Cold War science fiction, after taking this class has become one of, if not my new favorite genre to read. Prior to the start of the semester, my knowledge of Cold War science fiction, or rather science fiction as a whole was quite limited, but I was eager to develop and expand my understanding through the course of the proceeding few months. Specifically, my knowledge of science fiction at the beginning consisted of ideas surrounding contexts like technology, future societies, utopia/dystopia, etc. These ideas were correct but not broad enough to encompass the vastness that is science fiction. During this class my classmates and I were tasked with creating twelve blog posts based on questions or prompts we received each week. I have chosen six of my best blog posts that I feel capture my thinking and analysis of Cold War science fiction, and its development throughout the semester.
The first blog post I chose to include was also the first blog post I wrote in August. This post was on Samuel Delany’s essay “About 5,750 Words”, written in 1968. As mentioned earlier, my knowledge of science fiction was limited at the beginning of the semester, but might have been too specific in some cases. Delaney’s essay established an introduction to a more broad view of the genre, and discussed general attributes of writing and detail. One main point of the essay, which I highlighted in my blog post was that each word in a sentence has meaning, and the alteration or addition of even one word at a time can significantly change or improve the understanding. Even though it may seem trivial, even a word such as “the” could possess vast amounts of detail, contributing to the reader’s understanding of the text, and visual aspects of the reader’s mind. In the past I rarely read a text on a word-to-word basis, treating each word as unique as the next. I felt that only a general understanding of a sentence was needed to appreciate or visualize what the author intended, but after reading the essay, I knew I had to change this belief. The true point of the essay which I most used in my analysis of science fiction literature, film, etc., was how Delany defined science fiction. Delany’s definition of science fiction was that the genre represented things/events that have not happened. Not only this, but it is in the nature of science fiction for things to be questioned in a real world context. Armed with this new knowledge, I started to think about how science fiction texts I’ve read in the past could connect to this new definition. This explanation of science fiction made it much more of an umbrella term than I had previously thought. Ambitious to utilize this newly acquired knowledge, I looked forward to reading the set novels for the semester.
A place where I used both major points from Delany’s essay came from my second chosen blog post, which was the third blog post written. In the post I closely analyzed a sentence from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This novel is about a dystopian world, where a war has made many species go extinct, and has sent people off-planet. Because of the mass extinction, realistic robots were created that mirror real creatures. The technology is so complex that even humanistic robots called “androids” exist, but are banned from Earth due to the fear that humans have on them. The main character, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to find androids living on Earth and destroy them. The main difference between androids and humans is that androids are much more intelligent than humans, but lack empathy. The sentence I chose to analyze surrounds this idea of intelligence and empathy. The reason why the human race is so afraid of androids is because of their lack of an ability to empathize, making them the perfect predator. Humans are the only beings that contain the “gift” of empathy, and the possession of this trait blurs the lines between “hunter and prey” or “successful and defeated”. Viewing this in a real world context, the author uses the example of a spider. A large reason as to why a spider is such an effective predator is through its lack of an ability to empathize with its prey. This shows how science fiction can be used to exaggerate subtle ideas from the real world, into worlds of imagination. This close reading allowed me to understand the role of the character in the novel, and apply my learning of the genre. As said before, my initial thoughts of science fiction were correct to an extent. Philip K. Dick’s novel takes place in a future dystopian society where technology has advanced to the point of possibly overtaking humans, but through this course I was able to catch the much more subtle connections to the real world.
The third and fourth blog posts I chose to include were my fourth and fifth written blog posts. As much as this class was a reading and writing course, a good amount of history was learned, and helped to establish the “Cold War” in Cold War science fictions. The third post I chose was on the lasting effects of the Cold War in terms of ideas, motivations, politics, etc. Not only was the Cold War a battle between the physical strength of the Soviet Union and the United States, but it was also an ideological battle between capitalism and socialism/communism. The Cold War affected all forms of artistic media–music, film, literature, etc. Science fiction was no exception to this, and oftentimes was used as a medium to predict worlds where any of the listed ideologies prevailed. With respect to reality, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and to many this meant that capitalism had won. Only recently has this battle between the different economic/political ideologies been sparked again, with what many view as the slow decline of capitalism, connecting the collective openness to new ideologies on the level of, say, the Great Depression. My fourth chosen blog post discusses what I believe to be one of the most influential aspects of Cold War science fiction: socialist realism. Socialist realism was an aspect of most artistic media coming from the Soviet Union, with its main goal being to portray socialism as the dominant ideology, and express a utopian socialist future. This made its way into science fiction, where authors could utilize the near boundless nature of the genre to create alternate worlds, future societies, or any other way to promote the ideas of socialism, and show how it could benefit the world if it were to prevail. I have lived in the United States my entire life, and even though I was born after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formal conclusion of the Cold War, I still have always been taught a very one-sided account of the war. Through learning about aspects such as socialist realism, and the battle between capitalism & socialism, I am able to understand much more clearly how science fiction developed both from the United States and the Soviet Union during this time period.
An example of a novel that at times makes parallels to real life dilemmas is Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, The Dispossessed. The setting of the novel takes place between two different worlds, Anarres and Urras. Anarres is an anarchistic utopia, where everyone is seen as equal and things like collective ownership and lack of an existence of prisons is common. Urras on the other hand is a world vastly different to Anarres; a world with extreme wealth and poverty, and a world at war. A connection to reality of the differences between Anarres and Urras could be the differences between an idealistic socialist society and the real world, Anarres representing the former and Urras representing the latter. In my fifth chosen blog post, I discuss a key aspect of the Cold War represented in The Dispossessed; proxy wars. In the novel there is a proxy war discussed that happens in Benbili, a nation on Urras. It is described that A-Io, a capitalist state, supports the government of Benbili whereas Thu, a socialist state, supports the rebels fighting the government. As I read this novel, I immediately drew parallels to proxy wars that I had learned about, such as the proxy wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam. This inclusion of a hyper realistic scenario in an otherwise fictitious setting is why I now believe science fiction is an amazing way to critique or bring awareness to issues in reality.
The final blog post I chose to include was also the final blog post written this semester. In the post I connected the analysis of a scandal from the Hugo Awards to the roots and definition of science fiction. The scandal involved groups of people known online as the “Puppies”, whose goal was to hijack the Hugo Awards and stray away from what they believed to be a liberal agenda. Their overarching ambition was to bring science fiction back to its roots, away from politics. As explained in the article which discussed this issue, as well as my own blog post and personal knowledge, science fiction has always been a place to express politics. Whether it was from the United States or the Soviet Union, discussing aspects like capitalism vs. socialism, proxy wars, or anything else under the sun, the vague definition of “not happened” allows the imagination to run wild. There has been no true root of science fiction because of how little restrictions the genre has for writers.
Now that it is December, I can confidently say that I have created my own view of science fiction from all the work done this semester. Science fiction is defined as a genre of events that have not happened, and can be at times explained using real world parallels, technology, futuristic/alternate societies, or utopias/dystopias. The vast majority of Cold War science fiction was written during that time period and tackles issues such as capitalism vs. socialism, outcomes of the war, proxy wars, etc. The novels we have read, movies we have watched, and essays/articles we have analyzed, all have contributed to the development of my understanding and appreciation of the genre. The divisiveness of the Cold War, and radically different beliefs throughout the world impacted science fiction, and gave way to brilliant and imaginative literature, which is why it has ultimately become my new favorite genre.