Abstract
The willingness of both the United States and the Soviet Union to defend their ostensibly incompatible ideologies with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons presented a ready-made situation for dystopian fiction’s ironic troubling of utopian propositions. Many of the most immediately recognisable dystopian works from the Cold War arose from the two superpowers or from nations allied with them. As the chapter examines, such relatively familiar works tended to criticise inherent flaws within one or both of the Cold War’s dominant ideologies. However, the chapter also addresses the extensive body of dystopian literature produced by authors from the ‘non-aligned’ nations and that collectively revealed how the Cold War indirectly and directly deformed the societies it dismissively lumped together as the ‘Third World’.
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Notes
- 1.
Jill Lepore, ‘No, We Cannot’, New Yorker, 93: 16 (5 and 12 June 2017), p. 102.
- 2.
Tara Abell, et al., ‘100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction’, Vulture, 3 August 2017, http://www.vulture.com/article/best-dystopian-books.html (accessed 13 December 2018).
- 3.
Peter Fitting, ‘Utopia, Dystopia, and Science Diction’, in Gregory Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 141.
- 4.
The contours of this discourse are outlined excellently in Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 89–135, and in Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History: A Study of Modern Despotism, Its Antecedents, and Its Literary Diffractions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 273–90. Additional significant recent contributions to the scholarship on utopia and dystopia include Thomas Horan’s Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction (2018), Andrew Hammond’s Cold War Stories (2017), Daniele Fioretti’s Utopia and Dystopia in Postwar Italian Literature (2017), Mark Featherstone’s Planet Utopia (2017), Jeffrey C. Kinkley’s Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels (2015), Francisco Bethencourt’s edited Utopia in Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone African Countries (2015), Peter Marks’s Imagining Surveillance (2015), Judie Newman’s Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction (2014) and Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Amy L. Montz’s edited Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (2014).
- 5.
Claeys, Dystopia, p. 5.
- 6.
Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Westport: Greenwood, 1994), p. 117.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 118.
- 8.
Booker, The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), p. 1.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 11.
Jeremi Suri, ‘The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings: Historical Intersections’, Cold War History, 6: 3 (2006), p. 353.
- 12.
Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006), p. 117.
- 13.
The latter two technologies became particularly indispensable to the samizdat dissemination of contraband literature, a category into which dystopias frequently fell.
- 14.
Many of the texts included in the discussion of totalitarian dystopias below have literary bloodlines that can be traced directly back to a translation of one or more of the ‘classic’ dystopias by Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell.
- 15.
There is first-rate existing scholarship that details such explosions of dystopian writing in various national contexts. For example, M. Elizabeth Ginway has extensively catalogued the flowering of Brazilian dystopian works during that country’s military dictatorship (1964–85) in her book Brazilian Science Fiction (2004). On a smaller scale, Ana Maria Mão-de-Ferro Martinho surveys the growing influence of dystopian writing in postcolonial Angola in her article ‘Utopian Eyes and Dystopian Writings in Angolan Literature’ (2007).
- 16.
Westad, ‘Foreword’, in Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake, eds, Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. xii. For a more thorough articulation of these points, see also Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War (2005).
- 17.
The fact that these hearts and minds were accompanied by both labour and natural resources was also important, of course.
- 18.
Spires, ‘Homero Aridjis and Mexico’s Eco-Critical Dystopia’, in Brett Josef Grubisis, Gisèle M. Baxter and Tara Lee, eds, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), p. 343.
- 19.
Canivell, ‘Love, War, and Mal de Amores: Utopia and Dystopia in the Mexican Revolution’, in Grubisis, Baxter and Lee, eds, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, p. 243 (emphasis in original).
- 20.
In addition to his numerous books on utopianism in all its forms, Sargent has produced two additional pieces of scholarship that are essential tools for researching dystopia. His article ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’ (1994) introduced a multi-tiered classification scheme for utopian work that remains a core concept in utopian criticism. As of 2018, he also continues to add to an enormous online database entitled Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present (https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/).
- 21.
Alas, a thorough accounting of global Cold War dystopia requires not only far more space than is allotted to this chapter, but also far greater linguistic acumen than mine. There are several dozen works from the period that have not been translated into English, but which skilled readers have interpreted as dystopian; I have included such works here not because I have read them, but rather based on reliable—and corroborated—scholarly assessments.
- 22.
Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Westport: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 1, 176–7 (emphasis in original).
- 23.
Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (Westport: Greenwood, 1994), p. 3. Such a notion is perhaps justified by Lyotard’s postmodernist view that critique of ‘master narratives’—utopian or otherwise—is an inherently political act, but Booker himself seems to have moved away from this comment in his subsequent work on dystopia.
