We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
- Authors
Franklin, H. Bruce
- Abstract
American SF helped engineer and shape America's war in Indochina, which then profoundly reshaped American SF. Indeed, the Vietnam War cannot be fully comprehended unless it is seen in part as a form of American SF and fantasy. Straight out of American pulp, comic book, and movie SF came fantasies of techno-wonders and super-heroes that guided the decisions of political and military leaders. A paradigm of the American self-images that helped shape the war might be Buck Rogers—as he uses his manly skills and 25th-century technology to lead the good fight against the Mongol hordes—sporting a Green Beret. Although the decision-makers' customary discourse expressed these fantasies in a language of ostensible realism and practicality, comparison with SF about the war unmasks their content. One key policy-maker even published a story in Astounding which exposes the roots of the dominant ideology. But shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, there appeared—in the form of rival advertisements opposing and supporting the war—a roster of SF writers who, incarnating fundamental contradictions between Campbellian and New Wave SF, would participate in the transformation of American SF by and through the war. Some of the greatest achievements of New Wave SF—such as Kate Wilhelm's ‘The Village,’ Norman Spinrad's ‘The Big Flash,’ and Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest—use fantasy to expose the menace of being possessed by unexamined fantasizing; and more specifically, they employ the conventions of SF to dramatize the treacherous infantile SF being enacted in Vietnam. The extreme forms of alienation engendered by the war were transmitted into SF by a number of Vietnam veterans, including Joe Haldeman, whose The Forever War caricatures the technophilia in the hear of ‘Golden Age’ galactic combat fiction. After the Vietnam War, while a Vietnam War sequel has been shooting in Latin America and US culture seethes with militarist fantasies, the war has come home in apocalyptic S-F visions of post-war America. A cogent paradigm for Vietnam War as American SF and fantasy has shifted to an image (from a 1984 story by Lucius Shepard) of standard-issue drugs designed to turn US soldiers into instant Rambos, capable of wholesale slaughter in El Salvador or murderous frenzies in the US itself.
- Subjects
UNITED States; LITERARY criticism; SCIENCE fiction; VIETNAM War, 1961-1975; WAR &; society; LITERATURE &; science; WAR &; literature
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 1990, Vol 17, Issue 3, p341
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism