The “Space Oddity” clip came out long before music videos became a cultural institution, signaling one of the many ways in which it was prescient. And yet it did not come out of nowhere. It followed Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the similarity between “Space Oddity” and A Space Odyssey are entirely intentional; Bowie, who worked in marketing in his youth, knew the power of synergy. In 2001—which was based on the 1951 short story “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke, who also wrote co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Kubrick—astronauts in are forced to confront both the travails of artificial intelligence gone awry and the devastating metaphysical awe of discovering alien life.

There are no aliens in “Space Oddity”—those beings would factor greatly in some of Bowie’s best-known work to come—but a devastating metaphysical awe underpins the song. Faced with the vastness of the cosmos, Major Tom laments in newfound futility, “Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.” That ennui, bordering on paralysis, humanized astronauts in a way that NASA’s heroic sloganeering failed to do. As Bowie has noted, “The publicity image of the spaceman at work is of an automaton rather than a human being. My Major Tom is nothing if not a human being.”

But beside 2001 and “Quatermass,” there’s another work of science fiction that informed “Space Oddity.” After having drawn on Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man for the song “Karma Man,” Bowie dipped into that wellspring once more, namely the story “Kaleidoscope,” which hauntingly described a group of astronauts falling to their fiery deaths through Earth’s atmosphere after leaving their malfunctioning spacecraft in orbit. “I’m stepping through the door,” Bowie sings from the perspective of Major Tom. “And I’m floating in a most peculiar way/ And the stars look very different today.” Those lines would eventually gain a profound secondary connotation: Bowie himself was the rock star who was looking very different, a striking evolution that would continue over the next few years.

“I want it to be the first anthem of the moon,” Bowie once said of “Space Oddity,” adding drolly, “I suppose it’s an antidote to space fever, really.” It didn’t quite accomplish either of those feats, at least not immediately; programmers in the UK initially deemed the song too negative to play on primetime radio while there were still astronauts in space risking their lives to make science fiction into science fact. But by the mid-’70s, space fever had indeed cooled, just as disillusionment with many of the achievements of the ’60s had set in.

In that sense, “Space Oddity” perfectly mirrored what was going on in science fiction’s New Wave at the time—not to mention Bowie’s lifelong investment in speculative fiction. Even the B-side of the “Space Oddity” single, “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud,” reflects this; it’s the tale of a mystical boy whose attempts to enlighten his village earn him persecution—until the sentient mountain on which he lives causes an avalanche, which kills his accusers. It also makes the “Space Oddity” single a delightful rarity in sci-fi and fantasy music: A record that’s science fiction on one side, fantasy on the other.