- 24.
Claeys, Dystopia, p. 289.
- 25.
When citing primary texts in this chapter, I will be including the country (or in some cases countries) with which the author is most closely associated, whether by their birth, their residence or the thematic content of their work. For the most part, such designations are straightforward; in some cases, though—particularly those involving authors who were involuntarily exiled or had to send their works abroad for publication—it is a more complicated matter. My intent is not to ‘claim’ an author for a particular country, but rather to give a sense of the breadth and variety of national literary contexts in which dystopia arose during the Cold War. For example, even though Vladimir Voinovich was living in exile in West Germany when he first published Moskva 2042 (Moscow 2042, 1986) with a press located in the United States, I have associated both him and that book with the USSR bibliographically because it seems to me—perhaps arbitrarily—to be the nation most pertinent to Voinovich’s dystopian motives.
- 26.
Quoted in David Seed, Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2013), p. 112.
- 27.
Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 89.
- 28.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 133; Booker, Dystopian Literature, p. 3.
- 29.
Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview, 2000), p. xv.
- 30.
Claeys, Dystopia, p. 501.
- 31.
Baccolini and Moylan, ‘Introduction: Dystopia and Histories’, in Moylan and Baccolini, eds, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 7 (emphasis in original).
- 32.
Jean Raspail’s xenophobic dystopian novel Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973, France) is perhaps the best example of such a work, although Raspail’s self-proclaimed position as ‘Consul to the Kingdom of Araucanie and Patagonia’ was unsurprisingly never validated by the French government.
- 33.
Seed, Under the Shadow, p. 119.
- 34.
Claeys, Dystopia, pp. 494–5.
- 35.
Booker, Dystopian Impulse, p. 20.
- 36.
Orwell, whose dystopian works were frequently interpreted from a one-sided perspective, made it clear in a 1944 letter that his concerns about totalitarianism were not simply focused on Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union: ‘Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty f[ü]hrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman f[ü]hrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means’ (Orwell, ‘To Noel Wilmett’, in George Orwell: A Life in Letters, ed. by Peter Davison (New York: Norton, 2012), p. 232).
- 37.
Booker, Dystopian Literature, p. 5.
- 38.
McGuire, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 63.
- 39.
Unless otherwise noted, the works discussed in this chapter are all novels. There are myriad dystopian short stories and pulp novels that I could also list if space permitted. I have limited myself largely to novels here as it is the genre in which the most influential dystopian works were produced.
- 40.
Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, in Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), p. 9.
- 41.
Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 174.
- 42.
Rani, ‘Science Fiction in the Arab World: Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Voyage to Tomorrow’, Arab Stages, 1: 2 (2015), http://arabstages.org/2015/04/science-fiction-in-the-arab-world-tawfiq-al-hakims-voyage-to-tomorrow/ (accessed 13 September 2018).
- 43.
Irele, ‘Introduction: Perspectives on the African Novel’, in Irele, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 10.
- 44.
Claeys, Dystopia, pp. 494–5.
- 45.
Quoted in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 49.
- 46.
Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusionment of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 77.
- 47.
Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, new edn (1904; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 403.
- 48.
Ibid., pp. 377, 411.
- 49.
For more on this latter point, see Derek C. Maus, Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive American and Russian Cold War Satire (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 144–61.
- 50.
See Hanson, ‘The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?’, George Mason University, 15 September 1998, http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html (accessed 13 December 2018).
- 51.
Petersen, ‘German Science Fiction: Its Formative Works and Its Postwar Uses of the Holocaust’, in Bruce B. Campbell, Alison Guenther-Pal and Petersen, eds, Detectives, Dystopias and Poplit: Studies in Modern German Genre Fiction (Rochester: Camden House, 2014), p. 40.
- 52.
Maus, Unvarnishing Reality, p. 48.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 109.
- 54.
Duranty, ‘Russians Hungry, But Not Starving’, New York Times, 31 March 1933, p. 13.
- 55.
Arnett, ‘Major Describes Move’, New York Times, 8 February 1968, p. 14.
- 56.
Claeys, Dystopia, p. 290 (emphasis in original).
- 57.
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 759–60.
- 58.
Hammond, Cold War Stories: British Dystopian Fiction, 1945–1990 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer International, 2017), p. 3.
- 59.
Booker, Dystopian Impulse, p. 15.
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Maus, D.C. (2020). Plenty of Blame to Spread Around: Dystopia(nism) and the Cold War. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_15
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