CHAPTER 1Imagination

The Interplanetary Imagination

In 1905 the dream of socialism hemorrhaged in Russia. On January 22, “Bloody Sunday,” Imperial Guardsmen in Saint Petersburg opened fire on unarmed protestors as they marched toward the Winter Palace demanding reforms of Nicholas II. The shootings sparked massive protests and strikes in cities across the empire. At the same time, Tsarist forces suffered humiliating defeats to the Japanese at Port Arthur, Mukden, and Tsushima. Within weeks, chaos engulfed the entire country. The regime shot, hanged, or drove into exile thousands of revolting peasants and workers. Sailors mutinied in Sevastopol, Vladivostok, and Kronstadt. Armenians and Caucasian Tatars massacred each other in a protracted ethnic conflict. Jews perished in renewed pogroms. Nine million square miles had fallen into darkness.¹³

Searching for an escape, one of the most talented and fervent revolutionaries, Aleksandr Bogdanov—who with Lenin had helped establish the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Labor Party just two years before—penned a short, accessible novel with the 1905 revolution as its backdrop. Red Star begins in Saint Petersburg, where the novel's narrator and protagonist, a revolutionary and mathematician named Leonid, befriends a fellow partisan who reveals himself to be a visitor from Mars. Menni, as the alien is known, convinces Leonid to embark on a quest to the Red Planet to study it. Upon his arrival, the Earthling is overcome with awe and bewilderment at the contrast between the chaos of Russia and the transcendent harmony of Menni's society.

The forces driving Bogdanov's fictional revolution resemble those unfolding in reality: peasants earn little more than scraps and are unable to sell or mortgage the land they work (“the agrarian problem”); ethnic and national minorities violently resist Russification (“the national problem”); and the government has banned strikes and labor unions (“the labor problem”).¹⁴ Not so on Mars. There is no agrarian problem because there are no agrarians; farming is completely industrialized and food is plentiful. There is no national problem because there are no nationalities; Martians are ethnically homogenous and speak a single language. And there is no labor problem because labor is voluntary, carried out merely in the interests of self-fulfillment and edification. There is no state, no politics, and no private property. A centralized bureau of statistics, equipped with computer-like machines, determines the material needs of all and ensures fair distribution. Education, science, decision making, technology, and art are all collectivized. And while Martians possess wildly varying capacities and talents, there is nothing resembling class or rank. Even gender is neutralized, as there are no discernable physiological or behavioral differences between males and females. Socialism has been perfected.¹⁵

The story is not without conflict, of course. The Martians struggle constantly against their natural environment. Leonid experiences profound disorientation, even mental illness, in his new locale, and he learns of a Martian council debate over whether to colonize Earth. There is just enough murder, romantic complication, and political intrigue to throw Martian utopia into doubt. But for everyday Russians in the throes of a violent revolution, Red Star was a catharsis. Bogdanov's narrative permitted readers to imagine a world in which the social and political maladies then afflicting them simply ceased to exist. Leonid's excursions into Martian society opened a porthole into the disorder of human civilization and allowed one to envision alternatives.¹⁶ As historian Richard Stites observes in his English translation of the novel, the real drama of the story lies in “the juxtaposition of a unified, harmonious, serene, and rational life on Mars with the chaotic, barbarous, and self-destructive struggles of the people and social classes of twentieth-century Earth.”¹⁷

Red Star was but one of a score of turn-of-the-century works anticipating the dawn of space travel and the evolutionary changes it would render on human beings and their societies. The entire genre of interplanetary fiction from 1890 to 1930 can be read as an escape from, or alternatively a recommendation for how to solve, two sets of problems. The first was domestic: urban congestion, disease, chronic wealth inequality, and political corruption. The second afflicted international relations: imperialism, nationalism, racism, and war.¹⁸ To imagine worlds in which these ailments disappeared, authors reached out in time (perfect civilizations in the distant future), in geographic space (harmonious communities on lonely, remote islands), and to new strata of technology (machines that make war obsolete or provide unlimited food and energy for all). But as a narrative device and as a method of visualizing better worlds, outer space was unmatched. The cosmos provided a reliable tabula rasa onto which writers could project their societies’ most transcendent ambitions for social and political change. Years before the rocket revolution made spaceflight a matter of practicality, visionary writers pitched outer space as a viable setting for, or a catalyst of, political experimentation. Removed from the physical environment of Earth, or merely exposed to alien forces, human beings could, quite literally, start over.

Hebert George Wells was many things. For British workers, he was a Fabian champion of socialism. For Europe's war-torn masses, he was tireless advocate for world peace, human rights, and especially global governance. Anticipating the arrival of tanks, aircraft, space travel, satellite television, and the atomic bomb, he pioneered the genre of intellectual gameplay now known as futurism. He was a first-rate philosopher and political thinker. He was a talented sketch artist and cartoonist. And, for a sequence of remarkable women that included Margaret Sanger, the American birth control activist, he was a lover and companion.¹⁹ But for millions of ordinary people the world over, H. G. Wells was, above all, a writer of fantastic stories that took readers to times and places they could as yet scarcely imagine. Indeed, he birthed modern science fiction.²⁰ Though his writing career would ultimately span more than a half-century, Wells exploded onto the scene in the waning hours of the nineteenth century with four “scientific romances.” The first three were The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897). In 1897, reeling from poor health and still uncertain about his future as an author, he sat down in the cramped dining room of his home in Woking to finish the fourth, his masterpiece.²¹ It was called The War of the Worlds.

First serialized in Pearson's Magazine in 1897 and published by William Heinemann and Harper the following year, The War of the Worlds is Wells's grisly tale of a Martian invasion of Earth. The aliens first arrive in Woking, no less, where they begin laying waste to England in tripodic “fighting machines” equipped with chemical and thermal weapons. Caught completely unawares and possessing inferior technology, humankind is helpless to stop them. Martian craft eviscerate British defenses. They pluck fleeing humans from the ground and harvest their blood for sustenance. The onslaught ends only when the Martians succumb to bacterium for which they have no immunity, “slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put on this earth.”²²

Wells had conjured a vision of outer space as a hostile world where supreme beings, equipped with supreme weapons, plotted humanity's destruction and the absorption of Earth's resources. Far from the cooperative adventure promised in Jules Verne's earlier works—From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon—space was now a source of violence, death, and cold indifference.

