Collective Imagination and the Superpower State: Science Fiction and U.S. Militarism in the Late Twentieth Century

Andrews, Erin

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-pyer-qa43

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Collective Imagination and the Superpower State: Science Fiction and U.S. Militarism in the Late Twentieth Century

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Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the United States expanded the scale, funding, and technological sophistication of its defense resources, enabling its current standing as the dominant global military superpower. This dissertation examines the role that the popular narrative genre of science fiction played in shaping American cultural imagination about the U.S. military in this period, exploring how specific novels and films influenced political consent for state processes of military expansion. It argues that science fiction has been complicit with American military power, seemingly paradoxically, through its voicing of dissatisfaction with the U.S. state and the structure of the military itself. This argument complicates previous characterizations of the genre in literary and cultural studies as a form inherently oppositional to hegemonic power, instead using feminist and queer affect theory to illustrate how the genre’s genuine critical impulses have often dissipated dissent, rather than fomenting it. Including case studies of novels by Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, and Orson Scott Card, as well as of films directed by George Lucas and James Cameron, the project situates popular works of science fiction with archival research on public political rhetoric, government policy, and records of reader response to demonstrate the impact of the genre on U.S. military power.

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