Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction 9781789627558, 1789627559

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F U T U R IST IC CA RS A N D SPACE BICYCL ES

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 66

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies Editor David Seed, University of Liverpool Editorial Board Mark Bould, University of the West of England Veronica Hollinger, Trent University Rob Latham, University of California Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading Andy Sawyer, University of Liverpool

Recent titles in the series 46. Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel (edited, translated and with an introduction by Peter Swirski) 47. Sonja Fritzsche, The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film 48. Jack Fennel: Irish Science Fiction 49. Peter Swirski and Waclaw M. Osadnik: Lemography: Stanislaw Lem in the Eyes of the World 50. Gavin Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics 51. Peter Swirski, Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future 52. J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay, Science Fiction Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text 53. Tom Shippey, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction 54. Mike Ashley, Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990 55. Chris Pak, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction 56. Lars Schmeink, Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction 57. Shawn Malley, Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television 58. Derek J. Thiess, Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction 59. Glyn Morgan and Charul Palmer-Patel, Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction 60. Curtis D. Carbonell, Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic 61. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India 62. Gavin Miller, Science Fiction and Psychology 63. Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach 64. Regina Yung Lee and Una McCormack (eds), Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold 65. Joseph S. Norman, The Culture of ‘The Culture’: Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks’s Space Opera Series

F U T U R IST IC CA RS A N D SPACE BICYCL ES Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction

J ER EM Y W I T H ERS

L I V ER POOL U N I V ERSI T Y PR ESS

First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Jeremy Withers The right of Jeremy Withers to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-175-4 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-755-8 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

This one is for my mother, Elaine Withers.

Contents Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

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1 Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era

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2 Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age

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3 Electric Cars, Autoduelling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave

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4 Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk

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5 Staying Mobile in Postapocalyptic Cli-Fi

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6 Kids on Bikes in Twenty-First-Century Nostalgia Science Fiction

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures Figures

1 The ‘Tricycle of the Future’

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2 Two-wheeled, gyroscopic aircar designed by Hugo Gernsback

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3 ‘The Terror’ side-swiping another car

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4 A car taking flight in ‘Utopia Island’

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5 Paralyzed automobilists in ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’

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6 Crazed autonomous cars running people over in ‘The Living Machine’

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7 Bicycle and rugged individualists from ‘And Then There Were None’

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8 The life cycle of an alien life form in ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’

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9 Dueling cars speeding along in ‘Dogfight on the 101’ (a  variant of ‘Along the Scenic Route’)

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10 E.T. and Elliott on flying bicycle in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg)

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11 Paper Girls cover, with delivery girls on their bikes

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ix

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Jenny Howard (former senior commissioning editor at Liverpool University Press), to her successor Christabel Scaife, and to series editors David Seed and Sherryl Vint, for their decision to publish this book and for their help with it. Many thanks as well to the anonymous reviewer who carefully read the manuscript and provided their expert comments and suggestions. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Iowa State University – particularly the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – for its abundant support for this project in the form of several grants and awards that freed up time for writing and that paid for research travel. The Interlibrary Loan staff at the Iowa State University Library was also extremely helpful with acquiring rare materials that I needed for this project. Additional thanks to my former student Brenda Tyrrell who sent me many valuable leads on bicycles and cars that she encountered during her own reading of science fiction. Also, I benefited greatly from my time spent doing research at the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy located at the University of California Riverside. The head librarian of the Eaton Collection – JJ Jacobson – was especially welcoming and helpful. The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy located at the Toronto Public Library was also a useful resource with a kind and knowledgeable staff. Part of Chapter 2 was originally published as ‘Bicycles Across the Galaxy: Attacking Automobility in 1950s Science Fiction’ in Science Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (2017), pp. 417–36. Many thanks to this journal for its permission to reuse that material as part of this book. I would also like to thank the Ames Bicycle Coalition for their ongoing efforts to promote safe cycling in my town of Ames, Iowa, and for welcoming me as part of their organization. Last, but far from least, thanks to my wonderful and supportive family back in Ohio – Elaine, Gary, and Jason – and to my wonderful xi

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and supportive family here in Iowa – Clementine, Oscar, and Abby. Every moment I get to spend with you all is a treasure and a gift.

Introduction Introduction

For the May 1967 issue of Analog, the influential science fiction magazine that began under the name Astounding Stories of Super-Science in 1930, editor (and sometimes author) John W. Campbell, Jr. composed an editorial titled ‘The Safest Form of Transportation.’ Campbell wrote the editorial, he tells us, in the days immediately following the Apollo 1 disaster, an incident that occurred on January 27, 1967, in which a cabin fire broke out in a space module as it sat on the ground during a launch rehearsal test. Three NASA astronauts were trapped inside the module and killed by the fire. Campbell, concerned that this disaster might halt subsequent development of human space flight programs, opens his editorial by brazenly declaring: ‘As of January 30th, 1967 travel by spaceship retains its unblemished record as the safest known form of travel; in hundreds of millions of miles of travel, not one person has been killed or injured.’1 NASA astronauts Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were indeed tragically killed, Campbell acknowledges. But his editorial emphasizes that they were killed on the ground, not in space. Across the many accomplishments that defined the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union – Russia’s launching of the first human in space in 1961 and America’s Project Mercury that successfully put six astronauts in space by 1963 – not a single astronaut had been killed in space. At the end of the editorial, after several pages of discussion of how the interior and exterior of NASA space capsules are designed to be fireproof (or very fire-resistant, at least) in outer space, Campbell admits: ‘Sure – sooner or later someone will find a new and unexpected way of dying in space.’ That is one of the things it means to be a pioneer he tells us pages earlier – to pioneer new ways for humans to be killed. ‘But as 1

John W. Campbell, ‘The Safest Form of Transportation,’ Analog 79, no. 3 (1967), p. 5. 1

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of now,’ Campbell emphatically reminds us, ‘[human space flight] has a record of hundreds of millions of passenger miles, with no deaths or injuries. It’s obviously more dangerous to drive your car down to the corner drugstore for an ice cream soda.’2 This sudden shift by Campbell to referencing the automobile reveals that he has more than just human space flight in general and Apollo space modules in particular on his mind. In 1967 – the year in which Campbell published ‘The Safest Form of Transportation’ – the United States was in the midst of a dramatic surge in annual automobile fatalities.3 The 1960s started with 36,399 motor vehicle deaths, but by 1967 they had soared to 50,724.4 That number would climb higher still to 54,052 deaths in 1973, before starting to fall in the latter part of the 1970s (due in large part not to cars and roads suddenly becoming safer, but to the 1973 energy crisis created by an Arab country-led oil embargo that caused Americans to drive less frequently and more slowly).5 In the ten or so years leading up to the appearance of this May 1967 editorial, Campbell came to know the dangers of the automobile well.6 Most directly and most tragically, in 1955, his stepson Joe was killed when his car rear-ended a trailer truck on a highway.7 A few years after 2 3

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Campbell, ‘Safest Form of Transportation,’ p. 178. For more on the rise in automobile deaths in the 1960s and 1970s, see Chapter 3. On the annual number of traffic fatalities in the United States, see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2016: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System (Washington, DC: US Department of Transportation, 2018), p. 200, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ ViewPublication/812554. See Dennis P. Tihansky, ‘Impact of the Energy Crisis on Traffic Accidents,’ Transport Research 8 (1974), pp. 481–83. Automobile-related death was something several other important sf writers and editors knew well too: Hugo Gernsback had a young daughter killed and Robert A. Heinlein lost a beloved sister. On Gernsback, see ‘Taxi Kills a Child Retrieving Pennies,’ New York Times (November 19, 1928); on Heinlein, see Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 38. See Nevala-Lee, Astounding, pp. 311–16, for more on Joe’s death. One effect the accident had on Campbell is he began to write about a condition called ‘highway hypnosis’ that he thought killed his stepson. Highway hypnosis, according to Campbell, is caused by modern automobiles and modern highways being so perfect that they are dangerously imperfect, because they can lull drivers into trance-like states. See John W. Campbell, ‘Design Flaw,’ Astounding 56, no. 2 (1955), pp. 85–95.

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his stepson’s death, Campbell tells us in another editorial how a ‘young neighbor of mine, driving home from his graduation…was killed when his car was knocked off the road’ by a drunk driver.8 That same year, Campbell’s daughter Leslyn narrowly avoided serious injury when she was sitting ‘on a friend’s horse in a field by the highway’ and suddenly ‘[w]ithout warning, her horse leaped over the barrier into traffic and was hit by a car, rolling over the hood and severing one of its legs.’9 Despite the devastating injury to the horse, Leslyn emerged from the accident with only a broken ankle and bruised buttocks. Given Campbell’s personal experience with the danger of the automobile, we might not be surprised then that within the same issue of Analog where ‘The Safest Form of Transportation’ appeared, Campbell included a second editorial that he also wrote. The title of it – ‘Unsafe at High Speed’ – clearly alludes to Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), a bestselling nonfiction book published two years earlier. Written by political activist Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed savagely attacked American automobiles of that time for their dangerous designs that privileged style over safety.10 The book’s popularity led to widespread safety reforms by automobile manufacturers. Campbell, however, shows himself in his editorial to be unconvinced that redesigning automobiles would lower automobile fatalities. At first, he mocks the attempts by manufacturers to quickly engineer safety problems out of existence. For example, ‘the energy-absorbing collapsible steeringwheel system’ that General Motors invented to curtail the deadly nature of a car’s steering column during a collision ‘turned out to be collapsible under unintended conditions.’ Furthermore, Campbell believes that ‘“the nut that holds the steering wheel” is the primary cause of the accident.’11 In other words, the human element – the driver – always threatens to undermine any engineering fix that a company like GM comes up with. Given, therefore, the car’s unavoidable association with death and injury, Campbell recommends that ‘every automobile have an illuminated panel built into the dashboard saying: “WARNING: AUTOMOBILE DRIVING IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.”’12 Unlike the spaceships defended at length in his first editorial, Campbell dismisses cars in this second editorial as machines forever connected to human folly and technological flaws.

8 9 10 11

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John W. Campbell, ‘Overcompensation,’ Astounding 62, no. 3 (1958), p. 158. Nevala-Lee, Astounding, p. 323. Nader’s book is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. John W. Campbell, Jr., ‘Unsafe at High Speed,’ Analog 79, no. 3 (1967), p. 80. Campbell, ‘Unsafe at High Speed,’ p. 80.

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I open with a discussion of Campbell’s two editorials from May 1967 because they set up well the interests and agenda of this book. On the one hand, ‘The Safest Form of Transportation’ – Campbell’s editorial focusing on the Apollo disaster – acknowledges that a fascination with advanced transportation machines like spaceships in large part defines science fiction (hereafter, abbreviated as sf). We need only think of canonical sf novels like The Skylark of Space (serialization, 1928; book, 1946) by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Rendezvous with Rama (1973) by Arthur C. Clarke, or of canonical sf television shows and films like those that make up the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, to see the self-evident truth of that statement.13 Additionally, the genre shows a deep attraction to ambitious new mobility technologies in the moving walkways of Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), the solar yachts of Clarke’s ‘The Wind from the Sun’ (1963), the teleportation machines of Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), and the space elevators of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1992–96). Beyond technologies that move people across space and distance, sf also relishes technologies that move people across time. Portrayals of the latter can be seen in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and John Varley’s ‘Air Raid’ (1977). On the other hand, ‘Unsafe at High Speed’ – Campbell’s second editorial focusing on cars – demonstrates that when it comes to more earthly, more familiar forms of advanced transportation machines such as automobiles, American sf is rarely impressed. In fact, quite the opposite: many key figures within American sf have instead (like Campbell) been openly hostile toward the car and reviled it as a dangerous machine that threatens the well-being of individuals and societies. Such hostility is somewhat surprising, for the automobile certainly stands as one of the most important and influential pieces of technology that humanity has ever created. At least in the context of the United States, the car fundamentally changed – and continues to change – American society and the American landscape. For a genre like sf that is so infatuated with technology and with machines of all kinds, to be so hostile toward the car should come, at least at first, as a bit of a shock. What Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles focuses on is how an impressive number of sf texts are as likely to include depictions and discussions of automobiles – and of vital alternatives to automobiles such as bicycles – as they are to include depictions and discussions of the aforementioned spaceships, moving sidewalks, space elevators, teleporters, and time 13

With regards to Star Wars and Star Trek, I am of course referencing the iconic status of spaceships such as the Millennium Falcon and the Enterprise, respectively.

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machines. More specifically, this study analyzes the ways in which sf from the late nineteenth century to the present day responds to and attempts to intervene in events and changes related to American road transportation. The development of electricity generation in the 1880s and 1890s, the surge of traffic deaths in the 1920s and 1930s, the advance of suburbs and a national highway system in the 1950s, the resurgence of traffic deaths and the emergence of an environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the further entrenchment of suburbs in the 1980s, the expansion of knowledge about global climate change in the 1990s and 2000s: these important historical events and shifts in values related to American roads and American transport have left significant marks on a range of sf texts produced over the past hundred-plus years. (Of course, it goes the other way too, with sf often being credited with having provided inspiration to inventors of transport machines such as the submarine and the helicopter.)14 Beginning with an exploration of the early sf of the turn of the last century and of the interwar pulp magazine era, and working its way up to twenty-first-century cli-fi and more recent sf media such as web television, zines, and comics, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles argues that sf serves as a useful lens for examining how the United States arrived at many of its current transportation-related problems – and how it might forge a path out of them. In short, the overarching thesis of this book is that in much sf, cars are villainous, and bikes are heroic. Unlike many other American texts – novels like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), songs like the Beach Boys’ ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ (1963) and ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ (1964), films like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) – that romanticized cars as symbols of adventure and freedom, most American sf perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Instead, it often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead frequently promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement like the bicycle.

Purpose of this Book and Its Disciplinary Models Given the extensive influence of new transport technologies on the past two centuries (a time when trains, trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, and airplanes were invented), and given sf’s overall obsession with machines

14

The inventor of the submarine, Simon Lake, acknowledged a debt to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and the inventor of the helicopter, Igor Sikorsky, credited Verne’s Robur the Conqueror (1886) with inspiring him.

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of all kinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to issues of transportation in this genre. Earlier studies, such as Dunn and Erlich’s collection of essays The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982), investigate machines in sf, and that book somewhat resembles my project in spirit. But its interest lies emphatically in robots, artificial intelligence, and computers. It has no interest in transport machines. Similarly, Dinello’s Technophobia! (2005) examines attitudes toward technology in sf but confines itself to (as the book’s subtitle calls them) ‘posthuman technologies’ like biotechnology, nanotechnology, cyborgs, virtual reality, and so on. Again, the study neglects any kind of discussion of transport technologies. Other studies have focused on bikes and cars in literature, such as Gavin and Humphries’ Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940 (2015), or on just bikes, such as Withers and Shea’s Culture on Two Wheels: The Bicycle in Literature and Film (2016). But the focus of both of those essay collections is clearly on more mainstream, non-sf literature. One might expect a recent book like Abbott’s Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (2016) to devote robust space to how speculative texts have imagined transportation in the cities of the future. However, Abbott’s book makes only the occasional quick mention of how certain works of sf depict (for example) urban gridlock or some new kind of highway system; such images are never the object of any kind of sustained analysis. An even more recent book – Aguiar, Mathieson, and Pearce’s Mobilities, Literature, Culture (2019) – does, however, include two essays on sf, transportation, and mobility.15 Nevertheless, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles is the first in-depth, book-length study of sf’s representations of road transportation. Specifically, it examines depictions from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries of the automobile and the bicycle, two important machines that have frequently been locked in a contentious struggle for a presence on and an influence over American roads. I see this book as existing primarily at the intersection of several different disciplinary research models. First and foremost, I perceive important allies for Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles in much of the scholarship being done in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, two closely related, interdisciplinary fields convinced that areas of humanities research such as literary studies have an important role to play in addressing ecological problems like global climate change. 15

The two essays are Robert Braun’s ‘Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future’ and Neil Archer’s ‘Science Fiction Cinema and the Road Movie: Case Studies in the Estranged Mobile Gaze.’

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Specifically, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles draws inspiration from several ecocritical and environmentalist studies of sf that have appeared in recent years. Noteworthy ‘green’ studies of sf would include books like Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones (2018) by Marc DiPaolo, the anthology of essays Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014) edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (2012) by Eric Otto, and Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (2010) by Sherryl Vint. As Canavan declares, ‘SF can help us collectively “think” [the] leap into futurity in the context of the epochal mass-extinction event called the Anthropocene.’16 But sf can also help us imagine social and technological transformations such as ones related to mobility that might help us avoid (or at least endure) the many disasters that the Anthropocene is predicted to bring. However, when my analysis shifts more to a focus on transportation’s role in social relationships, in the health of communities, and in issues of gender, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles aligns itself more with the discussions of transportation that characterize what is now called mobility studies. Initially called the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and ‘the mobility turn,’ mobility studies congealed out of ‘a number of contributions from disciplinary corners as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism studies and sociology and social theory.’17 Mobility and mobilities are words I invoke repeatedly in this study, and I use them in the mobility studies sense of defining mobility as ‘movement imbued with meaning’ (cultural, political, spiritual, etc.) and as movement that has not been ‘abstracted from contexts of power.’18 In recent years, the humanities have left their mark on mobility studies in the form of (among other publications) Charlotte Mathieson’s Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (2015), Lynne Pearce’s Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (2016), a 2017 special edition of the journal Mobilities on ‘Mobilities and the Humanities,’ and the launch in 2018 of a new book series by Palgrave Macmillan called 16

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Gerry Canavan, ‘Introduction: If This Goes On,’ in Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, ed. Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), p. 16. Peter Adey, Mobility, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 22. For another useful overview of mobility studies, see The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller (London: Routledge, 2015). Adey, Mobility, p. 63; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: The Politics of Mobility in the Modern West (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.

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Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles follows in the footsteps of these important humanities-focused mobility studies projects.

Relevance of this Book A focus on how literature in general – and sf in particular – influences and challenges our perception of machines like cars and bicycles is a timely and relevant one, for our transportation habits are a topic very much on many people’s minds right now. Many scholars, activists, politicians, and everyday citizens are questioning some of American society’s most sacred and well-entrenched beliefs about automobiles and about how we get around as a society. Such a rethinking of everyday transportation is due to several factors. For one, the deadliness of the automobile is beyond debate – in recent years, auto crashes have annually killed over 30,000 people in the United States.19 Taking into consideration the danger posed on roads across the world – especially the notoriously unsafe roads of countries like Libya, Thailand, Venezuela, South Africa, and (as sf writer Nnedi Okorafor knows quite well) Nigeria – the global total of lives lost to automobile accidents in a typical year is about one million people.20 As President Lyndon B. Johnson pointed out back in 1966 when he was signing into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (an important piece of legislation designed to address the rise in automobile fatalities in the 1960s), the United States by that time had lost ‘nearly three times as many Americans [on streets and highways] as we have lost in all of our wars.’21 A recent study has even 19

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National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2016, p. 200. On the state of global road safety in recent years, see the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2013: Supporting a Decade of Action (Geneva: World Health Organization Publications, 2013). In Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), a novel about aliens landing in Nigeria, she repeatedly references the dilapidated and dangerous conditions of that country’s roads (especially its notorious Lagos– Benin Expressway). These references culminate in the surreal appearance in Chapter 40 of the ‘Road Monster,’ a rippling, snakelike creature formed from the road itself that attacks motorists. ‘I collect bones,’ the Road Monster tells one woman. ‘I have always collected bones. I am the road.’ Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (New York: Saga Press, 2015), p. 206. Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Remarks at the Signing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act.’ September 6, 1966. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27847.

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shown that cars (in the form of heavy traffic) might contribute to other displays of violence beyond car crashes such as incidents of domestic abuse.22 Furthermore, many people have foregrounded transportation’s relationship to a throng of pressing issues such as air pollution and climate change; the vibrancy and equity of communities; and personal health and well-being. Most pressing in that list is the role that transport plays as a major contributor to greenhouse gases that have already begun ravaging our planet in the form of global climate change. Within the transport sector – which includes road, rail, sea, and air transport – road vehicles in particular have been estimated to dispense ‘75–80% of all CO2 emissions from transport.’23 Thus, although some people have found cause for celebration in how at least some sectors of society have curtailed their greenhouse gas output (a record number of US coal plants, for example, closed in 2018), transportation is not one such sector.24 As one article somberly declares, whereas transport in the United States and the European Union is currently guilty of around 20 percent to 25 percent of total CO2 emissions, by 2050 ‘as much as 30–50% [of total CO2 emissions]…are projected to come from the transport sector.’25 In addition to contributing heavily to anthropogenic climate change, road transport also adds significantly to air pollution, which numerous studies have connected to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as certain cancers.26 Widespread adoption of alternative, cleaner modes of transport like bicycles, therefore, would be an important step toward making significant reductions to global greenhouse gases and other pollutants possible. Next, many people blame cars for the deterioration of local communities and of inner cities that has often been the result of rampant post-World War II urban flight and suburban sprawl. Thus, environmentalists and proponents of so-called ‘locovore’ culture have often praised the bicycle for its capacities to shrink distances. As 22

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Louis-Philippe Beland and Daniel A. Brent, ‘Traffic and Crime,’ Journal of Public Economics 160 (2018), pp. 96–116. Beland and Brent argue in here that heavy traffic on two major Los Angeles highways can increase nighttime domestic violence by approximately 9 percent. Elmar Uherek, et al., ‘Transport Impacts on Atmosphere and Climate: Land Transport,’ Atmospheric Environment 44 (2010), p. 4773. See Brad Plumer, ‘U.S. Carbon Emissions Surged in 2018 Even as Coal Plants Closed,’ New York Times (January 8, 2019). Plumer states that ‘emissions from…planes and trucks soared’ in 2018. Elmar Uherek, et al., ‘Transport Impacts,’ p. 4790. Elmar Uherek, et al., ‘Transport Impacts,’ pp. 4783–84.

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Dave Horton describes it: ‘the irony is that the bicycle historically led to an expansion in the geographical range of people’s everyday lives…[but now] the bicycle tends to symbolise and achieve the opposite effect, “squeezing” different aspects of daily life into a more compact geographical area.’27 Relatedly, proponents of cycling hail the bicycle’s potential contributions to social equality.28 Because private car ownership can be prohibitively expensive and because public transportation is often notoriously inconvenient in many American cities (especially in poorer neighborhoods), the bicycle – affordable and durable as it is – has, since its inception, been lauded as ‘the poor person’s horse’ and eventually ‘the poor person’s car.’ The bicycle, in other words, grants a degree of mobility and freedom of movement to people who otherwise would not know it, and who might therefore be kept from sufficient access to employment, health care, shopping, recreation, and so forth. Lastly, in addition to contributing to ecological and social sustainability, the bicycle has also been adopted as a crucial element in creating and maintaining healthy bodies.29 In recent years, the automobile has been implicated in various ‘lifestyle diseases’ (such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease) and in ‘the obesity epidemic,’ both of which are in part caused by – and significantly exacerbated by – an overly sedentary lifestyle.30 A significant advantage that cycling possesses is that it is something that can combine a healthy activity with the needs of everyday mobility. That is, since a large proportion of the trips people make on a daily basis are short distances of only a few miles, and a few miles is seen as an ideal cycling distance that is neither too ludicrously short nor too strenuously far, the bicycle provides the unique

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Dave Horton, ‘Social Movements and the Bicycle,’ Thinking About Cycling, http://thinkingaboutcycling.com/social-movements-and-the-bicycle, p. 16, last accessed July 15, 2016. On the bicycle’s connection to social equality, see, for example, the following: Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars, 1974); Melody Lynn Hoffmann and Adonia Lugo, ‘Who is “World Class”?’ Urbanities 4, no. 1 (2014), pp. 45–61; John Stehlin, ‘Regulating Inclusion: Spatial Form, Social Process, and the Normalization of Cycling Practice in the USA,’ Mobilities 9, no. 1 (2014), pp. 21–41. See Chapter 8 – ‘Health and the Bicycle’ – in Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), pp. 227–46. See Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona’s 2003 testimony to the US Congress titled ‘The Obesity Crisis in America,’ surgeongeneral.gov. July 16, 2003. Last accessed February 22, 2019.

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opportunity to exercise while doing the necessary commute to work or while running one’s daily errands.31 Thus, the time is ripe for a book-length study that thoroughly explores the history of sf’s treatment of road transport. In an oft-cited quotation, Isaac Asimov once defined sf as ‘that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.’32 In other words, sf is a genre that specializes in addressing humanity’s relationship to the machines it invents, and in inviting us to reflect on to what degree those machines are living up to their potential to become tools for our liberation and elevation, or to what degree they have instead contributed to our enslavement and abasement. Given what is at stake with our decisions regarding road transport – the health of our ecosystems, our communities, our bodies – it is valuable and necessary to explore how sf invites us to reconsider this technology that daily moves us around.

The Arrival of the Bicycle Before providing an overview of this book’s chapters, I want to move now into a discussion of how the arrival of both the modern bicycle and the automobile in the closing decades of the nineteenth century left its mark on early American sf of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will see in the paragraphs below how this early sf sets up a trend that (the rest of this book will demonstrate) sf in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reverses. In other words, early American sf initially appears uninterested in the new safety bicycles (the harbinger of the modern bicycle) of the late nineteenth century. Instead, it is the possibility of where automobile technology might be headed that more so fascinates the authors of these texts. However, most sf produced in the United States eventually (once it moves past the pulp era of the 1920s and 1930s) comes to valorize the technological simplicity of the bicycle and to demonize the technological extravagance of the automobile. 31

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In countries like England, for example, 58 percent of car trips in recent years have been for less than five miles, which means about half of all car trips are to destinations that most people would find comfortably bikeable. On this figure, see Peter Cox, ‘The Role of Human Powered Vehicles in Sustainable Mobility,’ Built Environment 34, no. 2 (2008), p. 144. Isaac Asimov, ‘How Easy to See the Future!’ in Asimov on Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday, 1981). This article originally appeared in the April 1975 issue of Natural History.

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As different iterations of the bicycle appeared throughout the nineteenth century – the draisine in the 1810s, the velocipede in the 1860s, the high-wheeler in the 1870s, the safety bicycle in the 1880s – people often saw each of these forms as synonymous with ‘speed, mobility, progress and the future.’33 Put another way, for many Victorian-era observers the bicycle was a ‘veritable icon of futurism.’34 It represented a first-rate technological marvel. Some early American sf accommodates the bicycle, such as Charles W. Caryl’s New Era (1897), Milan C. Edson’s Solaris Farm (1900), and C. W. Wooldridge’s Perfecting the Earth (1902), all of which depict utopian communities that accommodate both pedal-powered bicycles and motor-powered vehicles. Similarly, Edgar Chambless’ Roadtown (1910) envisions a house-wide horizontal city whose basement contains electric monorail trains but whose roof boasts a beautiful promenade with ‘a path for bicyclists and [roller] skaters.’35 However, much of this speculative fiction written between 1880 and 1920 was not particularly enchanted with the bicycle and can often be seen either wholly ignoring bicycles or fantasizing about more technologically advanced versions of them. For many of these early sf authors – and for others as well – a normal human-propelled bike simply did not embody enough futurity.36 For example, in Arthur Bird’s Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States of the Americas in 1999 (1899), the hemisphere-spanning futuristic America depicted in this jingoistic work now keeps ‘[t]wo or three of the bicycles of 1899…as curiosities in a glass case in 1999… They were regarded as instruments of voluntary torture, relics of a species of refined barbarism.’37 In place of the 1890s bicycle, one finds instead ‘Ærocycles,’ machines that Looking Forward describes as ‘ærial bicycle[s] that skimmed through the air with admirable ease, being operated like the old-fashioned bicycles suffering mortals in 1899 used to jump over hills and rough roads, straining muscle and nerve to the 33

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Paul Smethurst, The Bicycle – Towards A Global Future (New York: Palgrave, 2015), p. 153. For a general history of the bicycle, see David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Smethurst, The Bicycle, p. 25. Edgar Chambless, Roadtown (New York: Roadtown Press, 1910), p. 53. Historian Evan Friss asserts a connection between increased exposure by people to automobiles in the late Victorian era and an ‘altered…perception of bicycles as symbols of innovation, progress, and modernity.’ Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 192. Arthur Bird, Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States of the Americas in 1999 (Utica, NY: I.C. Childs and Sons, 1899), p. 128.

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utmost tension, and frightening horses with their “bicycle face.”’38 Bird, clearly, was not much impressed by the actual bicycles that surrounded him in the late 1890s: they reeked of a certain technological crudeness to him. When bicycles were not replaced with mysterious ‘flying bicycles’ like Bird’s ‘Ærocycles’ (mysterious because Bird never clarifies how they are able to fly), early American sf often reimagined the late nineteenthcentury bicycle as enhanced, 2.0 versions by transforming them into electric bicycles. Around the turn of the last century, excitement soared over the potential for electricity to transform people’s lives. Drawing inspiration from Thomas Edison’s developments of electrical illumination in the 1870s and 1880s, as well as from earlier utopian works like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888) that depicted an electrified world, a group of texts that we might call ‘electrical utopias’ flourished at this time and brimmed with visions of ‘the longer-term beneficial transformations to be wrought by electricity.’39 (Bird’s Looking Forward, with its abundant praise for electricity, would be one such electrical utopia.) Put simply, electrical utopianism ‘involves the idea that electricity and the devices it powers will facilitate or incite the development of a perfect society.’40 In addition to showing how electricity might radically alter many aspects of society such as medical care, food production, law enforcement, and so forth, these

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Bird, Looking Forward, p. 128. ‘Bicycle face’ was an invented medical condition of the nineteenth century that appears to have been first diagnosed by a certain Dr. A. Shadwell. Shadwell defined it as ‘the peculiar strained, set look’ caused by the effort to keep a bike balanced and upright, and he classified it as a nervous disorder. A. Shadwell, ‘Hidden Dangers of Cycling,’ Living Age 212, no. 2750 (1897), p. 833. Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), p. 136. Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a massive bestseller and was enormously influential on the late nineteenth century. Hundreds of other utopias and anti-utopias were written in direct or indirect response to it. Discussions of electricity in Looking Backward are rare, but the work – published six years after Edison switched on his first electricity generation and distribution plant in New York City – does include this detail about the work’s socialist utopian America of the future: ‘Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting.’ Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 70. Jennifer L. Lieberman and Ronald R. Kline, ‘Dream of an Unfettered Electrical Future: Nikola Tesla, the Electrical Utopian Novel, and an Alternative American Sociotechnical Imaginary,’ Configurations 25, no. 1 (2017), p. 7 (footnote 15).

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electrical utopias also present electricity as altering transportation technologies such as flying machines and trains. Furthermore, utopias defined by a widespread use of electricity often abound with electric bicycles. John Astor, in his A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894), describes how in that book’s utopian world of 2000 AD, ‘[l]ight but powerful batteries and motors’ have been ‘fitted on bicycles, which can act either as auxiliaries for hill-climbing or in case of head wind, or they can propel the machine altogether.’41 A few years later, John McCoy (writing under the pseudonym the Lord Commissioner) describes in A Prophetic Romance: Mars to Earth (1896) a utopian America in which ‘bicycles are everywhere; they are propelled by electricity, that power which has revolutionized the travel and transportation of the world.’42 Like Bird, Astor and McCoy reject the relatively low-tech bicycle of the late nineteenth century. The bike’s fundamental nature as a human-powered machine strikes them as distasteful or disappointing. Thus, these authors believe that the nature of their works – works energized by an impulse to deliver technological speculation and utopian prophecy – compels them to imagine bicycles that have transcended bicycleness, that are instead machines as mechanically complex as airplanes or automobiles. What Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles will show, however, is that as American sf develops in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, it increasingly glorifies the bicycle for the very reasons (and more) that Bird, Astor, and McCoy seem to disapprove of it: because a bike is human-powered, is relatively simple in design, and so forth. Interestingly, a work that precedes those by Bird, Astor, and McCoy functions as a striking ‘cautionary tale’ about an ‘overambitious transportation device,’ in this case, an overly ambitious tricycle.43 Frank R. Stockton’s ‘The Tricycle of the Future’ (1885) tells the tale of Fred Humphreys, a young boy who buys a bicycle when they appear in the United States, then quickly moves on to a tricycle when that machine becomes available. Quickly growing bored with each machine he acquires, Fred next becomes ‘convinced…that there might be something 41

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John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 31. John McCoy, A Prophetic Romance: Mars to Earth (Boston, MA: Arena Publishing, 1896), p. 197. John Eggeling, John Clute, and David Langford, ‘Stockton, Frank R,’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz; updated 31 August 2018. Web. Last accessed November 19, 2018.

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Figure 1. The ‘Tricycle of the Future’ better’: a ‘Great Tricycle of the Future.’44 Fred envisions this ambitious machine as a two-leveled one in which passengers are seated on top as on a stagecoach. Down below and inside the machine, six horses run on a treadmill to drive the tricycle’s massive wheels forward. The driver sits in front operating the tiller for steering, and an assistant works as a brakeman (see Figure 1). To test his new Great Tricycle, Fred decides to build a scaled-down prototype first, one powered by only two horses instead of six. Yet, even with this more modest version being used during a trial run, the situation quickly spirals out of control. The two horses, Glaucus and Jenny, reveal themselves to be independent and uncontrollable animals. The result is the ‘horse-power was going with such force and rapidity, that the regulating apparatus could not work, and the brakes seemed to take but little hold upon the driving-wheels.’45 The helpless Fred, unable to control his machine, drives it into a lake, where everyone, including the horses, emerges frightened but unscathed. Thus, ‘The Tricycle of the Future’ admonishes its readers about the compulsion to always make

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Frank R. Stockton, ‘The Tricycle of the Future,’ in The Clocks of Rondaine and Other Stories (New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1892), p. 93, p. 94. The story first appeared in the May 1885 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine. Stockton, ‘Tricycle of the Future,’ 102.

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transport machines as swift and complex as possible. For Stockton, simpler is safer: just because one can increase the speed and power of a tricycle with horses (or of a bicycle with an electric battery) does not necessarily mean one should. Again, as the rest of this book will show, much American sf eventually joins rank with Stockton and parts way with Bird, Astor, and McCoy. That is, a good deal of sf produced in the United States eventually comes to proclaim the many virtues of the bicycle and the many vices of the automobile.

The Arrival of the Automobile Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the automobile has often been hailed as a miraculous invention of the modern age and as one of the great technological wonders of history. James Doolittle, writing in 1916, opens his massive history of the automobile by unequivocally declaring in its preface: ‘The automobile is the most important device ever made by man.’46 Doolittle then proclaims in the book’s introduction that the automobile is ‘the only improvement in road transportation since Moses, and the most important influence on civilization of all time.’47 At around the same time, Henry Ford boasted of the famously affordable automobiles his Ford Motor Company would manufacture in the first few decades of the twentieth century: I will build a motor car for the great multitude…constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise…so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.48 4 6

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James Doolittle, The Romance of the Automobile Industry: Being the Story of its Development, its Contribution to Health and Prosperity, its Influence on Eugenics, its Effect on Personal Efficiency, and its Service and Mission to Humanity as the Latest and Greatest Phase of Transportation (New York: Klebold Press, 1916), p. v. Doolittle, Romance of the Automobile Industry, p. ix. Quoted in Roger Burlingame, Henry Ford: A Great Life in Brief (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 62. According to one website, ‘The precise year in which Ford issued the “multitude” statement is not known. Earliest source 6/6/13 Ford Times. Probably said 1903–1906, when expressed same views to associates,’ www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/ digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-quotes/.

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Here, Ford perceives his cars as not only marvels of construction and of engineering but also as exalted machines capable of putting people in deeper communion with the world around them (and, possibly, with that world’s Creator). More recently, Tesla cofounder, CEO, and engineer Elon Musk has shared his conviction that his company and the groundbreaking electric cars they manufacture are ‘changing the world and changing history.’49 Put another way, Musk thinks a new form of automobile will save the world from automobiles, because Tesla cars are helping the world ‘achieve a sustainable energy economy’ and one that will allow the private car to endure. Without such an achievement, Musk affirms, ‘civilization will collapse.’50 Similar to Doolittle, Ford, and Musk’s statements, sf might also be seen as characterized by a clear technophilia and techno optimism. In his essay ‘All Those Big Machines,’ sf author and historian Brian Aldiss claims: ‘Until very recently, the men and women in science fiction who subscribed most ardently to the belief in science and technology’s ability to transform the world for the better, and thereby to increase human happiness, were and are the men [and women] whose names we most vividly remember…Their message was most popular.’51 Here, Aldiss declares that sf is, by and large, defined by an excessive belief in the progress that ‘big machines’ supposedly represent. When we examine early American sf, we find many works that share the optimism of people like Doolittle, Ford, and Musk regarding automobiles and that capture well the technophilia Aldiss perceives as characterizing sf in general. Such works would include the early twentieth-century Tom Swift series, a juvenile series of scientific invention novels written under the house name Victor Appleton (most were written by Howard R. Garis). The Tom Swift series is considered one of the most popular and influential ‘Edisonades’ – cheap novels ‘celebrat[ing] how electricity, radium, x-rays, and other energies could serve the public good’ – that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.52 The Tom Swift novels also often focused on and celebrated a range of sophisticated transport machines such as airships, submarines, motor boats, and (in the series’ debut novel) motorcycles. As sf scholar Brooks Landon reminds us, ‘it is 49

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From an email sent to an employee and written by Musk. Quoted in Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 177. Elon Musk, ‘Master Plan, Part Deux,’ Tesla.com (July 20, 2016). Brian Aldiss, ‘All Those Big Machines – The Theme SF Does Not Discuss,’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7, no. 1 (1996), p. 87. Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882–1952 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), p. 96.

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important to mark the role Tom Swift played in laying the foundation for the success of American SF. The series…intrigued new generations of boy readers with a combination of science and engineering information and speculation that would be the core of genre SF.’53 In the fifth book of the series – Tom Swift and His Electric Run-About, or the Speediest Car in the World (1910) – the eponymous boy inventor sets out to build an electric car that will overcome the limitations of battery-powered cars at that time (and, to some degree, of electric cars still today): their relative slowness and their limited range. Tom strives to build an electric vehicle that can run several hundreds of miles on one battery charge and that can reach speeds of ‘a hundred miles an hour’ (an unheard of speed for any car at the time).54 Rather than present Tom’s aspirations as a form of hubris, the novel consistently portrays its young protagonist as a figure of moral integrity and mechanical genius. Thus, when we see Tom and his electric vehicle ‘speeding down the street’ and ‘violating the speed laws,’ such actions are sanctioned and celebrated because in this scene Tom employs extravagant speed for the noble cause of saving a bank being threatened by the novel’s villains.55 Ten or twenty years after Tom Swift and His Electric Run-About is published, it will become much harder (for reasons discussed in the next chapter) to glorify an automobile’s speed, but here Appleton reveres it as a technological achievement of the highest order. Relatedly, within the many American contributions to the utopian tradition published during c.1880–1920, a robust faith in the wonders of transport ran high. Specifically, as we saw above in connection with bicycles, the power and promise of electricity in particular captivated the writers of this time. By the late nineteenth century, many people had grown disenchanted with steam- and horse-powered transportation. Steam-powered trains filled the air with a din of rattling metal and a cloud of dirty smoke. Horse-drawn conveyances could also be obnoxiously loud, and instead of befouling their environment with abundant smoke they defiled it with abundant manure. The overall quality of air, water, and land were all under threat by the numerous carts, carriages, and trains of that era.56 53

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Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 48. Victor Appleton, Tom Swift and His Electric Run-About, or the Speediest Car in the World (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1910), p. 99. Appleton, Tom Swift, p. 178. On the emergence in the nineteenth century of an ‘environmental consciousness’ regarding transportation’s relationship to pollution, see Friss, Cycling City, pp. 133–36.

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Consequently, when writing his near-future electrical utopia titled Looking Forward: The Phenomenal Progress of Electricity in 1912 (1906), Harry W. Hillman includes a glimpse of an ‘electric train, wending its way along, making neither noise nor smoke.’57 In addition to electric trains, the streets in Hillman’s book teem with quiet, non-polluting electric cars, in part because the ‘Electrical Company had installed electrants [i.e., recharging stations] freely throughout the city, sparing no expense to encourage the use of electricity in every way.’58 Similarly, a work examined above – Arthur Bird’s Looking Forward – describes an imagined future in which ‘[s]treet noises that rendered city and often village life endurable in 1899 were entirely abolished in 1999. The clattering of horses’ hoofs became unknown in city life…thundering omnibuses no longer tortured the human ear in 1999. Automobiles had sent the clattering hoofs to Tophet and electricity…was exclusively used in transportation.’59 Almost everywhere you look, American sf of this time overflows with new types of electrical automobiles that supposedly represent a step in the right direction toward utopia. Of course, electric cars were a technological reality in the late nineteenth century. Early versions of them were invented in the 1880s and even entered modest production in the 1890s. In fact, one scholar reminds us that battery-powered cars outsold their internal combustion counterparts around the turn of the last century.60 However, ‘by 1930 electric cars…were curiosities,’ having been done in by technological limitations such as the inability of their batteries to hold a charge over long distances.61 But in his A Journey in Other Worlds (introduced above) – a work providing a tour of a utopian, futuristic United States that is a multi-continental superpower – Astor describes electric vehicles whose batteries can last for days without a recharge. This technological enhancement allows them to ‘roam over

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Harry W. Hillman, Looking Forward: The Phenomenal Progress of Electricity in 1912 (Northampton, MA: Valley View Publishing Company, 1906), p. 40. Hillman, Looking Forward, p. 37. As in Hillman’s Looking Forward, another work mentioned above – Chambless’ Roadtown – also features electric trains (in the form of monorails found in subterranean part of the Roadtowns) and electric vehicles (in the form of ‘agricultural conveyances’ that help move the food grown around the Roadtowns into these cities). Chambless, Roadtown, p. 101. Bird, Looking Forward, p. 192. ‘Tophet’ refers to a place mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible (mainly in the Book of Jeremiah) where sacrifices and burials were made. William R. Black, Sustainable Transportation: Problems and Solutions (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), p. 238. Black, Sustainable Transportation, p. 238.

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the roads…from the fertile valley of the Peace and grey shores of Hudson Bay, to beautiful Lake Nicaragua, the River Plate, and Patagonia, improving man by bringing him close to Nature.’62 Electric vehicles in the form of ‘electric van[s]…comfortable beyond compare – mounted on easy springs, and curtained and cushioned’ roll across the roads of William Dean Howells’ Through the Eyes of the Needle (1907), the final work in his trilogy focusing on the secluded island utopia of Altruria.63 Alexander Craig’s Ionia (1898) describes a ‘model city’ in which ‘the din and roar of city streets as we know them was absent,’ for the ‘soft tires of wagon or carriage made no noise on those immaculately smooth streets’ and because such vehicles were ‘propelled by…electric force.’64 In Equality (1897) – the follow-up to his bestselling Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy depicts people using ‘motor-carriage[s]’ powered by ‘electric motors’ that have (along with newly paved roads) ‘made travel such a luxury that as a rule [everyone makes] all short journeys, and when time does not press even very long ones, by private conveyance.’65 These newfangled electric vehicles envisioned by Hillman, Bird, Astor, Howells, Craig, and Bellamy represent the dream (a dream we are still pursing today) of a successful transport system that does not pollute its environment in any way. These electric cars are clean and quiet, the exact opposite of the horse-drawn wagons, steam trains, and gasoline cars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this unwavering faith in the potential of automobiles to move people around comfortably, efficiently, and safely, and therefore to help improve society overall, does not endure. As we will see in the next chapter, such faith is severely tested by the mass causalities caused by the private automobile in the 1920s and 1930s. From that point on, a robust skepticism regarding the supposed social and technological benefits of the modern-day automobile imbues American sf (however, we will see in Chapter 3 how some New Wave writers of the 1960s and 1970s helped revive interest for a while in the potential of electricity-powered vehicles). After 1940 or so, American sf comes instead to favor more restrained forms of movement such as walking, and more simple transport technologies such as the bicycle. 62 63

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Astor, Journey in Other Worlds, p. 31. William Dean Howells, Through the Eyes of the Needle: A Romance (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), p. 157. Alexander Craig, Ionia: Land of Wise Men and Fair Women (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971), p. 136. Edward Bellamy, Equality (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1968), p. 245, p. 298. In addition to electric cars, Bellamy also quickly mentions in this later work the development of some form of private ‘air-car.’ See Bellamy, Equality, p. 270, p. 298.