This was not Wells's intent. He embraced the novel's immediate success with ambivalence, for he sought not only to entertain readers but educate and reform them: The War of the Worlds was a warning not of predatory dangers looming in space but rather the dangers that lurked within humanity. More than an invasion drama, the novel was a penitence for human failing and its malevolent expressions in world politics, imperialism especially.²³ “We men,” says Wells's narrator in chapter 1, “must be to [the Martians] at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us…. Before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals … but upon its own inferior races.”²⁴ Britain alone sufficed as an example. By the time of the novel's release, the Raj had turned India, once teeming with megafauna, into an ecological wasteland.²⁵ During the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, the Anglo-Peruvian Company enslaved, tortured, and mutilated a generation of Putumayo River people. And the genocidal subjugation of Tasmania at the hands of British settlers had all but wiped out the island's aboriginal population. “Are we such apostles of mercy,” the narrator asks, “to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”²⁶

Not only did the Martians demonstrate the hypocrisy of imperialism; on a much grander timescale, they offered a remedy to humanity's evolutionary downfall. As numerous Wells scholars have attested, the writer was captivated—often haunted—about the implications of human evolution.²⁷ Born in 1866, just seven years after the release of On the Origins of Species, he had been a pupil of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who in his seminal lecture “Ethics and Evolution” had demolished Christianity's interpretation of Darwinism, which held that humanity was the product of Nature's special design, and therefore God's. Huxley, and soon Wells, were convinced that evolution would as likely produce evil as good in man, that humanity “might be damned as surely by the laws of evolution as by original sin.”²⁸ As early as 1891, Wells wrote that survival of the fittest inevitably accompanied “zoological retrogression,” that each furtive step toward biological perfection was joined by one toward “degradation.” Species constantly changed, of course, but “not necessarily in an upward direction.”²⁹ Wells complained that humankind was “still mentally, morally, and physically what he was during the later Paleolithic period,” that for an eon to come it was “likely to remain … at the level of the Stone Age.”³⁰ Taking the longest view, he reasoned that inevitably humans would go the way of the dodo.³¹

Wells's earliest fiction had reflected this pessimism. In The Time Machine, the working class of 1890 have evolved 800,000 years later into a separate species from the upper classes. The Morlocks, as the race of proletariats is known, live a dark, brutal life underground. Though richer, the evolved capitalists, the Eloi, are no better off. Natural selection has made them decadent, childlike, weak, anxious, and apathetic. The bestial humanoids of The Island of Dr. Moreau are even more pitiful creatures. “Remorseless as nature,” Dr. Moreau, the novel's psychotic antagonist, performs cruel vivisections on animals to make them “human.” He is evolution incarnate, embodying the “plasticity of living forms” Nature imposes over time.³²

The War of the Worlds, however, marked a shift in Well's thinking (figure 2). Frustrated with the glacial pace of social and political change both in Britain and the wider world, Wells abandoned evolution in favor of an abrupt change—a “cosmic happening”—that might shake humanity off its Huxleyan march to the grave.³³ Mars's invasion of Earth was that divine intervention, an apocalypse that brought at once judgement and deliverance, angels of death and salvation. As Jeanne and Norman Mackenzie note in their masterful biography of Wells, the arrival of the Martians was “a visitation, a warning of Old Testament severity that there is no hope for mankind unless it sees the error of its ways and repents.”³⁴ And so it goes in the novel. In the epilogue, as Britons begin to rebuild their shattered society, the narrator posits that for all its destruction the alien assault, “in the larger design of the universe,” had imbued humankind with a sense of humility and promoted “the conception of the commonweal of mankind.” He speculates, too, that the Martians had paved a technological path by which homo sapiens themselves might become a spacefaring species. “The broadening of men's views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated,” he intones on the final page. If Martians could reach Earth or Venus, perhaps humanity could escape to other planets when mother Gaia finally succumbed to the death of the sun. Spaceflight and hence survival, gifts from the alien gods.³⁵

FIGURE 2. By the late 1890s, H. G. Wells had decided that evolution would not deliver homo sapiens to the level of consciousness required for lasting peace. With The War of the Worlds (1898), he reached for an apocalyptic force whose destruction would bring about the profound social, political, and technological change needed for human development. The Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corréa rendered the Revelation-like catastrophe of the Martian invasion in a 1906 French translation. Wikimedia Commons.

“The Heavens,” as Wells admitted in his autobiography, held a unique power for the writer. As a child his mother had discovered him “in the small hours … inspecting the craters of the moon” with a telescope the boy had found and assembled himself.³⁶ In an 1894 essay, he rued the disappearance of cosmically oriented religions from which ancient people had derived meaning and a sense of their place in the world. He was intimately familiar with the imaginative tradition of space travel writing going all the way back to Lucian's Icaromenippus and True History in the second century.³⁷ For Wells, the cosmos served as a durable reference point by which human beings could aspire to higher stages of consciousness and reestablish a sense of modesty, of their “infinitesimal littleness” as he phrased it in another short story. After experiencing the monstrosity of Dr. Moreau's island, for instance, Wells's protagonist turns to astronomy: he looks to “the glittering hosts of heaven,” where “whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.”³⁸ It was a theme to which he returned again and again in his fiction. After the success of The War of the Worlds, Wells published two additional novels that helped build an anticipatory politics around space exploration and the rejuvenation it might one day deliver to men and nations. Both warrant close attention.

The First Men in the Moon was serialized in The Strand Magazine from December 1900 to August 1901 and was published in hardcover that year. The plot takes off when its businessman protagonist, Mr. Bedford, meets a reclusive physicist named Cavor, who is in the process of developing a new metal capable of negating gravity. After this material—dubbed “Cavorite”—proves a success, the two men embark on a trip to the moon in a spaceship lined with the revolutionary substance. When they arrive, Bedford and Cavor quickly lose themselves in the local vegetation, where they encounter a race of insectoid beings they call Selenites, who have created a seamlessly organized civilization in the bowels of the lunar soil. There are no tribes or political factions. They speak a single language. Violence is absent. They are “in intelligence, morality, and social wisdom … colossally greater than men.” What distinguishes Selenites is their physiological specialization and diversity: each individual is molded for a single purpose, “a perfect unit in a world machine.” Farmers are equipped with scoop-like limbs and sinewy muscles. Scholars and administrators have massive brains. Workers who traverse dark tunnels ferrying food from the surface to the inner cities are naturally luminous. Cavor marvels at the perfect synchronization of social purpose with physical form. “With knowledge the Selenites grew and changed,” he observes, while humans “stored their knowledge about them and remained brutes—equipped.”³⁹

Though the Selenites are peaceful beings, drama and conflict ensue.Bedford and Cavor separate to look for their spaceship after two contentious encounters with the ant-like beings, some of whom they kill. Bedford stumbles upon the ship and returns to Earth, miraculously crash-landing just off the coast of his native Britain. Cavor, meanwhile, injures himself and falls into captivity, where he beams a series of fragmented radio communications to Earth detailing his decent into Selenite society. Back home, Bedford is able with the help of a Dutch electrician to cobble together the essence of his partner's messages, which form the climax of the novel.

FIGURE 3. Mr. Cavor, the scientist-protagonist in H. G. Wells's 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, wins an audience with the Grand Lunar, the embodied accumulation of his civilization's knowledge. Having never committed violence in the course of their history, the moon's denizens, the Selenites, are horrified by the earthling's descriptions of war.

The First Men in the Moon culminates when Cavor recounts his audience with the Grand Lunar, leader of the Selenites (figure 3). His supreme knowledge is evidenced by his exaggerated head size, which stretches many times the length of his own body. Servants shower this “swollen globe” with a cooling spray. Through translators who have learned Cavor's tongue, the Grand Lunar proceeds with a battery of questions about Earth. Why did humans build their cities on the surface, instead of underground where it was safer? What made up Earth's atmosphere? Why did Earthlings speak so many languages? And what, pray tell, was “the democratic method?”⁴⁰

What holds the monarch most spellbound is the phenomenon of war, which he and the rest of the Selenites find utterly incomprehensible. The Grand Lunar is “astonished” to learn that Earthlings “were still not united in one brotherhood, but under many different forms of government” that battle ceaselessly for resources and supremacy. “You mean to say,” he asks in disbelief, “that you run about over the surface of your world—this world, whose riches you have scarcely begun to scrape—killing one another for beasts to eat?” Cavor sheepishly affirms. “But do not ships and your poor little cities get injured?” the king continues. “Make me pictures,” he demands of the scientist. “I cannot conceive of these things.” When Cavor further details the “story of earthly War,” the audience of enthralled Selenties are visibly shaken.⁴¹

It is not until after Cavor has spilt the beans about human nature—“the strength and irrational violence of men, of their insatiable aggressions, their tireless futility of conflict”—that he realizes his mistake. In a final, desperate message to Earth, Cavor cries that he had been a fool to explain war to the Grand Lunar and feverishly attempts to relay instructions to manufacture his gravity-defying Cavorite. But it is too late: the communication is abruptly cut off, presumably by the Selenites. Cavor is never heard from again, and the novel closes on ghostly allusions about his fate.⁴²

As with The War of the Worlds and indeed all Wellsian romances, The First Men in the Moon was a bald manifestation of the author's political worldview. By 1900 Wells had already synthesized a good deal of his intellectual influences—Enlightenment liberalism, the late nineteenth-century peace movement, international socialism, and Huxley's theories of “ethical evolution”—into a coherent set of ideas about what the future of international relations should and should not entail.⁴³ Over subsequent decades these convictions would burst forth in a torrent of writing. In Anticipations (1901) and New Worlds for Old (1908), Wells proposed that political globalism was inevitable and laid out his proposals for world government. His 1908 novel The War in the Air attacked humanity's funneling of technological innovation toward armaments. In 1917 Wells vowed himself “an extreme Pacifist” in War and the Future, but believing that the Great War would crush “the German will-to-power” and thereby create the necessary conditions for world peace, he supported Britain's entry.⁴⁴ That a total conflagration among great powers would pave the way for nonviolence and world federalism was a theme he had already explored at length in The War That Will End War (1914), The World Set Free (1914), and In the Fourth Year (1918), a key text that laid the case for a League of Nations. In other writings he would rail against imperialism and nationalism, support state control of weapons manufacturing, advocate the spread of English as a language of political unification, and lay out plans to create an educated, cosmopolitan citizenry that would embrace one-worldism.⁴⁵

The First Men in the Moon was an early, if fictional, expression of these ideas, one that helped solidify space adventure as a political genre. All of Wells's futurist ambitions are personified in the Selenites, his fears in the failings of human beings. His insectile antagonists have applied their ample technology purely to organization and industry. Bedford, in contrast, pursues the techno-magic of space travel only to access the moon's bountiful resources. Though they differ widely based on their social function, the Selenites are bound by a common language and by their collective knowledge, stored in the undulating brain of the Grand Lunar. Humans, meanwhile, have fallen from the Tower of Babel; they struggle endlessly against one another, tribe against tribe, nation against nation, tongue against tongue. As the two Earthlings struggle to find the way back to their spaceship, Cavor questions the wisdom of returning home in the first place, for if his secret to antigravity were to escape, “Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war.” “In a little while,” he muses, “if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead.” In a memorable passage, he resolves to hide Cavorite from the world. “Science,” he decides, “has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.” Other scientists would have to figure it out again on their own “in a thousand years’ time.”⁴⁶

The moralism of the Wellsian cosmos peaked in 1906 with the publication of In the Days of the Comet, a second, more sanguine attempt at a “cosmic happening.” The novel follows the story of William Leadford, who suffers at the beginning of the novel from joblessness, class-based alienation, and especially unrequited love. When Nettie Stuart, the object of his affection, jilts him for the son and heir of a wealthy family, the disillusioned young man buys a revolver, planning to murder both Nettie and his rival.

FIGURE 4. The protagonist of In the Days of the Comet (1906) inhales the fog created by the disintegration of a comet in the Earth's atmosphere. Instantaneously, he loses all impulses toward violence, lust, obsession, and envy. “The air was changed and the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.”

As this drama unfolds, an enormous comet approaches the Earth with greater and greater velocity. Earthlings look on helplessly as the celestial block of ice and dust grows larger in the night sky. Just as Leadford is about to commit his crime of passion, the comet enters the atmosphere and disintegrates into a thick, soporific green fog (figure 4). The nitrogen in the air changes form and becomes a respirable gas that completely upends the psychological condition of all who breathe it in.⁴⁷

Indeed, the fog single-handedly ushers in “The Change,” a metamorphosis within every human being—“a vast, substantial exaltation”—in which violence, selfishness, and passion give way instantaneously to reason, altruism, and peace. Leadford drops the revolver. After imbibing the fog, Wells's hero can no longer understand why he had murderous feelings toward Nettie or her lover in the first place.⁴⁸ He instantly experiences a “clear-headedness” that divorces him from “the tumid passions and entanglements” of his personal life.

Nor is this comet-induced revolution in human psychology and temperament confined to intimate relationships. Awakened individuals working for their respective governments bring newly enlightened minds and widened perspectives to bear on international life. One of the novel's characters, a cabinet member in the British government who before The Change had been planning a war with Germany, now pledges that he will end war once and for all. “We have chattered and pecked one another and fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the holy place of God,” he soliloquizes. “No more of this!” ⁴⁹

Across the globe the evaporation of personal insecurities and hatreds trickle up to institutions, communities, and nations. The “narrowness, the intensity, the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world” was “over and done”:

It was as if at the very moment of the awakening those barriers and defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washed through their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred once rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted and assimilated at once all that was good in the ill-dressed propagandas that had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of their minds in the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from an absurd and limiting dream.⁵⁰

At the end of the novel, diplomats from around the globe convene to frame a constitution that will govern a World State. Leadford explains that after inhaling the fog, national leaders could no longer truly comprehend, or bring themselves to care about, political jurisdiction or authority. The “web of conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order,” he reports, “they flung it all on one side.” Inaugurating the global confederation, the British cabinet member leads a universal refrain: “Let us begin afresh!”⁵¹

In the Days of the Comet was not a reversal of Well's Martian invasion but rather a softening of it. Compared with the rapacious aliens who force human beings into cooperation through violent conflict, the comet's tail was a benign yet equally purgative force. As Wells acknowledged years later, without bloodshed the passing bolide “does the work of centuries of moral education in the twinkling of an eye, and makes mankind sane, understanding and infinitely tolerant.”⁵² In a letter to his editor, Wells wrote that he had intended the novel “to be a beautiful dream” in which humanity might find its exaltation, where it might exist “above the law.”⁵³ Of all the narrative devices that he would deploy in his early fiction to achieve this dream—time travel, evolution, and technological saltation—contact with cosmic power was the most reliable. Any why not? Looking back, he considered it the mission of his body of work to give “concrete working expression to a world-wide ‘Open Conspiracy’ to rescue human society” from harmful tradition and “reconstruct it upon planetary lines.”⁵⁴

H. G. Wells was the most consequential “interplanetary” thinker of the twentieth century. He was influential not only because he was among the first to articulate the coming politics of space exploration, nor because he stated his ideas so plainly in his novels. Rather, Wells's significance owed to his popularity. His scientific romances reached millions of people across Europe and North America. By 1903 The War of the Worlds had already been translated into a half dozen languages.⁵⁵ Russian publishers both serialized the novel in a Saint Petersburg journal and issued a book version the same year of the English-language release. The German literary community, believing Wells a serious philosopher, invited him to deliver a speech on “The Common Sense of World Peace” at the Reichstag in 1929. Even in France, home to Jules Verne, Wells was widely considered the most important voice in science fiction. Despite the relatively tepid reception to In the Days of the Comet—attributable, as it turned out, to the narrative's embrace of free love—Wells scrambled to arrange for the simultaneous translation of the novel into French, German, Dutch, and Italian.⁵⁶ It was serialized to popular appeal in the United States, where, after a half dozen visits over his lifetime, he was regarded a modern prophet.

George Orwell later wrote of Wells: “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”⁵⁷ This was a keener and more prescient observation than Orwell realized, for among these youths were the energetic minds that would eventually propel the spaceflight revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. The Russians Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev (who was Ukrainian); the Germans Herman Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and Walter Dornberger; and the Americans Robert Goddard and John “Jack” Parsons had each adorned their bedside tables with Well's romances.

More immediately, Wells's stories had a profound impact on other science-fiction writers in Europe and the United States who reached out to space in the formative days of the genre. After the success Cosmopolitan magazine enjoyed in serializing The War of the Worlds in 1897, the Boston Post and New York's Evening Journal teamed up, without Wells's permission, for a sequel to his blockbuster entitled Edison's Conquest of Mars.⁵⁸ Its author, the noted astronomer Garrett Serviss, conjured a reversal of the original novel in which Earthlings mount an invasion of Mars, one that nevertheless fulfils the promise to achieve the “commonweal of mankind.” The story's main protagonist, as the title suggests, is Thomas Edison, who engineers a “disintegrator” capable of reducing any object to atoms, as well as an antigravity device powered by electric repulsion. These technologies promise to be Earth's salvation from another invasion, but the cost of building them surpasses the treasury of any single government. To meet the challenge, every nation convenes in Washington, D.C., to pledge its contributions to “a gigantic war fund” that will finance spaceships and disintegrators for an assault on the Red Planet. Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas, and Emperor Mutsuhito (Meiji) of Japan, among other royalty, each vouch their allegiance to the common cause.

On their way to this world congress, Edison and the story's narrator, a humble professor read to be Serviss, run across the massive armadas transporting the various delegations to Washington. Far from connoting a military arms race or an impending war, the glistening navies are a symbol of unity and peace. “Side by side, or following one another's lead, these war fleets were on a peaceful voyage that belied their threatening appearance,” the professor remarks. “There had been no thought of danger to or from the forts and ports of rival nations which they had passed. There was no enmity, and no fear between them when the throats of their ponderous guns yawned at one another across the waves.” The disparate warriors were now, “in spirit, all one fleet, having one object, bearing against one enemy, ready to defend but one country … the entire earth.”⁵⁹

Equally reflective of the Wellsian strain in space adventure was Auf zwei Planeten (Two Planets), the most prominent work of philosopher Kurd Lasswitz, widely considered to be the progenitor of science fiction in Germany (figure 5).⁶⁰ In October 1897, only months after the first serializations of The War of the Worlds appeared in Britain, Emil Felber Verlag published Two Planets to warm receptions in Berlin and Weimar. Like Wells's classic “first contact” story, Lasswitz's account relates a historic meeting between human beings and Martians. The novel begins in the Arctic Circle where three German explorers on a balloon expedition are marooned on an island close to the North Pole. The island serves as a forwarding base for another expedition, a Martian resource survey of Earth. The Martians, beneficent by nature, rescue two of the explorers (the third, Hugo Torm, goes missing) and encourage them to return to the Red Planet as guests.⁶¹

FIGURE 5. Kurd Lasswitz, in 1903, six years after the publication of Auf Zwei Planenten. Wikimedia Commons.

Frictions emerge in the search for Torm when belligerence and miscommunication result in a confrontation between the Martians and a British warship. Despite their superior weapons, the Martians refuse to act violently, and some are taken hostage. The alien visitors issue an ultimatum: return our comrades or become subject to a stifling quarantine. The English, proud and confident after the Martians had yielded, refuse, and prepare an offensive against the intruders. Yet when the British attempt to break the blockade near Portsmouth, the aliens’ superior technology destroys nearly the entire Royal Navy, ending British power for good. The world's largest empire collapses overnight, and a set of new wars break out over the globe as warring factions compete for the former colonies.

From this display of obstinacy and violence, the Martians conclude, in very colonial fashion, that Earthlings are too undeveloped—morally, philosophically, and psychologically—to govern themselves. “The Martians,” writes literary historian Ingo Cornils, “must reluctantly take on ‘the white man's burden.’”⁶² The planet's diplomatic representative declares the Earth a Martian protectorate. With the backing of massive military force, the Martians outlaw war and enforce global disarmament. Still defiant, Lasswitz's native Germany suffers the same fate as Britain; when the emperor resists the order to demilitarize, Martian airships appear over Berlin, where their enormous magnets pull every conceivable weapon into the sky. Initially the Martians pacify only the warring states of Europe, but eventually their rule extends over the globe as the race becomes ever more convinced of its mission to civilize the Earthlings. A Martian newspaper concludes that human beings are “wild animals, and we have to tame them.”⁶³

Martian rule, though bestowing certain benefits—hunger is eradicated, for example—becomes increasingly despotic. A human resistance forms (of course) in the United States, where a group of scientists have made certain improvements to Martian technology. The rebels strike the Arctic base as well as the Martian space station hovering above it. The Martians, despite the knowledge that they can easily quell this uprising, consent to negotiate an armistice. They agree to restrict relations between the planets to light-beam communications until a long-term policy could be hashed out at home. When technical difficulties threaten to derail the negotiations, representatives of Earth and Mars stand out on the planks of spaceships in the stratosphere and shout the final terms of peace, face to face, to the other.⁶⁴

Reaction to Auf zwei Planeten was mixed. When first published in 1897, Wilhelmine Germans criticized the Martians that Lasswitz wrote so highly of as Typen der internationalen Friedensapostel (types of international peace advocates). After World War I, however, the novel enjoyed high circulation in Germany and the book was translated into several European languages. When a new edition appeared in 1930, Verlag sold at least 70,000 copies, considerable compared with other popular works of the day. As a young man Wernher von Braun “devoured” the novel.⁶⁵ When the National Socialists, who considered the story “too democratic,” came to power, the fate of the book was sealed until after the Second World War. By 1934 it was out of print.⁶⁶

Much like Wells's Mars story, Two Planets is above all an allegory for and critique of European imperialism and “Nordic” supremacy. The Martians turn the table on the colonial powers, subjecting them to rule that is suppressive but purportedly civilizing. But the novel also imparted explicit political ideas about the cosmos. Note that in Two Planets the Martians are a beneficent, magnanimous, and peaceful race until they encounter Earth and its environs. On the Red Planet, the Martians adhere to regulations and customs that must have appeared enviably utopian to a late nineteenth-century German audience. They are incapable by nature and culture from compelling any other sentient being—initially, even the lowly Earthlings—from engaging in any undesired action. By law they are required to inform themselves of current events by reading a variety of newspapers with opposing views. A narrative tour of Mars reveals that the aliens have engineered a telescope-like apparatus called the “Retrospective,” which allows them to look back on the past and issue judgment based on the most accurate information.

