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- Title
Bicycles Across the Galaxy: Attacking Automobility in 1950s Science Fiction.
- Authors
Withers, Jeremy
- Abstract
This essay focuses on several works of science fiction from the 1950s that function as counter-narratives to the hegemony of the automobile during this decade and to the accompanying dismissive perceptions of the bicycle. In its analysis of a novel by Robert A. Heinlein (The Rolling Stones, 1952), a novella by Poul Anderson (“A Bicycle Built for Brew,” 1958), and a short story by Avram Davidson (“Or All the Seas with Oysters,” 1958), it asserts that some of the leading figures in Golden Age sf were not content to relegate bicycles to the status of a technological obsolescence fit only for children. Instead, they chose to portray bicycles as useful, potent, and agentic—images that counter the prevailing ideology of “automobility” that was crystallizing with such durability in postwar America.
- Subjects
SCIENCE fiction; HEGEMONY; BICYCLES in literature; HEINLEIN, Robert A. (Robert Anson), 1907-1988; ROLLING Stones, The (Book); ANDERSON, Poul, 1926-2001; BICYCLE Built for Brew, A (Book)
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2017, Vol 44, Issue 3, p417
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0417