Space: the final frontier,

The 21st-century urge to escape, as reflected in certain 20th-century literary works

Abstract

The dissolution of horizontal boundaries, driven by advances in communication technologies and the systemic interconnectivity of contemporary networks, has engendered a novel psychological condition: a human inclination to extend both perception and agency beyond terrestrial limits toward a cosmic, extra-planetary horizon. The article examines the spatial imaginary in twentieth-century literature and its influence on contemporary sensibility. For over a century, this “vertical elsewhere” has been developed by poets, writers – particularly in science fiction – and visionary thinkers of diverse backgrounds and origins. Over the course of the twentieth century, this imaginative construct generated an ideal tension that gradually evolved into an escapist ideology, exhibiting features akin to an emerging form of belief. The author identifies three principal thematic trajectories: the allure of nomadism, an enduring preoccupation with extinction, and an ambivalent engagement with alterity, characterized by a simultaneous attraction to and apprehension of the alien. These developments are situated within a socio-anthropological framework shaped by technological elites, major AI corporations, and heterodox intellectual currents.