Abstract
Herman Kahn, the man who gave us the concepts of the ‘arms race’ and ‘escalation’, complains that ‘it is characteristic of our time that many intelligent and sincere people are willing to agree that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight a thermonuclear war’.2 The same charge has been levelled at writers about living through and after a nuclear war, but this study is undertaken with the conviction that it is indeed immoral not to contemplate the possible nuclear apocalypse.
Do I love this world so well
That I have to know how it ends?1
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Notes
W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (London: Faber, 1948) p. 88.
H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War: Thinking About the Unthinkable (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962) p. 103.
F. Jameson, in Science Fiction Studies 1 (Fall 1974) p. 275.
See I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 1763–1984 (1966) and Resolution: Global The Pattern of Expectation (1979).
Ursula le Guin, in SF at Large, ed. Peter Nicholls (London: Gollancz, 1976) p. 32.
W. Wagar, Terminal Visions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) p. 5.
P.F. Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (New York: Avalon, 1962).
Brian Ash, Faces of the Future (London: Elek/Pemberton, 1975) p. 193.
Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1981) p. 109.
D. Wollheim, The Universe Makers (New York & London: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 66.
G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Sun-Bomb’ in Hiroshima (London: Andrew Dakers, 1946) p. 29.
F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 17, 29.
O. Stapledon, Starmaker (London: Methuen, 1937) p. vii.
Brigadier General Thomas A. Farrell in The Atomic Age Opens (New York: Pocket, 1945) p. 30.
K.R.R. Gros-Luis, Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974) p. 345.
Michael Seidel in E. Mendelson (ed.), Pynchon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) p. 210
E. Mendelson in G. Levine & D. Leverenz (eds), Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976) p. 192.
I.F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectations (London: Cape, 1979) p. 293.
In B. Aldiss & H. Harrison (eds), SF Horizons (New York: Arno, 1978) p. 53.
Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ in Science Fiction, ed. Mark Rose (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966) p. 130.
John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (London: Fontana, 1977) pp. 78–9.
J.O. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time (1947; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972) p. 10.
L. Jones (ed.), The New SF (London: Arrow, 1970) p. 8.
K. Amis, New Maps of Hell (1961; London: New English Library, 1969) p. 115.
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© 1987 David Dowling
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Dowling, D. (1987). The Bomb in Fiction. In: Fictions of Nuclear Disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08228-5_1
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