Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939 by William J. Fanning

Such a work might serve as a bookend to critical coverage of the literature and popular culture of the nuclear era, paired with Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1994), which brilliantly anatomized that era’s advent in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Given that the era of atomic terror seems to have receded with the Cold War, the time would appear to be ripe for a scholarly study that looks back on midcentury fears of global apocalypse with a sharply analytical eye. It is rather chastening to realize that the horrors of nuclear winter, so gripping for members of my generation, seem to young people today almost quaint, another retrofuturistic survival from the 1950s and 1960s, like googie architecture and lava lamps. A few might mention anxieties about dirty-bomb and “loose-nuke” scenarios such as depicted in the show 24 (2001-2010), but visions of global destruction via intercontinental ballistic missiles are no longer on their psychosocial radar screens. Strangelove (1963) for the first time? Their answer is inevitably no, the possibility of imminent nuclear holocaust is not something that troubles their sleep. Have any of them ever woken up shaking in terror from nightmares of mushroom clouds, as I did as a teenager after watching Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Whenever I teach an sf novel about nuclear war, I ask students whether the scenario depicted in the text frightens them at all.

Grave New World: The Decline of The West in the Fiction of J.G. The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema: Critical Essays.

Strangelove: The Anatomy and Influence of the Kubrick Masterpiece. Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939. Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination.

Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939 by William J. Fanning