It Came from Planet Z
20th Century Science Fiction
If you had to list three of the greatest contributions America has made to world culture in the past century, the blockbuster film, jazz and science fiction would be at the top of the list. This is a paradox, because the closer one looks at science fiction, the more uncannily un-American and shape-shifting the thing becomes. For one thing, sci-fi has always had an amazing ability to proliferate in several genres at once – magazines, films, animation and of course today videogames and the Web. For another, science fiction has always been much more complicated than the Cold War cliche of lantern-jawed astronauts battling flesh-eating space aliens with laser pistols. The best sci-fi narratives raise profound and unsettling questions about human knowledge and social identity, and ask us to question what we think we know and how we come to know it.
To help us think about these issues, this course will cover nearly a century’s worth of media, texts and narratives, drawn from a range of sources and periods. We’ll rediscover the original blueprints of Cold War space opera, excavate the prehistory of the Internet, pore over the neural circuitry of the Evangelions, and maybe even catch a few glimpses of humanity’s road-map to the stars, as the world accelerates into the 21st century.
Part I. Beginnings
Though sci-fi narratives first emerged in the late 19th century, most notably in the work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the genre did not fully flower until the 1920s. The key reason was the rise of the consumer culture, which moved science and technology out of the factory and laboratory and into the home.
Media
Metropolis Fritz Lang (Germany) 1927
Conan the Barbarian R.E. Howard (1930s)
The Shape of Things to Come (year?)
The War of the Worlds Orson Welles (radio broadcast, 1937? 1938?)
Flash Gordon (serial) (Which one?)
Texts
E.E. Doc Smith – Lensmen series. Galactic Patrol, Second-Stage Lensmen. (1937-40)
The Question Isaac Asimov (1950?)
Part II. The Limitless Frontier
In the 1940s, sci-fi kicked into high gear, thanks to the mass mobilizations of WW II and the advent of the military-industrial-university complex. Transistor electronics spawned the computer revolution, nuclear technology revolutionized warfare (and made world wars between technologically advanced nations unthinkable), while affordable antibiotics and birth control pills revolutionized human biology and gender roles. What changed least of all, in retrospect, were the political structures underlying the creation and deployment of technology – a fancy way of saying that most observers thought of the US as sole owner of the limitless frontier.
Media
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Robert Wise
Forbidden Planet (1954) Fred Wilcox
2001 (1968) Stanley Kubrick
Star Trek (mining planet episode; antibody episode)
Texts
All Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Lewis Padgett (US) 1942
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester (US) 1953
Solaris Stanislaw Lem (Poland) 1960
Nova Express, William S. Burroughs (US) 1964
Cyberiad Stanislaw Lem (Poland) 1967
Cosmicomics Italo Calvino (Italy) 1968
Snapshot: Motorola’s military-industrial rise
Part III. Post-American Futures
Though the Cold War officially ended in 1991, its economic demise occurred in 1985, when the US became a net debtor nation and began to run permanent trade and current account deficits with the rest of the world. Simply, while the US invested in its military-industrial complex, the rest of the world invested in civilian science, engineering and technology. The best sci-fi narratives of the 1980s and 1990s not only identified this contradiction, they also began to move beyond the narrative framework of the limitless frontier (i.e. US hegemony) in a variety of interesting ways.
Media
Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia) 1974
Star Wars George Lucas (US) 1977
The Terminator James Cameron (US) 1984
Castle of Laputa Miyazaki (Japan) 1986
Star Trek NG
Deep Space 9
Iron Man Shinya Tsukamoto (Japan) 1988
Neon Genesis Evangelion Hideaki Anno (Japan) 1995 (Episode 13)
Half Life Valve Software (US) 1998
The Matrix Larry and Andy Wachowski (US) 1999
Texts
Fiasco Stanislaw Lem (Poland)
Neuromancer William Gibson (US) 1984