Lauren Collee is a writer and researcher.
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Dutch astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoek saw the stars through both a telescope and a political lens—his drawings of the Milky Way reveal how perception, experience, and ideology shape our view of the cosmos.
More about this author
Lauren Collee is a writer and researcher whose work explores the cultural, technological, and political dimensions of light and darkness. Her writing has appeared in WIRED, The Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Public Domain Review, among others. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, where her research examined the cultural politics of illumination, including light pollution, Earth Hour, screen light, and nocturnal observation technologies. She lives on unceded Gadigal land in New South Wales, Australia.
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The Outer Spaces of Fiction
Lauren Collee on Writers Going Boldly Where no Humans Have Gone Before
Sydney Review of Books | July | 2025
Lauren Collee reviews Pip Adam’s Audition and Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts, exploring the challenges and rewards of setting stories in outer space.
Lauren Collee on Laura Jean McKay
Sydney Review of Books | October | 2023
Laura Jean McKay is an award-winning author whose work, Collee argues, falls somewhere between science fiction and allegory. Here, Collee develops that argument with reference to McKay’s 2023 short-story collection Gunflower.
Real Life | December | 2021
Lauren Collee argues that ‘going offline’ and eschewing the distractions and pitfalls of online engagement echoes an older concept of going to the wilderness to escape the hustle and bustle of life in industrial societies. Going offline, like going into the wilderness, is a concept that reflects “our own unexamined longings and desires.”
Real Life | March | 2021
Putting a tech company’s mark in the night sky is part of a bigger effort to link technology with cosmic ideas. These companies build myths about themselves, connecting their stories to science’s grand explanations of the universe. By borrowing the authority of astrophysics and cosmology—the most abstract and “pure” sciences—they make their endless growth seem natural and unavoidable. In doing so, they prepare people to see their control over Earth’s future as normal and inevitable.
On the politics of public lighting
Real Life Mag | November | 2020
The adage that under-lit places are less safe than brightly lit ones is so entrenched in the way we move about cities that we don’t question it. The horror industry wouldn’t be what it is if it wasn’t able to exploit the terror of darkened corners illuminated by the thin beam of a torch, of darkened alleyways, basements with broken bulbs, the mirror-black surface of a window onto the night. All of Hollywood’s favorite monsters are primarily nocturnal (the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, ghoul and ghost), and we grow up in the knowledge that “a dark and stormy night” never bodes well. Taking all this into consideration, it makes sense that nyctophobia (intense fear of the dark) is considered a “normal part of child development” that — for many, including myself — persists well into adulthood.
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