Excerpt from the Introduction to Failures of the Imagination Oil fooled some twentieth-century humans into thinking that the alchemist's ultimate dream was imminent: control over the world's material conditions. This idea is exuberantly encapsulated in ads and industrial films circulating in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. "Over space man has begun to win his victory!" declared a documentary produced by General Motors, To New Horizons.1 Shell Oil's 1945 ad "Climate in a Cage" features an image of the planet inside a laboratory. Praising the agricultural revolution made possible by petrochemicals, the ad copy explains that this "caged" climate will soon be "tailored to order."2 The documentary Oil for Aladdin's Lamp (1949) even more enthusiastically asserts that oil makes possi-ble things that are "more wonderful, more practical than anything Aladdin ever produced with his fabulous lamp."3 The documenta-ry continually claims that oil is miraculous, while simultaneously telling us that modern science has banished miracles.