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A Note on Scope and Further Notes on Terminology As Daniel Dinello writes about his own study of sf: ‘The vast literature of science fiction is daunting. Trying to read everything would confuse or kill me if not limited by some purposeful or even arbitrary standard.’66 Thus, like Dinello, I have drawn some necessary (yet at times subjective) boundaries. For example, I do not analyze any steampunk texts – the subgenre of sf that takes place in an alternative history version of the nineteenth century – in this book. Although many bicycles and many interesting steam-powered transport machines can be found in steampunk, that subgenre is vast and this book largely ignores alternative histories. Therefore, for the sake of consistency (and sanity), I ignore steampunk. I also mostly shun flying cars, such as the one used by Deckard in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).67 These ‘air cars’ (as Dick calls them) strike me less as automobiles and more like small airplanes lacking wings. And although my book occasionally analyzes film, television, and other media such as comic books (especially in Chapter 6), the dominant focus of this book is on literature, that is, on sf novels and short stories. The long history of sf film and television is largely ignored. However, although this book draws a boundary that excludes bikes and cars in some sf texts such as steampunk fiction, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles at times expands its boundaries to capture transport machines and mobilities beyond those referenced in my title. That is, when appropriate or productive, the analysis will detour at times into a consideration of other modes of transport like skateboards (such as when discussing Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash); walking (such as when discussing Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower); and airships (such as when discussing Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl). Furthermore, although this book focuses most often on the machinery of cars and bicycles, at times sf’s portrayal of the vital infrastructure of road mobility like highways, bridges, and traffic information systems will be addressed (such as when discussing William Gibson’s Virtual Light and Pat Cadigan’s Synners). Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles will also occasionally expand its scope to consider how other types of technology in sf (such as the new communication devices that populate Ursula K. Le Guin’s works) relate to transportation. And although works of American sf are the object

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Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), p. 7. Two films based on Dick’s novel – Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – feature flying cars as well.

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of sustained analysis in this study, I periodically make quick reference to works by some British sf writers (such as H. G. Wells, Eric Frank Russell, and J. G. Ballard) when useful. I also want to say a few more quick words about terminology. I often use the terms car and automobile in this book as a form of shorthand to refer to most any kind of motorized, private transport vehicle. Thus, when I refer to cars and automobiles, such terms often include vans, SUVs, pickup trucks, and so forth. Additionally, quite often I use the term ‘automobility.’ Drawing upon the work of sociologist John Urry, Zack Furness defines automobility as ‘the assemblages of socioeconomic, material, technological, and ideological power that not only facilitate and accelerate automobile travel but also help to reproduce and ultimately normalize the cultural conditions in which the automobile is seen, and made to be seen, as a technological savior, a powerful status symbol, and a producer of both “modern” subjectivities and “civilized” peoples.’68 Similarly, Cotten Seiler (drawing upon Foucault’s idea of the dispositif, a ‘mutifacted, coordinating network of power’) observes that automobility ‘comprises a “multilinear ensemble” of commodities, bodies of knowledge, laws, techniques, institutions, environments, nodes of capital, sensibilities, and modes of perception.’69 Automobility, in other words, refers not only to the material artifact of the privately owned car, but also to the widespread cultural, social, economic, and political forces surrounding cars that incessantly privilege these machines over other modes of transport like walking, buses, subways, and bicycles.

Overview of Chapters Chapter 1 focuses on the pulp era (c.1926–40) of sf and explores how a distinct technological optimism like what we saw above in turn-of-thecentury, proto-sf texts dominated early twentieth-century magazine sf as well. This pulp era optimism is best exemplified by the influential editor Hugo Gernsback and the all-sf magazines he started and (for the most part) ran: Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. However, this chapter argues that many American sf writers who appeared in Gernsback’s magazines stridently condemned the automobility of their own time. Where their technological optimism manifests itself, then, is in their belief that the

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Zack Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), p. 6. Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 5, p. 6.

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automobile is not worthy of abandonment and that a certain perfectibility resides in the machine. The bicycle, as we will see, rarely makes an appearance in the pulp era, and so at the end of this chapter I will speculate on reasons for this scarcity, as well as briefly discuss a few noteworthy exceptions to that trend. Despite the paucity of bikes in the pulp era, the second chapter focuses on several works from the 1950s (part of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of sf) in which bicycles do prominently appear. After first examining cars and walking in some works by Ray Bradbury, the discussion turns to a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, a novelette by Poul Anderson, and a short story by Avram Davidson. This chapter argues that these three texts favor portrayals of ‘low-tech’ bicycles as pragmatic, reliable machines worthy of continued use and appreciation, and of bicycles as potent, agentic pieces of technology capable of inspiring awe and even fear. Such representations repudiate that decade’s dismissal of the bike and are a far cry from the era’s advocacy for nearly all things automobile-related in its urban planning, legislation, literature, film, music, and so forth. Chapter 3 focuses on works from the New Wave era (c.1960–75) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Ernest Callenbach. The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how some sf writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation. First, we will see the reaction of several writers to the dramatic spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early 1960s and climaxed in the early 1970s. Second, this chapter explores how the emerging environmentalist movement of this time shaped the works of writers like Le Guin, Ellison, and Callenbach. Given the rise in automobile fatalities and the growing knowledge of the automobile’s unsustainability, it should come as little surprise that American sf literature in the 1960s and 1970s did not gaze fondly upon the modern, internal-combustion car. Instead, the New Wave looked to more hopeful alternatives such as electric cars and human-powered bicycles. The fourth chapter will focus on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. All these works celebrate transportation technologies such as skateboards and bicycles: technologies that challenge the car and its dominance over the road. Furthermore, an interest in transport machines helps these texts (I argue) demonstrate some of the key features that scholars have identified as setting postcyberpunk apart from the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s, as well as some of the features they see as building continuity between the two. Thus, in this chapter, I discuss how frequent images of cars, bikes, and skateboards allow postcyberpunk texts to, for example, explore the ways in which technology transforms the

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human body and the human psyche (a concern classic cyberpunk texts also share). But I also discuss how these images allow postcyberpunk works to show how technology can nourish robust social connections (a belief classic cyberpunk works almost never affirm). Chapter 5 examines how the rising popularity since the 1990s of works of postapocalyptic cli-fi (i.e., climate change fiction) has provided sf writers a convenient opportunity to explore issues of mobility. In these works, various forms of ecological disruption contribute to society breaking down, and then toiling to maintain order and stability. Amid such chaos, characters routinely struggle to stay mobile, and therefore often adopt the low-tech yet hardy bicycle to maintain some sense of normalcy and some sense of a working society. Cars and other gasolinepowered vehicles, on the other hand, are routinely demonized as tools of oppressors and of the corrupt, or these overly complex machines have been incapacitated by the collapse of society. After first examining an early postapocalyptic cli-fi work from the 1990s by Octavia E. Butler, the chapter then advances this book’s chronological analysis to some twentyfirst-century works of sf. In its discussion of a novel by Paolo Bacigalupi and one by Benjamin Parzybok, this chapter shows how more restrained modes of transport play a vital role in keeping a society functioning and keeping us as individuals from slipping into disempowerment. The sixth and final chapter focuses on one of the most recent and most popular trends happening right now in sf: the rise of a decidedly nostalgic form of sf. In particular, the trend I will examine in this chapter is one I call ‘1980s-nostalgia sf’ and is made up of sf literary and screen texts from c.2010 to the present that exhibit a profound fondness for or interest in the American 1980s. After first discussing what is one of the most influential texts for this 1980s-nostalgia sf – Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial – I then track and analyze how these nostalgia texts align themselves with Spielberg’s blockbuster film by demonizing motorized transport while simultaneously exalting the bicycle. However, the frequent association between kids (particularly boys) and bikes in all the texts this chapter focuses on is problematic, as I will argue at some length. The three nostalgia texts that comprise much of the focus of this chapter – Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls – do, unfortunately, bolster a connection between kids and bikes. Moreover, these texts maintain unpalatable gender assumptions about mobility machines like bicycles, although I show how some of these texts do acknowledge and interrogate these assumptions in some rather provocative ways.

Chapter 1 Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era

In the 1955 edition of Forecast, Hugo Gernsback – the former editor of the influential sf magazines Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories – addressed the topic of the future of transportation.1 After acknowledging how America struggles with traffic congestion and with inadequate parking in its cities, Gernsback launches into a description of his proposed solution to these problems: the widespread use of thin, two-wheeled cars that stay upright using an internal gyroscope.2 Such space-saving vehicles, Gernsback believed, would allow cites to ‘gain over 40% more space in the streets and roads’ and would certainly be ‘a challenge to our present over-crowded streets.’3 Gernsback’s innovations to the modern automobile, however, did not stop there. A few years earlier, when addressing the topic of automobile collisions and the appalling numbers of injuries and fatalities that were a result of these accidents, Gernsback proposed the use of a radaroperated braking mechanism. That is, he envisions brakes that the car automatically applies when the radar installed in the vehicle senses

1

2

3

Forecast was a self-published booklet of technological prophecies that Gernsback produced annually throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s. They were sent as ‘Christmas cards’ to his friends and were not for sale to the public. Gernsback’s interest in transport technology is also on prominent display in his early novel Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (originally published in 1911 as a twelve-part serial in Gernsback’s magazine Modern Electrics; a book version appeared in 1925). Among the many inventions it depicts, the novel features aeroflyers (small flying machines); electromobiles (electrically powered ground vehicles); a subatlantic tube (a high-speed, electromagnetic, underground train connecting New York City and France); and tele-motor-coasters (motor-powered roller skates). Hugo Gernsback, ‘Future Transportation,’ Forecast 1956 (New York: Hugo Gernsback, 1955), p. 11 (emphasis in the original). 25

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an object in its path that the vehicle is in danger of hitting. Sounding remarkably prescient of the automatic emergency braking systems being installed in some new cars today, Gernsback writes of how if such a device ‘were installed on the front fender of all cars, then as soon as any body having a large capacitance (such as an automobile, truck, pedestrian) came within, say, two feet of it, a relay would automatically cause the brakes to be applied.’4 Eventually, however, Gernsback declares that even these modifications to the 1950s-era car might not be enough to solve the many problems associated with cars. ‘[I]n my opinion,’ Gernsback exclaims, ‘the future of the automobile is in the air!’5 He then proceeds to describe what he calls ‘airmobiles,’ cars built to hover above the ground by employing some future form of antigravity (see Figure 2). Recognizing that tremendous energy will be required to lift these airmobiles into the sky, Gernback – in a somewhat surprising statement given the article’s post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki, Cold War context – confidently assumes that ‘universal cheap atomic power…will surely be the prime moving power in our future transportation.’6 Throughout his life, Hugo Gernsback was a consistent (some might say a static) thinker.7 Across six decades of writing, speaking, and editing, he showed himself to be a firm believer in what Bleiler refers to as ‘technological perfectibilism,’ that is, a belief in technology’s capacity for perfection and for solving the world’s problems.8 It was uncharacteristic 4

5 6 7

8

Hugo Gernsback, ‘Anti-Collision Cars,’ Radio-Electronics (April 1952), p. 23. As Gernsback mentions in this article, he first envisioned radio-controlled brakes nearly twenty years earlier in another piece of writing. See Hugo Gernsback, ‘Auto-Radio Developments,’ Radio-Craft (June 1935), p. 709. Gernsback, ‘Future Transportation,’ p. 14 (emphasis in the original). Gernsback, ‘Future Transportation,’ p. 31. One prominent Gernsback scholar, for example, notes that in a 1961 ‘Guest Editorial’ for Amazing Stories, Gernsback shows ‘in his very first sentence’ that he ‘has not forgotten or abandoned his original definition of science fiction.’ Additionally, Gernsback reveals in this editorial that for him sf is still best encapsulated by the fiction written by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, the same authors he rhapsodically celebrated in his first issue of Amazing Stories published over 30 years earlier. Gary Westfahl, Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), pp. 89–90. Everett F. Bleiler (with the assistance of Richard J. Bleiler), Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), p. xiii. Bleiler contrasts technological perfectibilism with ‘social messianism,’ the belief that a particular group of people (socialists, for example) will be the vital agents of positive social change, not technology. In the ‘1926–1936 [era],’ Bleiler writes, ‘social messianism…is not very important’ (xiii). On

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Figure 2. Two-wheeled, gyroscopic aircar designed by Hugo Gernsback Used with permission from Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries of Gernsback to oppose any form of new technology. If a machine was causing a problem, instead of simply eliminating the machine, Gernsback’s natural reaction was to devise some additional technological fix to solve that problem. The various technological enhancements to automobiles described above epitomize Gernsback’s attitude: you should never abandon or eliminate a particular machine or a particular piece of technology. Instead, you should improve it. Gernsback ignores in this article solutions to traffic problems such as a wholesale redesigning of our built environments to be less car-centered, or an instituting of any measures to limit the use of private cars in order to promote more walking or more use of public transportation or bicycles. For Gernsback, to rid us of our many automobile-derived problems, humanity need not the prominence of utopian optimism in the Gernsback era, and how it begins to decline in the 1940s and 1950s, see Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 107–14.

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rid itself of the automobile; it need only work to perfect the automobile instead.9 This chapter focuses on how this Gernsbackian ‘technological perfectibilism’ pervaded many of the texts in the pulp era (c.1926–40) that depicted automobiles. Such pervasiveness, of course, does not mean that American sf writers of the early twentieth century comprised a chorus singing the praises of the car. As we will see below, much sf of the pulp era expresses a harsh judgment of the automobility of the 1920s and 1930s. When pulp era sf writers depict the automobiles of their own time, it is almost always through strident language and harrowing imagery borrowed from the anti-car, pro-pedestrian campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s that ‘perceived the car as inherently dangerous and… ill suited to city streets.’10 Yet, with a few noteworthy exceptions, we see these same writers who condemn the car saturating their texts with a utopian optimism and a belief in perfectibility when they imagine where the automobile might be headed in the future. The bicycle, however, rarely makes an appearance in the pulp era, and so at the end of this chapter I will speculate on reasons for this scarcity, as well as briefly discuss a few noteworthy exceptions to that trend.

Changing Notions of the Car and Street This chapter focuses specifically on the first few years of what is often referred to as the ‘Gernsback era’ (c.1926–36) that occurs within the more general pulp era. Hugo Gernsback famously launched the first all-sf pulp in 1926 when he published his first issue of Amazing Stories in April of that year. Although sf stories had been published before – in late nineteenthcentury publications like Pearson’s Magazine and the Strand Magazine, in early pulp magazines like the Argosy that also included crime fiction and adventure stories, and even in some of Gernsback’s own earlier science 9

10

This attitude toward the car is also on display in an article by Gernsback titled ‘The Murderous Automobile.’ Despite his title’s ominous reference to the automobile and despite acknowledging in its opening paragraphs how much cars contribute to ‘the hazards of the occupants, as well as of pedestrians,’ Gernsback merely proceeds to quickly list some technical improvements to the car that could be made such as the installation of windshield defrosters, skid-resistant tires, and more rounded car handles. Hugo Gernsback, ‘The Murderous Automobile,’ Everyday Science and Mechanics (February 1936), p. 56. Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 12.

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magazines like Modern Electrics and The Electrical Experimenter – it was Amazing Stories’ focus solely on sf that helped to popularize and define it as a distinct genre. After Gernsback lost control of this magazine in 1929 due to bankruptcy, he moved on to found two new magazines later that year: Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. In 1930, these two magazines merged into Wonder Stories, which Gernsback oversaw (but often did not personally edit) until selling the magazine off in 1936 due to, again, financial complications. Although many other pulp magazines published sf during and after the Gernsback era, this chapter focuses on Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories for several reasons. First, scholars like Michael Ashley and Gary Westfahl have done much in recent years to rehabilitate Gernsback’s reputation and to show that these early magazines have had a clear influence on nearly all subsequent sf. In particular, Westfahl has been a fervent spokesman for the towering legacy Gernsback left behind. Westfahl writes: I came to recognize that Gernsback had effectively created the genre of science fiction and had imprinted his image upon all of its texts; that he had an impact on all works of science fiction published since 1926, regardless of whether he played any direct role in their publication; that he had influenced perceptions of the works published before 1926 now acknowledged as science fiction; and that the overall effects of his work were overwhelmingly positive, as demonstrated by the vibrant, fascinating genre he had fashioned.11 Thus, even when sf writers aren’t aware of doing so, Westfahl believes they are subscribing to much of Gernsback’s paradigm that he laid out in the 1920s and 1930s for what constitutes the genre.12 But for a book like this one focusing on the history of sf and road transportation, the 1920s and 1930s are significant not only as the dawn of sf as a named genre – Gernsback began using the phrase ‘science fiction’ in the late 1920s – and as the era that gave rise to the first all-sf magazines. Of equal significance (or perhaps more significantly), the time span in which Gernsback publishes his two influential magazines Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories coincides with an important moment in the history of American transportation. These two decades are – as historians of technology such as Peter D. Norton have demonstrated – significant as an era defined by changing perceptions of cars, of non-car 11 12

Westfahl, Hugo Gernsback, p. 3. See Gary Westfahl, ‘“An Idea of Significant Import”: Hugo Gernsback’s Theory of Science Fiction,’ Foundation 48 (1990), pp. 26–50.

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modes of transport like walking and street railway, and of streets (particularly urban streets) in general. To put it in the language of ideas about the social construction of technology (SCOT): in the 1920s, an ‘interpretive flexibility’ is introduced into the formerly stable meanings of the car and the street.13 As Norton argues, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, people largely disparaged automobiles as frivolous, unessential toys. Eventually, though, cars were demonized as speedcrazed, destructive juggernauts of the street.14 The automobile’s ‘ugly reality could not be avoided for long,’ another historian writes. ‘Indeed, as early as 1921, daily published accounts of the dead and wounded acted as a Greek chorus predicting the fall of these Olympians,’ the cars.15 By 1937, annual automobile fatalities during the pulp era reached their harrowing peak of 37,819.16 Comprising part of that ‘Greek chorus,’ a New York Times headline from 1928, for example, proclaims the tragic news of how a ‘Taxi Kills a Child Retrieving Pennies.’ That child was, in fact, the three-year-old daughter of Hugo Gernsback. She was killed while out on a walk with her nursemaid. This page of the Times also contains the chilling news of a man in a ‘double accident,’ who was ‘knocked down by a hit-and-run driver and hit by another [car] as he lies in the street.’17 So much did the deaths begin to mount in the 1920s and 1930s that Clark Ashton Smith, in his story ‘The Great God Awto’ (1940), imagines an archeologist from the year 5998 mistakenly concluding that early twentieth-century automobility developed out of a sacrificial blood-cult devoted to the god Awto (i.e., Auto). During his lecture, the archeologist harangues his audience: ‘Picture, if you can, the ever-mounting horror of it all. The nation-wide madness of immolation. The carnivals of bloody holidays. The highways lined from coast to coast with crushed and dismembered sacrifices!’18 13

14 15

16

17 18

On the social construction of technology (SCOT), see the following: The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 30 (pleasure cars), pp. 27–29 (juggernauts). David Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 15–16. Blanke, Hell on Wheels, 51. On the soaring rates of automobile-related fatalities in the 1920s and 1930s, see table 2.10 in Blanke, Hell on Wheels, p. 60. ‘Taxi Kills a Child Retrieving Pennies,’ New York Times. Clark Ashton Smith, ‘The Great God Awto,’ Thrilling Wonder Stories 15, no. 2 (February 1940), p. 114.

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In addition to a blood-thirsty god or juggernaut, the car was also looked at as a haughty interloper in urban streets at this time because streets were still – in a carry-over of perceptions of the street dating all the way back to ancient Rome – socially constructed in the early twentieth century as a commons.19 As Norton succinctly states it: ‘By custom the street had always been free to all.’20 In fact, so entrenched and pervasive was this notion of the street as a place for all comers that when children who habitually played in them in the early twentieth century were struck and killed by cars, the driver was almost always reviled as a guilty murderer and the child was mourned as an innocent victim. However, these perceptions began to change around 1930. Throughout the 1920s, automobile owners, manufacturers, and various interest groups fought an increasingly organized and sustained rearguard action against these dominant social constructions of streets as a democratic commons and of cars as intruders and trite playthings. Consequently, by the 1930s, the interpretative flexibility and instability introduced throughout the 1920s has largely ended and achieved what SCOT theory calls ‘closure.’ Streets, by that time, were perceived as properly belonging to cars, cars that – instead of being frivolous luxuries – were now deemed essential machines of modern life. It is of tremendous significance, therefore, that sf magazines like Amazing Stories began publication in the early twentieth century against not only the backdrop of the rise and spread of new industries and new sciences, but also against the backdrop of this contentious era of shifting perceptions of the road and of the car. As mentioned above, most of the stories published in Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories ally themselves with the chorus of anti-automobile voices chanting in the mid- and late 1920s. These texts represent cities and societies organized around the cars of that era as defined by discontent, suffering, and death. However, most (but not all) of these same texts express an optimism that technological advancements will one day lead to automobiles better suited to our streets and our urban spaces, and therefore better suited to helping humanity achieve happier, more prosperous societies. Put another way, many of these pulp stories reveal themselves to be incapable or unwilling to think outside the system of automobility congealing at that time; they merely think in terms of revisions to that system.

19

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On the road as a commons being an idea stretching all the way back to ancient Rome, see James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), pp. 9–12. Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 67.

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A Futuristic New York City As discussed in this chapter’s intro, a belief that the power of technology could solve the world’s problems permeated the pulp era. If a machine was causing problems, often the natural reaction of Gernsback and the writers he published was to devise some scientific way to fix the problem, rather than simply eliminate the machine. One of the earliest instances of this trend in the pages of Amazing Stories is Harold Donitz’s ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century’ (1928). In this story, the cars of the early twentieth century have been thoroughly eradicated only to be replaced by a 2.0 version, that is, a more improved iteration that supposedly provides the solution to all the problems of earlier cars and their urban environments. This story focuses on Markham, an architect who has spent all morning working on his entry for a ‘$10,000 “City Beautiful” contest… to determine the best plan for an ideal city on the site of New York.’21 That night, exhausted, he opens a book by ‘Verne, or Wells, or one of that class,’ soon falls asleep, and experiences a vision of New York City in the late twenty-first century. The futuristic New York that Markham awakens in is a utopian version of the megacities H. G. Wells envisioned in works like The Sleeper Awakes (1899, revised 1910) and ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ (1899).22 Markham sees gigantic buildings (built horizontally instead of in Wells’ vertical style) housing thousands of people, moving platforms of various speeds carrying citizens throughout the city, and so forth. Markham eventually notes an additional feature of this futuristic city. Markham exclaims to his guide, Warren: ‘I have it! Something queer, something bothered me when I looked at the streets, and I have just realized what it was. I have not seen any automobiles’ (174). Although clear innovations in transport exist in this city – such as pneumatic tubes that move goods from manufacturing and distribution centers to stores, dirigibles and airplanes delivering mail from the sky, and the aforementioned moving platforms – Markham fails to see any immediate evidence of automobility. The subsequent discussion Warren and Markham engage in over the apparent lack of cars clearly situates ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century’ within the rancorous debates of the 1920s involving the car,

21

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Harold Donitz, ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century,’ Amazing Stories 3, no. 2 (1928), p. 171. Additional quotations from the story will be from this version and will be cited parenthetically. The first half of the latter text by Wells even appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories as Donitz’s story.

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debates centered on such topics as infrastructure, natural resources, and safety. Immediately incredulous upon being told by Warren that there are no more automobiles, Markham responds by recalling the immense infrastructure requirements of cars in his own time and how 1920s New York City was already being reconstructed as a car-centric city: ‘Why, in my time New York was being carved to suit [automobiles]. Streets were being widened, sidewalks were being narrowed, residences were being torn down ruthlessly to make streets and cross streets for them. Skyscraping garages in the business districts were being contemplated and built’ (174). Such statements about rebuilding cities to better accommodate cars recalls the historical reality of American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when the first traffic lights, parking meters, and crosswalks were being installed to assist the flow of traffic and to discipline the bodies of pedestrians. Additionally, the first pedestrian overpasses and underpasses, as well as the first multi-lane highways, were being built, construction projects that eroded the former egalitarian, ‘mixed-use’ nature of city streets by effectively turning control of them over to the car and by banishing pedestrians to limited areas such as sidewalks and crosswalks. The dubious safety of early twentieth-century streets is also called to mind in Donitz’s story when Warren says to Markham regarding the latter’s own time period: ‘You have said…pedestrians [were] crowded to the walls or killed by the score’ (174). Markham comments as well on the danger created by a city glutted with taxicabs ‘driven by men who, lured by profits, had obtained licenses after a minimum number of lessons…men who after a day’s work were mere automatons and incapable of being entrusted with the human lives they were responsible for’ (175). These remarks reference what was perceived by many as a wholesale slaughter by cars of pedestrians around the time Donitz published his story. As Norton informs us: ‘In the 1920s, motor vehicle accidents in the United States killed more than 200,000 people…In cities with populations exceeding 25,000, pedestrians accounted for more than two-thirds of the [traffic fatalities] in 1925.’23 It is no wonder then that a twenty-first-century, more utopian version of New York City would eradicate the automobile. Except, this city of the future hasn’t actually eradicated the automobile; it has merely rejiggered it. Warren proceeds to inform Markham that in place of the automobile this society has ‘a form of surface vehicle, used solely for pleasure’ (175). In other words, in the optimistic Gernsbackian spirit of finding a technological fix for a technological problem, cars 23

Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 21.

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‘used solely for pleasure’ have been preserved by transforming them into vehicles that are ‘forty feet in length, fifteen in width, and gyroscopic, balancing on two huge rubber-tired wheels’ (175). (Donitz’s cars anticipate Gernsback’s two-wheeled, gyroscopically-balanced ones from his 1955 article, but they hardly qualify as being narrow enough to help deal with urban congestion like Gernsback’s were.) Furthermore, these new cars are autonomous, draw power from their own movement, move along electro-magnetic tracks, and – in what resembles Gernsback’s idea for radar-operated brakes – utilize ‘[a]utomatic safety devices [that] stop the car as soon as it comes within fifty feet of another’ car (175). However, one of the essential features of early twentieth-century cars, and the one that made them so deadly – their capacity for speed – has been maintained, for these futuristic vehicles routinely go ‘fifty miles an hour’ (175). Thus, this story gives with one hand what it takes with the other. ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century’ stridently criticizes 1920s-era cars for their harmful effects on cities and for the prodigious danger they represent to pedestrians. However, the story does not emphatically denounce and fully reject automobility, like we see happen, for example, in David H. Keller’s ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ (discussed below) and like we see in so much later sf. Donitz’s story condemns the car-centric infrastructure being adopted in the interwar years, but in his story he merely replaces it with other forms of car-centric infrastructure, such as the metal tracks ‘to which [these newly imagined cars] are held by a sort of electro-magnetism’ (175). Automobility itself is not the root of the problem for this particular author. The state of automobility in the 1920s is the problem, and Donitz (like many others) believes it is one that can be engineered out of existence.

Good and Bad Terror One of the more interesting takes on this pulp era trend of depicting a technological fix for the technological and social problems associated with automobility is George McLociard’s ‘The Terror of the Streets’ (1929).24 Published in Amazing Stories, this narrative focuses on Stefenson, a brilliant young inventor who invents an invisibility device and who the story depicts, in its opening pages, as driving a speedster with which

2 4

McLociard’s interest in transportation machines was well established by his two publications in Amazing Stories prior to ‘The Terror of the Streets’: ‘Smoke Rings’ (February 1928) about a German Zeppelin and ‘Monorail’ (December 1928) about a Canadian monorail train.

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he enjoys racing other drivers. One day while racing his own fiancée who is driving a coupé, Stefenson and the woman are involved in a horrible wreck after a ‘huge machine of the high-speed truck type…shot out’ in front of them from a cross street.25 The truck ‘smashed full tilt squarely into the side’ (20) of the woman’s car, and she consequently dies from her injuries. ‘The Terror of the Streets’ portrays this wreck as an epiphanic moment for Stefenson. Although Stefenson, right after the accident, delivers a speech to his friend Malone in which the former questions whether the truck’s driver, the truck’s mechanic, or the truck’s manufacturer are responsible for the woman’s death (all the while, keeping strangely silent on his own potential responsibility), Stefenson ultimately blames the truck driver’s carelessness and love of speed for her death. ‘What did this insane driver mean,’ he asks Malone, ‘by coming down a bumpy pavement at a forty-mile pace, a two-ton load on the rear, and with brakes which he knew were worthless? Are there no laws for this type of person, who commits murder as surely as one does with a revolver, and is immune from punishment just because he can claim that the machine got out of control?’ (21). Stefenson decides that he will put his scientific and technological abilities to work by becoming periodically invisible and waging a campaign outside of the law ‘to eliminate those offenders’ from the road who insist on driving in an excessively fast and reckless manner.26 The great inventor builds a mighty automobile (see Figure 3) – eventually dubbed ‘the Terror’ by the public – that will be bigger, faster, and stronger than any other vehicle on the road, and he will use this super-machine to prowl the streets, locate speeding cars, and then incapacitate those dangerous machines before they can do harm. ‘The Terror of the Streets’ draws upon, therefore, widespread concerns in the 1920s about the automobile’s capacity for speed, a feature of cars that often struck fear in the hearts of city dwellers. As Blanke states: ‘From the very beginning, automobilists expressed a love for speed. In the words of one pioneer, he was “conscious of only one wish – to go faster.”’27 However, this love of speed was repeatedly singled out and blamed by people as the culprit for the many accident casualties 25

26

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George McLociard, ‘The Terror of the Streets,’ Amazing Stories 4, no. 1 (1929), p. 20. Additional quotations from the story will be from this version and will be cited parenthetically. Stefenson’s ability to turn invisible demonstrates McLociard’s likely borrowing from another work that appeared one year earlier in the June and July 1928 issues of Amazing Stories: H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (originally published in 1897). Blanke, Hell on Wheels, p. 71.

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Figure 3. ‘The Terror’ side-swiping another car

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of the 1920s and 1930s, casualties that more often than not involved pedestrian-car collisions. Norton informs us that pedestrian fatalities were routinely blamed on drivers who were maligned as ‘speed maniacs’ and ‘speed hogs.’28 Some people thus called for outlawing what made cars so dangerous: their speed. For example, one person who sent in a letter to the St. Louis Star, writes: ‘This intolerable condition…can be easily prevented by restricting automobiles…to a speed not exceeding that of the horse-drawn carriage, before the day of the death-dealing speeding automobile.’29 Some people even went so far as to call for a mandatory mechanical manipulation of cars to keep their speed in check, as evidenced by the fact that in 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio, 42,000 people signed petitions ‘for a city ordinance requiring local motorists to equip their cars with governors that would shut their engines off at 25 miles per hour.’30 In short, the extravagant speeds of these new machines certainly troubled many people of McLociard’s time who were aware of the mounting death toll caused by cars (particularly by cars in dense urban areas). Also worthy of note, McLociard’s ‘The Terror the Streets’ clearly takes much of its raw material from The Master of the World (Maître du monde, 1904), one of Jules Verne’s last novels and a sequel to his earlier novel Robur the Conqueror (Robur-le-conquérant, 1886) about the eponymous engineer who creates a dazzling helicopter-like flying machine. Significantly, Gernsback published The Master of the World in Amazing Stories one year prior (February–March 1928) to when McLociard’s own story appeared. Like ‘The Terror of the Streets,’ The Master of the World also contains an astonishing transportation machine called ‘the Terror,’ but Verne’s machine is more than just an extremely fast and powerful automobile like we see Stefenson build. The Terror in The Master of the World also possesses the ability to transform almost instantaneously into a boat, a submarine, and an airplane. Thus, Robur the Conqueror has ‘construct[ed] a machine which could conquer all the elements’: earth, air, and water.31 But it is what Robur and Stefenson intend to do with their respective machines that represents the most significant difference between Verne and McLociard’s texts. Arthur B. Evans sees examples of what he calls

28 29 30

31

Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 31. Quoted in Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 31 (emphasis added). Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 96. Norton discusses here how cities like St. Louis were also considering implementing mandatory speed governors on cars. Jules Verne, ‘The Master of the World’ (Part II), Amazing Stories 2, no. 12 (1928), p. 1179.

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‘dream machines’ and ‘vehicular utopias’ elsewhere in Verne’s corpus, such as the submarine named the Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and the mechanical elephant named the Steel Giant from The Steam House (1880). Evans sees these machines as being defined more by their status ‘as a cultural product’ and as a ‘one-of-akind artistic creation’ that allows their passengers to move around in sumptuous comfort.32 However, cultural value and aesthetics seem to play little role in Robur the Conqueror’s creation of his transport machines. Instead, excessive pride and a desire to carry out evil predominantly guide his use of the Terror in The Master of the World. Robur tells us that after he invented his first great transportation device – the helicopterlike ‘Albatross’ that is the focus of Robur the Conqueror – he intended eventually to reveal the secrets of his amazing flying machine to humanity for our collective betterment. However, his pride eventually grew to such a degree that ‘he now presumed to enslave the entire world.’33 Furthermore, his ‘vehement mind had with time been roused to such over-excitement that he might easily be driven into the most violent excesses.’34 When, early on, The Master of the World shows us the Terror as an automobile (the machine’s first incarnation that the reader sees in the novel), Verne describes the machine as an apocalyptic force threatening both human and nonhuman life. Traveling the roads at speeds of around 120 mph, the Terror ‘constituted an extreme danger on the highroads, as much so for vehicles, as for pedestrians. This rushing mass…caused a whirlwind which tore the branches from the trees along the road…and scattered and killed the birds, which could not resist the suction of the tremendous air currents engendered by its passage.’35 But, 32

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Arthur B. Evans, ‘Jules Verne’s Dream Machines: Technology and Transcendence,’ Extrapolation 54, no. 2 (2013), p. 138. See also Arthur B. Evans, ‘Vehicular Utopias of Jules Verne,’ in Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, ed. George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain (New York: AMS Press, 1999), pp. 99–108. Verne, ‘Master of the World’ (Part II), p. 1179. Some scholars point out that in the second half of his career Verne’s works take on a darker tone and are far more skeptical toward and fearful of new technologies. As Evans writes: ‘in most of Verne’s post-1886 novels…a seemingly vengeful God repeatedly strikes down hubris-filled scientists who have “crossed the line.”’ Such is ‘the fate of Robur and his polymorphic flying machine both of whom are blasted by a celestial lightning bolt in the denouement’ of The Master of the World. Arthur B. Evans, ‘Jules Verne: Exploring the Limits,’ Australian Journal of French Studies 42, no. 3 (2005), p. 271. Verne, ‘Master of the World’ (Part II), p. 1179. Jules Verne, ‘The Master of the World’ (Part I), Amazing Stories 2, no. 11 (1928), p. 1034.

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as we saw above, Stefenson’s goals with his machine also called the Terror could hardly be more different from Robur’s. Rather than being motivated by pride and seeking to terrorize the world at large, Stefenson desires – in his, admittedly, vigilante-style way – to improve society by targeting only its most dangerous drivers, thereby helping to make the streets safer for everyone. By focusing so much attention on the ‘offenders’ – that is, on reckless drivers – ‘The Terror of the Streets’ positions itself in the middle of one of the key points of debate surrounding the automobile in the 1920s and 1930s. This debate involved the issue of whether the car itself was inherently a dangerous piece of technology, or whether it was ultimately drivers that made cars so dangerous (and, if the latter, the debate further zeroed in on whether it was just a ‘few bad apples’ – those who insisted on speeding and other reckless driving behavior – who made cars so deadly). As Norton tells us, automobile interest groups increasingly promoted the ‘few bad apples’ theory as the 1920s wore on. These groups worked to convince society at large that if they ‘removed reckless motorists from the streets, accidents would surely fall, and the responsible majority of motorists would be vindicated.’36 The fact that ‘The Terror of the Streets’ depicts Stefenson targeting and punishing only those drivers who ‘happen to perform any nonsensical feats of driving when the Terror was in the vicinity’ (31) illustrates that, for McLociard, society does not need to remove cars in general and in large numbers to render streets safe again. Instead, this story suggests that we need only to remove the ‘few [drivers] that merited the most stringent lesson’ (31) to decrease the dangers of the road. Furthermore, McLociard’s depiction of the Terror resists castigating cars in general, for it is when Stefenson begins to wage his campaign that the technology of the automobile itself is deployed to rid the streets of dangerous drivers. For a story that registers a considerable amount of anxiety about the many injuries and deaths that the automobile has brought into people’s lives, McLociard’s tale – interestingly and somewhat paradoxically – celebrates automobile technology through the Terror. For example, despite its impressive mass, the Terror utilizes an (at that time) unheard of sixteen-cylinder engine, making it the fastest vehicle on the road, and some mysterious form of air-brakes that grant it impressive stopping ability.37 And although this machine

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Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 215. At the time of my writing, sixteen cylinders are the most that have ever been offered on a commercially built car, on vehicles such as the CizetaMoroder V16T and the Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4.

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is ‘[o]f a length befitting a motorbus’ and ‘as solid as a battleship’ (30), it is capable of astonishing agility and can perform ‘movements that [were] difficult to follow’ (31) in smaller, lighter cars. In fact, one detail the story repeatedly emphasizes is that Stefenson never injures anyone during his campaign. When the Terror begins to menace the streets by chasing down and ramming vehicles it deems worthy of attack, the narrative is clear that ‘uninjured passengers’ (30) and ‘uninjured men’ (31) walk away from these deliberate wrecks. Additionally, the narration twice refers to Stefenson’s acts as ‘just’ (32, 34) and, later in the story, even a one-time detractor like Saunders (Stefenson’s former teacher who dismisses his student’s ideas in the story’s opening) says of the Terror’s campaign: ‘I knew that the great, though destructive, crusade he was waging was admirable’ (33). Even one of the federal officers trying to catch the Terror cannot help proclaiming it a ‘wonderful machine’ (32). Conversely, in Verne’s The Master of the World, Robur’s Terror is repeatedly cast in a negative light such as when we are told it ‘would threaten mankind everywhere’ and was ‘a perpetual public danger.’38 Like we have seen above with Gernsback’s article ‘Future Transportation’ and with Donitz’s ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century,’ in ‘The Terror of the Streets’ another writer associated with the pulp era finds it difficult to engage in a wholesale condemnation or rejection of the automobile. Instead, what McLociard does with his Terror is put his faith in the idea that if only a more rarified and more sophisticated form of automobile technology could be invented, then the problems associated with cars could be adequately addressed and hopefully eradicated. Put another way, ‘The Terror of the Streets’ clearly celebrates Stefenson’s use of automobility to fix what is broken with 1920s-era automobility. His campaign to show the need for more serious traffic regulation emphasizes that there is nothing wrong with the automobile itself. In fact, Stefenson’s ability to drive the Terror as fast as he does and still refrain from injuring anyone suggests that advanced automobile technology might one day even allow all cars to have as powerful an engine as the Terror and still be operated safely. But because braking technology and other aspects of cars at the time of McLociard’s writing prohibit a car’s safe use at excessive speeds, his story asserts that automobiles of the 1920s require vigilant regulation until such time as the necessary technical advancements have been adopted.

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Verne, ‘Master of the World’ (Part I), p. 1038, p. 1046. Although Verne mentions the danger posed by the Terror throughout The Master of the World, the narrative refrains, however, from explicitly depicting any scenes of injury or death caused by Robur’s machine.

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Moving Roads and Flying Cars One story that initially appears like it will defy the pulp era trend tracked above of ultimately embracing automobility is Otfrid von Hanstein’s ‘Utopia Island’ (1931), published in two issues of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories. The story focuses on Santa Scientia (Latin for ‘sacred science’), a futuristic, technocratic utopia on the imaginary Iguana Islands off the coast of Peru. The island is run by a group of scientists and engineers who were initially abducted but who eventually chose to stay in order to create and maintain ‘a sort of world university – not for teaching but for doing, on which city planners may realize their magnificent plans.’ This society also insists on remaining aloof from two influences it sees as corruptive of scientific progress: politics and war. Furthermore, Santa Scientia ‘strive[s] to remove from man all mechanical drudgery and to substitute automatic machines.’39 The story makes clear early on that advanced transportation technologies serve a key role in this utopian society. For example, Santa Scientia possesses a submarine railway system, speedy rocket planes, and remote-controlled airships. But when Elso, an adventurous young woman who hides in one of the airships and comes to Santa Scientia, looks out the window of the hotel room with which she has been hospitably provided, an ‘indescribable picture met her eye…Far below her lay streets, but they were streets in which there were no vehicles. They were covered with grass and edged with flowers.’40 The story further corroborates a couple of pages later this suggestion that – despite its many other sophisticated technologies of movement – the roads of Santa Scientia might be devoid of automobiles. In this scene, a group of scientists who are new to the island peer down from a high vantage point and the narration tells us that what they saw was this: ‘Below lay streets, on which no car, no auto, no bicycle moved to whirl up dust. People, only people, walked along the pretty gravel walks.’41 Again, the people of this island utopia appear to rely upon walking for their everyday mode of transport; transport machines like cars and bicycles seem to have no place here. However, Hanstein is merely throwing a red herring at his readers, for these initial suggestions of Santa Scientia’s rejection of automobility intentionally mislead the reader. The story eventually reveals

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Otfrid von Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part I), Wonder Stories 2, no. 12 (1931), p. 1374, p. 1364. This story is a translation by Francis Currier of Hanstein’s Ein Flug um die Welt und die Insel der seltsamen Dinge (1927). Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 1), p. 1369. Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 1), p. 1371.

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that throughout Isabella, the capital city of Santa Scientia, ‘[a]ll roofs are covered with thick loam and gardens and parks are put there. The streets are all bridged over, so that the whole city surface at the height of the tenth story forms a single great garden.’42 As it turns out then, Elso and the scientists were only peering down onto the tenth story of the city of Isabella, a level where these specially designed gardens and parks are located. No motorized traffic exists here. What lies beneath this level, however, is a different story entirely. Around the middle of Part 1 of ‘Utopia Island,’ Hanstein reveals that Santa Scientia actually employs several segregated tiers of transportation, each stacked one on top of another. An underground railway line comprises the bottom level of transportation, a line that connects all the various Iguana Islands being utilized in this grand social and technological experiment. Above the underground railway, tram lines stretching across the city of Isabella and its immediate environs exist. The uppermost tier is where one finds the walking paths amid grassy parkland that Elso and the scientists initially saw from their lofty vantage point. After Bob White, one of the founders of this utopian society, shows the newest group of scientists to Santa Scientia these bottom two levels of transportation – the underground railway and the ground-level tram line – he next directs them to ‘the first story above the ground,’ and it is here that the scientists ‘saw the auto cars.’ One scientist exclaims upon seeing the vehicles: ‘The deuce, those cars are making good time! They must be going at least two hundred kilometers an hour.’43 This utopian island has indeed been built to accommodate the automobile – and extravagantly fast ones at that. The city of Isabella has, however, taken measures to try to address the catastrophic loss of life for which the automobile was notorious by the 1930s. But it is not by trying to technologically reconfigure the car to make driving safer like we saw in Gernsback’s essay ‘Future Transportation,’ and in the stories ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century’ and ‘The Terror of the Streets.’ Instead, Santa Scientia focused its efforts on engineering the streets in such a way that collisions on them are nearly impossible. Instead of cars moving around by means of their own power, the roads themselves (in a way that portends Heinlein’s well-known story ‘The Roads Must Roll,’ discussed in the next chapter) propel the cars along on a system of bands moving at different speeds and that radiate out from a central point, like the spokes on a tire. As Bob White further explains: ‘You see, there is a dividing wall…running 4 2 43

Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 1), p. 1388. Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 1), p. 1382.

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through the middle [of the road]. That divides the traffic going in different directions.’ By way of providing additional safety, ‘[t]hese gliding bands make the autos always go in line. There is no driving in the side streets, hence there are no crossings. Skidding cannot occur on the rough bands, and a driver who is not skillful enough to steer his auto from band to band is not allowed to drive.’44 Such extravagantly engineered roads aim to enhance safety by eradicating head-on collisions between two cars (through the use of barriers) and collisions caused when one vehicle pulls out in front of another (through the avoidance of perpendicular, intersecting roads). The risk of two cars side-swiping one another still exists when a vehicle is moving from band to band, but this society protects itself from a high frequency of such accidents by revoking driving privileges from those people deemed ‘not skillful enough’ to perform this maneuver. Yet again we see the classic Gernsbackian technological fix to the problems and dangers posed by automobility. But, again, the key difference we see in ‘Utopia Island’ is that the car appears not to have been tinkered with and technologically revamped in this story; rather, it is a part of the larger infrastructure of automobility – the roads – that the scientists perceive as further perfectible in their quest to create an ‘example of how the world can and must look in centuries to come.’ Such optimism regarding how the larger traffic infrastructure surrounding cars might be engineered in a way that preserves automobility stands in stark contrast to later, more pessimistic sf works such as Synners (1991). This novel by cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan envisions a vast computerized traffic control system named ‘GridLid.’ GridLid was designed to deliver up-to-the-minute updates on traffic conditions around Los  Angeles (where Synners is set) so that drivers can avoid congestion, but the system is faulty from its beginning, for ‘GridLid usually ran anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour behind the traffic patterns, so that you were more likely to find yourself in the middle of a clog before the warning about it appeared on [a car’s navigation] screen.’45 As David Seed sums up this failure of scientifically enhanced infrastructure to aid and to serve automobility: ‘“GridLid” becomes gridlock.’46 Returning to ‘Utopia Island,’ the level above the sophisticated one designated for cars contains, significantly, a ‘cycle road.’ The citizens of

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Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 1), pp. 1382–83. Pat Cadigan, Synners (London: Gollanz, 2012), p. 21. David Seed, ‘Los Angeles’ Science Fiction Futures,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 130.

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Santa Scientia evidently feel quite proud of this bit of segregated roadway they have created for cyclists, for twice when the people visiting Isabella for an athletic festival are being taken through the streets and shown the splendors of the city, we are told that their guides also show them – in addition to the automobile roads, the railways, and so forth – ‘the cycling roads’ (112) and ‘the cycling streets’ (120).47 Hanstein’s story provides us, therefore, with a rare instance of cyclists being provided with a place and with special accommodations in the futuristic cities that populate so many pages of Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. Today, of course, cyclists praise segregated bike paths as what sets progressive, ‘cycling mecca’ cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen apart from so much of the rest of the world.48 Hanstein’s ‘cycling roads’ also call to mind previous experiments in innovative cycling infrastructure in the United States such as the California Cycle-Way, an elevated, wooden, nine-mile bicycle path opened in 1900 and that connected Pasadena and Los Angeles. ‘[W]ide enough to accommodate four cyclists abreast’ and ‘illuminated by electric lights at 100-foot intervals,’ the Cycle-Way was, however, already being dismantled by 1907.49 However, a problem hovers around these cycle paths on Utopia Island. Like the automobile level located one story down with its moving bands, the cycling road too, oddly enough, employs ‘gliding bands [to] make the going easy’ (1383). Thus, ‘Utopia Island’ seems not to understand

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Otfrid von Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 2), Wonder Stories 3, no. 1 (1931), p. 112, p. 120. Not everyone, however, celebrates such segregation of the road. People who believe in what is often called ‘vehicular cycling’ affirm that cyclists should always be riding in the road alongside other types of vehicular traffic. They believe that special bike accommodations such as segregated bike paths are a setback for cycling because cyclists should constantly be asserting their legal right to the road. On the debate between proponents and opponents of vehicular cycling, see Luis A. Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 107–9. On the California Cycle-Way, see Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 105. Friss also includes a reproduction of a plan designed for 1890s New York City but never built that is similar to Hanstein’s tiered roads. This plan ‘called for streetcars on the ground level, elevated railroads above, and a bicycle-only path on the very top.’ Friss, Cycling City, p. 106. We should point out that this vision of tiers of smoothly flowing but completely separated modes of transport was one Gernsback described (accompanied by a full-page illustration by Frank R. Paul) around this time too. See Hugo Gernsback, ‘Fifty Years Hence,’ Practical Electrics (November 1921), pp. 10–11.

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something essential about why many people choose to cycle, i.e., the mental and physical pleasure that often comes from self-propulsion, from being both the passenger and the engine of one’s vehicle. A techno-fix appears, in short, where most cyclists would likely never desire one. At any rate, the bicycles of Santa Scientia appear to be of little interest to Hanstein: despite the several references to ‘cycling roads’ and ‘cycling streets’ in the story, the reader never sees an actual bicycle in action. Cars and other forms of motorized transport clearly captivate Hanstein much more. I wrote a couple of paragraphs ago that the car ‘appears to not have been tinkered with and technologically revamped’ in ‘Utopia Island’ because in Part 2 of the tale Hanstein once again performs a sleightof-hand for his reader. That is, similar to how he made the reader think this utopian society might be surprisingly free of automobiles of any kind only to then reveal a hidden level of automobility beneath the tenth-story floor of the main city, so too does Hanstein unveil an impressively redesigned car later in the story after he has led readers on to believe that only the roads have been redesigned in Santa Scientia. Part 2 of ‘Utopia Island’ centers on a grandiose Olympics-style athletic festival that the citizens of Santa Scientia host to show off their society and its miraculous accomplishments (especially ones related to quick and efficient transport) to the world. An auto race constitutes the first competitive event of the festival, and it is here that a bold new automobile designed by Santa Scientia’s transport engineer, Grotefendt, is revealed. During the race, a driver by the name of Joao (who is part of an assassination plot that comprises a sub-plot of Part 2) suddenly swerves his car around and starts driving directly at Bob White’s car. What happens next, we are told, is nothing short of a ‘miracle,’ for ‘[a]t both sides of Bob’s car there emerges wings which had been folded together like those of a butterfly…The car seems to rear up and rise into the air’ (see Figure 4). Then, as further evidence of this technological miracle, Bob’s car suddenly transforms into a submarine that ‘dives into the middle of the lake, and disappears’ before eventually resurfacing as a propeller-powered boat.50 Once again, Verne’s The Master of the World and its depiction of a transport machine that subjugates the three elements of earth, air, and water reveals its influence on the stories that appeared in the pages of Gernsback’s magazines after the publication of Verne’s novel. But whereas in The Master of the World Robur’s Terror functions as a device designed to aid one man’s campaign of fear and domination, both 50

Hanstein, ‘Utopia Island’ (Part 2), p. 104.

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Figure 4. A car taking flight in ‘Utopia Island’ Used with the permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate

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McLociard and Hanstein ignore Verne’s use of this super-automobile as an emblem of human pride and technological hubris. Instead, the two pulp writers repurpose Verne’s car to serve as a positive machine, one that helps to protect the streets in McLociard’s narrative and one that foils an assassination plot and showcases the glory of a utopian technocracy in Hanstein. Again, what is particularly noteworthy about ‘Utopia Island’ regarding our focus on transportation is how Hanstein structures the story around a series of misleading suggestions as to the true extent of technologies of movement in Santa Scientia. The opening pages of the tale lead us to expect a wholesale rejection of automobility in this perfect society, a rejection that would have been surprising given the overall trend toward Gernsbackian techno-optimism that we have seen thus far in our examination of the pulp era. However, we do eventually learn that cars and their specially designed roads do exist here. Next, the auto race provided an opportunity for the story to unveil that it was not just the roads that were radically altered, for a radical new type of vehicle was poised to become widespread in Santa Scientia too. Even though such a car seems unnecessary in Santa Scientia given its many other efficient transport technologies such as submarine railway and fixed rail trams, this amazing vehicle unveiled by Bob White embodies the Gernsback era’s propensity for embracing bold new technologies instead of rejecting them and opting for a less machine-centric society. In sum, what initially appears like it is going to be a story that radically deviates from the trend we have seen so far eventually becomes a story that settles into being yet another incarnation of that trend. But in the next story this chapter focuses on, the reader does encounter an example from the pulp era of a story involving automobiles that does deviate from this trend in a surprising way.

Killing Off the Automobile In his ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ (1928), David H. Keller delivers something truly rare for a pulp era text: a complete and unequivocal rejection of automobility. It is certainly one of the most strident and disturbing anti-automobile texts in the entire pulp era – if not in all of sf literature. Published in Amazing Stories and set centuries into the future, Keller’s story draws upon works like H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) to imagine a world in which humans have evolved into two separate species. Similar to how Wells represents his Eloi and Morlocks as diverging down different evolutionary paths because

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one group has lived a life above ground free of any associations with machines and the other group has lived underground surrounded by machinery, Keller also envisions an evolutionary bifurcation connected to machinery: in this case, the machinery of automobiles. One ‘species’ of people, known as automobilists, live Wall-E-esque existences tethered to individual mini-cars. ‘Men thus,’ we are told, ‘came to live within metal bodies, which they left only for sleep’ (1049).51 The other ‘species’ – called pedestrians – rejected the car and insisted on walking, but they were persecuted and hunted to near extinction by the powerful automobilists.52 However, the pedestrians managed to survive in small numbers by retreating from cities and forming survivor colonies in the mountainous Ozarks region of Missouri and other remote locations around the world. ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ associates automobility with a host of social, environmental, and health issues. Even though the car early on was often associated with clean, healthy air – many advocates of the car, such as Sir Henry Thompson, praised the machine’s ability to provide urban dwellers with easier access to the less polluted, more wholesome air of the countryside – Keller’s story associates the car with what people today would more readily associate automobiles with: air pollution.53 The story repeatedly references, in fact, an automobile-obsessed culture’s extensive poisoning of the air with carbon monoxide fumes. Keller writes: ‘The air was filled with the dangerous vapors generated by the combustion of millions of gallons of gasoline and its substitutes’ (1051). Already in the time when ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ appears, the public health effects of a widespread distribution of carbon monoxide and other toxins were beginning to be understood by the medical profession.54 In the cities that Keller’s story depict, air quality has 51

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David H. Keller, ‘Revolt of the Pedestrians,’ Amazing Stories 2, no. 11 (February 1928), p. 1049. Additional quotations from the story will be from this version and will be cited parenthetically. This theme of automobilists fighting pedestrians is paralleled some forty years later in Fritz Leiber’s ‘X Marks the Pedwalk’ (in the April 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow). Leiber’s story depicts the urban ‘Feet’ sect at war with the suburban ‘Wheeled’ sect. We see an associating of cars with healthy air in Thompson’s contribution – a chapter titled ‘Motor-Cars and Health’ – to a book called Motors and Motor-Driving. See Alfred Harmsworth, Motors and Motor-Driving (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 81. See, for example, E. R. Hayhurst, ‘Carbon Monoxide and Automobile Exhaust Gases,’ American Journal of Public Health 16, no. 3 (1926), pp. 218–23; J. C. Sinclair Battley, ‘Automobile Exhaust Gas Poisoning in Children,’ American Journal of Public Health 17, no. 10 (1927), pp. 1024–26.

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deteriorated so much that, due to buildings hundreds of stories high creating ‘canyons’ that confine the toxic air and make that air difficult to disperse, ‘an ozone machine was necessary every few feet to purify the air and make unnecessary the use of gas masks’ (1054). Motorized transport’s excessive contributions to air pollution will lead a later sf text like Paul Antony Jones’ Extinction Point (2012) to depict its main character, Emily Baxter, as cycling through New York’s Central Park after a recent apocalyptic event has killed everyone else in the city but still being able to enjoy her bike ride, for now ‘a couple of days of no traffic’ means for ‘the first time she could actually smell the park and its plant life… [S]he allowed herself to imagine she was riding through the back roads of Provence, or maybe Tuscany.’55 Similarly, in Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind (2017) – his sequel to Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) set some 14 years after Wells’ original novel – the narrator Julie Elphinstone reminiscences about cycling in territory controlled by hostile aliens: ‘It is odd that veterans of those years often speak nostalgically of the cleanness of the English air, with human industry [including most use of cars and trucks] all but shut down across swaths of the southern counties. The Martian Cordon is fine cycling country!’56 Air pollution, in short, can be so abhorrent that even in apocalyptic scenarios some characters can still, surprisingly, find themselves reveling in a bike ride if it is in the fresh air of a landscape miraculously purged of automobiles and other polluting machines. As we are already beginning to see in this study, the car has – since its earliest years – been a contested technology. Sf writers seldom romanticized the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence. Instead, they often abhorred it as an ecological menace. Additionally, widespread use of cars is associated in Keller’s ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ with another kind of defilement of the air: a grating noise pollution. Keller informs us that, in addition to toxic fumes, the ‘air was filled with…the raucous noise of countless horns’ (1050). A similar emphasis on the car’s loudness appears in later sf works like John Barnes’ Caesar’s Bicycle (1997), a time travel narrative in which bicycles have been introduced into the era of Julius Caesar. 55

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Paul Antony Jones, Extinction Point (Las Vegas: 47North, 2012), p. 185, p. 186. Stephen Baxter, The Massacre of Mankind (New York: Crown, 2017), p. 255. The bicycle messenger Sal in The Courier’s New Bicycle also remarks regarding her futuristic Sydney in which cars are more scare and bicycles more common: ‘It’s hard to imagine wanting the city back as it once was: noisy and impatient, the smog of exhaust inescapable.’ Kim Westwood, The Courier’s New Bicycle (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 151.

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At one point the narrator of his novel observes while cycling: ‘there were no windows or windshields in the way, and no running engines to fill the air with noise. The loudest thing I passed on the road was one wagonload of ducks and geese. It was enough to give you some doubt about that word “progress.”’57 However, it is not the automobile’s relationship to air and noise pollution that most disturbs Keller in ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians.’ The primary innovation of the story is its extrapolation from the fact that automobiles fail to provide the human body with adequate exercise to provide readers with recurring images of automobilists so reliant on their machines that their legs have atrophied to the point of being useless anymore for movement.58 ‘With disuse came atrophy,’ the story informs us, and ‘with atrophy came progressive and definite changes in the shapes of mankind’ (1049). As mentioned above, Keller portrays the automobilitists and the pedestrians as having evolved into two distinct races, and the former have so excessively disused their legs that severely atrophied legs are now a hereditary trait passed on to their offspring.59 Issues of the health effects of automobiles were debated almost as soon as the machines were invented. As gestured toward above, some writers such as Sir Henry Thompson – curiously, from our contemporary vantage point – associated cars with health benefits such as an increased exposure to cleaner air. Thompson also represented car rides as providing a ‘healthy agitation’ and ‘easy jolting’ that were good for the liver and bowels, as being ‘invigorating and refreshing’ for ‘enervated’ nerves (especially women’s nerves), and as being relaxing and conducive to contemplation after a hard day’s work.60 But even within these same texts that extol the alleged health benefits of cars, the negative effects on a person’s health could not be entirely avoided.

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John Barnes, Caesar’s Bicycle (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 222. This defining trait of the automobilists might constitute another example of H. G. Wells influencing Keller’s story. In The War of the Worlds, Wells portrays his Martians as so reliant on their tripod machines for mobility that they can barely move without them. (However, the unnamed narrator of the novel speculates that such sluggish mobility might also be caused by Earth having a stronger gravity than Mars.) The exception to this trend in Keller’s story is, of course, the character Margaretta Heisler, the daughter of a rich and powerful automobilist named William Henry Heisler, who, due to having an intermarriage between a pedestrian and an automobilist in her ancestry, is portrayed in the story as having been born with a singular ability and urge to walk. See Thompson in Harmsworth, Motors and Motor-Driving, pp. 79–80.

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For example, Thompson also cautions that excursions in motorcars should in no way completely replace forms of movement that vigorously exercise the body such as walking or cycling. Thompson admonishes his readers: ‘The vigorous man who has been used to take exercise on horseback, on his bicycle, or on his legs, must beware lest the fascination of motoring lead him to give up his physical exercise. Unless he systematically maintains habits of muscular exertion he may find that he is putting on flesh, becoming flabby, and generally losing condition.’61 Being one of the rare sf writers who had a medical degree – he was a practicing physician and psychiatrist and is identified as ‘David H. Keller M.D.’ in the author line for this story – Keller would have surely known what the medical consensus was regarding the negative effects of excessive automobility on one’s bodily health.62 More shocking than the recurring image of automobilists who have lost physical use of their legs through extended disuse is the story’s emphasis on the increasingly violent nature of car–pedestrian encounters. As discussed earlier in this chapter, scholars like Norton have shown that the 1920s was an important decade in which cities were grappling with changing notions of who has rights to the street and who was to blame for car–pedestrian collisions. In the decades leading up to the 1920s, people perceived streets as a common space for walking, socializing, selling, and even playing; streets were, in short, a place where pedestrians had the most long-established rights. When cars become more ubiquitous in the cities after World War I, these machines were initially deemed interlopers because ‘cars violated prevailing notions of what a street is for.’63 But after car manufacturers and car enthusiasts began launching more sustained and more systematic attacks throughout the 1920s on this entrenched notion of streets as a public space free to all people, this notion was weakened and replaced by the 1930s with a newer conception of the street as a place belonging first and foremost to automobiles. Keller’s ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ was published, therefore, right amid this important historical moment in which ideas about what a street is and who a street is predominantly for are undergoing profound change. It is this moment of an evolving notion of the street 61 62

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Thompson in Harmsworth, Motors and Motor-Driving, p. 81. As the editor’s introduction to ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ proclaims: ‘There is excellent science in this story, and if you do not believe that too much riding around in cars is bad for you, just speak to your doctor and get his advice.’ Hugo Gernsback, ‘Introduction to “Revolt of the Pedestrians,”’ Amazing Stories 2, no. 11 (February 1928), p. 1049. Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 7.

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that the editor’s introduction to Keller’s story references when it says: ‘Here is a story worth reading because many of the things of which the author speaks are gradually coming about. There was a time when pedestrians had certain rights. In our large cities, however, these rights are practically lost even now.’64 According to Norton, by ‘circa 1930’ – a mere two years after ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ appears – those pedestrian rights have been lost and this new social construction of the street that privileges cars has achieved ‘closure.’65 The text opens with a dramatic portrayal of just how eroded pedestrian rights have become in the era in which the story is set. A mother and child are walking along a country road when the mother is struck by ‘a skillfully driven car, going at least sixty miles an hour’ (1049). Keller describing the car as ‘skillfully’ driven suggests either the driver could have avoided – but didn’t – hitting the pedestrians or that he quite deliberately struck them. The deliberate murder of a pedestrian seems plausible when we read that after the woman riding in the back of the sedan – who ‘was annoyed at the jolt’ – asks her chauffeur what caused that bump and, after being told the car had just run over a pedestrian, callously responds: ‘“Oh, is that all?”’ When her daughter, also riding in the car, asks if ‘“pedestrians feel pain the way we do,”’ her mother answers, ‘“of course not, Darling…They are not like us, in fact some say they are not human beings at all”’ (1049). In fact, in ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians,’ the situation has grown much worse than merely exonerating drivers of vehicular violence, for a law called the ‘Pedestrian Extermination Act,’ a piece of legislation permitting ‘the instant death of all pedestrians wherever and whenever they are found’ (1050), now actively encourages the hunting down and murder of non-automobilists. Like African Americans in the Jim Crow-era southern United States, or Jews in Nazi Germany, pedestrians have been denied a fully human status, thus making them killable (but not murderable because the dominant perception of them as less-than-human renders killing them ethically unproblematic).66 Keller’s disturbing opening scenario looks ahead to what many would say is the current status of pedestrians and cyclists: when struck and killed by cars, the drivers of those vehicles are almost never prosecuted with a crime (except in extreme and blatantly

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Gernsback, ‘Introduction to “Revolt,”’ p. 1049. Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 6. The distinction between ‘killable’ and ‘murderable’ is central to some of Judith Butler’s work on ethics. See, for example, Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

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unlawful situations such as driver intoxication or leaving the scene of an accident). Put simply, today the car has such unassailable rights to the road that when drivers kill another road user who is walking or cycling, a driver usually need only plead ‘I just didn’t see them’ to be exonerated of any wrongdoing (even if speeding, driver distraction, etc., was a factor). Again, Keller’s story embodies an important moment of shifting ideas about culpability on the road. In the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, pedestrians – even when it was a case of parents allowing their children to play in the street – were almost never deemed the guilty party in pedestrian-vehicle collisions. Police, judges, juries, and the general public: they all tended to privilege pedestrians over motorists prior to around 1930.67 However, such favoritism is shifting during the early days of Amazing Stories, and thus Keller’s story exaggerates for dramatic effect the trend that was clearly picking up momentum throughout the 1920s: drivers, rather than pedestrians, are becoming the favored users of the road. Drivers – at the expense of the rights of pedestrians – are consolidating power over roads through their enhanced legal standing and legal clout. The story ends with a famous bit of indulgence in revenge fantasy. After unleashing a new technology that ‘separates the atomic energy which makes possible all movement, save muscle movement’ (1055), the pedestrians halt all machinery in the world. The automobilists with their atrophied legs are left to starve and die in horrific numbers, trapped as they are in their colossal cities designed for cars, cars that are now rendered useless (see Figure 5). At this moment in the late 1920s when it is surely becoming clearer and clearer with each passing year that the automobile is here to stay in cities, Keller’s story imagines an alternative future: one in which the cars and their drivers become preserved in the metaphorical amber of a city-wide museum, a warning to all humanity to not go down that terrible, short-sighted path of automobility again. With the mass death of the automobilists at the end of Keller’s story, an image of automobiles and pedestrians harmoniously co-existing in urban environments has been rejected. Instead, cities have been abandoned (except as museums) and forms of transportation that require any kind of energy besides that created by ‘muscle movement’ have been rendered extinct. This story is ahead of its time then, for its vision of a car-free society anticipates so many later works of sf (especially the postapocalyptic texts discussed in Chapter 5). The emphatic rejection of 67

See Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 69.

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Figure 5. Paralyzed automobilists in ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ Used with the permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate

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automobility in ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ stands in stark contrast to the typical Gernsbackian belief in the power of technology to solve problems (even problems of technology’s own making) that we have been tracking in this chapter. In fact, that story’s rejection stands in contrast to another story Keller published several years later, and which shows his willingness to align himself at times with the general technooptimism of the pulp era.