When the enlightened race is exposed to the Earth's heavier gravity, its thicker atmosphere, and the hostility of many of its inhabitants, however, its innate magnanimity falls away. Slowly, the aliens become avaricious and come to disregard the rights and freedoms they had so cherished back home. As one of the principal Martian characters, a captain in the spacefaring fleet, explains amid Britain's violent resistance: “The humans are insane…. I hear that the human beings have named our planet after the god of War. We wanted to bring peace, but it appears that our contact with this wild species in throwing us back into barbarism.”⁶⁷

Mars is home to a mature, politically enlightened race; Earth, to a pugnacious, tribal one. The contrast was intentional. By conjuring a civilization more morally and ethically advanced than those on Earth, Lasswitz sought to show the steps humanity could take to reach higher levels of political consciousness, to a higher state of “maturity.”⁶⁸ He also aimed to show that by exposing itself to other worlds and the infinity of space, human societies might develop traditions, customs, and bodies of thought capable of creating a united people like the one on Mars. Perhaps merely escaping the corrupting influence of Earth's atmosphere and its gravitational pull might open men's minds to new, more virtuous possibilities—it had worked for the Martians.

The emphasis of these early space novels on peace, reconciliation, and cooperation is particularly remarkable when considered alongside the sudden proliferation of future war stories in the United States and Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the first quarter of the twentieth. Beginning in the 1870s, in the wake of managerial and mechanical innovations that modern nation-states had displayed in both the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, writers sought to capture reading audiences with prognostications about cataclysmic, even apocalyptic, conflicts they determined to be in wait just over the horizon. Unlike most space-themed science fiction that emerged over the period, these forecasts were unequivocally dark and violent. George Tomkyns Chesney's 1871 novel The Battle of Dorking, which describes the invasion of Britain by a massively armed Germany, launched a wave of invasion literature that pitched national homelands against ravenous barbarians or advanced, but dispassionately covetous, civilizations. In nearly all cases, authors reflected contemporary political and racial hatreds. Pierton Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880), King Wallace's The Next War: A Prediction (1892), J. H. Palmer's The Invasion of New York; Or, How Hawaii was Annexed (1897), M. P. Shiel's The Yellow Danger (1898), and Jack London's “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910) were only the most widely read examples of an avalanche of Yellow and Black Peril literature that Americans and Europeans consumed wholesale in the years before World War I. In all, publishers released more than four hundred such stories between 1871 and 1900.⁶⁹

As War of the Worlds, Edison's Conquest of Mars, and Auf Zwei Planeten attest, military themes and anxieties about civilizational conflict suffused early space novels, too. The presence of futuristic weapons, cruel but superior aliens, and widespread violence represented an acknowledgment of both contemporary fears and the popularity of war adventures at the end of the nineteenth century.

But these and other fictional accounts of interplanetary contact said something quite different about war. They suggested, first, that war would be a unifying experience for human beings, that conflict with distant aliens would serve to make intraspecies conflicts obsolete. To garner the necessary arms to defeat an advanced Martian enemy, human societies would finally act as one. As Lasswitz understood it, this war-induced cooperation would produce a postwar order based on universal sacrifice in battle. Wartime alliances would persist. For other interplanetary writers, moreover, outer space was the site, or the very cause, of the transcendence of war. Taking the view of aliens not only permitted an investigation of what made human beings so pugnacious in the first place but also offered a means to imagine psychological substitutes in which war was inconceivable or simply unnecessary. While possessing superior weaponry, alien visitors often had societies that outlawed war altogether. Interplanetary writers used alien civilizations to proffer new ethical values, laws, and institutions that diverged radically from the ones with which they knew well and sought to criticize. Small wonder that cosmic fiction grew only more popular after 1914.

Twins in the Cradle: Rocketry and Politics

Wells, Bogdanov, Lasswitz, and other writers provided the loose, imaginative material from which the succeeding generation of spaceflight “pioneers” drew inspiration and in some cases hard theoretical speculation. Over the quarter-century between the first appearance of The War of the Worlds and the coalescing of the spaceflight movement in the mid-1920s, the most important minds of that movement—Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Oberth—sought to complete the bridge between plausible technology and fantastical romance that the great science-fiction novelists had begun to construct. Tsiolkovsky offered an equation for the minimal horizontal speed required to orbit the Earth in a 1903 essay. Goddard, without knowledge of this work, presented a detailed analysis of weight-to-thrust ratios and the results of his experiments with various fuels in a seminal 1919 article for the Smithsonian Institution. Three years later, Oberth submitted a study of rocketry to the University of Heidelberg for his doctorate, which the school rejected as impractical and far-fetched. Nevertheless, with money borrowed from his wife, he published his research as a book, Die Rakete zu den Planetanraumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space), which garnered intense interest among a growing cadre of spaceflight enthusiasts in both Europe and the United States. Largely independent from one another, all three men came to the same set of basic conclusions: that human space travel was possible; that rockets, powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, would be the most effective means of escaping Earth's gravity; that reaching escape velocity would require rockets with multiple stages; and that the basic formula for engine performance and vehicle trajectory, among other problems, were already within reach.⁷⁰

These arguments, particularly those contained in Oberth's and Goddard's work, helped propel human spaceflight from the outermost margins of scientific theorization to the frenzied discussions of public fascination in the years after World War I. Yet the mathematics and physics of rocketry did not grow up alone. Alongside the flowering of new technical speculations about space travel grew several philosophical, metaphysical, and political claims about the purpose of human activity in the cosmos. Often these claims embodied the cultural assumptions that had undergirded the turn-of-the-century scientific romances: that exploration would inaugurate a period of human evolution capable of pacifying and enlightening the species; that cooperation in space would mitigate and then erase international conflict; and that human beings would leave behind on Earth all the historic “diseases” of society. Just as the rocket pioneers had drawn inspiration from Verne's crude mathematical calculations in From the Earth to the Moon, so too did spaceflight enthusiasts from a variety of specializations draw on the obvious moral lessons contained in stories like In the Days of the Comet and Two Planets.

Notions that outer space was a font of greater wisdom, morality, and egalitarianism found early expression, it should come as no surprise, in Russia. From the late nineteenth century through the Soviet period, ideas about space predominated in a native philosophy known as Cosmism. This body of thought, as literary historian George M. Young has pointed out, can be difficult to define. It is an “oxymoronic blend” of religion, science, esoterism, paganism, and utopianism, “higher magic partnered to higher mathematics.” Its ranks included Bolshevik radicals, both Eastern and Western scientists, philosophers, poets, physicists, and novelists. It also incorporated Pan-Slavism and the theologies of the Russian Orthodox Church. Pitching their ideas as an alternative to the destructive intellectual traditions in the West, Cosmists sought to elevate to scientific discourse topics typically reserved for science fiction, esoteric literature, and the occult. At heart their writings centered on the perfection of human beings as a species; omniscience, omnipotence, and transcendence to higher forms of consciousness were common themes.⁷¹

More than any other goal, however, Cosmists sought to defeat death itself. They pursued not only immortality for the living but also resurrection for the dead. Nikolai Federovich Fedorov, Cosmism's leading light, referred to immortality as the “Common Task” of every person. All problems were at their base a struggle between life and death, Fedorov preached: “All philosophies, while disagreeing about all else, agree on one thing—they all recognize the reality of death, its inevitability, even when recognizing, as some do, nothing real in the world. The most skeptical systems, doubting even doubt itself, bow before the fact of the reality of death.”⁷²

The solution? Mobilize every nook and cranny of science to the cause. In his writings, collectively titled Filosofiia obshchego dela (The Philosophy of the Common Task), Fedorov explained that humans, after they die, disintegrate into infinitesimal particles, which could be collected and reconnected using some future technology. By reassembling those already passed, and by achieving immunity from old age and disease for the living, humanity could finally achieve “brotherhood” among the countless generations that had occupied the planet. This was, in effect, resurrection, a fact that attracted the interest of many Christians, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and one that attracted the interest of Russians still reeling from the physical ravages of the Crimean War.⁷³

