Abstract
In the summer of 1945, with Nazi Germany defeated and the war in the Pacific drawing to a close (albeit a prospectively bloody one), American behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner sat down to write a now famous Utopia called Walden Two, which was published in 1948. Walden Two is a Utopia very much like a frontier community with the benefits of twentieth-century sociological and technological advances, and was a centre of controversy when it was published and has remained so since.1 However, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and the following two decades were characterised not by the production of Utopian texts, but by Utopia’s inverse: dystopia.
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Notes
B. R Skinner, Walden Two (1948; New York: Macmillan, 1976). The controversy surrounding Walden Two has largely centred on its use of behavioural engineering, a social science which attempts to modify human behaviour through the control of environmental factors, and the ‘positive reinforcement’ (rewarding) of positive communal behaviour.
David Riesman, Abundance for What? and other essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 95–6.
George Orwell, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, Tribune (19 October 1945), reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968), pp. 6, 9.
Philip K. Dick, ‘Pessimism in Science Fiction’, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. by Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 56.
H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: Heinemann, 1945), pp. 8, 6.
Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (New York and Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 31.
Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (1973; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press/London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 140.
Krishan Kumar, ‘Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia Today’, Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 205.
Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952; London: Flamingo, 1992), p. 11.
Ray Bradbury, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ (1950), The Martian Chronicles (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), p. 206.
Bernard Wolfe, Limbo (1952; New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987), pp. 9–10.
Martha A. Bartter, The Way to Ground Zero: the Atom Bomb in American Science Fiction (New York, Westport, Conn./London: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 214.
Philip K. Dick, ‘Second Variety’ (1953), repr. in Second Variety: the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 2 (1990; London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 31.
Philip K. Dick, ‘Pay for the Printer’ (1956), repr. in The Father-Thing: the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3 (1990; London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 301.
Philip K. Dick, Penultimate Truth (1964; St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1978), p. 36.
Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7 (1959; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1989), p. 118.
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959; Boston: Gregg, 1975).
Ray Bradbury, ‘The Fireman’, Galaxy Science Fiction (February 1951), pp. 4–61.
W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: the Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 7.
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Baker, B. (2000). The Map of Apocalypse: Nuclear War and the Space of Dystopia in American Science Fiction. In: Sandison, A., Dingley, R. (eds) Histories of the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1929-8_9
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