A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

Dr Prudence Black is a Research Fellow in Adelaide University's School of Humanities, and her varied research interests includes the culture of the aerospace profession and how this is reflected in broader society. The Adelaide Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics invites you to hear her present on some of her recent work regarding social and cultural responses to rocketry.

We look forward to a fascintating presentation, with the abstract of the talk included below.

“A Screaming Comes Across the Sky”: Operation Backfire and the V-2 in Australia

The year 2024 marked the 50th Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s perplexing novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The narrative is set primarily in Europe during the aftermath of World War II and the central character is the German supersonic V-2 rocket that terrorised London. This rocket has a place in my family’s history as my grandfather, Major Charles Black, was part of a British Army special unit known as Operation Backfire, which went to Germany in 1945 to learn about the technology and logistics. With the assistance of German technicians, Operation Backfire launched three V-2 rockets. It is no surprise that Major Black would end up at Woomera rocket range in South Australia in 1953. This paper is an attempt to track one man’s career along the trajectory of powerfully evocative new technologies, a kind of parallel with Pynchon’s character Tyrone Slothrop whose life was tied up with the rocket. Pynchon’s innovation was to make an encyclopaedic system out of all the social/psychic/sexual effects of these cutting-edge scientific technologies. Making sense of them is more than the sciences allow for, especially when one finds that one’s own existence is caught up in the global historical and gravitational pull of the V-2.

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