’s groundbreaking and influential documentary used special effects to understand, through pyrotechnics and model making, the topographical features of the Moon, both as geological remnant and colonial opportunity. Ostensibly an imagining of coming Soviet triumph, in Klushantsev’s film, the Moon is defined as an ultimately terrifying Other to Earth: the light of a ‘Strange morning – no rustle of leaves, no singing of birds, no murmuring stream’ confirms the Moon as an inversion of the Earth that has persisted in speculative fiction since Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and continues in the likes of Sebastian Cordero’s Europa Report (2013), haunted by the deeper, non-anthropocentric indexical traces of geological time. This paper will explore these in relation to our continued landscaping of our home planet.