The Astronomy of Melancholy

Arnaud Gerspacher considers “Sad Planets” by Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker.

By Arnaud GerspacherJune 14, 2025

• Science & Technology

• SF

POOR POOLE. I like to think the mission pilot from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is still out there, a frozen mummy in his orange-yellow space suit, gliding along in zero gravity. How many times does he die? If losing your lifeworld and all the people you know through space-time displacement amounts to a living death, then his first came simply by making the ill-fated trip aboard the Discovery One. Then there is his biological death when a mistake-prone and hubristic AI leads to his asphyxiation in the astral abyss. Finally, there is his semiotic death: turning into something, once HAL is disactivated and Dave is off on his celestial acid trip to God knows when or where, that no longer has any observers to encode it with meaning—in other words, into a piece of media that no longer mediates, barring some divine entity or eventual discovery by extraterrestrials with a similar propensity for semiosis. Through this third death, Poole becomes, for all intents and purposes, as unthinkable as an undiscovered planet.

This is the sort of scene that media theorists Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker take up in their recent collaboration, Sad Planets (2024), which is filled with similar case studies, both fiction and nonfiction. The book contains an ensemble cast of celestial objects—some sent off into space by human hands, like “Oppy,” the Mars rover whose “passing away” was inexplicably (though not unexpectedly) emotionally charged for those who knew him; some with a trajectory and facticity all their own, like ʻOumuamua, that weirdly purposefully shaped space slab that flew into our solar system in 2017, becoming astronomy’s first officially designated “Interstellar Object,” or Saturn, the most melancholic of planets. The book, which stems from a course by the same name that the authors have co-taught, is a vast and worldly trove of philosophical, literary (especially science fiction), scientific, and aesthetic references, some of which may be well known and expected—Sebald, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche—while others amount to new finds (for this reader, these included W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story “The Comet,” Ranald MacDougall’s 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and the early science fiction writings of J.-H. Rosny aîné).

This wide array of material hints at Sad Planets’ general approach, which forgoes any single thread or discipline in favor of a constellation of objects, entities, and ideas. This is media studies that far exceeds the conventional bounds of human culture and technology. Here everything mediates information and moods, sometimes in very strange and unhuman ways. Sad Planets is an attentively promiscuous book—and not only at the level of content, but also in style and form. The prose is refreshingly adventurous and unafraid to experiment. The format is a series of micro-essays complied into 16 “sequences” that can be read in any order. This format mirrors the unthinkably large expanse of the universe, the nested galaxies within, the glittering stars within them, the planets within solar systems, all the way down to the space stuff indexed by our very own sapient bodies (as the theory of panspermia—the idea that some of the key ingredients for our biological soup hitchhiked from outer space—is appearing increasingly likely). This ambient form of writing matches the book’s ambition, which is to track the affective relay between these celestial bodies on our ways of being and thinking. As the authors put it: “We seem to be pairing an ancient science—astronomy—with a new field—affect theory.” This includes the emotional toll of the climate derangements we now face on Earth, whereby psychic and weather depressions overlap all the time in the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real in ways that are often difficult to totalize or even localize. Dark symptoms nonetheless bloom in the short sections titled “Extreme Weather” that intercede each sequence of the book. These are a series of weather reports on often bizarre and troubling environmental news from around the world: deadly wet-bulb events; sinkholes; catastrophic land and ocean fires; swarms of armadillos, scorpions, and worms; sea snot; algae; and dead zones. These “Extreme Weather” entries remind me of the short riddles that mark the way in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), and it is up to the reader to connect these planetary communiqués with the philosophical introspections of the much lengthier sequences.

Sad Planets can be quite bleak, though humor, wonder, and humility do kick in as welcome immune responses (and maybe the bleakness itself provides a bluesy remedy for insufferable or delusional optimism). If the book has a theory of the contemporary, it is that we are held hostage to a maddening present wherein being present is becoming increasingly difficult, suspended as we are in a state of implacable dread: “Going backwards is impossible, and going forwards is a nightmare.” No reactionary returns and no accelerationist pushing-through. Just a mean case of “solastalgia”—a condition named by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht—which titles the book’s penultimate sequence, where we pine away for a home we have not left but which has left us, degraded, asphyxiated, and faded away (contrary to nostalgia, which presumes a happy, healthy home in some elsewhere). In the meantime, our species-potential is being thrown off course by posthuman prostheses that paradoxically make us subhuman. In assessing the sobering tone of Sad Planets, one could lift from Camus’s review of Sartre’s Le mur (1939) in claiming that the price paid for embracing nothingness is gaining a measure of lucidity (and if Sisyphus, that classic figure of existential absurdity, still resonates with us today, it is only with the plot twist that the hill itself has become a serious problem).

Does this make for a reading experience equivalent to doomscrolling? Yes, at least at times. As someone who read the sequences in order and in one go, I might advise a more homeopathic approach. Take judicious breaks with loved ones, human and nonhuman. Jump around and treat the sequences as self-enclosed monads (as the authors suggest in their preface). I also recommend watching or reading the references unknown to you as you go along. To really set the mood, you could do worse than starting with a screening of Aniara, the 2018 Swedish film based on Harry Martinson’s 1956 epic poem of the same name, and then reading Sequence 10: “Liquid Sky.”

If you do read Sad Planets straight through, be prepared for some possible side effects. Since each sequence (or even micro-essay) can be read independently, this means that a reference you will have encountered in a previous sequence may be introduced again as if for the first time. This can produce a sense of amnesia or dementia (but then, this could be my own projective baggage—good books can often feel like the fictional planet Solaris, with personalized fears, anxieties, and regrets emanating from the strongest of pages).

