The narrative frame of “science fiction,” which emerged as a commercial genre in the 1920s, has provided writers with a vocabulary for the fantastic and speculative that has supported a wealth of storytelling for the last hundred years—and also made it difficult, at times, to talk about a cosmic sense of wonder in other terms.

But the commercial genre did not emerge in a vacuum. Along with the rise of a new writing mode that sought to address extraordinary technologies and scientific ideas about the universe at scale, there were the new technologies and scientific ideas themselves: Sir Arthur Eddington’s confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity through photography; Sergei Eisenstein’s development of a filmic vocabulary for narrative through editing technique; the capacity of film to take still pictures from astronomers and turn them into “moving” tales for the rest of us. All of these early wonders occurred in lockstep with the rise of literary enthusiasts of the cosmic and science-fictional—and all expanded humanity’s sense of scale, its capacity for self-immortalization, and the realm of possibilities for storytelling itself.

The cinema in particular, coming into its own with sound-on-film in the 1920s, promised a deeper visual awakening to the cosmos writ large. In the wonder of a movie theatre, one could be transported to far-off lands and dwell in impossible alternate realities, with a narrative consistency across viewings and at a level of sensory immersion never before achieved in human history. The distinct spatiotemporal experience of cinema, emerging alongside the rapid popularization of new theories of time and space, represented a technical transformation in society: something that could be gestured at by science fiction as a new genre, but which also existed as its own, self-contained and monumental site of wonder.

This is the landscape into which a recent work of film scholarship, Hannah Goodwin’s Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World (2024), emerges. It’s a tight, slender work which makes its argument with sometimes deceptive simplicity across a few eras in which human scale was expanded by cinematic possibilities. That brevity is to its credit. Although there is much here to satisfy scholars of memory studies, film production and its media histories, cinema of the pre- and post-war era, and histories of science and its cultural representations, the work also offers science fiction writers and readers a glimpse at vocabularies for our underlying sense of wonder that exists beyond the commercial category.

We have had, more or less, one hundred years of science fiction (against a much longer time frame of speculative writing); and we have had, more or less, one hundred years of modern cinema (against a much longer time frame of visual performance). Goodwin’s academic text explores some of the most consequential moments across that latter spectrum, from how 1920s science documentaries sought to leverage a new storytelling medium to convey abstract concepts for lay audiences to how aerial footage from World War II gave everyday viewers a new vantage point for scales of wartime conflict and destruction; from how the dawning of the nuclear age and its human outcomes were depicted on screen to how our first views of the planet from outer space reconfigured our sense of self.

In the epilogue, one then finds some strong tie-ins to more contemporary cinema, much of which could more explicitly be called science fiction: from Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014), to Melancholia (2011), to Don’t Look Up (2021)—all films that strive to depict the enormity not just of our cosmos, but also of the crises that exist for us as we try to preserve our existence amid forces well beyond human scale.

But this is not a book to be read simply to graft technical ideas from film studies onto theories of science fiction as a commercial genre of writing and of cinema. All throughout, Goodwin instead invites us to sit with what it means to bear “cosmocinematic witness” to our universe, and with the implications of doing so for how we articulate and try to navigate our impending destruction. As noted in relation to her first topical focus,

The representations of cosmic models in educational films of this period [the 1920s] more generally also betray the discomfort that surrounded fluctuating conceptions of the globe and its cosmic context in the interwar period. They highlight how Einstein’s theory in particular was seen as warping conventional notions of space and time, but a sense of unease permeates explanations of other astronomical and astrophysical concepts as well. (p. 49)

This “unease” with the implications of a fluctuating cosmos also manifested in the earliest science fiction magazines, through stories which wrestled with the cosmic perspective in tales of humans shrinking from or engaging with beings living in civilizations as advanced as our own—albeit on smaller scales, in en echo of the rise of quantum theory. Equally, there were stories of humans otherwise afflicted by vibrational and temporal energies that reflected a much more expansive sense of reality working on our hapless mortal frames.

The visual medium of cinema created new sensory opportunities for the depiction of such existential unease—but not without some in this early era trying to compartmentalize different mediums in relation to their explanatory utility: in other words, trying to set finite limits on storytelling about the infinite. Just as filmic narrative could and often did deviate from scientific precision, so too could still photography be seen as a less effective way to tell grand cosmic tales of the human condition. Speaking of the storytelling niche that film seemed to fill for some of its earliest practitioners, Goodwin writes:

These films thus imagine cosmic voyages that activate deeper pasts. They also reveal the creative visions that unfold at the limits of the philosophical and technical affinities of astronomy and the cinema. Film was not as useful a tool for astronomers as was photography, but these films expose a very human longing for temporal mobility that was projected onto the cosmos and realized in the filmstrip’s archives of light. (p. 59)

But, as film captured the immensity of the cosmos, so too did it confront the limits of human experience on that timescale. The growth of cinematic wonder could not help, then, but yield forms of storytelling that also attended to notions of cosmic horror, and were filled with melancholy and grief over what humanity was set one day to lose to that great expanse.

This is where cinema, as a medium, served as more than an educator. It also operated as an historian, archiving human activities as a kind of buffer against our oblivion in deep time.

Writing on the Big History Project, “a multimedia course to be used in classrooms or explored independently,” Goodwin highlights the twinned wonder and sorrow necessarily encapsulated in narratives that adopt such a holistic perspective of the cosmos:

It is as if the threat of finitude necessitates a resuscitation of a kind of history that reassures us of our importance, as well as that of the stories our civilizations have told themselves about progress, victory, and greatness. This is an impulse that resonates with Felix Eberty’s cosmocinematic gaze, updated with an array of digital media that allow a user to browse through history at their fingertips. … [T]he past here is manufactured to convince us of continuity, both of time and of meaning. (p. 128)

What follows in this line of argument is one last poignant observation about the implications of human storytelling at such a scale. In our push to document and reflect on everything, we have created “an explosive archive of immediacy with an emphasis on presence” (p. 128). This archival work emerges not only through the overwhelming abundance of creative writing and film produced in our era, but also in the everyday documentarian approach to life made available to us by online technologies—for better and for worse.

Goodwin’s analysis closes out with a return to specific filmic outings and the contexts that informed their development (as befits a work centrally written to serve within an academic milieu); but the throughline she’s constructed from early histories of cosmocinematic wonder invite another takeaway entirely, for those involved in commercial science fiction and its much older companion, speculative prose. Goodwin first describes how the authors of early film reached for new vocabularies with which to speak about the universe. She then explores how decades of expanding possibilities through aerial and space photography—along with more daring and inventive editing and digital techniques—yielded a twinned sense of dread and uncertainty for the future. Her note about the current narrative climate raises an unanswered question for us to dwell upon instead.

Today, we do not want for footage of our immense world. And yet, the sheer scale of our accumulated storytelling—whether formally published or curated only in the confines of the media applications we use to share our “stories” from day to day—creates its own sense of an ending. In trying to harness the multitudinous nature of our existence, to persevere against the end of our species and life in the cosmos itself, we find ourselves creating a new, unending expanse of content in which individuals cannot help but feel disconnected and adrift.

However, if there is any comfort to be found in our most recent struggles with the infinite—whether literal, in relation to the greater cosmos, or practical, in terms of how much more “story” there is than time to view it all—it’s that they’re not exactly new. Hannah Goodwin’s Stardust draws from a few key moments of material response to the twentieth century’s new scientific and human realities over the last century, just as commercial science fiction has done over the same period. Both are also simply the latest iterations of an ancient struggle to understand humanity’s place, and reasonable hopes for the future, amid a view of time and space always grander than us all.