Strange Scenarios

Having attained access to the forces that shape matter, we now have powers that could either grant us conscious control over our destiny or extinguish all human life. SF has been projecting scenarios of this ultimate contradiction between freedom and alienation ever since the emergence of industrial capitalism. The Marxist theory of alienation, appearing shortly after Mary Shelley’s archetypal visions in Frankenstein and The Last Man, assumes a profoundly new significance when applied to modern technological warfare, which took shape in the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. When the new popular literary genre of fiction imagining future wars, itself part of the dialectic of modern war, was appropriated by American authors between 1880 and 1917, they became missionaries of the myth and cult of the superweapon, thus helping to create the cultural matrix of America’s actual wars and our current potentially apovalyptic predicament. Meanwhile, two priests of that cult—Edison and Tesla—were projecting different forms of salvation through weaponry. Both the ideology and the hardware of nuclear weapons were first projected in pre-World-War-One SF, which can be understood most relevantly by a suggested new extension of the Marxist theory of alienation. Some modern SF has penetrated to the essential meaning of the alien forces we have created and of our own identity as creators of the only known monsters capable of annihilating us as a species. (HBF)

Alienation · Art · Art history · Literature · Nuclear physics · Nuclear science · Physics · Political science · Law · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction