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Introduction - David Seed 1. Future-War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900 - I. F. Clarke 2. How America's Fictions of Future War Have Changed the World - H. Bruce Franklin 3. War Is Peace: Conscrption and Mobilization in the Modern Utopia - Patrick Parrinder 4. From Unvasion to Liberation: Alternative Visions of Mars, Planet of War - Robert Crossley 5. John Henry Palmer's The Invasion of New York, or, How Hawaii Was Annexed: Political Discourse and Emergent Mass Culture in 1897 - John Rieder 6. John Wyndham's World War III and his Abandoned Fury of Creation Trilogy - David Ketterer 7. Prophesying Neocolonial Wars in 1950s American Science Fiction - Rob Latham 8. On the Beach: British Nuclear Fiction and the Spaces of Empire's End - Brian Baker 9. Adapting the Absurd Apocalypse: Eugene Burdick's and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe and its Cinematic Progeny - Nicholas Ruddick 10. The Strategic Defence Initiative: A Utopian Fantasy - David Seed 11. When All Wars Are Done: The Transcendent Humanity of Iain M. Banks - Patricia Kerslake 12. 'The Benefit and the Handicap of Hindsight': Modelling Risk and Reassessing Future-War Fiction after the 9/11-Induced Shft to a US National Security Strategy of Pre-emptive Attack - A. Michael Matin 13. The War after Next: Anticipating Future Conflict in the New Millennium - Antulio J. Echevaria II The Writings of I. F. Clarke: A Checklist Bibliography Index

Surveying the American scene in 1958, Aldous Huxley recorded his dismay over the speed with which Brave New World was becoming realized in contemporary developments: “The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Having struck a keynote of urgency Huxley then lines up a series of oppositions between limited disorder, individuality and freedom on the one hand, and order, automatism and subjection on the other in order to express his liberal anxieties that political and social organization might hypertrophy. Huxley sums up an abiding fear which runs through American dystopian fiction of the 1950s that individuals will lose their identity and become the two-dimensional stereotypes indicated in two catch-phrases of the period: the “organization man” and the “man in the grey flannel suit. ” William H. Whyte's 1956 study diagnoses the demise of the Protestant ethic in American life and its replacement by a corporate one which privileges “belongingness. ” The result might be, he warns, not a world controlled by self-evident enemies familiar from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an antiseptic regime presided over by a “mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”

Unlike British spy fiction which has tended to concern itself with issues of empire, the spy in American writing initially carried the status of a fighter for independence. James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), generally taken as the prototype of the genre, is concerned with distinguishing its protagonist from a “common spy,” as Cooper explained in his 1831 introduction. The novel centers on the activities of Harvey Birch, an American who uses his occupation as a peddler to travel between the rival forces during the War of Independence and gather information on the whereabouts of the English soldiers. The prevailing ethic in The Spy of military honor is based on overt bravery, in other words on the very quality which Birch's role debars him from showing. Others may declare their loyalty verbally; he has to screen his commitment behind the discourse of trade, even at the risk of being pronounced a traitor. Others wear the uniform of their calling; he goes through a whole series of disguises. Birch performs like an actor within an uncongenial context. Cooper thus, like many succeeding crime and mystery novelists, has to nudge the reader toward revelatory details, but without giving too much away. Throughout the novel he exploits incomplete lighting where figures - especially Birch - cannot be seen clearly; and he draws our attention to dress, especially the clothing which muffles the face of Birch.

The phrase ‘cinematic fiction’ has now been generally accepted into critical discourse, but is usually applied to post-war novels. This book asks a simple question: given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings? From its very beginnings the cinema has played a special role in defining American culture. Covering the period from the 1910s up to the Second World War, Cinematic Fictions offers new insights into classics like The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath discussing major writers’ critical writings on film and active participation in film-making. Cinematic Fictions is also careful not to portray ‘cinema’ as a single or stable entity. Some novelists drew on silent film; others looked to the Russian theorists for inspiration; and yet others turned to continental film-makers rather than to Hollywood. Film itself was constantly evolving during the first decades of the twentieth century and the writers discussed here engaged in a kind of dialogue with the new medium, selectively pursuing strategies of montage, limited point of view and scenic composition towards their different ends. Contrasting a diverse range of cinematic and literary movements, this will be compulsory reading for scholars of American literature and film.

Dreiser on Film In addition to sharing Dos Passos' conviction that film should inform representations of society in his novels, Theodore Dreiser's interest in the cinema had a long history, as has been partly acknowledged by three critics. In 1928 Dreiser published an article about Mack Sennett in which he records that he had been an enthusiastic viewer of his films since 1910. In 1938 Dreiser wrote to Sergei Eisenstein, whom he had met in Moscow ten years earlier, declaring: ‘ever since the inception of the moving picture technique, I have looked on it as an artistic medium far surpassing for most expressive purposes, writing, painting and the other arts, and I have hoped that my own work could be satisfactorily translated into it’. The first signs of this interest begin to show themselves in Dreiser's writings of the 1910s, although it is important to recognize that even earlier, around the turn of the century, he had expressed a related fascination with photography, writing articles on Alfred Stieglitz and the Camera Club of New York. In a letter of 1914 to H. L. Mencken (by then a close friend), he discussed the scene divisions in ‘The Born Thief’, a script he had submitted to Pathe for consideration, and the following year he told Mencken that he had been approached about becoming scenario director for Mirror Films, ‘a new and somewhat imposing film corporation’.

Unlike the writers considered in the previous chapter, the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was actively involved in film-making for a time. Throughout her career she remained obsessively preoccupied with the visual but constantly pushed against the limits of visibility. ‘Vision’ was a term which oscillated in her works between the physical and the transcendental, and for her film was a crucial medium for exploring this border area. Although she witnessed the shooting of scenes for a Mary Pickford film in Carmel in 1920, her closest involvement in the cinema took place between 1927 and 1933, and in the midst of her enthusiasm she declared: ‘the world of the film to-day […] is no longer the world of the film, it is the world’. For H.D., as for Henri Bergson and Hugo Munsterberg, film offered a new means of articulating the dynamics of the mind. In H.D.'s writings from the late 1920s onwards, perception is repeatedly referred to as a quasi-cinematic process. For example, in the short sketch ‘Mira-Mare’ (written in 1930), while a female character is watching a man on a beach, we are told: ‘her narrowed squint widened like a camera shutter’. Sometimes H.D. sets up an opposition between mechanical and organic perception; often she refers to the eyes as if they were unusual lenses registering different dimensions of reality.

Just as THE UNCANNY offers a connection to the structure of the unconscious, the abject offers a sensation of horror that connects us viscerally to the experience of repression and the process of subject formation. For Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, abjection disturbs ‘identity, system, order’ and is characterised by ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.