Estranging places: The small town, suburb, and megalopolis in post-war California science fiction.

Abstract

In the twentieth century, California produced a concentration of writers of science fiction (SF), many of whom migrated to the state in the years between the two World Wars. Using literary theory, cultural studies, and urban theory, this interdisciplinary dissertation argues that science fiction is best suited for engaging and dismantling the mythos of the post-World War II California municipal spaces of the small town, suburb, and megalopolis. Science fiction captures the alienating, disconnected sensibilities of post-war California communities in a way that no other cultural expression of this period approximates. Chapter one discusses the phenomenon of science-fictional googie architecture in Southern California as a mainstay of the landscape. It argues for reading California as a uniquely constructed science-fictional space. It then examines how material changes in science fiction publishing shifted the genre's locus from New York to Los Angeles. The second chapter discusses how Disneyland, Ray Bradbury's <italic> Martian Chronicles,</italic> and <italic>The Twilight Zone</italic> respectively respond to the mythology of the nineteenth-century Midwestern small town. It argues that SF skillfully manipulates the tropes of this mythology to expose the futility of ever recreating such idealized communities in the uncanny spaces of California. Chapter three reads Philip K. Dick's novel <italic>Time Out of Joint </italic> as an index to postwar California suburbia. Suburbia is a project that seeks to mitigate the contingencies of mid-twentieth century urban America by superimposing a version of utopia onto formerly undeveloped spaces. Dick offers powerful counter-narratives to many of the dominant popular cultural representations of suburbia as a technologically sophisticated haven removed from the concerns of the metropolis and liberated from the drudgery of the farm. The fourth chapter considers Aldous Huxley's novels <italic>After Many a Summer Dies the Swan</italic> and <italic>Ape and Essence</italic> as written from within a Southern California community of expatriate European intellectuals. Huxley's novels paradoxically contribute to a mythology of the megalopolis: they critique the superficiality of California culture while concurrently celebrating the region's sprawling urban spaces as a reconciliation of traditional European divisions between the country and the city. The dissertation concludes with a brief consideration of SF in the post-1970s era.