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For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable Alternately a heavenly body, the resting place of the gods, or a divine being itself, the moon’s earliest meanings for humanity were ultimately spiritual, if not purely sacred, largely because it was unattainable and the distance insurmountable: an enchanted, mysterious object The basic facts of the moon’s physical reality inform the fundamental structure of its role in both fiction and history A barren canvas, whose symbolic and ontological weight for humanity far outstrips its practical import (currently), the moon is frequently implicated in a complex reflection of earthbound power relations or cast as a mirror in which humanity apprehends its uglier truths   Viewing the moon as a political and commercial entity in the science fiction era allows us to trace a complicated web of interrelated meanings The Apollo programme of recent history, ostensibly about space exploration, represented a meeting of political, technological and ontological paradigms which created a global media spectacle Assumed to be the herald of a new age, the motives and cost of the Apollo programme have since been questioned The human impulse to travel to the moon was often couched in the edifying rhetoric of progression and nobility by the American government of the 1960s, but treatment of the subject in fiction and film both before and after the landings is typically and overtly marked by a deep-seated ambiguity surrounding the motives for exploring and/or colonising the moon, and often focus instead on the human cost associated with such grand imperatives   In H G Wells’s First Men in the Moon (1901), Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth (1987), the moon is deeply entangled in complex political agendas In H G Wells’s novel the two central protagonists embody blind, scientific instrumentalism on the one hand, and scheming, bloody, blundering capitalism on the other (These twin figures, used to critique imperialism by Wells, can incidentally be found in more recent science fiction such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)) Lem’s novel presents a satire of the Cold War from