There is a commonplace that people became bored of the moon after Apollo 11 landed on its surface. Matthew Tribbe points to ‘the fact that Americans were never as keen on the moon program as current public memory and myth suggest’ and an anecdote from a 1973 essay in the New York Times Book Review by Hugh Kenner, a conversation between himself and the owner of a science fiction bookstore:

As it is posed here, the borders of reality began to shift for fiction writers in the late 1960s and 1970s. With expert and complex technology entering popular culture in the form of a media barrage promoting the moon shot, the basic function of representation went into question. This is one of the explanations for the drift in literary fiction from modernism to postmodernism, so posed by Brian McHale's argument that there was a shift from epistemological to ontological concerns in the mid-twentieth century, an ‘ontological shock […] of recognizing that there are other worlds besides this one’. No longer was progress headed toward opening up new ways of thinking and conceptualising the expanding world (as its space had been exhausted) it was opening up actual new worlds – spaces such as the moon. Joseph Tabbi calls the literary techniques used to express this new form of the unfamiliar the ‘postmodern sublime’.

Two images that exemplify the tensions between reality and representation during this period are the Earthrise and Blue Marble photographs, two of the few unplanned artefacts of the tightly planned NASA engineering spectacle. As Richard Lewis points out in a 1974 book about the Apollo program: ‘the story of each mission was known in advance.