Space Tourism in Contemporary Cinema and Video Games

Abstract

Contemporary cinema and video games express considerable skepticism toward the colonization of further planets. Contemporary films including Elysium and Passengers depict space travel as the prolongation of inequalities within human civilization, while others such as Gravity and The Martian predict a rebirth of the human species through technological advances and space travel limited to a lucky few. Games, meanwhile, explore topics ranging from private spaceflight to the genetic modification required for long-term space habitation, especially in EVE Online, which we focus on in this chapter. Although both contemporary films and games celebrate technological advances, these media also show that multiple inequalities lurk behind the celebratory human renewal into a multiplanetary species.