Space has long been a frontier myth rewritten in the language of rockets and nationalist dreams. But lately, it’s gotten increasingly tangled up with the priorities of American billionaires. From asteroid mining to nuclear waste storage and space hotels, our billionaire class promises us ways to transport venture capitalism to new worlds, albeit leaving this one in ruin. Companies map out interplanetary borders and prospect the moon for water.
Meanwhile, we’re no longer in the age of Big Government space projects. The Cold War era’s space race has come and gone, and whispers point to an impending slashing of NASA’s budget, which was already facing big deep cuts with a change in US leadership. With the US space program on shaky ground, are we just left with the billionaires up in the stars, bidding for defense contracts and humming Katy Perry?
The Kármán Line, my hybrid-genre book of prose and poetry, asks whether we can imagine new relationships to the literal cosmos. I journey to Spaceport America, a commercial space launch site in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where I find myself tracing fantasies of space and queer life through a character who asks why we desire distance—from ourselves, from our histories, and even from the Earth itself. The Kármán line, a 1950s mathematical equation by Hungarian aerospace scientist Theodore von Kármán, is our only current reference for any kind of jurisdictional boundary between the Earth and space, a place at the edge of earth’s atmosphere where national borders cease to exist. What’s beyond it is known as “free space”: a threshold of possibility. In writing The Kármán Line I found myself asking, what is free space?
Literature, like space travel, offers an escape, but also a way to reimagine what it means to be tethered to this planet, to each other, to the futures we may or may not reach. A multi-genre class of experimental writers challenged me to think against the steady gravitational pull of capitalist orientations to space. Space belongs not to the empire, but to the storytellers, the poets, the dreamers who refuse the logic of extraction and conquest. Each of these books remind us that another world is always possible, whether here, “out there,” or somewhere between.
Fires Seen From Space by Betsy Fagin
I read Fires Seen From Space in one fell swoop after hearing Betsy Fagin read in person at The Poetry Project in New York City. It’s a blazing poetry collection that inhabits what some anthropologists call the “pyrocene,” a new geologic term describing an age characterized by human‑driven fire activity, or what Fagin paints as our time of the titular “fires… seen from space.” Elegiac and revolutionary in the same breath, Fagin weaves together meditations on ecological collapse, lives lived in “careless possession,” and afrofuturist visions of resistance. The radical care and patience required for resisting oppressive systems, an ethos that Fagin may have drawn from her time helping to build The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street or wearing other activist hats, is depicted beautifully, in fragmented imagery sourcing itself from life, affect, and ontologies beyond the terrestrial.
Dark Matter by Aase Berg (translated by Johannes Göransson)
A surreal, unsettling book of poetry that deforms language itself, Dark Matter reads like a transmission from an other-than-human consciousness in an other-than-Earth setting. Berg’s poetry moves through alien ecologies and dystopian transformations. It makes material matter, even where form is unrecognizable, cyborgian, and other-wordly. Where material is a body in Dark Matter, it is hybrid or mutant. It coalesces or disintegrates according to obscure logics.. What feels urgent about these poems is their refusal to inhabit a practice we recognize, bringing instead energies hostile to states of being (and bodying) within our rigid Earthly frameworks.
After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions by Eva Díaz
Eva Díaz’s brilliant rethinking of R. Buckminster Fuller’s utopian vision of our planet as a shared spaceship, “Spaceship Earth,” is a secret way to dive into a critical history of art about space. But After Spaceship Earth is not a survey—it comes with its own distinct lens that is itself a politics. I was struck by how Díaz weaves Fuller’s geodesic domes and techno-optimism into the work of over thirty contemporary artists who dismantle the imperialist, corporate, and patriarchal myths of space exploration. Through artists like John Akomfrah, Mary Mattingly, and Farhiya Jama, Díaz reveals that outer space is not just a playground for billionaires but a contested site where histories of colonialism, racial injustice, and gender exclusion are reimagined. I appreciated how she connects Afrofuturism and ecofeminism to Fuller’s experimental spirit, yet exposes his blind spots. This book is a counter-narrative to the exploitative dreams of SpaceX and Blue Origin, insisting that just, sustainable, and plural futures are possible.
