One Small Step

What sort of cultural impact did the moon landing have on literature, music, and so forth? This is the question The Guardian asks.

From the story...

Forty years on, it's easy to forget the apprehensions and superstitions of that time: the fear that the American space programme would be punished for its hubris, much as the Titanic had been, or that the astronauts would meet more than they'd bargained for (aliens, death rays, poison gases). Unease pervades the songs and films of the period: Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance (which features a hostile onboard computer, Hal), the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Bad Moon Rising ("I see trouble on the way"), even Jonathan King's 1965 hit Everyone's Gone to the Moon. While science targeted the bright face of the moon, artists explored the shadowy craters. The theme of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon is madness.

Madness is also a running motif in the first major book about the Apollo 11 mission, Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon. Mailer was the perfect chronicler: who better to describe America's macho technocratic triumph? But his book is far from a love poem to Nasa. The astronauts unnerve Mailer because they are so cold and computerised, whereas to him there's something lunatic in the venture and in the events of that summer (Chappaquiddick, Woodstock, the Manson murders). For all its egotism, Of a Fire on the Moon brilliantly captures that "moon-crazy summer" - and at the end, Mailer is relieved to note that the first full moon after the landing is "more radiant with lunacy than ever".

The Book Beast also notes of a new coffee table book highlighting the event. It'll cost you $1,000.