Space exploration was a key ingredient to the Cosmists’ ambitions for human immortality. For starters, Fedorov and his disciples believed that the corporeal particles that emanated from disintegrating bodies would disperse and eventually escape Earth's atmosphere. Reassembling human beings from these disparate particles meant collecting them from the moon, the planets, and the furthest reaches of space. Second, once these bodies were again made whole, the resurrected would need room to live. Space again provided the answer. As Fedorov explained, conquering space was “an absolute imperative, imposed on us as a duty in preparation for the Resurrection. We must take possession of new regions of Space because there is not enough space on Earth to allow the co-existence of all the resurrected generations.”⁷⁴

Cosmism, and more precisely the Common Task, may seem peculiar if not outright bizarre, even to a twenty-first-century audience increasingly familiar with the basic ambitions of transhumanists, who seek to enhance human intellect and physiology through integration with technology. Yet cosmism enjoyed a wide readership in prerevolutionary Russia, and counted among its ranks scores of prominent scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and officials, including Alexander Bogdanov. One of Fedorov's followers, perhaps his most consequential, was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the eccentric schoolteacher from Kaluga widely credited as a “grandfather” of modern astronautics and rocketry.⁷⁵

Born to a middle-class family in Izheyskoye in 1857, Tsiolkovsky's early life was beset by misfortune. At age ten, while sledding amid an early frost, he contracted a cold that developed into a bout of scarlet fever. Tsiolkovsky lost most of his hearing. Because of his new impairment, he was unanimously turned away from elementary school. Undeterred, his mother Maria Ivanovna spent countless hours teaching him how to read and write at home. Crucially, she also bestowed some basic arithmetic. Maria died in 1870, leaving the boy of thirteen mostly alone with nothing but books to keep him company.⁷⁶

Despite these setbacks, Tsiolkovsky achieved theoretical successes that historians now agree were foundational to human spaceflight. With no formal education, he traveled to Moscow to learn and work at the city's leading public library, where he became a pupil of Fedorov. Although Fedorov and the young Tsiolkovsky never spoke of spaceflight, the latter developed an intense interest in the subject, largely inspired by the stories of Jules Verne. Beginning in the early 1880s, Tsiolkovsky began to write a series of scientific papers that soon blossomed into a full-bodied collection of works on flight. After 1884, his research, including experiments done in a self-made laboratory in his apartment, focused on designs for an all-metal balloon (an airship), streamlined airplanes and trains, hovercraft, and rockets for interplanetary travel. His designs were prescient, especially his multistage rocket fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. He argued, correctly, that liquid fuels could help propel spacecraft at the minimal horizontal speed to achieve a low orbit of the Earth. Other contributions included designs for airlocks, steering thrusters, space stations, coolants, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen to space colonies. All were rough approximations to technologies that the Soviet and US space programs would develop a half-century later. In 1895, inspired by the recently constructed Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tsiolkovsky even sketched the first-ever design for a space elevator.⁷⁷

Though these experimental and theoretical accomplishments have made Tsiolkovsky a household name in rocketry, the “Kaluga eccentric” regarded them as secondary to his metaphysical work, what he collectively called “cosmic philosophy.” Cosmist in its attitude and content, Tsiolkovsky's writings connected the colonization of outer space with the betterment of humankind—intellectually, spiritually, and particularly morally. It is unlikely that he ever read Lasswitz's Two Planets (a Russian translation was never published), but Tsiolkovsky came to the same basic conclusion: Earth was but the seedbed of human civilization, and the planet had a suppressive and deleterious impact on the behavior and social organization of human beings. For Tsiolkovsky, human evil was the product of a parochial viewpoint that encompassed only Earth, the sun, and perhaps brightly lit stars in the night sky. Holding such narrow worldviews—“moved by a rough egoism of [a] short earthly life”—humans naturally resorted to selfishness and violence. Avoiding war therefore required people to cultivate a “cosmic mindset,” to consider themselves microscopic entities in a much larger scheme. Universalism must replace localism; holism must replace provincialism; and “perfection” must replace “the bad.” Tsiolkovsky was convinced that intelligent life existed in the universe and that if humans were to meet them as “celestial neighbors,” they first must achieve a measure of emotional and intellectual maturity toward which space exploration was but the first step. Through the transformative power of space travel, human beings would develop the emotional and social capacities necessary to create perfect societies on other worlds, far from the narrow worldviews of their species’ childhood on Earth. Distant planets would provide an ever-widening home where benevolent civilizations could achieve the total elimination of “suffering.”⁷⁸

During the interwar period, Tsiolkovsky helped usher in the world's first true space fad. Popular science writers such as Yakov Isidorovich Perel’man and Nikolai Rynin helped articulate the mathematical formulae of Oberth, Goddard, and Tsiolkovsky for a laymen audience. Young avant-garde painters in the Amaravella collective produced mythical and spiritual images of outer space as a “place” for humankind to fulfill the quest for immortality. Particularly popular was Aleksey Tolstoi's novel Aelita—and filmmaker Yakov Protazanov's movie adaption of the same name—in which a lonely engineer travels to Mars aboard a self-made rocket and discovers an advanced civilization. In the wake of a May 1924 news article in Izvestiia detailing Oberth's claims about the possibility for spaceflight, a group of engineers and science educators based in Moscow formed what would be the first of dozens of enthusiastic “rocket societies” aimed at raising public support—and money—for spaceflight experiments, the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Mezhplanetnykh Soobshchenii, or OIMS). Later that year, at a Moscow event advertised as “The Truth about … Professor Goddard's Moon Projectile,” so many people pushed to gain admittance to the conference hall that the police had to be called in to restore order. Demand for the talk was such that organizers staged it again a few days later.⁷⁹

The Soviet Union's early obsession with space travel, though initially based on the discoveries of Oberth and Goddard, came to include both Tsiolkovsky and his cosmic philosophy as integral components of the spaceflight dream. When in 1927 the Association of Inventors, an enthusiastic group of students and workers, staged the world's first exhibition on rocketry, Tsiolkovsky was the centerpiece. The organizers, who referred to themselves as “cosmopolitans” and “citizens of the universe,” declared Tsiolkovsky the prophet of human spaceflight and the Soviet Union the true birthplace of the space age. The exhibition, attended by nearly 12,000 people in the two months that it was open to the public, pitched outer space as the future site of human civilization, one in which it would achieve not only higher states of technology but perhaps also a slice of socialist utopia.⁸⁰

Spreading out from Berlin, Oberth's home base, the popular spaceflight phenomenon proceeded apace in the Weimar Republic. As historian Michael Neufeld has observed, widespread beliefs about the linear trajectory of technology and human progress, intense nationalism, and the growth of a distinct consumer culture all combined to make Germany fertile soil for popular rocketry. In mid-1927, Max Valier, an Austrian science writer, along with Johannes Winkler, a World War I veteran who had gained engineering experience at the Junkers Plane and Motor Works in Dessau, established the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel, or VfR) to pool research, raise money for rocket experiments, and publicly promote the dream of spaceflight in their journal Die Rakete (The Rocket). Before long they were joined by Oberth as well as another young science writer, Willy Ley, whose popular English-language books would soon bring space travel literature to a broad audience in the United States.⁸¹

The German space craze peaked in 1928–1929, when Valier teamed up with Fritz von Opel, heir to his family's car-manufacturing fortune, to stage thrilling rocket-car experiments. Two thousand invited guests packed the Avus racetrack in Berlin in May 1928 to witness Opel's RAK2, powered by two dozen black-powder rockets, reach a record speed of 147 miles per hour. Just a year later, another crowd rushed into the Ufa-Palast am Zoo cinema to view the premier of Fritz's Lang's Frau im Mond, a space romance based on a novel written by his then-wife Thea von Harbou. The German film company UFA hired both Ley and Oberth as scientific consultants and commissioned them to construct a working liquid-propelled rocket to publicize the film at the premiere (Oberth's design was too ambitious, and the rocket was not completed in time). The effect seemed immediate. Suddenly rockets appeared on advertisements, in parades and fireworks displays, and as toys and models for children. Still reeling from the hyperinflation brought on by the debt payments instituted at Versailles, Germans hungrily consumed the escapist fantasies of interplanetary colonization, new resources, and political utopia that this incipient “astroculture” provided.⁸²

Issues of war and peace insinuated themselves in the German space fad. This included Oberth himself, whose monumental contributions to technology occluded his political views. As early as 1931 he expressed hope that the rocket would prove so terrible a weapon that it would “force the world, in self-protection, to outlaw all war.”⁸³ Even as he volunteered his services to the Nazis (who found him too irascible and insufficiently trained), the Transylvanian understood that exploration was “bound up with the future of human culture.” Later, after the Soviets orbited Sputnik, he felt it necessary to ponder, in his otherwise specialized treatise Man into Space, the political conditions that should precipitate space travel. “Research and progress are only possible,” he’d conclude, “so long as human society values them and if there is common effort instead of the frittering away of energy in wrangling over language, religion, parties, systems of government, and battles for trade and world markets, with one side fearful of disclosing to the other side the knowledge and experience it has gained.” Concerned that the Cold War would influence the direction spaceflight would take, Oberth urged that it was “not necessary that it should be Mars, the god of war, who fathers all the projects that await us.” He believed, on the contrary, “that the evolution of space people can be hastened only by men and women whose minds are not solely concerned with arms production.”⁸⁴

Even more disillusioned with the military domination of rocketry was Willy Ley, Oberth's young colleague at the VfR and arguably the most significant proselytizer of spaceflight in Europe. Though he was for a time a member of the National Socialist Party, Ley was a true believer in the universality of science, and he set about trying to integrate the disparate “interplanetary” societies that had sprouted across the industrial world. In 1928 he stopped contributing articles for the Nazi press and opted instead for Vorwarts, the official newspaper of the Social Democratic Party. The following year, he published Die Starfield Company, an idealistic celebration of international cooperation set in the 1980s. The novel describes a future in which rockets and planes make global travel seamless and politically integrative. To combat alien “air pirates,” the West's largest airline company, Transcontinental, teams up with the Starfield Company, India's largest airline. An interracial love story emerges between the German- and Indian-born chief executives of the two companies, a friendship that trickles up to nations.⁸⁵

In time, Ley “wanted nothing to do” with military rockets or the Nazis, who considered him a xenophile.⁸⁶ In the first half of 1932 he spent hours in Berlin libraires digging up materials on ballistics, aerodynamics, and weapons in a vain attempt to debunk the military utility of rockets, what appeared as Grundriß einer Geschichte der Rakete (Outline of the History of the Rocket) later that year. In March, after reading Carl Spohr's story “The Final War” in publicist Hugo Gernsback's popular Wonder Stories, he wrote to the magazine with a lesson from his own novel: instant travel, and with it global consciousness, would purge humanity of its violent and selfish instincts. “If men of one nation learn and see enough of other nations they will lose the idea of war against a nation in whom they have friends,” he gushed, concluding: “there is a hope.”⁸⁷ But within a matter of months Hitler became chancellor, the Reichstag went up in flames, and the newly empowered state began burning books, including Ley's favorite, Lasswitz's Two Planets. Using company stationary to write a letter authorizing a vacation to London, in 1935 he escaped first to the United Kingdom, then the United States.

By then space fever had already spread to America. On April 4, 1930, twelve enthusiasts crammed into the midtown Manhattan apartment of G. Edward Pendray, a newspaper editor, science-fiction author, and rocketry promoter, where they founded the American Interplanetary Society (AIS). The group's name was telling: the vast majority of the AIS's founding members were authors of scientific romance; only three had been trained in science or technology. Nearly all were contributing writers for Gernsback's pulp magazine, initially called Science Wonder Stories, launched the previous year. For most of the 1930s, the group's rolls and its bank account remained small, but its participants were passionate. They met for bimonthly meetings at the Museum of Natural History, exchanged copious notes, and published their papers in the Bulletin, a mimeographed publication that kept members abreast of rocketry developments in Western Europe, Russia, and in their own backyard.⁸⁸

The Society's first president was the socialist science-fiction author and publisher David Lasser. Born in 1902 to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Lasser came of age amid the political turmoil of the Progressive movement. Lying about his age, he left high school at age sixteen to enlist in the Army during World War I. He was gassed on the front lines in France and honorably discharged in 1919. Remarkably, after the war MIT admitted him for a bachelor's in engineering administration despite his never having finished high school. Though he never used this training in his professional life, it was his degree that attracted Gernsback, who hired Lasser to help authors authenticate their submissions to Science Wonder Stories with sound engineering principles. Throughout his time at the magazine, Lasser took up various social causes, above all fighting for the rights of workers and the unemployed (figure 6). In 1933 the Socialist Party named him head of the Unemployed Leagues in New York, a conglomeration of socialist and communist advocacy groups that sought to relieve workers employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).⁸⁹

As with many of the European revolutionaries of spaceflight, Lasser's enthusiasm mixed with his politics. He considered the advent of rocketry a hinge upon which the entire fate of humanity rested. “Its power of good and evil are so equal and so opposite,” he observed in the AIS's Bulletin, that the ends to which states used rockets would serve “as a test of our right to inherit the Earth.”⁹⁰ In 1931 he delivered his first AIS presidential address, “The Rocket and the Next War,” in which he, like Oberth, predicted that future conflicts would include the pulverization of city populations and industrial centers by rockets. Also like Oberth, he entertained the “rather naïve belief” that when “wars become as terrible as the rocket can make it … war will cease, because then, I think, the organized opposition of the earth's people will prohibit them.”⁹¹ The rocket presented a moral choice: if used merely for scientific discovery it offered “a means to a newer, higher and better civilization”; but if “ever used to the extent that I have pictured it,” Lasser argued, “I would rather that the knowledge of it be erased from our minds, and that we lose also its wonderful possibilities in peace.”⁹²

FIGURE 6. David Lasser goes door to door in 1937 for the Worker Alliance of America. Like H. G. Wells, his socialist politics infused his dreams for spaceflight. Library of Congress.

