A Trip to the Moon: Lunar Fantasies and Earthly Supremacy

This thesis investigates several Euro-American lunar fantasies and realities across time and space. In examining three specific nodes of space-time, this thesis argues that there is an all-too-terrestrial logic operating within these imaginings and realities of lunar conquest; specifically, the logic of Christian-authorized and -infused colonialism. By closely looking at Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's seventeenth-century "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," Jules Verne's nineteenth-century lunar novels, and NASA's twentieth-century Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions, this thesis strives to illuminate how earthly anxieties and ambitions have been historically displaced onto the celestial body of the moon.