Camelot’s Killers: Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America

Abstract

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King – Else, wherefore born… Tennyson, Idylls of the King Writing Around the TableThe idea of Camelot was a lance stuck in the side of American culture – the erup­tion that followed spilled some of the best and the brightest blood in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the science fiction community, Gordon Dickson’s well-liked Childe Cycle1 published between 1960 and 1994, made a fictional Camelot that paralleled Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this paper, I argue that the series functions to make war bloodless and palatable, to mirror the rhetorical postures of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and its political aftermath. A line can be drawn from Kennedy’s rhetoric to the creation of the Peace Corps, the space race, and the deepening involvement in Vietnam. This paper understands Kennedy’s rhetoric to be a step in the direction of American foreign policy that began in Vietnam and extended to other global conflicts. However, Dickson’s writing reflects the early heroic part of the mission: the part we most typically associate with Kennedy’s New Frontier.