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Dark Star (a title taken from an obscure science fiction movie) is not a comprehensive technical history of NASA’s space shuttle program, nor does it contain much new information. (For that, see the work of Dennis Jenkins.) Rather, it is a scathing critique of what Hersch sees as a project doomed from the start by space agency leaders’ fixation on a winged, reusable rocket plane as the means to drastically reduce the cost of space launch. Conceived as part of the infrastructure of an ambitious post-Apollo space program, it became instead NASA’s last chance to sustain human spaceflight as its budget began falling even before the first lunar landings. In order to save the shuttle, the agency made major design concessions to secure Air Force participation and to reduce peak expenditures in the lean 1970s. The result was a “bad design” (p. 160) that NASA accepted on the [End Page 1066] assumption that the shuttle would soon be redesigned or replaced—it never was. As a result, “the shuttle failed because it was designed to fail” (p. 12; italics in the original).
Hersch is critical of the most important scholarly work on the topic, Diane Vaughn’s The Challenger Launch Decision (1996). That book is a sociological analysis of the first shuttle accident in 1986, and Vaughn asserts that the disaster’s root cause was poor management, leading to the “normalization of deviance” and the refusal to recognize that a catastrophic failure of one of the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) was imminent. Hersch argues instead that NASA managers succumbed to “fatalism” (p. 160) because they knew that the shuttle’s design was flawed. Mounting the orbiter on the side of a huge external tank that shed insulating foam, often striking the orbiter’s fragile reentry protection system, and next to segmented SRBs that could burn through or explode, doomed the system to an accident. Making matters worse, the design constraints made it impossible to install an escape system for the full crew.
I am in fundamental agreement with Hersch’s critique of the shuttle, which I have long considered the United States’ worst space policy decision. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments and my work is cited and quoted.) But he often pushes the argument too far. In his analysis of the Challenger accident, he makes his disagreement with Vaughn into a binary choice: either it was a short-term management failure, or it was a long-term result of a bad design (pp. 149–56). Yet in his epilogue, he concedes that it could be both (p. 217). He condemns the segmented SRB (in which the solid pr
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Peter B. Soland’s Mexican Icarus explores the intersection of culture, technology, and celebrity in modernizing Mexico. The author notes that it is “the first monograph-length, scholarly analysis of aviation development in Mexico” (p. 16). He considers how the aviation industry, and aviators in particular, played a key role in the reconstruction of the Mexican state and society following the 1910 revolution. The strengths of Mexican Icarus lie in Soland’s narratives of the people (mostly men, as he acknowledges) who championed aviation; their biographies serve as framing for a larger national narrative of how elites and average people interpreted the importance of flight. For example, Soland writes about Emilio Carranza—from a wealthy northern family and the nephew of a former president—who became known as the “Mexican Lindbergh” for his aeronautical feats. Following a plane crash that took his life, in death he became a “martyr” of modernization, which inspired others to take up flight.
As Soland shows, however, most Mexicans could not afford the costs for training to become pilots. People wrote the left-populist president Lázaro Cárdenas for financial help, but the economic conditions of the 1930s and 1940s meant that many aviators either came from wealth or had backgrounds in the Mexican armed forces. Despite the barriers to flight, Soland does share one inspiring and astonishing case of a young man from the countryside making good on his dream to be an aviator. Miguel Carrillo Ayala built his own plane, relying on manuals translated into Spanish and a focus bordering on obsessive to achieve his goal. The government took notice and supported his work; when he flew from his hometown in Michoacán and landed in Mexico City, the achievement made headlines across the country. Soland notes that the extraordinary circumstances of Carrillo’s journey highlighted the challenges most people faced if they hoped to fly.
Reading Mexican Icarus, one comes away with an understanding that most Mexicans experienced flight as spectators. Whether consuming news reports on the radio or in print, or attending the takeoff and landings of celebrity “goodwill aviators” or the funeral of one of these “martyrs” after a crash, average people were passive consumers of aviation. In this way, the line between aviators and celebrities was a thin one. For decades, aviators like Carranza, Francisco Sarabia, and others captivated the public’s imagination, especially in the collective ceremonies surrounding their deaths. Soland notes a turnin
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Paola Bertucci’s book is a well-written and engaging study about a 1749 visit to Italy, the land of “marvels,” by the “intelligent traveler” Jean Antoine Nollet, a French “philosopher . . . [and] a man of true worth” (p. 25). Those visiting Italy in the period often came armed with stereotypes that presumed Italians were more prone than most to believe in the “marvelous” over the “truth,” and Nollet was no different. It was an era of “fabricated realities” with a contemporary craze for electrical cures, and Nollet aimed to undermine those he saw as impostors. It is this debate, over four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, that Bertucci seeks to examine.
In fact, the manuscript diary of Nollet that lies at the center of Bertucci’s book reveals that Nollet’s scientific travels were also a cover for a more secret mission he undertook for the French state. He was there not only to battle the land of marvels but to uncover the mysteries of the Italian silk industry. We are familiar enough in our own day with such economic espionage, yet Bertucci, sensibly enough, eschews that phrase as far too modern an interpretation for what Nollet was actually up to. Instead, she argues that he was really a philosophic gentleman on a state-sponsored “intelligent” tour. While Nollet did disguise his actual intentions and often used dissimulation to gain evidence, the Italian silk industry in fact proved all too open to him as a man of letters (p. 17).
This intelligent traveler also undertook to examine the contemporary Italian enthusiasm for medical electrical cures. In this respect, Nollet was keen to undermine what he saw as Italian self-deception. In an era where wheel-cranked electric machines could bring with them not only the sparks of shock (literally, in some cases) but also an understanding of electricity’s supposed curative properties, Nollet sought to restore order and control in a printed philosophical duel. Here his reasoned “truth” about the subject of electricity could not only vanquish the Italian love of the marvelous but also [End Page 1019] remove it from the hands of quack practitioners, who were seen by him as a major threat to scientific truth as presented by the French Academy.
Nollet’s especial bête noire was Gianfrancesco Privati. Privati’s electrical medicated tubes were supposedly designed for the curing of medical ailments, but they were also a means to sell his encyclopedia. They were shown off in electrical soirées, where hand-cranked el
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Creativity is encouraged in everyone, except accountants. Accountancy aside, society seemingly cannot have enough of creativity. According to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report 2023, the second most sought-after skill of employers is “creative thinking” (out sought only by “analytical thinking”). Two recent volumes, Samuel W. Franklin’s The Cult of Creativity and Shannon Steen’s The Creativity Complex, explore the roles and exploitations of creativity in the United States. Both monographs historicize the notion of creativity (in line with recent scholarship such as A. Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity, 2017; T. Beyes and J. Metelmann (eds.), The Creativity Complex, 2018; W. P. McCray, Making Art Work, 2020) and shed light on the ways in which creativity, over the past century, has been instrumentalized, commercialized, and promoted as a solution to problems ranging from boredom in school to sales optimization and ecosystem collapse.
In the United States, creativity research has been a big deal in psychology and business studies since the mid-twentieth century, as such well funded by, among other sources, public money. Research outcomes have included “creativity tests,” psychometrics of “highly creative” individuals, “divergent thinking,” methods for “creative problem-solving,” fostering of “creative thinking” across industries, and more (see V. Glăveanu, The Creativity Reader, 2019).
In The Cult of Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin points to the paradoxical character of the notion of creativity. It is commonplace and sublime; it makes work less alienating while it optimizes workers’ performance; it encompasses both Don Draper and Louise Bourgeois. Creativity is the darling of management gurus and starving artists alike. Franklin, elegantly, submits that the contradictory character of the concept of creativity is its special force: it reconciles tensions between the “individual and mass society, the extraordinary and the everyday, the spiritual and the crassly material, the rebellious and the status quo” (p. 7). The notion of creativity has become a lens for us to [End Page 1030] see social change in a particular light and to come to terms with deep-seated tensions of contemporary society. In nine chapters, Franklin’s book pre
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Technology and the Common Good provides an ambitious but sometimes loosely argued synthesis that combines critical perspectives on technology with Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize–winning analyses of the political economy of shared resources. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons and subsequent research, Ostrom examines how, despite the “tragedy of the commons” predicted by rational choice theory, communities have in fact found ways to manage shared goods, whether natural resources, shared spaces, or more metaphorical commons such as knowledge. Batteau aims to build on Ostrom’s work by highlighting the critical role modern technology has played in both creating and governing the physical and metaphorical commons of contemporary life. In Batteau’s eyes, as in much of this literature, common goods are both the source and site for struggles to identify and shape the common good.
The strongest parts of Batteau’s book explore how modern technology has created new common goods and thus the need for new governance strategies (e.g., chs. 4 and 5). For example, airflight opened a new common physical space, airspace, but likewise created the need to regulate and control movement through that space, eventually instantiated in elaborate national and international policies governing air travel. More metaphorically, we can think about the common “spaces” of the radio frequency spectrum (allocated by [End Page 1026] governments for various purposes) or the virtual “commons” of social media platforms such as Facebook. Beyond creating new commons, modern technology has extended the ability of human action in one locale to affect common goods in far distant places (just think of global warming, for example), thereby extending and integrating previously localized common goods into broader, at times global, common goods that demand an appropriately global governance strategy. Of course, modern technology has not only constructed or altered these commons; it has also become essential to managing them.
