Cold War Stories : British Dystopian Fiction, 1945–1990

170 Pages·2017·1.5 MB·English

by  Andrew Hammond

C O L D
W A R
British Dystopian Fiction, 1945-1990
S T R I E S
ANDREW HAMMOND
Cold War Stories
Andrew Hammond
Cold War Stories
British Dystopian Fiction, 1945–1990
Andrew Hammond
School of Humanities, Falmer Campus
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-61547-9 ISBN 978-3-319-61548-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61548-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945822
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Cold War Anxieties 29
3 A Weakened Nation 63
4 The Art of Dystopia 97
Bibliography 135
Index 161
v
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Writing in the late 1940s, Roald Dahl was shocked at how quickly the
Cold War had followed on from the Second World War and appalled at
the dire prospects of the atomic age. ‘What then is one to think about
war?’ he demanded: ‘What is one to think about man? What is one to
think about the future?’1 As the Cold War gathered pace in the 1950s,
Dahl’s dystopian anxieties became a mainstay of British popular culture.
An average television viewer faced a barrage of futuristic projections,
ranging from destitution in Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966) to tyr-
anny in The Prisoner (ITV, 1967–1968), contagion in Survivors (BBC,
1975–1977), nuclear disaster in Threads (BBC, 1984) and alien invasion
in UFO (Century 21/ITC, 1970–1971) and The Tripods (BBC, 1984–
1985). Similar projections appeared in film from the low-budget movies
of the 1950s to the blockbusters of the 1970s and 1980s. The steady
stream of pessimistic, often apocalyptic forecasts included Quatermass II
(1957), Village of the Damned (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire
(1961), The Damned (1961), The Bed Sitting Room (1969), A Clockwork
Orange (1971), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Memoirs of a
Survivor (1981) and When the Wind Blows (1986). No escape was found
either at the theatre, where audiences were faced with Marghanita Laski’s
The Offshore Island (1959) and Edward Bond’s Lear (1971), or on the
radio, where listeners tuned in to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(1978) and two versions of The Day of the Triffids (1957, 1968), a tale of
rogue bioengineering which also spawned TV and film adaptations. This
is not to mention the American films, comics, magazines and computer
© The Author(s) 2017 1
A. Hammond, Cold War Stories,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61548-6_1
2 A. HAMMOND
games that flooded the British market. Despite the optimism caused by
the reconstruction drive of the late 1940s and 1950s, there was clearly
something about the Cold War that enflamed the dystopian imagina-
tion. The existential implications did not go without comment: in terms
of cinematic culture, for example, the frequency of ‘visions of decay and
doom’ suggested to H. Bruce Franklin ‘that we were experiencing the
most profound crisis in human history’.2
The point is given additional support by British literary production
from the mid-1940s. The fact that so many of the films and programmes
in the above list were written by, or were adaptations of, the work of
Cold War novelists indicates the central role that literature played
in dystopian culture.3 As a general definition, the dystopian novel is a
cautionary tale that takes the most negative features of the contempo-
rary world to be the most significant and which, via a careful choice of
material, imaginatively intensifies those features in order to warn against
them. Although the nightmarish worlds of the fiction can be displaced
geographically, it is the future that authors most typically use for com-
mentaries on the here and now. In doing so, dystopian narratives work
through a process of defamiliarisation, or through what John Brunner
terms the ‘future as metaphor’: that is, the deployment of particular
symbols by which real-world deficiencies can be magnified for the pur-
poses of analysis.4 On occasion, the result is less censorious then may be
expected. In film and television, the demand for ratings has often meant
a focus on spectacle instead of social criticism, a feature evident in the
‘casts of grotesque blobs, squelchy extraterrestrials and victims of mad
science’ met with in cinema.5 While fiction is not immune to the need
for sales, its urgent concern with the cause of the future, rather than with
the future itself, tends to produce a more complex engagement with
contemporary realities. Indeed, there are many Cold War narratives that
fail to separate future and present, but which draw the two together in
a nightmarish continuum that denies the possibility of political or social
change.6 Alongside writers who were ‘keenly aware of the uncertain-
ties of the future’ or ‘“have every sort of doubt about the future”’ were
many others who had no such uncertainty about the troubles ahead.7
Despite issuing warnings to humankind, the twentieth-century mani-
festation of this admonitory genre rarely had solutions for its reader-
ship. Raffaella Baccolini’s contention that dystopian fiction, ‘with its
disasters and representations of worse realities, retains the potential for
change, so that we can discover in our current dark times a scattering of
1 INTRODUCTION 3
hope and desire that will arise to aid us in the transformation of society’,
is not borne out by the majority of texts studied in the following chap-
ters.8 This sense of futility, reflecting the acute crises of Cold War society,
begins to indicate the value of the genre for examining the culture of
the period. The ‘age of extremes’, to borrow Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase,
required for its expression a literature of extremes, and the dystopian
techniques of amplification and embellishment were a fitting response
to historical experience, articulating in heightened form the fears which
informed all British literature of the era.9
The extent to which the post-1945 imagination became gripped by
disaster can partly be gauged by the relative lack of dystopian literature
in previous periods. The genre exists within the more general category of
speculative fiction, a loose designation for all modes of imaginative writ-
ing that address the possible futures in store for humanity and which,
before the twentieth century, had been largely utopian in their search for
perfection. Although the European tradition of utopianism can be traced
back to Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC) and to the Arcadian and Edenic
myths of lost innocence in classical and biblical writings, the mod-
ern features of the genre were initiated by Thomas More’s De optimo
reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (Utopia, 1516). In this foun-
dational text, More not only created the conventions and attitudes of
utopian writing but also coined the term ‘utopia’, drawing on the Greek
