The Space Age

Before the 1950s the conquest of space seemed a distant fantasy.  In America, comic books like Flash Gordon fuelled the obsession with space.  Flash Gordon was drawn by Alex Raymond from the 1930s onwards.  It was later made into an adventure serial that was shown as a Saturday matinee feature.  This was the kind of serial that inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  These early texts were very outlandish, but serious science fiction writers began to speculate about the future.  In the last years of the 19th century the British science fiction writer H.G. Wells made incredibly accurate predictions about space travel and alien beings in novels like The War of the Worlds.  He later made a film entitled Things to Come. 

Arthur C. Clarke was perhaps the greatest sci-fi writer of the 20th century and was best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey.  He wrote a non-fiction book called The Exploration of Space (1951), which was an accurate description of how interplanetary travel might develop.  The book was illustrated by R.A. Smith.  Clark wanted the illustrations to ‘avoid mere fantasy’ so the images of space ships were as realistic as possible.   They included a lunar spacecraft that was very similar to the Lunar Landing Module later used in the Apollo space missions.

By the 1950s space travel was becoming a reality and dreams of a Space Age utopia were soon eclipsed by the real thing.  In the late 1950s America and the Soviet Union became locked in the Space Race, a battle for supremacy in space and international prestige back on Earth.  The Space Race was stimulated by political rivalry between the USA and the USSR; these were the two world superpowers and they were engaged in the Cold War. 

The Cold War was an ideological feud between two opposing political systems – Capitalism and Communism.  Both sides were deeply suspicious of the other and this gave rise to intense paranoia.  This influenced sci-fi cinema of the period, but it also gave a boost to the espionage genre.  Spy thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Ipcress File dealt in Cold War intrigue.  Later, the James Bond novels and films gave a more sensationalistic interpretation of this climate.