This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise_and shape_to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.
Author(s): Charles E. Gannon
Edition: 1st Rowman & Littlefield Ed
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 312
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 9
Introduction: Assessing Rumors—of War and Infernal Machines......Page 10
1 Armageddon by Gaslight: Victorian Visions of Apocalypse......Page 17
2 Opportunistic Anticipations and Accidental Insights: William Le Queux’s Exploitation of Edwardian Invasion Anxieties......Page 41
3 Promoters of the Probable, Prophets of the Possible: Technological Innovation and Edwardian Near-Future War Fiction......Page 71
4 H. G. Wells: The Far-Future War Prophet of Edwardian England......Page 100
5 Hard Numbers, Hard Cases, Hard Decisions: Politics and Future-War Fiction in America......Page 121
6 An Imperfect Future Tense(d): Anticipations of Atomic Annihilation in Post-War American Science Fiction......Page 137
7 Nuclear Fiction and Silo Psychosis: Narratives of Life in the Shadow of a Mushroom Cloud......Page 155
8 Radio Waves, Death Rays, and Transgressive (Sub)Texts: Future-War Fiction in the Wide Black Yonder......Page 182
9 Making Man-Machines of Mass Destruction: Future-War Authors as Seers in an Age of Cyborg Soldiers......Page 217
10 Cultural Casualties as Collateral Damage: The Fragment-ing/-ation Effects of Future-War Fantasies vs. Fictions......Page 248
Afterword: On Conducting a Literary Reconnaissance in Force-and in Earnest......Page 265
Notes......Page 268
Selected Bibliography......Page 296
Index......Page 301