To this promising line of analysis, Batteau has wedded a more tendentious and underdeveloped historical thesis, namely that while material culture and artifacts have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, “technology” per se is a more recent phenomenon. Batteau has different stories about precisely what distinguishes “technology” (in his usage) from other material culture and when this new form emerged. Thus on the very first page, he attributes it to the coining of the word “technology” in 1612 (though this occurred
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It is still common today for news coverage, film, and much human rights scholarship to depict Cambodia as a broken, corrupt, authoritarian, violent, dysfunctional, and amnesiac cultural and political space. Such tropes risk the reproduction of pathologizing and flattening representations of Cambodia that present a helpless country whose postgenocide present is inescapably defined and trapped by its own violent history. In Media Ruins, Margaret Jack offers an important corrective to these tendencies by developing a historical account of the material relations within and with media infrastructures across Cambodia’s multiple historical transitions and conflicts. Jack does so with an emphasis on contingency, a commitment to nuance in her reading of the histories of Cambodia’s media architecture, and a strong sense of relational Cambodian agency within these accounts.
Media Ruins speaks across disciplinary audiences. The book places histories of material media infrastructures in Cambodia into dialogue with themes in memory studies, postconflict and peacebuilding responses, and more orthodox histories of Cambodia’s recovery from the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–79). Readers with a background in memory studies are asked to take seriously the role of material objects and artifacts within processes of both memory and forgetting—including transmitters, radios, projectors, film reels, [End Page 1017] and the audiovisual (representational) content disseminated through them. For readers with a background in human rights, peacebuilding, or transitional justice, Media Ruins asks us to think through processes of social and cultural transition from violence away from more conventional institutional spaces, such as the ballot box or courtroom. For area studies readers, or those interested in more disciplinary histories of Cambodia, Media Ruins develops several important new angles on the histories of political control and contestation during Cambodia’s prewar and postgenocide periods. Jack adeptly situates the material architecture of media within these stories as sites that are both constituted by and deeply constitutive of their historical contexts.
Reading Media Ruins, two important concepts developed by Jack tend to stay with you. The work of “infrastructural restitution” is the signature concept running throughout the text. By this, Jack refers to the creative practices that seek to restore and reconstruct media artifacts and infrastructures. This work is undertaken by a range of actors. Some are t
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Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in speculative fiction from the Caribbean. This is not without precedent, of course. The unfathomable violence of the plantation complex and the brutal estrangements of colonial society have long pushed Caribbean authors toward fabular, allegorical, and irrealist forms of representation, from the “marvellous realism” of Alejo Carpentier or Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, for example, to the genre-defying novels of Wilson Harris or Simone Schwarz-Bart. But since the turn of the century, a rich seam of explicitly science fiction work has appeared by writers as diverse as Karen Lord, Stephanie Saulter, Rita Indiana, Tobias S. Buckell, Curdella Forbes, Cadwell Turnbull, Kacen Callender, Yoss, and Rafael Acevedo. Much of this work is concerned with using the conventions, tropes, and devices of science fiction to register and challenge the racism, classism, sexism, and ecocide on which the modern capitalist world-system is founded. But why use science fiction to this end, and why now?
A version of this question animates Samuel Ginsburg’s timely and important study, The Cyborg Caribbean. Focusing specifically on technology’s role in colonial and imperial domination, Ginsburg analyzes twenty-first-century science fiction narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to “better understand the cultural, political, and rhetorical legacies of techno-dominance and resistance” (p. 4). Science fiction has come to prominence as a means to address such issues, suggests Ginsburg, not only because it is generically well suited to exploring the relationship between technology and power but also because over the last decade or so “the line between real life and science fiction in the Caribbean” has become ever more blurred (p. 5). Ginsburg’s examples range from rumors of weaponized supersonic devices being used against U.S. embassy staff in Havana to the invasion of Puerto Rico by digital currency investors hoping to turn the island into a “crypto utopia” in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Add to this the impact of climate breakdown and the apocalyptic scenarios it threatens, and it becomes clear why, in the words of Dominican science fiction writer Odilius Vlak, “it is the genres of science fiction and fantasy that have the resources to contend with our reality” (quoted in Ginsburg, p. 6).
The four central chapters of The Cyborg Caribbean each address the history, legacy, and literary representation of a different techn
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