phrases eu-topos (good place) and ou-topos (no place) to encapsulate what
Darko Suvin calls an ‘imaginary community […] in which human rela-
tions are organized more perfectly than in the author’s community’.10
As impossible as perfection may finally be considered by the writer, its
contemplation expresses a belief that social progress is possible and that
something other than existing reality is desirable. In this sense, the genre
is motivated by dissatisfaction, critiquing a contemporary society that,
by producing the need to dream of alternatives, falls short of the ideal
conditions described in the text. For several centuries, More’s imagin-
ings dominated textual reflections on human possibility. Befitting its ori-
gins in Hebrew, Greek and Roman mythology, utopianism was also an
international current, appearing in such widely translated texts as Johann
Valentin Andreae’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (Republic
of Christianopolis, 1619), Tommaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole
(The City of the Sun, 1623), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627),
Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Louis-Sébastien
Mercier’s L’An 2440 (The Year 2440, 1771). The utopianist preference
4 A. HAMMOND
for reason and order over emotion and instinct was boosted by the Age
of Enlightenment and made rapid advances in the nineteenth century,
when industrialisation, mechanisation and urbanisation, allied to gradual
political reform, seemed to confirm the human potential for improve-
ment. With terra incognita being lost to global exploration, this was
also the period in which future fiction became fully established, its writ-
ers discovering their utopias in time rather than space. Whether hope
was derived from technological and political progress, as in Andrew
Blair’s Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century (1847) and Edward Bulwer-
Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), or from pastoralist regression, as
in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and W.H. Hudson’s A
Crystal Age (1887), there seemed to have been no loss of idealism in
the four centuries since More’s original text. Indeed, with progress being
‘one of the potent beliefs of the age’, I.F. Clarke argues, late Victorian
writers produced ‘the largest, most varied and most influential body of
utopian fiction in the history of the genre’.11
Yet the maelstrom of the nineteenth century would dramatically trans-
form speculative fiction. The growth of teeming, polluted cities and the
horrific conditions of work in the new industries were the bane of social
reformers, who came to associate modernity with squalor, disease and
immorality. The fact that science had played such a central role in the
industrial revolution cast doubt on one of the key tenets of Victorianism,
one already expressed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the
third book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Paradoxically,
the misgivings were aggravated by one of the most celebrated branches
of nineteenth-century science. The evolutionary theories expounded in
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) brought new insight into
the duration and transformation of the natural world and, for many read-
ers, suggested an auspicious destiny for humankind; Darwin himself was
adamant that, ‘as natural selection works solely by and for the good of
each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress
towards perfection’.12 It suggested to others the inevitable decline of the
species. By the latter part of the century, the fear of biological and social
regression was being intensified by Max Nordau’s writings on degenera-
tion, Oswald Spengler’s hypotheses about dying civilisations and William
Thompson’s theories of entropy. These fin de siècle fears not only suf-
fused late nineteenth-century gothic and decadent writings but also
inspired a predictive fiction more sceptical about the prospects in store
for society. Overshadowing the natural disasters foreseen in H.G. Wells’s
1 INTRODUCTION 5
‘The Star’ (1897) and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) were the
negative potentials of evolution outlined in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
(1872) and Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885) and the disastrous
consequences of urbanisation shown in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom
of the Great City (1880) and Walter Besant’s The Inner House (1888).
Writers also had to contend with the rise of imperial competition and the
likelihood that the British Empire would go the way of the Greek and
Roman Empires. For example, George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking
(1871), published shortly after the French defeat in the Franco–Prussian
War, imagines a similar defeat for a Britain weakened by imperial compla-
cency. Written as a propaganda piece for the modernisation of the army,
Chesney’s work inspired a new sub-genre of literary speculation, that of
invasion or future-war fiction, which appeared in a number of countries
over the following decades.13 In Britain, the Prime Minster’s denun-
ciation of The Battle of Dorking as a piece of inconsequential alarmism
did little to allay public concerns that a country that had so successfully
secured the national past would fail to secure its future.
The creeping pessimism of intellectual culture continued in the dys-
topian novels and stories published in the early decades of the twentieth
century. E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) and Arthur Conan
Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913) continued the late Victorian obsession
with natural and man-made disaster, while George Griffith’s The Lord
of Labour (1911) continued to fixate on future war, with some justi-
fication three years after going to press. The First World War was not
only a culmination of European imperial rivalry but also the world’s first
technological war, in which military innovation facilitated slaughter on
an unforeseeable scale. With the dream of advancement so dramatically
shattered, it is no surprise that ‘[a]fter the First World War utopias were
everywhere in retreat’.14 The memory of the carnage, combined with the
poverty and unemployment of the Great Depression, produced a further
flurry of dystopian texts in the inter-war years, many of them depicting
the fragility of metropolitan civilisation and the dangers of mechanisa-
tion (as Olaf Stapledon declared, ‘[o]ur minds stink with machinery’).15
Many more charted the loss of freedom and individuality in an increasing
totalitarian age. Although governmental tyranny had already appeared in
fictional forecasts, most famously Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910), it
became a more common focus in the ‘devil’s decade’ of the 1930s, when
the rise of extremist politics and the burgeoning of state power across
Europe led writers to suppose that the horror of Nazi Germany and