Lasser continued this line of thinking in his best-known work, The Conquest of Space, released that same year. Providing a legible distillation of earlier work by Goddard and Oberth, the book was at once technically sophisticated and readable, inspiring and serious. In an interlude from his technical explications, Lasser speculated about the impact space exploration would have on international relations. Solutions to the mechanical challenges of rocketry, he suggested, were “too large to be localized in any group or nation.” He could foresee the building of the first spaceship “only as a joint effort of [a] united earth.” At a time when discriminatory policies racked American civil society, he predicted that space travel would break down “racial jealousies” and unite nations in a “communion of joy.”⁹³ In the appendix, he included his annual report to the AIS from 1931, in which he proposed founding an International Interplanetary Commission as a forum for scientists around the globe to exchange data on rocket development and cooperate on experiments.⁹⁴

Interplanetary Thought in Context

Just as the novels of Wells, Lasswitz, and others offered relief from the dreary outlook of future war literature, the coalescing of interplanetary thought in Europe and the United States was a welcome reprieve from an array of theories regarding the global order that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1930s and 1940s. These theories were far more pessimistic about the unfolding of international relationships and the possibility for conflict. Geography, race, and nationalism, argued many intellectuals, were immutable forces closing in on modern international life, continuously prodding human beings toward civilizational warfare and internal collapse. In 1904 British geographer Halford Mackinder suggested that competition over the territory of Eastern Europe, “the Heartland” of the world, would define global conflict. Like the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who published his famous frontier thesis just a decade before, Mackinder conceived of the world as a now-closed political system. “Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos,” he wrote, “will be sharply re-echoed from the far-side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered.”⁹⁵

The totality and barbarity of World War I only magnified intellectual skepticism about the prospects for peace. Political scientists such as G. Lowes Dickinson and James Bryce, though they fought for the League of Nations, wrote deterministically about the rationality—and hence inescapability—of political competition and war. From the fifteenth century onward, Dickinson observed in The European Anarchy (1916), the calcification of sovereignty as the reigning policy among European powers meant that international policy was dictated by “Machiavellianism.” The imperial pursuit of territory, wealth, and prestige would drive nations into war so long as a legal vacuum existed on the international level. Without common law and a supranational entity to enforce it, “moral sentiments … will be defeated by lack of confidence and security.” Peace would be nothing but war-in-wait. Bryce similarly remarked that international politics existed in “a State of Nature.” Quoting Plato, he raised the possibility that war was “the natural relation of every community to every other.”⁹⁶ Verdun and the Somme were extrapolations, to a global stage, of humanity's innate proclivities toward selfishness, paranoia, and violence.

Interwar thinkers were equally fatalistic about race relations. As Robert Vitalis has shown, the “race problem” was at the very heart of the birth of international relations as an academic discipline. The most popular IR textbook of the decade, Raymond Leslie Buell's International Relations, observed that the most fundamental problem of the contemporary world was the “restless energy of Caucasian people” in their “search for new markets” and “demand for cheap labor.” Basically, conflict could be broken down into two dilemmas: “1) the extension of the white man into the colored world; and 2) the entrance of colored people into the white man's world.” The zoologist Madison Grant became a political scientist almost overnight with the publication, in 1916, of The Passing of the Great Race, which purported to detail the history and migration of distinct racial groups across Europe. Drawing on then-prevalent theories of genetics and Darwinian evolution, as well as eugenicist writing, Grant set out to convince the general reader that the “maudlin sentimentalism” behind open immigration policies was “sweeping the nation toward racial abyss.” If the American “Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” he foreboded, “the type of native American of Colonial descent will become … extinct.” Grant's protégée, the political scientist and historian T. Lothrop Stoddard (also a member of the Ku Klux Klan), followed suit with his 1921 study The Rising Tide of Color, which narrated the disintegration of white supremacy and empire from population growth among non-whites, rising nationalism in the Global South, and industrialization in China and Japan. Above all, The Rising Tide of Color, The New World of Islam (1921), Revolt against Civilization (1922), and Stoddard's other early works were calls to strengthen what he termed “bi-racialism,” essentially the strengthening of Jim Crow segregation, particularly antimiscegenation laws. Keeping the races separate, he argued, might “exorcise the dread spectre of race war.”⁹⁷

Prognostications about the future of global race relations fared no better on the other side of the black/white divide. For W. E. B. du Bois, World War I had epitomized white imperialism, “the real soul of white culture.” It foreshadowed, he thought, larger wars to come between the oppressors and the oppressed. “The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as they must and not one moment longer.” The “War of the Color Line,” du Bois predicted, “will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has seen.”⁹⁸

More than anything else, these gloomy outlooks—and the roots of IR as a scientific project—were responses to World War I. Scholars wanted to know how such a calamity had come about and how the survivors could avert the next one. The same can be said about the maturation of “interplanetary thinking” in Europe and the United States between 1919 and 1939. Recognizing that technology had been crucial to both the lethality of the Great War and the prospect for the political, economic, and social integration of the world, they set about casting the rocket as a history-defining object, an instrument at once of civilizational destruction and salvation—a technological embodiment of Wells's Martians.

But interplanetary thinkers also pitched space exploration in opposition to incipient IR scholarship. For interwar political scientists, territory and resources were finite, racial hatred innate and immutable, and war and anarchy natural processes akin to evolution. All were logical outgrowths of human behavior and history. The Interplanetary School rejected these hypotheses. Squabbles over territory and resources would be unnecessary, for both were infinite in space. Diverse populations would transcend racism through cooperative efforts to probe the cosmos; far from a race war, the human family would come together in space. Political experimentation outside of Earth's atmosphere would ensure that progress, not anarchy, was natural law.

E. H. Carr, the political scientist and historian to whom most IR scholars attribute the genesis of political realism, would have regarded this collection of ideas as quintessentially “utopian.” Interplanetary thought mapped neatly onto the definition he laid out in his famous book The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Work like Tsiolkovsky's or Lasser's were characterized by “wishing … over thinking, generalization over observation.” Based almost entirely on aspiration, their theories were “purposive,” putting ends before means and ambition over analysis, priorities that limited the possibility of turning ideas into action.⁹⁹

This appraisal, while sharp, is fair. Interplanetary thinkers conjured an appealing vision after World War I (critics would call it a “fantasy”) but did not spend much time interpreting the facts. They extracted rocketry from its political contexts, or invented new political contexts in which exploration was supposed to unfold. Futurists and romantics, they failed to perceive the full weight of the technology's value to modern nation-states competing in a system that had caused the Great War in the first place. Later paragons of realism would make the contrast even sharper. Whereas Hans Morgenthau wrote that “lust for power” was an indestructible feature of human nature and the root cause of conflict, interplanetarians held that traveling and living in space could alter human nature by reaching a new and higher consciousness.¹⁰⁰ Whereas Carl Schmitt hailed the Westphalian system of sovereign states and wars conducted—and contained by—those states, the Interplanetary School cheered for a postnational synthesis.¹⁰¹ And while Raymond Aron eschewed predictions and thought that political theory should never go beyond the teachings of history, the interplanetarians hunkered down in the future and relished prophecy.¹⁰²

What made their dream endure through yet another world war was, as Carr conceded of all utopian writing, a “simplicity and perfection” that lent it “an easy and universal appeal.” The global crave for peace would prove as intense in 1945 as it had been in 1919, a fact that helped sustain the legitimacy of the interplanetary idea through the beginning of the space age. Theories about the pacifying and globalizing effect that exploration would have on international relations provided all the things that Carr admitted realism lacked: “a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement, and a ground for action.”¹⁰³ One can fairly judge that instead of ignoring the facts completely, interplanetary thinkers, appreciating the facts with clarity, presented their vision as a plausible alternative to realism. As Carr himself noted, utopianism and realism were necessary in balance; the Interplanetary School supplied that balance at a crucial moment when the rocket, no longer a fairytale, emerged as an all-too-real instrument of violence.