Futuramas and Atom Bombs

Abstract

This chapter shifts away from geographical landscapes to focus on technology during the period. Not only does the chapter examine debates over the “technological sublime” at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, it examines ways that science fiction authors use the “sf grotesque” to highlight the potentially devastating environmental and social consequences of uncritical forms of technological progress. The early work of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril calls attention to the apocalyptic threat of the atom bomb by exposing its effects on the natural world as well as on human communities and bodies. Merril and George Schuyler also call attention to ways that ideologies associated with Western notions of science and progress have been used to support gender and racial inequality. In Black Empire (1938), Schuyler envisions innovative forms of renewable energy created by Black scientists that allow them to establish independence from Euro-American control.