TO THESTARS
How the story of the American frontier left the West and went to space. An analysis of how space exploration became the new myth of Manifest Destiny.
Space as the final frontier
When historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1890 that the American frontier was closed, the national imagination did not stop. Instead, it sought a new frontier in the stars. American science fiction took the mythic structures of the Western — the solitary pioneer, the empty land to conquer, the raw struggle for survival, and the lawless wild — and moved them to outer space. From John Carter's Martian travels to the starship Enterprise, space exploration remained a deeply American myth of exploration and personal rebirth.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Western
In his 1912 novel 'A Princess of Mars,' Edgar Rice Burroughs created the planet-adventure archetype. John Carter, an American Civil War veteran, wakes up on a wild, tribal Mars. Click the underlined phrases to analyze the text.
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have , nor do I know any who has seen me other than as I am today. I have been a very old man for as long as I can remember, and yet my body is today as as it was when I was a ...
Pick an underlined phrase to analyze how Burroughs links the Civil War to the Martian frontier.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Ray Bradbury and the Conquest of Mars
Ray Bradbury's 1950 masterpiece 'The Martian Chronicles' explicitly mapped the colonization of Mars to the history of the American West. The stories do not depict space travel as technical progress, but as a repetition of the frontier: the arrival of pioneers building towns, the tragic displacement and erasure of native Martian cultures by disease and expansion, and the replacement of an ancient wilderness with familiar midwestern suburbs. For Bradbury, Mars was a canvas upon which Americans projected both their highest ambitions and their deepest historical regrets, proving that wherever the pioneer goes, they carry their home and their history with them.
Robert Heinlein and the Lunar Revolution
If Bradbury saw the tragedy of the frontier, Robert A. Heinlein saw its revolutionary and political possibilities. In 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' (1966), Heinlein cast a lunar penal colony as the new United States of the space age. The story is a direct sci-fi retelling of the American Revolution: a colony subjected to taxation and resource extraction by an earth-based authority rebels, drafting its own Declaration of Independence and declaring its sovereignty. Heinlein uses the harsh lunar environment as the ultimate test of frontier self-reliance, arguing that the severe constraints of the environment forge a superior, free society that outranks the bureaucratic decay of the mother planet.
Primary Source Library & eBooks
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Dune
Frank Herbert
Imagery: 19th-century portraits and manuscript scans in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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