Spacecraft

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, USA. They are the author of 16 books, including Being Ecological (2018) and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com @the_eco_thought

• Introduction: Ships and Craft1. Garbage2. Winnings3. Luck4. Lounge5. Hyperspace6. AnyoneIndex

As 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.