FUEL by Rosie Stockton
While this poetry collection takes place on Earth, Stockton’s meditations amid a worsening climate crisis and “impossible apocalypse” pulls us through scenes spanning Los Angeles neighborhoods and pumpjack oil fields. FUEL is a punk polyphony that explores a world transformed by water scarcity and veiled stars, inhabited by a narrator that wants to love and fight in the breakage. I found this book to be an intimate, speculative meditation on how humanity faces extinction, grief, and continuation. Poems titled “Dear End,” conclude its sections. Stockton refuses didacticism and moves through raw, messy and tender interpersonal moments. The collection resists techno-imperialist fantasies of escaping Earth, instead asking how we carry love and loss across generations, in and through contaminated futures. For me, this became a book about space as a fragile continuum of human longing, insisting that even amid planetary ruin, our capacity to imagine compassion survives, tethering us imperfectly to each other.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Also set on Earth, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel takes place in a world and time outside our present, drawing us through interconnected stories spanning centuries. How High We Go in the Dark is a haunting, polyphonic novel that explores a near-future world transformed by a recently thawed, ancient Arctic virus that sets off a devastating global plague.Each chapter introduces characters like scientists, grieving parents, children, robots, and space explorers whose lives intersect through acts of care and resilience. What struck me most is how Nagamatsu flips familiar sci-fi tropes: Space travel, cryogenics, and climate catastrophe become tender sites for mourning rather than conquest. This book insists upon our capacity for compassion, fusing us to each other and the stars.
Alien Weaving by Will Alexander
Will Alexander is a radiant, high-intensity surrealist thinker whose language spirals into an extraterrestrial poetics that is not for everyone, but is certainly for some. When I first heard his work, I was captivated by the ways it functioned almost as an architecture structured to accomplish the infinite penetrability of one idea into the next. Alien Weaving was in hibernation for almost 15 years before it was published. Reading the book again recently, I felt like I was stepping into a supernova. The novella unfolds entirely within the supra-consciousness of Kathrada, an Afro-Indian poet whose breath births worlds. Rather than charting space as an empire to be mapped or mined, Kathrada’s mind is the cosmos. Poltergeists, spectral suns, and hallucinatory verbs constellate into an anti-cartography that dissolves colonial boundaries. I’ve started to think of Will Alexander’s work as annihilating the idea of space as a frontier. It considers space an inner infinitude. Alexander’s ecstatic Surrealism and radical Black poetics reject linear narration, familiar sense-making, and other forms of imperial reason. In Kathrada’s blaze of perception, space exists as a dimension of mind, an ozone of spirit, not a battlefield of domination. Alien Weaving reminds me that imagination itself can be a sovereign cosmos, ungoverned and luminously alive.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
No list about space, power, and alternate possibilities would be complete without Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which turned 50 last year. (Happy birthday!) If you, like me, were always meaning to read it, you may vaguely know that the book offers a vision of an anarchist moon society struggling against the gravitational pull of capitalism and excess. Le Guin’s twin planets, Urras and Anarres, extend state repression into space, where imperial logics go unchecked. But the novel’s profound counter-narrative centers in Anarres, the anarchist moon, which embodies a living experiment in mutual aid, collective decision-making, and freedom from private property. trust. Le Guin’s utopian worlds remain fragile and unfinished, forever vulnerable to bureaucratic rigidity and the pull of old hierarchies.
Unlike stories that glorify space colonization as progress, The Dispossessed insists that freedom must be continually reimagined, not exported like a commodity. For me, this book remains a stunning reminder that the social life of space can reproduce earthly politics and economics, or become a galvanizing point for solidarity beyond national (Earth) borders.
Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov
I was introduced to Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik utopian science‑fiction novel by McKenzie Wark through Molecular Red, her scholarly book that unpacks Bogdanov’s theories of labor and materialism through his early 20th Century writings. Wark’s take on the novel, Red Star, was so compelling that I had to see for myself what it’s like to be transported from a defeated Russian insurrection to a socialist society on Mars. On the red planet, the book’s main character and narrator, Leonid, encounters an organized, technocratic commune with rotating labor assignments, an experiment in collective living with advanced atomic energy and even atypical gender norms. The character intends to learn from this socialist system and return to Earth, specifically his native St. Petersburg, with new tools, but mishaps along the way, including a murder plot, leave him questioning much about his journey. What Bogdanov reveals through Red Star, and what is so particular to Bogdanov’s thinking and perspective after witnessing the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and clashing with Vladimir Lenin, is that utopia built on cooperative politics is fragile, imperfect and always creating itself. Future human and extraterrestrial world-making requires an enormous amount of trial and error.