In this past semester, my perspective on the genre of Science Fiction (hereinafter referred to as “SF”) has shifted dramatically. A genre which I once associated with pulp tales of outer space and aliens invading 1950s suburbia has morphed in my mind into one of the most radical statements in literary history, and one of the most damning accounts of life in one of humanity’s darkest hours: the Cold War. In my observation on the nature of the Cold War, I concluded that it was a period of both rapid change and harsh standstill between the towering empires standing on either side of the globe. SF was born in this bipolar crucible, seeking to both come to terms with the rapid change in all aspects of daily life (whether they be technological, cultural, or political), and to speculate on what might be birthed from this nuclear halt imposed on humanity. In order to organize my thoughts on SF’s precise relation to the Cold War, I’ve broken up my posts into three main topics of discussion: how SF dealt with the changes in everyday life brought upon the Cold War; SF’s political potential and its role in the Soviet Union; and SF’s role in envisioning a future for humanity.
Before delving into the genre’s relevance to the Cold War period, it is important to present a definition of SF to work with. Early on, four works were assigned which offered various viewpoints on the definition of SF. One definition that truly stood out to me was that of Darko Suvin: “SF is, then a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 118). To put it in simpler terms, SF as a genre takes aspects of the world which seem to us normal and presents them to us in an estranged way, forcing us to reevaluate those aspects as foreign. This cognitive estrangement is necessary in order for SF to comment on the state of things around it. By taking the new parts of life arriving with the Cold War period and reflecting them back to readers as strange, it jolts people’s minds into critical thought about their current situation, and really forces them to reconsider that which they accept as normal. This technique can be radical in its use, and if done properly can break down someone’s entire worldview through such outside analyses.
With this definition laid out, I would first like to examine the way in which SF of the Cold War responded to the rapid development of new technologies in the period. One common fear was the dehumanizing properties of this technological advancement. Two works which exhibit this fear are Ernst Jünger’s The Glass Bees and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The former is written by a german veteran of the first World War in the 1950s, and details the feeling that those from his time have been left in the dust of history. The main character of the novel, Richard, recalls his final years in war through various flashbacks. He had been trained in the ancient skill of horseback combat, but then lived through the development of the machines of war which rendered such combat useless. Not only has his line of work disappeared, so too, he argues, has the dignity of warfare. In the author’s lifetime, war went from a thing of honor amongst those in the battlefield to cold, calculating nuclear proliferation which could be over in an instant. While this facet of the novel does not explicitly relate to the SF nature of the rest of the work, it definitely reflects a massive shift in the mood from before and after the Cold War. In the two blog posts below concerning The Glass Bees, there is discussion on both the author’s feeling of being out of place in history and the feeling of technological advance being forced upon those living during the Cold War.
The other work mentioned which deals with SF’s response to the rapid shift in human experience is Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The central investigation found in the novel is how technology in the Cold War period can come to make humans themselves outdated. To return to the earlier definition of SF having an element of cognitive estrangement, the novel employs distinctions between androids and humans to reflect two different ideas back at readers. First, that technology is going at such a speed that one day even humans may be replaced by it. Second, that humans during the Cold War have somehow lost their human drives. The novel accomplishes these both through the plight of androids, fictional machines which act almost exactly like humans do. In my blog post on this work, I discuss the ways in which androids in the novel become “more human” than humans themselves. This way of speculation about the future of humanity really is a way to discuss the present world which Dick is writing in. The idea that humanity lost some part of itself due to reliance on new technology is a common one, and the Cold War period’s rapid development of these technologies would then rapidly strip humanity of essential human experiences if they were not careful. In a world dominated by machines, a piece of the human is lost.
Another major point on the connection between SF and the world of the Cold War is in its relevance to the political world of the time. In the Soviet Union, SF was at the center of a debate which was integral to the future of literature in the nation. SF literature served as a threat to the narrative of Socialist Realism imposed during the Stalin years. Under his rule, SF was tamed and corrupted into merely showing off the wonders of (already existing) Soviet technology. The government at the time did not appreciate the genre’s speculation far into the future, into utopias, as they saw the state doctrine of Marxist-Leninism as the only correct way of reaching a true utopia. For this reason, SF became myopic in scope, with works only ever going about 4 or 5 years into the future. This all changed following the death of Stalin. In the period known as the Thaw (an apt name for a Cold War happening), SF went from being policed heavily to having almost no limits, with SF authors such as the Strugatsky brothers even going as far as to criticize the government in their novels. SF being radical enough to be the center of a debate in the Soviet Union’s government as to how it might lead to dissidence is a far cry in my mind from my previous view of SF being an entirely kitsch form of literature. The story of SF’s shifting role in the Soviet Union also gave me an insight into the nation that I previously had not. For years, I had always pictured the USSR as an unmovable monolith of repression of dissidence, not a country which would ever actively entertain radical arts and literature, even for a brief period of time.
The final point of SF’s important place in the history of the Cold War is in its radical speculation of the future, particularly on the question of Utopia. Authors attempting to create utopian societies had to push the boundaries of human experience in order to realize such societies. One way authors thought to do this was in the exploration of language’s relationship to utopia. In her work The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin presents a utopian society based on anarchism which has its own language fashioned to strip away notions of ownership and enforce ideas of collectivism. Entirely altering language to achieve this goal shows just how far SF authors went in imagining futures for humanity. However, SF critic Joanna Russ brought up an important idea in her essay “The Image of Women in SF” that SF literature can sometimes not go far enough to truly speculate on the future. Russ makes an argument that has stuck with me since reading this essay, that to truly exist solely in the realm of speculation, SF must be entirely unfamiliar, not just with our current present, but with the “futures” of our present. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed might not go far enough for Russ, as its society is modelled off of an ideal which existed at the time of writing (anarchism), meaning that its “speculation” is more of an application of an already existing political ideal to the future. Russ’ ideas on SF best reflects the idea that SF authors during the Cold War were met with a monumental task; imagining a future so different from our own in order to break free of the world-spanning conflict which defined the era.
With this all said, I’d like to reiterate before going into the following blog posts my main three points on SF which will be explored in order below. First, SF served as a way for authors to deal with the environment of the Cold War and to explore its nature through literary means. Second, SF had a lasting impression on not just literature and culture but also the world of politics. Third, SF allowed for authors to picture worlds radically different from our own as to imagine a way out of the tensions of the Cold War.