Autonomous and Battery-Powered Cars ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ marked Keller’s first appearance as a sf author. Seven years later, and near the end of his career writing for the pulps, he published in Gernback’s Wonder Stories another story focusing on automobile technology: ‘The Living Machine’ (1935). Significantly, this story constitutes one of the earliest sf texts to take up as its main subject what has, in recent years, quickly progressed toward becoming a reality: autonomous, self-driving cars. Major tech companies like Google and Apple, established car manufacturers like Ford and Tesla, and ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft have all been investing exorbitant amounts of money in this technology in recent years. Some of the more optimistic members of this group have declared that safe self-driving cars will be on the market in the next decade or so, and possibly as soon as a few years from now, although recent set-backs such as the first fatality of a pedestrian caused by an autonomous car have tempered such optimism (the accident was in Tempe, Arizona, and involved an Uber vehicle). However, if these companies succeed in overcoming the many engineering hurdles of such technology – and there are many – then ‘[o]ver the next century, [autonomous cars] may alter the built environment as radically as the manually driven car did over a century ago.’68 Additionally, to be successful, self-driving cars will also need to develop a level of awareness ‘that approaches that of a full-fledged A.I.’69 The only other sf work I am aware of that portrays self-driving cars but precedes Keller’s ‘The Living Machine’ is Miles J. Breuer’s novel Paradise and Iron (1930).70 Paradise and Iron depicts an island replete

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Bill Wasik, ‘Introduction’ [special issue on autonomous cars], New York Times Magazine (November 12, 2017), p. 22. Kevin Roose, ‘Detroit Hustle,’ New York Times Magazine (November 12, 2017), p. 76. Paradise and Iron first appeared in the Summer 1930 issue of Amazing Stories

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with autonomous machinery, including cars lacking steering wheels. However, Paradise and Iron portrays the cars and other autonomous vehicles as developing beyond humanity’s ability to control them; furthermore, the problem of stagnation afflicts the island’s humans due to the many responsibilities they have delegated to their machines. The novel, in short, represents a rare pulp era text that sounds a ‘warning note about the perils of the Utopian technological fix.’71 After Paradise and Iron and ‘The Living Machine,’ many iterations of autonomous vehicles show up in later sf works. For example, in his novella Killdozer! (1944), Theodore Sturgeon envisions a bulldozer possessed by an alien composed of pure energy embarking on a murderous rampage against a construction crew. Isaac Asimov, in his ‘Sally’ (1953), presents a future world in which autonomous cars alone populate the roads and are controlled by the ‘positronic brain’ that provides his famous robots in other stories with a consciousness like humans.72 Philip K. Dick’s ‘Autofac’ (1955) contains a range of autonomous machines – cars, trucks, carts, and tractors – that have escaped human control and threaten to consume every resource on Earth. Robert A. Heinlein – somewhat surprisingly given the skepticism he expresses toward the car in some of his early works (see the next chapter for more on Heinlein) – provides a fairly neutral portrayal of self-driving cars in the opening chapters of his Methuselah’s Children (1958). Roger Zelazny’s ‘Devil Car’ (1965, a story discussed more in Chapter 3) portrays both a loyal, benevolent self-driving car (named Jenny) and a rebellious, malevolent one (the demonic car of the title); the story culminates in an epic battle between the two machines.

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Quarterly. Although lacking autonomous automobiles, an even earlier text like H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds does, however, depict other types of autonomous transport machines being used by the Martians. At the end of Chapter Two, Book Two, the narrator glimpses a ‘handling-machine’ driving around a pit and working ‘without a directing Martian at all.’ H. G. Wells, A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds, with introduction and notes by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 153. John Clute, ‘Breuer, Miles J,’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight (London: Gollancz; updated March 8, 2019). Last accessed October 29, 2019. For a discussion of early sf stories like Keller’s and Asimov’s that depict autonomous cars, see Robert Braun, ‘Autonomous Vehicles: From Science Fiction to Sustainable Future,’ in Mobilities, Literature, Culture, ed. Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynn Pearce (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 259–80.

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In the more recent era, an autonomous car named KITT was a central character in the sf-tinged American television show Knight Rider (1982–86), and such vehicles also appeared in Hollywood sf films like Total Recall (1990) and The Minority Report (2002).73 More recently, Elly Blue – in one of her annual Bikes in Space collections – published ‘Night of the Living Machines’ (2015), a story by her depicting the outbreak of a mysterious ‘zombie car plague’ that causes autonomous cars to rebel in droves against their human users.74 In ‘Car Wars,’ sf author and journalist Cory Doctorow provides a series of fictional vignettes that convey grave concerns about heightened surveillance and an increased ability to weaponize cars in an era of self-driving vehicles.75 Some of these texts exhibit awe and excitement over self-driving car technology, but the majority of them – like the early models provided by Breuer’s Paradise and Iron and Keller’s ‘The Living Machine’ – convey a profound fear and distrust of it.76 Keller’s ‘The Living Machine’ tells the story of Poorson, an inventor who one day receives a ‘glancing blow from [a] recklessly driven automobile.’77 Poorson quickly affirms that his experience represents ‘one more reason why the average human being should not be allowed to drive such a powerful machine’ (1465), especially when ‘[t]ens of thousands of our people are being killed every year on our highways’ (1467). That is, like many modern-day autonomous car developers, he declares that the tragically high rate of automobile fatalities is the result of driver error. Consequently, Poorson creates a self-driving car that is 73

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Both films are adaptations of Philip K. Dick works, although Dick himself mentions autonomous cars only in his ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (1966), the source text for Total Recall. Elly Blue, ‘Night of the Living Machines,’ in Pedal Zombies: Thirteen Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories, ed. Elly Blue (Portland, OR: Microcosm Publishing, 2015), p. 129. For more on Doctorow’s reservations about autonomous cars, see Cory Doctorow, ‘The Problem with Self-Driving Cars: Who Controls the Code?’ Guardian (December 23, 2015). For a more positive overview of self-driving cars and how they might change our world, see Lawrence D. Burns (with Christopher Shulgan), Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car – and How it Will Reshape our World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). For an overview characterized by more trepidation and skepticism, see Samuel I. Schwartz (with Karen Kelly), No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018). David H. Keller, ‘The Living Machine,’ Wonder Stories 6, no. 12 (1935), p. 1465. Additional quotations from the story will be from this version and will be cited parenthetically.

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controlled by a mysterious ‘shining sphere about eight inches in diameter’ (1469) and that is located under the front seat.78 The new cars (and eventually planes) outfitted with this revolutionary technology quickly become immensely popular. The number of traffic deaths plummet, and Poorson’s cars (like autonomous cars today) are lauded for granting mobility to people who before were largely immobile: ‘the blind, the aged, timid women, cripples, little children too young to secure permits to drive’ (1467). Trouble ensues, however, when the head of the World Gasoline Company, irate over a failed merger between his company and the Universal Auto Construction Company (U.A.C.C.) that is manufacturing Poorson’s new self-driving cars, sabotages the machines by contaminating the supply of gasoline with cocaine. The drug deranges the ‘living’ machines, causing them to start ‘chasing pedestrians, killing little children, smashing fences’ (1473) (see Figure 6). Keller raises, then, several concerns regarding autonomous car technology in ‘The Living Machine.’ First, as the successful sabotage demonstrates, the technology is far from infallible. Since Poorson’s cars rely on a central ‘brain’ to function, that brain possesses the same vulnerabilities – such as a vulnerability to intoxication – as human brains. Secondly, Keller laments near the middle of the story how absorbed with and dependent on these machines people become. They stop taking pride in themselves and only talk now ‘of the accomplishments of their cars’ (1471). Moreover, people by the millions ‘forgot how to drive’ (1471). Lastly, and similar to a concern Asimov raises in his ‘Sally,’ Keller portrays Poorson as growing increasingly troubled by the idea that if his autonomous cars utilize a form of artificial intelligence to function, then perhaps it represents a form of unethical bondage to make these cars our perpetual slaves. Yet, rather than depict people as rejecting automobiles altogether, as happened at the end of ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians,’ or as reverting to the cars they drove before autonomous technology was introduced, Keller chooses instead to present a classic Gernsbackian technological fix. By way of announcing his solution to this dire situation of coked-out 78

Keller’s description of an autonomous car sounds remarkably similar to an early prototype of an autonomous car built in the early 2000s where most of its important hardware was protected inside ‘a sphere a little larger than a classroom globe’ that sat inside the car. See Burns, Autonomy, p. 28. In general, Keller’s depiction of autonomous cars is quite prophetic, such as his portrayal of these cars lacking a steering wheel, of a human-driven car following behind the autonomous car in case confused police try to pull it over, of a route (complete with details on speed limits, detours, etc.) being ‘pre-programmed’ into the car before a test drive, and so forth.

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Figure 6. Crazed autonomous cars running people over in ‘The Living Machine’ Used with the permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate

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cars ‘on a wild riot of uncontrolled destruction’ (1473), Poorson declares: ‘I have a new power. It is a little electricity, and a little radiant energy, and a little something else I was able to locate. I can put a battery of the stuff in a U.A.C.C. car and it will run ten thousand miles and be recharged for ten dollars…Of course [people] will have to drive their own cars, but they won’t have to use a drop of gasoline’ (1511). By having Poorson invent an electric car that people need to drive for themselves as a solution to the failed experiment with autonomous cars, Keller falls in line with the other pulp era writers we have looked at who champion a new type of car as being able to cure problems associated with an older type of car. Rather than put forward a solution that is a true alternative to driving – such as cycling (like Elly Blue does in her ‘Night of the Living Machines’) or walking (like Keller does in his earlier ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’) – Poorson merely promotes a technological fix that preserves the overarching system of automobility and leaves it intact. Perhaps the acquiescence by this later story to the car is because, by 1935, when Keller publishes ‘The Living Machine,’ the automobile appeared much more likely to stay and to be a permanent fixture of the urban environment than it did in the late 1920s when ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ – a far less conciliatory work – appeared. As Norton states: ‘By 1930 the American city was preparing for the coming motor age. Accidents and congestion were as bad as ever, but highway engineers promised to alleviate both problems. Casualties were no longer the inevitable price of fast vehicles in cities; by then the leading experts said they were either human failures, correctable through education and law enforcement, or design errors, correctable through highway engineering.’79 Due to effective campaigning throughout the second half of the 1920s by pro-automobile interest groups, the car did not appear in the 1930s to be going away any time soon. Unlike ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians,’ ‘The Living Machine’ seems to have resigned itself to that fact.

Where Are All the Bicycles? One thing the reader has probably noticed by now is that there has not been much discussion of bicycles in this first chapter. That silence has been for a very good reason: there simply were not many bicycles being written about in the Gernsback era of the pulps. An examination of the magazines from c.1926 to 1939 uncovers precious few bicycles, a paucity corroborated by Bleiler’s very thorough and useful resource Science-Fiction: 79

Norton, Fighting Traffic, p. 243.

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The Gernsback Years that lists in its thematic index no texts from this era incorporating bicycles.80 The reason for this disinterest lies, I think, in reasons that we have already explored. That is, a widespread technooptimism and belief in the perfectibility of complicated machines like automobiles defines this era. Additionally, the years spanning c.1900 to 1940 represent a near-disappearance of the bicycle from American life. As Longhurst asserts: ‘Bicycles – dwindling in numbers, no longer the object of desire of a politically organized elite, overtaken as a symbol of modernity by the internal combustion engine – were no longer significant either politically or legally’ in the United States during this time.81 It is not until the extreme rationing of materials like metal, rubber, and oil during World War II that the bicycle stages a comeback in America.82 Thus, it is not much of a surprise that many writers contributing to Gernsback’s magazines did not look back to ‘obsolete’ machines of the previous century such as the bicycle when it came to searching for solutions to humanity’s problems with traffic congestion, traffic fatalities, and so forth. As we have seen, their predilection (except for in rare cases like Keller’s ‘Revolt of the Pedestrians’) was instead to place their faith in more technologically advanced versions of the automobiles that existed in that era. However, a paucity of textual appearances of bicycles does not constitute a total lack of appearances. For example, as we saw above, Hanstein’s ‘Utopia Island’ – although originally published in Germany and therefore boasting a provenance outside the American pulps – contained several references to specially made bicycle roads that complemented that utopian society’s many other advanced transport technologies. But beyond the quick mention of these bicycle roads, Hanstein conveyed little interest in the bicycle. He did not describe the bicycle roads in detail and did not depict anyone actually riding a bicycle in his story. Furthermore, Gernsback’s penchant for reprinting older H. G. Wells texts also periodically snuck some bicycles into the pages of Amazing Stories.83 In his very first issue of the magazine that appeared in 1926, 8 0

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Demonstrating Bleiler’s interest in and alertness to the presence of bicycles in sf magazines, his previous book does include a bicycle entry in its index, an entry listing some half a dozen texts from pre-1930 that contain bicycles. See the entry ‘Bicycles and tricycles’ in Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years, p. 866. Longhurst, Bike Battles, p. 118. On the relationship between rationing and transportation during World War II, see Longhurst, Bike Battles, pp. 120–51. Gernsback included a Wells text in the first 29 issues of Amazing Stories (April 1926–August 1928).

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Gernsback included Wells’ ‘The New Accelerator’ (originally published in 1901). The story contains a glimpse of a cyclist sharing the road with other modes of transport such as a horse-drawn charabanc and a motorbus.84 Ultimately, the story warns about society’s increasing obsession with speed, an obsession that these machines (especially the motorbus) help usher in. This obsession is embodied most emphatically in the story by ‘Gibberne B Syrup,’ a newly invented drug that gives people ‘the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.’85 Although ‘The New Accelerator’ barely mentions the bicycle, in his famous Martian invasion tale The War of the Worlds – a work originally published in 1898 but that appeared across two issues of Amazing Stories in 1927 – Wells references and depicts the bicycle just over a dozen times in this relatively short novel. As I have argued at length elsewhere, however, in this work ‘Wells depicts the cyclist in a surprisingly negative light…The War of the Worlds constitutes Wells at his most hostile and disdainful toward the bicycle,’ for he uses the late nineteenth-century bicycle here as an emblem of human pride and of human over-reliance on its machinery.86 A more positive set of references to cycling technology by Wells occurs in his ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ (a novella originally published in 1899 and that was reprinted in two parts in the April and May 1928 issues of Amazing Stories). Wells’ tale centers on two young lovers, Elizabeth and Denton, living in a 22nd-century London whose population has swelled to 30 million people. But it is not just the population that has swelled: the borders of London now expand all the way out to Wimbledon and massive skyscrapers now tower over the city because by the 22nd century ‘foolish legislation against tall buildings’ has been abolished.87

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The illustration accompanying the story depicts the cyclist and the horse-drawn charabanc, as well as two automobiles, even though Wells does not mention any cars in his original text. H. G. Wells, ‘The New Accelerator,’ Amazing Stories 1, no. 1 (1926), p. 58. Jeremy Withers, The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017), p. 74. In The Massacre of Mankind – his sequel to The War of the Worlds – Stephen Baxter maintains Wells’ interest in bicycles even though the former’s novel is set squarely in the automobile age of the 1920s. Baxter even portrays cycling in a bit more positive light than Wells’ novel, for Baxter shows Julie Elphinstone, Walter Jenkins, and other characters using bicycles (for a while at least) to help achieve various missions and goals. H. G. Wells, ‘The Story of the Days to Come’ (Part I), Amazing Stories 3, no. 1 (1928), p. 13.

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In short, the London depicted in the story is a megacity of staggering dimensions, and it represents Wells’ extrapolation of the trend happening throughout the Victorian period whereby people were fleeing the countryside in dramatic numbers to take up residence in large cities like London, Manchester, and Birmingham. In addition to imagining bold new changes to urban architecture and to the overall size and scope of London in ‘A Story of the Days to Come,’ Wells portrays technologies of movement as having undergone dramatic changes too. As part of this future transport revolution – one that includes international air travel and moving platforms throughout cities – a man by the name of Warming devised a new road system, one comprised of ‘longitudinal divisions.’ These new roads are further described thus: On the outer [division] on either side went foot cyclists and conveyances traveling at a less speed than twenty-five miles an hour, in the middle, motors capable of speed up to a hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face of enormous ridicule) reserved for vehicles traveling at speeds of a hundred miles an hour and upward. For ten years his inner ways were vacant. Before he died they were the most crowded of all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of twenty and thirty feet in diameter, hurled along them at paces that year after year rose steadily towards two hundred miles an hour.88 Even though the inner lane reserved for fast, motorized traffic have become ‘the most crowded of all,’ ‘foot cyclists’ still endure in this megacity of the future and its environs. When Elizabeth and Denton are leaving London to begin their failed quest to live a more fulfilling life in the primitive conditions of the abandoned countryside, they glimpse an abundance of strange, new foot-powered machines carrying laborers of the Food Company out into the countryside for a day’s work. ‘[T]he inner ways were filled,’ Wells tells us, ‘with…swift monocycles bearing a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads.’89 Once they are out in the countryside, Elizabeth and Denton witness ‘some Company shepherds [going] down the river valley riding on a big multicycle.’90 8 8 89 9 0

Wells, ‘Story of the Days’ (Part I), p. 13. Wells, ‘Story of the Days’ (Part I), p. 15. Wells, ‘Story of the Days’ (Part I), pp. 16–17.

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Thus, Gernsback’s decision to reprint works like ‘The New Accelerator’ and ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ allows them to serve as a counterbalance to what we typically see in the American pulps, for these Wellsian tales portray different kinds of cycling machines having a place on the street alongside automobiles (as well as alongside other technologies of movement such as sliding sidewalks and flying machines). The co-existence of self-powered transport with motorized transport provides a more promising image than what many other pulp era writers provided: an urban environment almost completely devoid of bicycles and almost completely overrun by automobiles.

Conclusion As we have seen in this chapter, Gernsback and some of the writers that he published in the two important pulp era magazines he started – Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories – were not opposed to the automobile per se. Given the right amount of technological advancement, motor-powered vehicles, they believed, could play an integral role in the utopian cities of the future. But across the board, the texts this chapter has focused on found the automobile technology and the larger automobile infrastructure of the 1920s and 1930s severely lacking. They perceived the automobile of the interwar years as a horrifically dangerous machine and as a piece of technology that was threatening the democracy of the streets, a place that (since the Roman era) was supposed to be available to all citizens and for a wide variety of uses. These texts, therefore, reflected the widespread perception at that time of cars as harmful, intrusive machines. In the next chapter we turn to a consideration of the 1950s, a decade that falls in what many people refer to as the ‘Golden Age’ of sf (c.1940–60). In its examination of some of the key writers of that era, that chapter will argue that the dream shared by the pulp era writers of an improved automobile that will cure the problems of contemporary automobility is abandoned. Instead of looking ahead to a future populated by some kind of radically altered car, the writers focused on in the next chapter begin to look back to the past for guidance. They look back, that is, to the bicycle and thus to the technology of the fin de siècle era (the time when Wells is publishing many of his famous novels and stories) for answers to the transportation problems of the American midcentury.

Chapter 2 Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles

As most any historian of transportation will tell you, America in the 1950s was a golden age in terms of automobility’s vigor and influence. After a couple of decades of sluggish sales due to the Great Depression and World War II, car ownership surged in the postwar era. Christopher W. Wells reports: ‘Between 1950 and 1960, annual new-car sales averaged 5.9 million – 1.4 million more than the old 1929 record – and set a new single-year record of 7.9 million in 1955.’1 Accompanying this growth in car sales was the massive growth on the outskirts of cities of low-density, car-oriented suburbs. Additionally, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 forever altered the American landscape when it was signed into law by President Eisenhower and ushered in one of the largest public works projects in human history: the Interstate Highway System. About ten years later, sf writer Pamela Zoline – drawing upon imagery of the disciplined female body – describes this new highway system as having led to a ‘land…brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways.’2 (About ten years after Zoline, the British writer Douglas Adams similarly mocks building highways in the name of progress by opening his classic comedy sf novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [1979] with a race of aliens demolishing Earth to build an interstellar expressway.)3 The result of the sharp increase in the 1

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Christopher W. Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), p. 279 (emphasis in the original). Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe,’ in Daughters of the Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, ed. Justine Larbalestier (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), p. 132. Zoline’s story was first published in the July 1967 issue of New Worlds. Before this scene of planetary destruction, we also see the house of the main human character – Arthur Dent – destroyed to build a bypass road. When Arthur asked the man about to tear down his house why a bypass has to be built, the man can only respond with dogmatism about the need 65

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Fifties of car ownership, suburb expansion, and highway construction was an America ‘so thoroughly remade around car-based mobility that older ways of moving around have become difficult, if not impossible, for most Americans.’4 Whereas the 1950s constituted a zenith for the car, it was a nadir for the bicycle. In the mid-1890s, during the so-called ‘bicycle boom,’ the United States – and a good portion of the rest of the world – embraced the bicycle with an almost religious fervor.5 But throughout the early twentieth century and throughout the pulp era, the bicycle’s fortunes in America steadily plummeted before bottoming out in the Fifties. James Longhurst sums up the situation in this decade thus: ‘Across the nation, bicycles were increasingly being defined not as the equals of automotive vehicles but as their diminutive inferiors.’6 As Longhurst goes on to show, bicycles were, for the first time ever, ‘excluded entirely from certain public roads’: the new interstate system of highways.7 Further signs of the bicycle’s decline in the Fifties include the disbanding in 1955 of the once-mighty national advocacy organization, the League of American Wheelmen (founded all the way back in 1880). Additionally, the juvenilization of bicycles by advertisers, the mass media, and even the bicycle manufacturers themselves was on the rise. As Robert J. Turpin has shown, since the 1920s, the bicycle industry – in an effort to recapture the sales figures of the late nineteenthcentury bicycle craze – was ‘reconstitut[ing] the bicycle as a necessary part of the boyhood experience’ and was therefore ‘inadvertently transforming the bicycle into a child’s toy.’8 By the 1950s, this juvenilization of the bicycle was widespread in the United States. For example, leading bicycle manufacturers of the era, such as Columbia and Schwinn, were increasingly producing heavy, decoration-laden

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for new roads: ‘What do you mean, why’s it got to be built…It’s a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.’ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Del Ray, 2017), p. 7. Also, by way of mocking rampant automobility, Adams has the novel’s main alien character – Ford Prefect – adopt the name of a popular mid-twentieth-century British car when he first arrives on Earth and tries to blend in, apparently because he has mistaken cars for the planet’s dominant life form. Wells, Car Country, p. 287. On the ‘boom’ years, see David Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 251–82. James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), p. 159. Longhurst, Bike Battles, p. 155. Robert J. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom: A Cultural History of Bicycle Marketing in the United States (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018), p. 76.

