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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

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

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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poetry

May 2012

FINALLY RICH

Sam Riviere

poetry

May 2012

I got a job I got a job writing poems oh hi I never met you before going to...

Interview

July 2015

Interview with Sarah Manguso

Catherine Carberry

Interview

July 2015

There’s a certain barometer of a writer’s achievement that urban readers know well: did this book cause me to...

feature

May 2016

Postcard from Istanbul

Sydney Ribot

feature

May 2016

    Saturday       On March 19, at 1 p.m. in a café off Turnacibaşı St., an...

 

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