In the early nineteen-eighties, when Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as a novelist, a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet. It was launched by Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization--what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie--as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: "Model T is a room with the lock inside-- / a key is turned to free the world / for movement." Or, later in the poem: "In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up." For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: "Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings-- / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. Teachers liked Raine's poem, and ...

This essay first appeared in our "Home" issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today. Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly half a century ago. For Bullock, home is (as it was for Dullea) the Earth, looming below so huge it would seem she couldn't miss it, if she could somehow just fall from her shattered spacecraft. She cares about nothing more than getting back to where she came from, even as 2001's Dullea is in flight, accepting his exile and even embracing it.