ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the contested place of “the planet” in literary history, focusing on post-Copernican visions of the planets as spaces of possible human habitation. Fantasies about human colonization of outer space have an important place in the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a time when it becomes simultaneously understood both as a major spending priority of the US military-industrial complex and as the quasi-theological “destiny” of the human race. The conclusion of the chapter takes up a different sort of planetarity: the global cosmopolitan vision of the contemporary ecological movement, which seeks to understand the Earth as a unified totality whose future is threatened by the actions of human beings.
