Late for the sky

"Heeding the metaphors rife among contemporary voices, David Lavery finds in this compelling probe of the tacit messages of the age a preoccupation with space so pervasive that he can only conclude that many--anxious to flee the Earth and conquer space--speak and act as if even now they are "late for the sky."" "Lavery's goal is "to hear us talk in the Space Age, to listen to how we are beginning to think about a possible extraterrestrial future, and by so doing to foreground the extreme spaciness of the era." He terms his effort a "deep questioning of the extraterrestrial urge by a conscientious objector."" "Lavery argues persuasively that those intrigued by the challenge of perfecting a world ruled solely by human artifice are increasingly committed to abandoning the Earth. Writers ranging from physicists to rock stars salt their works with references to leaving the Earth. Lavery calls these references "evolutionary Freudian slips" that reveal genuine "extraterrestrial urges." Because metaphors of space are now ubiquitous, Lavery rejects C. P. Snow's dichotomy separating science from the humanities; the true split now is between Earthkind and Spacekind.".