Sadness is the prevailing feeling, emotion, affect, and mood (for a helpful and precise differentiation of these related terms, see the micro-essay “Dissipative Structures” in Sequence 12: “Prayers for Rain”). If gravity always wins, then so does sadness—or, as Pettman put it in a podcast interview around the time of Sad Planets’ release, “happiness is fleeting, and sadness is eternal.” Yet sadness is never alone: anxiety, eco-stress, fear, dread, depression, grief, helplessness, anger, and disappointment, all of these invested energies flare together. Pettman and Thacker maintain that sadness is our base condition. It can be likened to the mood equivalent of the cosmic microwave background—that radiating entropic residue left behind after all these other invested energies have been discharged and have quieted down. One of the great merits of Sad Planets is the honesty of its nihilistic feelings and embrace of melancholy, an honesty that never slides into cynicism. There is cheap pessimism and there is thoughtful pessimism—Sad Planets is the latter.

For me,, there was no better moment of sadomasochistic pleasure than pondering one of Emil Cioran’s vituperative invectives that the authors quote in the seventh sequence, “Entropology.” It is his view of the neotenic “human stain” from 1979’s Drawn and Quartered (tr. Richard Howard): “This little blind creature, only a few days old, turning its head every which way in search of something or other, this naked skull, this initial baldness, this tiny monkey that has sojourned for months in a latrine and that soon, forgetting its origins, will spit on the galaxies.”

Not a glowing review of our species, to say the least, though looking around and seeing the mess we have made of things, it is hard not to have some tacit agreement. The misanthropic devil on my one shoulder smugly nods his head, while the leftist angel on the other worries about what this all means for emancipation. This level of honesty is often uncomfortable, and it is easier to disavow the very worst. On the other hand, it also risks being its own form of disavowal, in that fetishizing the very worst has a way of warding off its very real effects. There is also the worry that relishing the very worst can amount to what Fredric Jameson called “nostalgia for the present”—specifically, the relief in finding, after a pessimistic theoretical sojourn, that things are not quite that bad just yet.

What is most compelling about Sad Planets is how it tends to bend the mind. Think about the recently discovered exoplanet Kepler-442b, which makes an appearance in the third sequence, “Planetary Sorrow.” This exoplanet appears to have a higher habitability rating than Earth. With this discovery, we become the species with the technological supplements to downgrade our own planet. Is this a cosmic joke intended to provoke our jealousy? Did God die before having the chance to populate his second go of it? Far more likely, Kepler-442b is just a messy contingent outcome of a universe that does not hear our laughter or care about whatever meaning we might make of a cruelly undevelopable zip code some 1,100 light years away (the twist is that Kepler-442b only became a greener pasture once we came onto the scene; in other words, the possibility of celestial dissatisfaction is coextensive with us). There are moments in the book when Earth itself will start to feel like an exoplanet—an uncanny or “unearthly” estrangement turning you into a visitor to this beautiful place in the process of being trashed.

There is a trippy way in which obsolete theories begin to vibrate again with some sort of veracity in Sad Planets. If there is a central methodological orientation here, it is this. Maybe those Hippocratic and Galen humors do have something to tell us in times of climate disaster. Maybe the cosmos is mirrored by the microcosmos—not as in Polykleitos’s idealized canon, whereby human bodily proportions give us a map of the firmament, but more like Michel Granger’s album art for Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 space-synth masterpiece Oxygène (which makes a wonderful cameo in the book), depicting a rotted Earth peeling away its blue epidermis to reveal a boney human skull at its core. The authors describe it as a fitting “visual allegory for the existential quandaries presented by the Anthropocene.”

Microplastics floating around our bloodstreams like so much space debris; noxious information proliferating across media, echoing life-altering greenhouse gases deviating Holocenic weather patterns; microbiomes dying for more fiber and microbial diversity mirroring the capitalist necrobiome of deforestation and monoculture; consciousness as our inner dark matter or energy. Similitudes of micro-macro scaling could go on and on. When it comes to reconsidering obsolete epistemes, like Neoplatonic theories of the microcosm and macrocosm, I often come back to Foucault’s walnut in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), which is offered as an example of how Renaissance knowledge based on similitude is premodern: i.e., walnuts look like brains, so they must be good for the brain. We now know that walnuts are rich in alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an essential fatty acid that plays a crucial role in brain health and composition. What to make of an obsolescent knowledge paradigm that hits upon the truth by other means? Can it be that we have never been the only ones speaking or sending out signs after all?

In all this, there seems to be a subtle critique of anthropocentrism—that all is derived from a purportedly proprietary human condition—and correlationism, the German idealist idea that we can never sneak up on the world (let alone the universe) without projecting our observational faculties of ascertaining the world in the process. Sad Planets does not claim that we can exit this circle, as some speculative realists or object-oriented ontologists do. Pettman and Thacker are more modest. They serve more to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow, and maybe not even a very important one. Neither, however, does the book lionize this preexisting condition of ontological stickiness. Correlationism is just kind of sad—we can never get away from ourselves:

It’s possible the sadness of planets is less about our inability to experience what cannot be experienced and more about this gulf between self and world, a rift that will never be broached without immediately (and magically) transforming the ‘it’ into something else: a celestial body, a planet, our planet, our home.

When it comes to the wondrous more-than-human realm, be it on Earth or across the universe, we come across more like pathetic King Midases that compromise nearly everything we touch.