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I caught the last day of Ellen Gallagher's AxME exhibition at Tate Modern on Sunday. Particularly taken with this Sun Ra homage: 'Abu Simbel 2005 is based on a print that hung in Freud’s library, showing the Temple of Ramesses II. Reworking the faces of the Pharaoh’s statues and adding incongruous figures, Gallagher also brings in a cartoon-like spacecraft derived from Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place 1974. The evident humour of the piece belies its knowing references, setting black historiography that claims a cultural lineage stretching back to ancient Egypt alongside Sun Ra’s fantasy of discovering a new homeland in outer space' ( Tate )

The death this week of Gerry Anderson has sparked an outpouring of nostalgia from those brought up on his TV programmes in the 1960s and 1970s - Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Space 1999 etc. And yes this is partly a nostalgia for the future that never happened, the thrilling world of space travel, underwater exploration and mass luxurious leisure that children in that period were told would be their birthright in Tomorrow's World by the end of the 20th century. I won't labour the point - Simon Reynolds has after all written a whole book about Retromania - but not only has that future not materialised but the whole belief in the future expansion of human possibilities is often dismissed as a mere retro fixation. The Association of Autonomous Astronauts (1995-2000) was partly an attempt by some of the children of the Gerry Anderson generation to carry forward that hope - inevitably we  called our 1999 conference in London 'Space 1999: ten days that shook the...