Abstract
When we look to the edge of the universe, do we see god? An empty void? Ourselves, looking back? For millennia humankind has looked up in wonder to the darkness above, dreaming of what lies in the depths of the night’s sky. As human culture and society developed, so too did a view of the universe as machine, an eternal mechanism put in place by an intelligent external other and set in motion. Such cosmology was accepted as canon and remained in place for centuries until challenged by Copernicus in 1543. What he began, was a scientific dialogue that continues today. This paper examines the quest for the margins of the universe in the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and H.P. Lovecraft.