British Science Fiction and the Cold War, 1945-1969

WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/westminsterresearch British science fiction and the Cold War, 1945-1969 Christopher Daley School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2013. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] British Science Fiction and the Cold War, 1945-1969 Christopher Daley A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2013 Abstract This thesis examines British Science Fiction between 1945 and 1969 and considers its response to the Cold War. It investigates the generic progression of British SF in the post-war years, assessing the legacy of the pre-war style of scientific romance in selected works from the late 1940s, before exploring its re-engagement with the tradition of disaster fiction in works by John Wyndham and John Christopher in the 1950s. The thesis then moves on to contemplate the writings of the British New Wave and the experimentations with form in the fiction of J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss as well as the stories and articles incorporated within New Worlds magazine during Michael Moorcock’s period as editor. Following on from this is a consideration of the emergence of SF film and television in Britain, marking out its convergence with literary works as well as its own distinctive reactions to the changing contexts of the Cold War. This thesis therefore diverges from existing literary histories of post-war British writing, which have largely focused on the numerous crises affecting the literary novel. Such examinations have tended to represent the Cold War as an ancillary theme – despite Britain being the third nation to acquire nuclear weapons – and have generally overlooked Science Fiction as a suitable mode for engaging with the major transformations taking place in post-war British society. Reacting to such assumptions, this thesis argues that British SF was not only a form that responded to the vast technological changes facilitated by the Cold War, but equally, that cultural life during the Cold War presented considerable challenges to Science Fiction itself – with visions of nuclear war and authoritarianism no longer the exclusive property of the speculative imagination but part of everyday life. Additionally, by concentrating on overtly British responses to the Cold War this thesis aims to further illuminate an area of cultural history that has otherwise received limited attention. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 List of Illustrations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Declaration 7 Introduction 8 Defining Science Fiction 10 Defining the Cold War 16 Structure 21 Chapter One: 1945 – 1949 26 The Legacy of Scientific Romance: Gerald Heard’s Doppelgangers 31 (1947) and Olaf Stapledon’s The Flames (1947) From Utopian Urges to Bleak Satire: Aldous Huxley’s Ape and 45 Essence (1948) Chapter Two: the 1950s 54 Arthur C. Clarke and the Festival of Britain (1951) 58 Class, Culture and the Cosy Catastrophe: John Wyndham’s The 70 Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Kraken Wakes (1953) Britain, the Bomb and the Semi-Cosy: John Christopher’s The 86 Death of Grass (1956) Towards the New Wave 101 Chapter Three: the 1960s 105 Re-working British Disaster Fiction: J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from 112 Nowhere (1962) and The Drowned World (1962) Excavating the ‘Pre-Third’ in J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Beach’ 124 (1964) Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (1964 – 1970): Issues 174 and 129 177 ‘There had been a war, a dislocation’: Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in 145 the Head (1969) Chapter Four: British Science Fiction Film and Television in 155 the 1950s Seven Days to Noon (1950) 157 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) 164 The Quatermass Serials (1953 – 59) 169 3 Chapter Five: British Science Fiction Film and Television in the 181 1960s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) 182 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 188 Bomb (1964) The War Game (1965) 194 Out of the Unknown (1965 – 71): ‘Some Lapse of Time’ (1965) and 200 ‘Level Seven’ (1966) The Bed Sitting Room (1969) 210 Conclusion: J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and 217 the Evolution of British Science Fiction Bibliography 227 4 List of Illustrations Figure 1 Skylon and the Dome of Discovery at night, Festival of Britain (1951), 60 South Bank, London. ©John Maltby/ RIBA Library photographs collection. Figure 2 Daily Express. 1st June 1957. 109 Figure 3 Daily Express. 25th October 1962 109 Figure 4 © New Worlds, Volume 51, No. 174 (1967). Reprinted by permission 139 of the publisher. Figure 5 © New Worlds, Volume 51, No, 177 (1967). Reprinted by permission 139 of the publisher. Figure 6. International Times, No. 25 (1968). Reprinted by permission of the 150 editor Figure 7 The Bed Sitting Room (1969). Image from Accompanying Notes to 212 DVD (2009), 19. Figure 8 Alison and Peter Smithson, Patio and Pavilion. This is Tomorrow 212 exhibition (1956), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. ©John Maltby / RIBA Library Photographs Collection 5 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the excellent support and guidance provided throughout this Ph.D. by my supervisor, David Cunningham, and also thank all of the staff in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, particularly Alex Warwick. I would also like to thank the staff at the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, who were very helpful when I visited their Science Fiction archive, and also thank the British Film Institute for digging out recordings of Out of the Unknown for me to watch. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the fantastic support provided by my family throughout my Ph.D. study. My wife, Rachel, deserves particular praise for her patience and affection regardless of my increasingly hermit-like existence as the writing and research intensified. This thesis is dedicated to her. 6 Declaration I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. 7 Introduction In his 1999 book American Science Fiction and the Cold War, David Seed notes how the start of the Cold War constituted an important moment – for critics and writers alike – in elevating Science Fiction to a more prominent position in the literature of the time: The unique urgencies of the Cold War, and particularly fear of nuclear war, affected writers’ perceptions of the changed status of science fiction. Asimov dated the shift precisely: ‘The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable’. Similarly James Gunn: ‘from that moment on thoughtful men and women recognised that we were living in a science fiction world’. Indeed by the mid-1960s news reports of rockets and nuclear weapons had become so routine that for James Blish they challenged the novelist’s imagination. (8) Not only was, then, SF emerging as perhaps the most appropriate form for representing the vast technological changes of the Cold War, but the Cold War era was itself, as Seed notes, inventing the kinds of technology previously only imagined in SF writing – space flight, satellites, the potential for global technological destruction. As such, it is important to study SF as a genre already well suited in its existing forms to examining the changes in cultural life after 1945 – indeed, atomic war had itself already been imagined speculatively, most notably in H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914) – but also as a form of representation that was challenged by the Cold War, in a historical moment in which speculations previously confined to SF were themselves becoming part of everyday reality in the post-war world. In political terms, the Cold War has been generally characterised as a period of antagonism between the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union who embarked, particularly during the fifties and sixties, on a series of technological ‘races’ as a means of projecting their supposed cultural, political and military superiority. Consequently, criticism of Cold War SF has invariably examined the responses of American writers to perceived Soviet threat. David Seed’s book (1999) provides what is no doubt the most comprehensive assessment of the ways in which American writers between the 1940s and mid-eighties engaged with not only the prospect of nuclear war but also surveillance cultures, nationalism and computerisation. One could also cite here Bruce H. Franklin’s War Stars: The 8 Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988), which, while not solely focused on the Cold War, devotes large sections to the representation of nuclear conflict by American SF writers after 1945. Similarly, Paul Brians’s extensive survey Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (1987) maps a vast field of predominantly American narratives, which is continued in David Dowling’s Fictions of Nuclear Disaster (1987). Each of these texts have provided valuable contributions to assessing how the Cold War and the nuclear arms race shaped the American imagination.

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