Rumors of War and Infernal Machines

Technomilitary Agenda-setting in American and British Speculative Fiction

Charles E. Gannon

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2005
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780742568716
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise-and shape-to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Assessing Rumors—of War and Infernal Machines
• Chapter 1 - Armageddon by Gaslight: Victorian Visions of Apocalypse
• Chapter 2 - Opportunistic Anticipations and Accidental Insights: William Le Queux’s Exploitation of Edwardian Invasion Anxieties
• Chapter 3 - Promoters of the Probable, Prophets of the Possible: Technological Innovation and Edwardian Near-Future War Fiction
• Chapter 4 - H. G. Wells: The Far-Future War Prophet of Edwardian England
• Chapter 5 - Hard Numbers, Hard Cases, Hard Decisions: Politics and Future-War Fiction in America
• Chapter 6 - An Imperfect Future Tense(d): Anticipations of Atomic Annihilation in Post-War American Science Fiction
• Chapter 7 - Nuclear Fiction and Silo Psychosis: Narratives of Life in the Shadow of a Mushroom Cloud
• Chapter 8 - Radio Waves, Death Rays, and Transgressive (Sub) Texts: Future-War Fiction in the Wide Black Yonder
• Chapter 9 - Making Man-Machines of Mass Destruction: Future-War Authors as Seers in an Age of Cyborg Soldiers
• Chapter 10 - Cultural Casualties as Collateral Damage: The Fragment-ing/-ation Effects of Future-War Fantasies vs. Fictions
• Afterword: On Conducting a Literary Reconnaissance in Force—and in Earnest
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index