Coda

Summary

As with the death of the sun in Byron’s “Darkness,” the prospect of Earth being rendered uninhabitable collapses the end of the world with the end of the planet. The discovery of other planets might thus, by extension, represent the discovery of new worlds, including new political worlds. Space becomes the site of new societies in various examples of contemporary science fiction, but we find an example close to the world of this book in two films by Ridley Scott. Prometheus (2012) and its sequel Alien: Covenant (2017) imagine a group of scientists and engineers tasked with seeking out a new planet that could be home to man. As in their precursor Alien (1979), they gruesomely fall prey to the creatures that inhabit the planets they discover after those alien beings take over their bodies as their new hosts. The recent films make several additions to the themes of the original Alien trilogy.