ABSTRACT
In the iconography of myth, ghosts have interesting first and second cousins in UFOs and fictional spaceships respectively. Jung argued that the UFOs of that era were a collective manifestation of the fears aroused in Western nations by the Cold War. The Promise of Space was published in the same year that the celebrated film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, the screenplay for which Clarke had written with its director Stanley Kubrick. While a true epic is a narrative which may well have a large number of characters in it, the fundamental point is that its action should be on a grand scale, its themes involving the fate of an entire people, or indeed, as here, the entire human race. The narrative has an outer frame, opening and closing to the triumphant musical annunciation of Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”.