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bikes that resembled airplanes, motorcycles, automobiles, and cowboy horses (the last accomplished by adding ‘cap guns, as well as a saddle blanket, saddlebags, and embellishments to make the seat look more like a cowboy’s saddle,’ to a bike).9 Automobility in the Fifties finds, of course, memorable cultural expression in films of that era (such as Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean), in publications such as Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Hot Rod magazine (the latter commencing in 1948 and still published today), as well as in popular car-oriented practices of the decade such as ‘cruising’ and going to drive-in restaurants and movies. Most memorably, perhaps, the new rock ’n’ roll music encapsulates that decade’s intense love affair with the car: from what some consider to be the first rock ’n’ roll song ever – ‘Rocket 88’ about a new Oldsmobile – to later references to Cadillacs in Elvis Presley’s ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away,’ and to souped-up V8 Fords in Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene.’10 What this chapter focuses on is several works of sf from the 1950s that function, I argue, as counter-narratives to the dismissal of the humanpowered bicycle that we saw gaining momentum in the sf of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After first looking at cars and walking in some works by a writer who is arguably the most famous from this era – Ray Bradbury – the discussion turns to a novel by Robert A. Heinlein, a novelette by Poul Anderson, and a short story by Avram Davidson. These texts reveal that some of the leading figures in 1950s sf were not content to relegate bicycles to the status of ‘technologically static and obsolete vehicles inferior to more “advanced” vehicles such as motorcycles and cars.’11 Instead, some of these writers’ most celebrated and award-winning fiction brims with images of ‘low-tech’ bicycles as pragmatic, reliable machines worthy of continued use and appreciation (in the case of Heinlein and Anderson), and with images of bicycles as potent, agentic pieces of technology capable of inspiring awe and even fear (in the case of Davidson). Such images open up noteworthy 9 10

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Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 170. On the intermingling of cars and early rock ’n’ roll music, see the following: Duncan Heining, ‘Cars and Girls – The Car, Masculinity and Pop Music,’ in The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century, ed. David Thomas, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 96–119; E. L. Widmer, ‘Crossroads: The Automobile, Rock and Roll and Democracy,’ in Autopia: Cars and Culture, ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp. 65–74. Luis Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on an (Old) New Thing (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 26.

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faultlines in the system of automobility by inviting readers to reject the devaluation of the bicycle and, consequently, to question the widespread glorification of the car occurring in 1950s America.

Murderous Cars and Restorative Walking Before turning to the three works on which the bulk of this chapter focuses, I would like to first examine some works by one of American sf’s most strident critics of the automobile: Ray Bradbury. Throughout many of his writings – including his most celebrated work, the 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 – Bradbury exposes the destructive nature of the car and its frequent degradation of our public spaces. Examining some works by a well-known writer like Bradbury will assist us in setting the stage for this chapter’s focus on the 1950s, an era in which mass-produced mechanical commodities like radios, televisions, and automobiles became entrenched in nearly every aspect of postwar American life. A brief discussion of Bradbury will also help foreground the degree to which sf writers of the Fifties embody a dramatic shift away from their pulp era predecessors, for these later writers can be seen rejecting the techno-optimism we saw in the last chapter with writers such as Donitz and Hanstein. Put simply, these 1950s writers held onto little (if any) hope that automobility could somehow be redeemed through future iterations of the car. Famously, Ray Bradbury, despite living in car-centric Los Angeles for much of his life, never learned to drive and instead relied on bicycles and public transportation to move around that sprawling city.12 Numerous texts by Bradbury and interviews with him attest to his scorn for automobiles and his fear of motorists (especially male motorists, for he was convinced that the more combative nature of men – that is his generalization – made them dangerous drivers).13 For example, his story ‘The Highway’ (1950) portrays a highway in rural Mexico 12

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On Bradbury’s preference for bikes and busses, see his 1966 interview with Pierre Berton, ‘Ray Bradbury: Cassandra on a Bicycle,’ in Conversations with Ray Bradbury, ed. Steven L. Aggelis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), p. 31. One biographer also reports that Bradbury never flew in an airplane until he was 62, and that in his teens he had a fondness for getting around Los Angeles on roller skates. See Sam Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). An unpublished interview between Bradbury and biographer Jon Eller (Los Angeles: October 9, 2005) includes the following exchange: ‘Bradbury: Men were always talking about women drivers. They’re wrong. Men are the bad

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that is often used by arrogant American tourists who use their cars to gawk at Mexican farmers. In one flashback scene, we hear about how a car’s ‘tire had come into [a farmer’s] hut with violence one night, exploding the chickens and pots apart! The car, off which it had come, had rushed on…before plunging into the river.’14 Appropriately, then, given his aversion to cars, several of Bradbury’s works from the Fifties incorporate bicycles, such as the stories ‘Way in the Middle of the Air’ from The Martian Chronicles (1950) and ‘The Great Collision of Monday Last’ from A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), as well as the novel Dandelion Wine (1957). Readers can glimpse his lifelong concern with transportation issues as late as a 2006 article (published when he was 85) for the Los Angeles Times in which Bradbury decries that city’s notoriously congested highway system, and argues for the adoption of a citywide monorail system that ‘would allow us to move freely, once more, within our own city.’15 In an interview with Sam Weller, Bradbury shares his contempt for the car: ‘We have paid a terrible price for the automobile. We lose almost fifty thousand people a year. Do we really want that many people killed every year so we can drive? I don’t want that.’16 Elsewhere, Weller asks Bradbury why he has never learned to drive. Bradbury cites as his reason a personal experience with the deadly nature of the car: I saw a terrible accident when I was fourteen…A car had come along doing sixty or seventy miles an hour, and right in front of the cemetery, it hit a telephone pole. The car was cut in half. There were six people inside. Three of them were killed instantly…I ran up and looked at one woman lying there, and I bent over to help her. Her jaw had been torn and was hanging by one hinge. Her eyes met mine, then they fluttered and she died. I was stunned…That one experience, along with all the people I knew who had been killed by automobiles, is the reason why I have never driven a car.17

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drivers. They cause all the accidents and all the deaths. Women don’t do that. Eller: Men have tempers. They have car rage. Bradbury: They compete.’ Ray Bradbury, ‘The Highway,’ in The Illustrated Man (New York: William Morrow, 2001), p. 57. This story was first published in the Spring 1950 issue of Copy Magazine. Ray Bradbury, ‘L.A.’s Future is Up in the Air,’ Los Angeles Times (February 5, 2006). Sam Weller, Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010), p. 183. Weller, Listen to the Echoes, pp. 250–51. Bradbury turned the memory of this car crash into his short story ‘The Crowd’ about a man who witnesses and personally experiences several car crashes, each one involving a

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From the very beginning of the 1950s, Bradbury incorporates this distrust of the automobile into his fiction. In short stories like ‘The Pedestrian’ and in novellas like ‘The Fireman’ (both published in 1951 and both early versions of material later adapted into Fahrenheit 451), he portrays the car as a malevolent piece of technology that prowls nocturnal streets, ready in an instant to pounce and interfere with personal liberty and halt behavior that society deems dangerously unconventional. In ‘The Pedestrian,’ the main character Leonard Mead goes for a walk on a chilly November evening in the year 2052 because it was ‘what he most dearly loved to do.’ In ten years of walking at night, however, ‘he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time.’18 Bradbury registers his concerns about the stultifying power of the mass media and about its ability to alienate people from the rural and urban environments outside their homes by depicting everyone besides Leonard Mead as hunkered down every night inside. Their faces are ‘ill-lit by television light…the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them’ (19, emphasis in the original). In ‘The Pedestrian,’ corrosive technologies of modernity like the television find a parallel in the automobile. The only other glimpse the story gives us of what the other three million inhabitants of Leonard’s town do when they are not watching television at night is when Bradbury tells us that ‘[d]uring the day’ they can be found on the town’s highways as part of a ‘thunderous surge of cars’ (18). Television and cars, therefore, both appear as alienating technologies that keep people apart. These machines isolate people either in the box of their house or the box of their vehicle, and impair the development of a healthy and robust social body. This alienating nature of modern technology is also foregrounded in ‘The Fireman,’ when the narration describes husband Montag and wife Mildred as ‘never together. There was always something between,

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mysterious group of onlookers. The story first appeared in the May 1943 issue of Weird Tales. In his biography of Bradbury, Eller mentions Bradbury’s ‘fear of high-speed automobile travel’ and ‘fear of being trapped in a speeding automobile.’ See Jonathan R. Eller, Ray Bradbury Unbound (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), p. 15, p. 26. Ray Bradbury, ‘The Pedestrian,’ in Twice Twenty-Two: The Golden Apples of the Sun/A Medicine for Melancholy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), p. 16. All quotations from this story will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter. The story was originally published in the August 7, 1951 issue of The Reporter magazine.

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a radio, a televisor, a car, a plane…They didn’t know each other; they knew things, inventions.’19 But the most ominous manifestation of automobility shows up about halfway through ‘The Pedestrian’ when a self-driving police car (the only police car left, due to most everybody staying indoors now) stops and interrogates Leonard due to the latter’s suspicious behavior of walking at night. Like David H. Keller’s ‘The Living Machine’ (discussed in the previous chapter), Bradbury gives us a less than benign version of an autonomous car.20 But whereas Keller suggests his autonomous cars might be so mentally alert that their involuntary service to humanity constitutes a form of slavery, Bradbury depicts his autonomous car as the epitome of cold, lifeless technology. When Leonard peeks into the back seat, he immediately notices ‘[i]t smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there’ (20). This car certainly does not represent freedom and adventure as do the cars that Jack Kerouac wrote about or that Chuck Berry sang about in the 1950s; instead, it represents imprisonment, paranoia, and surveillance. The story ends with the autonomous car taking Leonard away to the ‘Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies’ (20). Bradbury’s distrust of new technologies like the automobile and his privileging of older, more primal modes of transport such as walking attain their most memorable expression in Fahrenheit 451. As David Seed writes: ‘The novel articulates two perceptions which Bradbury had of Los Angeles, CA: the gradual disappearance of bookstores and the priority given to the automobile.’21 Thus, although most people probably associate this celebrated classic by Bradbury primarily with disturbing images of book-burning (and probably secondarily with unflattering portrayals of television), it is also a novel deeply concerned with how different forms

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Ray Bradbury, ‘The Fireman,’ in Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451, ed. Donn Albright and Jon Eller (Colorado Springs: Gauntlet, 2006), p. 422. This novella was originally published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy. One scholar points out that Bradbury was a passionate, life-long admirer of another Keller story – ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians (1928), discussed in Chapter 1 – and suggests that Bradbury was drawing inspiration from Keller’s story for his own tale of pedestrians versus cars. See Jonathan R. Eller, Becoming Ray Bradbury (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 13, p. 238. David Seed, ‘Los Angeles’ Science Fiction Futures,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 129.

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of movement contribute to either the enhancement or the diminishment of our individual freedom. As in ‘The Pedestrian,’ to walk in Fahrenheit 451 is to be deviant, for this type of mobility is associated with subversion and nonconformity because everyone else drives or stays locked away in their homes. The opening pages depict the main character – a ‘fireman’ named Montag – leaving the fire station after yet another night of burning outlawed books, by walking home, a mode of transport that quickly signals to the reader Montag’s growing disenchantment with the authoritarian society in which he lives. Bradbury draws upon, then, what Solnit refers to as the extension of ‘the notion of the pilgrimage into political and economic spheres.’22 By Bradbury’s time, the overlap between walking and political rebellion was well-established by Henry David Thoreau’s rejection of urban capitalism in his daily walks in the woods around Walden Pond, and by Gandhi’s ‘famous 200-mile-long Salt March in 1930, in which he and many people living inland walked to the sea to make their own salt in violation of British law and British taxes.’23 Montag’s rebellious walking also looks ahead to future acts of politically charged pedestrianism like Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington and 1965 march on Montgomery, as well as the use of walks in the 1980s and 1990s to raise awareness of and concern for diseases like AIDS. On Montag’s way home, he meets Clarisse, a 17-year-old girl who shares the former’s love of walking, for she likes ‘to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.’24 It is while going for hikes that Clarisse finds ample opportunity to observe and experience nature directly, to ‘watch the birds and collect butterflies,’ and to put her head back during rainstorms to drink in some of the water that ‘tastes just like wine’ (23). Clarisse’s penchant for walking – associated by Bradbury with the supposed innocence of nature and of childhood – helps Montag see the more meaningful experiences and values beyond those embodied by, for example, his television- and sedative-addicted wife. Clarisse helps Montag to see what the philosopher Gros has said about walking: 22

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Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 54. Solnit, Wanderlust, 58. On Gandhi and walking, see also Fédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 193–206. On Thoreau and walking, see Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), pp. 141–52. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine, 1991), p. 7. All quotations will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter.

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Walking is setting oneself apart: at the edge of those who work, at the edges of high-speed roads, at the edge of the producers of profit and poverty, exploiters, labourers, and the edge of those serious people who always have something better to do than receive the pale gentleness of a winter sun or the freshness of a spring breeze. 25 Bradbury’s frequent correlating of different modes of transport with different degrees of conformity finds notable expression in another Golden Age work: ‘And Then There Were None’ (1951) by the British writer Eric Frank Russell. 26 In this story, a character named Harrison is part of an Earthling space crew that lands in a ludicrously large spaceship on a planet populated by anarchist, nonconformist humans named Gands (after Gandhi). Harrison is the only crewmember with a bicycle. A rumor even swirls ‘that he sleeps with’ his bike, they are so inseparable. 27 After first being mocked by his superiors as a crazy ‘spaceman toting a bicycle’ and as a ‘nut,’ Harrison is sent out to explore the new planet and look for its leader due to his bike being ideal for such a task. 28 However, he eventually goes AWOL and joins the Gands. Thus, Russell employs Harrison’s bike to reference throughout the story the individualism of the main character and his ripeness for adopting radical anti-hierarchical ways of thinking. Harrison, with his preference for a slower and ‘less evolved’ mode of transportation, stands in opposition to his fellow Earthlings’ preference for more speed and a more expansive mobility (a preference gestured toward in the story’s opening description of the ‘Great Explosion’ as when the denizens of Earth by ‘the dozens, the hundred, the thousands’ took off to the stars as soon as it became mechanically possible to do so).29 Harrison’s confident individualism and its association with the bicycle is on full display in the cover image done by Hubert Rogers for the 25 26

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Gros, Philosophy of Walking, p. 94. Russell published this tale in the June 1951 issue of Astounding and later incorporated it into his 1962 novel The Great Explosion. Even though Russell published frequently in American sf magazines like Astounding and even though ‘And Then There Were None’ revolves heavily around a bicycle, due to Russell’s lifelong residence in the UK I am engaging here only in a brief discussion of him and this story. Eric Frank Russell, ‘And Then There Were None,’ in Major Ingredients: The Selected Stories of Eric Frank Russell, ed. Rick Katze (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2000), p. 39. Russell, ‘And Then There Were None,’ p. 39. Russell, ‘And Then There Were None,’ p. 25.

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issue of Astounding in which the story appeared. Here, we see (what I assume is) Harrison’s steely visage in the center, surrounded by his fellow Gands. The bicycle looms in the left-hand corner; significantly, this machine is more foregrounded than the spaceship hovering in the background, thus suggesting the former’s superiority over the latter (see Figure 7). For both Bradbury and Russell, adopting simple modes of transport like walking or cycling is never simple; they are instead politically charged acts of subversion and nonconformity. In Fahrenheit 451, motor-powered vehicles, on the other hand, represent only aggression, violence, and alienation. The novel makes repeated reference to ‘jet cars’ being used to race and crash into each other for fun. Clarisse tells Montag that ‘[t]en of [her friends] died in car wrecks’ (30) and Montag himself watches the violent use of cars being televised for entertainment. While watching a wall-sized TV with his wife, he sees ‘jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air’ (94). Tragically, Clarisse herself disappears from Montag’s life when she is run over and killed by a car.30 And cars threaten not only human life, but animal life too. When Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty, senses that Montag is losing his enthusiasm for his line of work, he shares with Montag his own personal remedy for such ennui: ‘I always like to drive fast when I feel that way. You get [the car] up around ninety-five and you feel wonderful…It’s fun out in the country. You hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs’ (64). In addition to cars, Fahrenheit 451 portrays the fire truck that Montag and his fellow firemen use – named the ‘Salamander’ – as a demonic instrument of destruction. It is a machine that pollutes the air around it with hideous sounds and smells. We witness such defilement when, as the fire crew is heading out on a run to burn Montag’s own house, the text describes the Salamander as a ‘gaseous dragon roaring to life’ and that soon is rounding corners ‘in thunder and siren, with concussion of tires, with scream of rubber’ (109). And, of course, the tanks that formerly held beneficial life- and property-saving water now only hold the ruinous kerosene that we see so frequently employed to burn books, houses, even people.31 30

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In a story published a little later than Fahrenheit 451 – Fritz Leiber’s ‘X Marks the Pedwalk’ (1963) – cars are similarly portrayed as murderous machines being driven around by motorists as they look for human bodies to smash up. Joseph Mugnaini – Bradbury’s favorite illustrator for many of his books – captures wonderfully the menacing nature of this vehicle in a full-color, fold-out drawing of the Salamander done for a special edition of Fahrenheit

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Figure 7. Bicycle and rugged individualists from ‘And Then There Were None’

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Also, like we saw in ‘The Pedestrian’ and ‘The Fireman,’ automobiles are condemned as machines that alienate people from their surroundings. When Clarisse and Montag are talking early in the novel, the ways in which walking familiarizes these two characters with their environment is contrasted with the car’s contributions to an unsavory defamiliarization. Clarisse opines: ‘I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly…If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass!’ (9). Racing by at eighty or ninety miles per hour, and encased within a box of metal, glass, and plastic, drivers perceive the world only as a collection of indistinct smudges and blurs. They never really get to intimately know the nuances of their surroundings like a walker (or a cyclist, for that matter) does. Bradbury, in sum, was one of the harshest critics of the automobile, if not in all of sf literature (J. G. Ballard would also be a contender for that title), then certainly in the 1950s-era of sf. The number of dead left in the wake of automobiles clearly horrified Bradbury, so much so that (as we saw above) he eventually swore off the car while living in Los Angeles. Furthermore, he associated the car with the stifling conformity of the 1950s suburbs and of the Cold War political climate, and he was well aware of the automobile’s habit of cutting people off from their environments. The authors that the rest of this chapter focuses on also shared Bradbury’s distrust of the automobile. But, whereas Bradbury often positioned walking in his fiction as a restorative antithesis to automobility, these other writers promoted the bicycle and the experience of mobility that this machine offered.

The Retrofuturism of the Bicycle The next two texts this chapter discusses – Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones (1952) and Anderson’s ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ (1958) – portray bicycles as enduring components of the future worlds they depict. Notably, however, none of these texts describes bicycles that are in any way futuristic, that is, that are in any way technologically enhanced versions of bicycles akin to what the turn-of-the-last-century, utopian writers (discussed in this book’s intro chapter) give us with their electric bicycles. What Heinlein and Anderson do, therefore, is go back to the nineteenthcentury past to recover a notion of bicycles that had largely been rejected and lost by the 1950s: the notion of the bicycle as suggestive of ‘speed, 451 bound in ‘fire-proof’ aluminum. See Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1982).

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mobility, progress and the future.’32 But, of course, the paradox here is that these texts travel to the past to travel to the future, a move reminiscent of retrofuturism, which one scholar defines as the literary and visual ‘practice of referencing, framing, or inserting elements of older futuristic imaginaries into contemporary narratives.’33 That is, although the bicycle was a ‘veritable icon of futurism’ in the Victorian era, that iconic status had faded by the Fifties.34 But these sf authors portraying bicycles in the 1950s, when automobiles were ubiquitous and spacecraft were being excitedly talked about, embody a noteworthy form of retrofuturism. In sum, we see Heinlein and Anderson resurrecting that ‘older futuristic imaginary’ of the fin de siècle era in their respective texts, and we see them participating in sf’s overall complicated engagements with time and history, engagements that find notable expression in such subgenres as steampunk and alternative history, as well as in the medievalism found in some sf works. It might seem then, at first glance, that these texts engage in a pointless nostalgia for a lost pre-automobile era. But, as one scholar has argued, nostalgia can represent both a productive and a counterproductive force; it ‘can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.’35 The idea of a ‘counterproductive’ or pointless nostalgia calls to mind Frederic Jameson’s critique in his Postmodernism of nostalgia as a problematic cultural amnesia, an amnesia that might (say) forget that bicycles were at one time problematically entangled in a rampant commodity culture and were at times used as objects to help strengthen divisions of gender and social class.36 Alternatively, we might initially expect the retro element of bicycles in these texts by Heinlein and Anderson to be mocked and criticized like the colossal superhighways and giant Zeppelins are in William Gibson’s story ‘The

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Paul Smethurst, The Bicycle – Towards A Global Future (New York: Palgrave, 2015), p. 153. Paweł Frelik, ‘The Future of the Past: Science Fiction, Retro, and Retrofuturism,’ in Parabolas of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p. 207. Smethurst, The Bicycle, p. 25. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 354. Jameson’s own critique centers on what he calls the ‘nostalgia films’ of the 1970s and 1980s that attempt to recover a lost 1950s because ‘for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of pax Americana, but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 19.

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Gernsback Continuum’ (1981). But this chapter asserts that the use of bicycles in these 1950s sf texts is not a naïve or politically conservative attempt to go back into the past and ‘recover a lost object of desire,’ nor are they satirical works that deride the yearning to perform such a recovery. (In Chapter 6, however, I will discuss some other sf texts that are also nostalgic but that do, I argue there, represent more of a counterproductive, conservative form of nostalgia.) Rather, as in Elizabeth Guffey’s analysis of retro, I see bicycles in Heinlein and Anderson as ‘representing a kind of subversion in which the artistic and cultural vanguard began looking backwards in order to go forwards.’37 Even though these texts summon forth a mode of transport whose golden age had passed by the end of the nineteenth century, the projection of bicycles into the future – alongside spaceships and interplanetary colonization – in The Rolling Stones and ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ gestures toward the bike’s futurity. These texts are not stuck in the past. Instead, in the face of overwhelming 1950s automobility, they still perceive the bicycle as possessing a ‘capacity to point forwards and backwards’: back to the utopian shimmer with which the bicycle gleamed in the nineteenth century and forward to a future that, despite the supposed advantages of the car, embraces the bicycle as a useful, elegant, and efficient mode of transport.38

Labor and Commerce It is to a discussion of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones (published as Space Family Stone in the United Kingdom) that we turn to next. This novel was written as part of the ‘Heinlein juveniles,’ a series consisting of twelve core novels published by Scribner’s between 1947 and 1958 and aimed at a predominantly male, teenage audience. Heinlein conceived of this series as ‘a successor to the…Tom Swift books [discussed in my intro chapter] he had loved growing up.’39 As Clareson and Sanders write: ‘Besides the favorable reactions of generations of readers, critics agree on the excellence of Heinlein’s juvenile novels. From Jack Williamson to Lois Bujold a virtually unanimous opinion praises the twelve juvenile

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Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 8. Smethurst, The Bicycle, p. 153. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 226.

