The Kármán Line

Author: Daisy Atterbury

Publisher: Rescue Press (2024)

The Kármán line describes the altitude at which outer space begins and national airspace ends, where the body in flight achieves orbit. In The Kármán Line, a heartsick narrator drives across the Jornada del Muerto to the commercial rocket launch site Spaceport America. Tracing back from outer space to the American Southwest, their account glides between off-planet simulations, uranium mining, queer erotics, military rockets, galactic zones of avoidance, and settler logics to arrive in the “outside of outside.” In Daisy Atterbury’s hybrid epic, colonial histories and speculative futures coalesce into hope for a shared present.