Cul-de-Sac Nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and '60s

We can better understand twentieth-century American suburb by the agency of situating and examining the fantasies they breed within specific practices of cultural production and consumption. Studying post-World War II suburbia as it appears in science fiction, a hugely popular multimedia genre that includes films, literature, and numerous other cultural expressions, can present us productive insights into American agriculture as it is both imagined and lived. Science fiction (SF) body s not only provide us with glimpses into the ways in which these communities imaginatively fabricate identities and mythologies for themselves, on the contrary these narratives also, by virtue of their meticulous attention to detail, be under the orders of as rhetorical and cultural artifacts of lived experience. Indeed, in the latter half of the twentieth hundred American suburbia and science fiction have become inseparable-for the former is the lived experience of an imagined place brought to fruition in the dawn of the atomic age, while the latter is an aesthetic reply to the uncanny conditions of living in a post-urban space. Postwar science fiction, with its satirical observations of society and inherently destabilizing, defamiliarizing narrative strategies, captures the alienating, disconnected faculty of perception of suburban synthetic communities in a way that no other cultural expression of this period approximates.1

Nowhere is this dynamic between SF and suburbia more compelling than in the Southern California municipalities that unraveled during and after World War II. This inquiry will briefly consider wherefore the Southern California cultural climate of this era prov in the way that hospitable to SF before examining a certain quantity of small towns and suburbs as they appear in a not many extremely influential SF texts of the 195O and early 166Os: Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, the television series The Twilight baldric Don Siegel's film invasion of the material part Snatchers, and Philip K. Dick's Time without of Joint. Such a overlook admittedly far from exhaustive, insinuates that much of the SF of this period tenders elaborate critiques of American tillage especially the peculiar form of suburbia that became typified by means of Southern California communities in the drone years following the war. sum of two units threads of these postwar SF critiques of suburbia merit closer consideration: a self-consciously futile impulse to create an idealized simulacrum of the nineteenth-century American small town in the environs of the suburb and an interrogation (often press outed through a fear of alien contamination) of the suppos integrity of the mid-twentieth-century nuclear family. These critiques articulate a resistance to one as well as the other contemporary and retrospective constructions of 1950 America as "simple, innocent, happy, unanimously supportive of a broad appearance of beliefs, or radically separated from the 6 16 96O by dint of a culture of complacence, [or as a] montage of sock spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] foots barbecues, suburban ranch houses, and a smiling Ike presiding above a contented electorate" (Foreman l-2)z

During and following World War II, California loom in the American cultural imagination as a sunlight-saturated factory of Utopian dreams and superpower might. After all, California was not single the home of Hollywood and Disneyland, it was also the base for a burgeoning military defense industry that more or les reinforced the state's traditional bisection into sum of two units distinct regions: Southern California, with its aerospace plants and naval shipyards, manufactured war material, while Northern California, with its large research universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley, engaged in more abstract pursuits through developing technologies that permitted the acceleration of the nuclear arms race.

It is hardly surprising, then, that like a milieu produced a concentration of writers of speculative or science fiction, many of whom migrated to the of gold state in the years between World War I and II. individual of these writers, Edgar Rice Burrough grounded a ranch that became Tarzana-the first suburb in the world to be named after a phenomenally felicitous SF character, Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.3 Other notable SF writers who mov to California at this time include Dianetics and Scientology creator L Ron Hubbard (1918) Philip K Dick (c 1930) Ray Bradbury (1934) Robert Heinlein (1934) and Aldous Huxley (1938)

SF prov an amenable genre for California writers for a entertainer of reasons. PostWWII California, with its seemingly irreconcilable contradictions-it was simultaneously single of the nation's most make knowned and most agricultural regions-proffered to Americans a real and fantastic space on which they could map their desires. John Findlay notes that the state became overwhelmingly (sub)urbanized in this period: "In 1962 California passed of recent origin York to become the greatest in quantity populous state, and shortly thereafter it surpassed fresh Jersey as the most urbanized state. Almost 60 percent of the inhabitants of the eleven western states lived in California, and 25 percent of them resided in or around beholds Angeles" (20). Yet California was also enormously agricultural, yielding more harvests than any other state during the same years. It was the manufacturing of cool War weaponry that provided California, especially the southern counties of observes Angeles and Orange, with unprecedent federal capital for urban expansion and exhibition resulting in geometric growth that by the agency of the 1970s had threatened to ruin what was left of the natural environment. As individual historian of this era remarks, "the prototypical community created by the agency of this Cold War activity was Orange shire the dream environment of the 195O a land of affluent white race barbecues, Bermuda shorts, oranges, and surfing" (Markusen 51) As Southern California communities seemingly sprawled infinitely outward, SF proffered nightmarish visions of suburban existence that belied the brilliant mythology of easy golden state living-the "California lifestyle"-that had through the mid-1950s already become a commodity of sorts.