Outer Space and Popular Culture

Book excerpt: This book provides detailed insights into how space and popular culture intersect across a broad spectrum of examples, including cinema, music, art, arcade games, cartoons, comics, and advertisements. This is a pertinent topic since the use of space themes differs in different cultural contexts, and these themes can be used to explore various aspects of the human condition and provide a context for social commentary on politically sensitive issues. With the use of space imagery evolving over the past sixty years of the space age, this is a topic ripe for in-depth exploration. The book also discusses the contrasting visions of space from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the reality of today, and analyzes space vehicles and habitats in popular depictions of space from an engineering perspective, exploring how many of those ideas have actually been implemented in practice, and why or why not (a case of life imitating art and vice versa). As such, it covers a wide array of relevant and timely topics examining intersections between space and popular culture, and offering accounts of space and its effect on culture, language, and storytelling from the southern regions of the world.