Capitalism on the Moon

I think, for example, of that relatively late mass cultural genre, the “space opera”; we would understand a great deal about the mechanics of mass culture and the ideological operation of this particular narrative form, if we could grasp the dynamics of that purely imaginative excitement and sense of adventure which readers derive from the contemplation of one of the most physically restrictive situations into which human beings can be thrust – if we could sense the intimate relationship between the libidinally gratifying experience of the reading of such texts and the unimaginably barren sensory privation which is their content and the “lived truth” of the experience of space flight.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious