| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. By De Witt Douglas Kilgore. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 294 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8122-3719-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8122-1847-7.)
In recent decades imaginative historians and other scholars have gradually rescued science fiction and utopian studies from the peripheral position within academia to which they had long been relegated. Despite the intrinsic appeal of many works about earth, outer space, and utopian societies, most traditional writings about these phenomena were admittedly so pedestrian and so shallow as to deserve that marginalization. Too often the focus was upon the scientific and technological advances themselves, virtually ignoring what their presence revealed about the real world, the world these advances would supposedly either transform or allow escape from.	1
By contrast, Astrofuturism, the first book by De Witt Douglas Kilgore, a perceptive young scholar, delves deeply into the historical, cultural, social—and, not least, gender and racial—contexts of the many science fiction and utopian writings that it examines. By astrofuturism Kilgore means the "tradition of speculative fiction and science writing inaugurated by scientists and science popularizers during the space race of the 1950s" (p. 2). Although he hardly ignores earlier pioneers, Kilgore concentrates on Cold War writers and on engineering projects funded by government and by private industry.	. . .

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