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novels published with Scribner’s.’40 In 1952, Boys’ Life – the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America – published a version of The Rolling Stones in several installments with the title ‘Tramp Space Ship,’ before the full-length novel version appeared at the end of that year. Considerations of publication history and intended audience for this novel are significant here, for (as discussed above) the Fifties constitute a culmination of when bicycles were almost exclusively made for and marketed to children and teenagers in the United States. But even then, bikes functioned primarily as ‘signifiers of desirable automobility’ through their balloon tires and superfluous decorations like gas tanks and luggage carriers, for it was ‘apparently inconceivable that the bicycle rider of today might also be the bicycle rider of tomorrow.’41 Because Heinlein’s novel contains two teenage boy characters – Castor and Pollux – and is a critical and commercial success that was published first in a boys’ magazine and then in a juvenile book series, the analysis below will pay close attention to its frequent mention of bicycles – objects often associated with children – as well as to its one striking digression on the car. Such attention will reveal how Heinlein’s novel subverts for its largely adolescent audience the promotion of the car and the dismissal of the bicycle that are both typical at this time. The Rolling Stones is a novel about the adventures of the Stone family as they travel across part of our solar system in a spaceship after wanderlust seizes them all while living on a lunar settlement. The novel, therefore, on one level, admittedly promotes certain values we would associate with automobility: values such as freedom of movement and an ability to conquer vast distances, both of which are on full display in the novel’s closing paean to mobility and restlessness. Here, in connection with Grandma Hazel’s decision to not return to the moon with her family but instead to head out to the rings of Saturn, Heinlein rhapsodizes in the novel’s closing lines: ‘In her train followed hundreds and thousands…of restless rolling stones…rolling out to the stars…outward bound to the ends of the Universe’ (253).42 Yet, the text makes it emphatically clear that, whether or not they contribute to human freedom of movement, the automobiles of Heinlein’s own era are to be excluded from any glorification. This dismissal of the car 4 0

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Thomas D. Clarenson and Joe Sanders, The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014), p. 62. Longhurst, Bike Battles, p. 109, p. 171. On bicycles made to look like cars, see also Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, pp. 148–53. Robert A. Heinlein, The Rolling Stones (New York: Ace Books, 1952), p. 253. All quotations from the book will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter.

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is a continuation of the one Heinlein began in ‘The Roads Must Roll,’ an early work of his from 1940. At one point the story references a near-future scenario in which runaway rates of automobile ownership have led to cars ‘boil[ing] over the countryside like yeast in ferment.’ These rampant cars are condemned by the text as ‘steel-bodied monster[s]’ and ‘steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speeds.’ The deadly toll of these automobiles upon pedestrians renders them, we are told, ‘more destructive than war.’43 In contrast to the focus on the over-abundance and the violent nature of cars in ‘The Roads Must Roll,’ the fault that The Rolling Stones finds with automobiles is their lack of a bona fide technological sophistication. At one key moment, the novel opines that all technology goes through three stages and that the car belongs only to the second stage, a stage defined as follows: ‘an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original [i.e., of the first stage] and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise’ (53). In short, the automobile, for Heinlein, is an overly and needlessly complicated machine. The next two pages lay out in some detail the design flaws of the car that make it tantamount to ‘a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery’ (53), flaws such as its inefficient engines that waste energy and its lack (at that time) of autocontrols of any kind.44 Strikingly, in this time period of the Fifties, an era of rapidly congealing automobility and of an overall fetishization of the car by mainstream America, Heinlein’s novel dismisses cars as ‘mechanical jokes’ to which ‘[t]hree whole generations were slaves’ (54). Heinlein doesn’t appear to have bicycles overtly in mind in this section as a superior alternative to cars, for he bemoans in here how the drivers of his time had to use their ‘own muscle power’ (54, emphasis in the original) to turn the steering wheel and to apply the brakes. In other words, the car’s name is a ludicrous misnomer: there is nothing automatic about the automobile. 43

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Robert Heinlein, ‘The Roads Must Roll,’ in The Best of Robert Heinlein, 1939–1942, ed. Angus Wells (London: Sphere Books, 1973), p. 39. This story was originally published in the June 1940 issue of Astounding. People today still call attention to what masterpieces of inefficiency and wastefulness cars can be. Most American automobiles turn only about 5 percent of their gasoline into energy that is used to move the driver down the road. On this figure, see Lawrence D. Burns (with Christopher Shulgan), Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car – And How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), pp. 2–3. Other sources are more kind toward the car and describe it as being more around 10 percent to 15 percent efficient at turning gasoline into propulsion.

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However, if within this one significant diatribe against the automobile it is not apparent that Heinlein has the bicycle on his mind as a superior alternative to the car, as the novel progresses it becomes much clearer that the novel does indeed envision the bike as a machine from the past worth keeping around in the future. In the chapter that follows Heinlein’s anti-automobile screed, we learn that Castor and Pollux, the young twins of the family, have decided to fill the ship with as many secondhand bicycles as they can in order to sell them on Mars. The justification for this entrepreneurial venture is this: ‘On both Mars and Luna prospecting by bicycle was much more efficient than prospecting on foot…all the prospectors took bicycles along as a matter of course’ (68, emphasis added). And when not actively riding them, the lower lunar and Martian gravities means ‘it was an easy matter to shift the bicycle to one’s back and carry it over any obstacle to further progress’ (68). This idealness of the bicycle for the context of prospecting leads the narrator to opine: ‘on Mars or on the Moon [the bike] fitted its purpose the way a canoe fits a Canadian stream’ (69). Unlike the car, the bicycle is associated with efficiency, versatility, and suitability. Heinlein references it as a nearly perfect machine, not only on Earth (as bikes are typically depicted), but also in the diverse environments of other planets.45 Heinlein’s dismissal of the automobile and his elevation of the bicycle connects up his text – as well as Anderson’s novelette (discussed below) with its positive portrayal of a bicycle and of a jerry-rigged, beer-powered ship – to sf’s frequent mistrust and rejection of overly complex forms of technology. From early stories like E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), with its dark vision of people living in isolation whose every need is met by a vast, omnipotent machine that surrounds them, on down to fears about nuclear weapons in postapocalyptic works like Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and fears about rebellious A.I. machines in Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (1967): sf often perceives elaborate technologies as all too quick to escape the control of their creators and to contribute to the misery of humanity. The Rolling Stones’ depiction of the bicycle as a machine that genuinely helps people makes it a strikingly benevolent form of technology in the world of sf, a benevolence that appears to come at least in part from the machine’s relative simplicity.

45

In his Martian Time-Slip (1964), Philip K. Dick also mentions the idealness of a bicycle for moving around diverse environments – such as that of another planet like Mars – due to the bike’s low energy consumption, cheapness to purchase, versatility, and so forth. See Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip (London: Orion, 1999), p. 14, p. 206.

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Moreover, Heinlein resurrects here a social meaning for the bicycle that was almost completely lost in the western world by the mid-twentieth century: the bicycle as a pragmatic device used for work. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a different story. American and British doctors, police officers, postal carriers, messengers, and others often employed the bicycle to enhance their speed and efficacy while working. Similarly, in the Far East, as Glen Norcliffe has shown, bicycles and tricycles used for work – although increasingly under threat by the processes of modernization – are everyday features of many Asian cities, particularly Chinese ones. What Norcliffe writes about the working tricycles of China can, however, easily apply to Heinlein’s interplanetary bicycles: ‘it costs little to manufacture and maintain, is flexible in where it can go and in the loads it can carry, is a safe vehicle with minimal risks…and it provides meaningful work for people.’46 Heinlein, in short, undermines the frequent perception at that time of bicycles as trivial playthings; he restores to the bicycle the dignity that often comes from an association with labor and commerce.47 Despite the modest technological complexity of the bicycle, the twin boys work on fixing up the used bikes for a good amount of time while en route to Mars. What is significant about this association of bikes with Castor and Pollux is that The Rolling Stones repeatedly references the twins as engineering geniuses. For example, they help their father – the ship’s captain – calculate the complex ballistics of their interplanetary launches, flights, and landings. And yet the novel never implies that the bicycle is beneath their attention. Instead, repairing and fixing up these machines are depicted as a worthy and sufficiently sophisticated challenge for these two prodigies. Even an adult like their father – another engineering expert in this family – is not above assisting the twins in the work of fixing up these bikes, such as when we are told he ‘help[s] the twins spray enamel on reconditioned bicycles’ (116). True, The Rolling Stones references the bikes often in somewhat debased terms as commodities that Castor and Pollux are trying to sell to make some quick money. But, significantly, the novel never portrays the bicycle as 46

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Glen Norcliffe, Critical Geographies of Cycling: History, Political Economy and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 227. According to one biographer, Heinlein knew firsthand how useful the bicycle could be for adult concerns such as winning World War II. Because of gas rationing during the war, Heinlein’s ‘preferred mode of transportation at the Navy Yard [the US Navy shipyard where he did engineering work during World War II] was by bicycle.’ During his time there, Heinlein ‘could often be seen pedaling between the buildings in his suit and tie.’ Nevala-Lee, Astounding, p. 167.

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a simplistic, low-tech toy that is unworthy of the time and attention of this family of geniuses. Heinlein further associates the bicycle with adults – rather than just with children, as they so often were in the post-World War II era – when the twins make their first sale en route to Mars to the captain of a nearby ship. Captain Vandenberg specifically requests a ‘Raleigh Sandman,’ a model that the well-established British manufacturer of bicycles never actually made, but which Heinlein likely invented for its association with the sands of Mars. But the significance of the captain wanting a Raleigh lies in the fact that, unlike its American counterparts, the British manufacturer was known after World War II for producing high-quality lightweight, three-speed bicycles for adults, and not the heavy balloon-tire bikes with fake gas tanks imitating motorcycles (as well as cars and airplanes) that so dominated American production in this decade. That is, this particular adult – Captain Vandenberg – wants a decidedly adult, practical bicycle, not one of the ineffectual, overly heavy bicycles that American manufacturers like Schwinn were churning out and marketing to kids. Such aggressive marketing even involved using children’s television characters like Captain Kangaroo, who, in 1958, ‘began pitching Schwinns to the under six set’ on television so that ‘when they got older they asked for a Schwinn.’48 In this scene, Heinlein references a key disparity between the two sides of the Atlantic: even though American manufacturers were helping to ensure the obsolescence of the bicycle for adult mobility needs in the post-war years through impractical designs and an overall juvenilization of the bicycle, their British and European counterparts still affirmed that the bicycle could be an efficient, useful machine if made (and marketed) correctly. When Dr. Stone, the mother of the twins, wonders aloud what Captain Vandenberg would want the bicycle for, the father surmises: ‘Probably just sightseeing’ (116). In addition, then, to its utilitarian value for prospecting, the bicycle is also associated with the needs and interests of adults through sightseeing. But it is only after first establishing the bicycle as an important machine for aiding adults in their everyday work that the novel then moves on to associate them with adult pleasure, such as when Pollux and Castor finally sell their cache of used bicycles to a

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Ross D. Petty, ‘Peddling Schwinn Bicycles: Marketing Lessons from the Leading Post-WWII US Bicycle Brand,’ in Marketing History at the Center: Proceedings of the 13th Biennial Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (Charm), ed. Blaine J. Branchik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 167.

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Martian restaurateur in order for him to rent them to tourists outside his restaurant. Later in the novel – in a memorable bit of anti-bureaucracy satire – Heinlein has the twins jailed for failing to pay the appropriate Martian customs duties and profit taxes on their bicycles. But Grandma Hazel gets the twins off by successfully arguing that the bikes, even when being used for the pleasure of tourists, are still serious and important contributors to Martian society. She declares to the courtroom: ‘albeit a luxury to the tourist, [the renting of bicycles] is a productive activity for export to the unmixed benefit of every city of the Commonwealth and that therefore those bicycles are “articles of production”’ (174); thus, the bikes should be exempt from taxes and duties. The bicycles and their defeat of the Martian bureaucracy allow Heinlein to sound off on one of his favorite mid-career themes: ‘the importance of individual liberty conceived in the American libertarian mode, with a pendant mistrust of “government.”’49 In sum, important aspects to note here are how The Rolling Stones consistently portrays bicycles as worthy of the attention of highly intelligent adults and children, and how it associates these machines with serious, practical pursuits (like prospecting), in addition to being modes of transport that facilitate pleasurable activities (like sightseeing). Mature, practical, pleasurable: these are not words that mainstream American society of the Fifties often equated with the bicycle. Yet Heinlein’s novel, like the rest of the texts discussed in this chapter, offers up an alternative vision of this piece of technology that challenges 1950s American society’s dominant, dismissive view of it. The fact that this work was first published in Boys’ Life and then as a Scribner’s juvenile novel, and therefore had teenagers as its main audience is indeed significant. As Longhurst reminds us, most young cyclists in the 1950s were addressed by texts like bike safety films as being in ‘training for the adult responsibility of automobile driving’ and by Boy Scouts of America pamphlets as being ‘the automobile driver of tomorrow.’50 That is, it was assumed that bicycles were only a momentary stop on the inevitable path toward automobility. But The Rolling Stones subverts this ‘common sense,’ naturalized perspective. For Heinlein, bicycles are a superior and desirable mode of transport; automobiles are an inferior technology that constitute only so much ‘mechanical buffoonery.’

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Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 201. Longhurst, Bike Battles, p. 168, p. 169.

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Stealth and Pragmatics Another sf text published in the Fifties that puts a surprising amount of focus on the bicycle given the time period and – like Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones – envisions the bike enduring far into the future is ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew,’ a novelette written by Poul Anderson and published in Astounding in 1958 (and subsequently expanded into an Ace Double book in 1962 with the title The Makeshift Rocket). As the original magazine title indicates, bicycles play a role in this story about Knud Axel Syrup, a Danish engineer who lands in a decrepit spaceship filled with a cargo of beer on a large asteroid named Grendel and controlled by the British. After discovering that the asteroid has been taken over by a group of Irish nationalists, Herr Syrup must then try to find a way to warn the English at nearby New Winchester of the threat of impending invasion. Tom Shippy finds that ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ has ‘a good claim to be the funniest sci-fi story ever written.’51 But, according to a recent edition of Pohl’s works, ‘[t]he actual title proposed by Poul Anderson’ for this very humorous story ‘was “Bicycle.”’52 Given the fact that bicycles play a less memorable role in this story than its beer-powered spaceship (the eponymous ‘makeshift rocket’ of the Ace Double title), it is striking that the bicycle is highlighted as much as it is by its published magazine title (and even more so by the alternative title of just ‘Bicycle’ that supposedly was at one time considered by Anderson). But, as with the above discussion of Heinlein, the bicycle does indeed play a vital role in the story as a meaningful and lively piece of technology. The published title of the story – ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ – puns on the most famous song ever written about bicycling: ‘Daisy Bell’ (also known as ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ due to its memorable refrain: ‘It won’t be a stylish marriage, / I can’t afford a carriage, / But you’ll look sweet / On the seat of a bicycle built for two’). A love song involving a tandem bicycle and composed in 1892 by Harry Dacre, it was a hit during the ‘bike boom’ of the mid-1890s (when many songs about cycling were 51

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Tom Shippey, ‘Book Review: “A Bicycle Built for Brew” by Poul Anderson,’ Wall Street Journal (August 1, 2014). Web. Last accessed January 17, 2019. Rick Katze, ‘Editor’s Introduction,’ in A Bicycle Built for Brew, vol. 6, The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, ed. Rick Katze and Michael Kerpan (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2014), p. 6. Katze writes elsewhere: ‘The source [of this alternative title] was either Karen Anderson, Poul’s wife, or Astrid Anderson Bear, Poul’s daughter. I’ve had conversations with both so while I’m not entirely sure, it is more likely that it was Astrid.’ ‘Re: “A Bicycle Built for Brew” by Poul Anderson.’ Email message to author (September 16, 2016).

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written).53 Because Anderson’s story early on depicts Herr Syrup riding a bicycle and then later portrays him creating some propulsion for his spaceship from the kegs of beer stowed on board, it might just seem like Anderson couldn’t resist connecting those two details by making a clever pun with ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ when he thought of it. However, Knud Axel Syrup’s pragmatic use of the bicycle throughout the story, and especially the fact that – just when it seems like all hope is lost – the bicycle saves Herr Syrup’s plan to warn New Winchester about the Irish militants, points to the serious and weighty value Anderson ascribes to the bike within this humorous tale. After Knud Axel Syrup and the other crewmembers of his ship (named the Mercury Girl) land on Grendel, they are immediately prohibited from leaving the asteroid, lest they warn the English about the impending attack. At this point, Herr Syrup gets his bicycle out of the ship’s storage and uses it for transportation around Grendel. We see him, in particular, cycle a couple of times to The Alt Heidelberg, the bar run by a Martian named Sarmishkidu von Himmelschmidt, where Syrup develops a plan with Herr von Himmelschmidt and a woman named Emily Croft to warn the British king at New Winchester. More importantly, when at one point Syrup’s crewmates try to rebel against the Irish and destroy some of the terraforming machines on Grendel, Syrup uses his bike to accompany the crew and try to talk them out of their foolish mission. After the crewmates are discovered by the Irish and shot at by machine guns, Herr Syrup ‘stole from the shadows and began to pedal back the way he came’ (29).54 The well-known stealth and speed of the bicycle allow him to return back to the ship undetected, thus escaping the undesirable fate of his friends. The silence of the bicycle has been one of the qualities most celebrated about the machine since the Victorian era. Early advocates of the bicycle such as H. G. Wells boasts of the bicycle’s quietness (and its usefulness for wartime) in his futurological work known as Anticipations (1901) 53

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The song ‘Daisy Bell’ has had some additional intersections with science and sf after Anderson’s story was published. In 1961, an IBM computer at Bells Lab was programmed to ‘sing’ the song ‘Daisy Bell’ in the earliest demonstration of computer speech synthesis. After witnessing the demonstration, famed sf author Arthur C. Clarke referenced the event in 2001: A Space Odyssey, his 1968 novel and subsequent film script (co-written with Stanley Kubrick) in which the malevolent computer HAL sings ‘Daisy Bell’ during its deactivation. Poul Anderson. ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew,’ in A Bicycle Built for Brew, vol. 6, p. 29. All quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter.

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when he envisions the following military scenario: ‘under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will be swift, noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part’ (111). Closer to Anderson’s own time, the stealth of the bicycle was embraced and put into service during World War II. For example, Japanese soldiers famously captured Singapore from the British in a surprise attack that relied on a ‘blitzkrieg of bicycles.’ Similarly, French and Dutch Resistance fighters often utilized the bike for their clandestine missions against Nazi occupation.55 Thus, even though spaceships and automobiles are sure to possess certain advantages and technological superiorities, Anderson’s story depicts the bicycle as remaining unmatched in this futuristic world in terms of speedy silence. Like we see in retrofuturism, ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ goes back to go forward. It looks back to the bicycles of Wells’ fin de siècle period and of the World War II era – bicycles both real and imagined – to project into the future a continued existence for the bicycle. Of course, where Axel von Syrup acquires his deep devotion to cycling is probably from his Danish heritage. As John Clute writes of Herr Syrup’s creator, Poul Anderson: he was ‘born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents’ but ‘lived in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of World War Two.’56 Scholars and urban mobility experts have asserted that those years leading up to World War II coincided with a golden age for the bicycle in Denmark, with its capital city of Copenhagen reaching a ‘cycling peak in 1949.’57 After that, Copenhagen – like most every other American and European city – began being inundated in 55

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See Jim Fitzpatrick, The Bicycle in Wartime: An Illustrated History, revised edition (Kilcoy, Queensland: Star Hill, 2011), pp. 144–53 (invasion of Singapore), pp. 158–64 (use by French Resistance). On bicycles and the Dutch Resistance to Nazi occupation, see Pete Jordan, In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), pp. 157–233. John Clute, ‘Anderson, Poul,’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight (London: Gollancz; updated June 13, 2019). Last accessed September 20, 2019. See Mikael Colville-Andersen, Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), p. 68. On the history of cycling in Denmark, see also: Trine Agervig Carstensen, Anton Stahl Olafsson, Nynne Marie Bech, Thea Scmidt Poulsen, and Chunli Zhao, ‘The Spatio-Temporal Development of Copenhagen’s Bicycle Infrastructure, 1912–2013,’ Geografisk Tidsskrift – Danish Journal of Geography 115, no. 2 (2015), pp. 142–56; Trine Agervig Carstensen and Anne-Katrin Ebert, ‘Cycling Cultures in Northern Europe: From “Golden Age” to “Renaissance,”’ in Cycling and Sustainability. ed. John Parkin (Bingley: Emerald, 2012), pp. 23–58.

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the 1950s and 1960s by unprecedented numbers of automobiles, and thus everyday cycling rates were on the decline in those postwar years. With the global energy crises of the 1970s, however, Denmark began to reverse its auto-centric policies and today Copenhagen – alongside Amsterdam in the Netherlands – is considered one of the premier cycling cities in the world. In short, with his character Herr Syrup, Anderson is likely drawing upon his own first-hand experience with that golden age of cycling in Denmark that immediately preceded the outbreak of war. Anderson uses this historical connection between Denmark and cycling as comedic fodder. When Herr Syrup is bringing his bike on board the ship before they head into space and hopefully carry out their plan to warn New Winchester, Anderson tells us that Herr Syrup ‘took his bicycle by the seat bar and dragged it up into the ship. No Dane is ever quite himself without a bicycle, though it is not true that all of them sleep with their machines. Fewer than ten per cent do this’ (39). Axel von Syrup is not ready to abandon his bicycle even when heading up into space. ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ clearly doesn’t celebrate those who adopt the most recent, cutting-edge technologies; rather, it is Syrup and his team, people associated with the clever and resourceful use of ‘low-tech’ objects, like bicycles and beer, who emerge victorious in this tale. To emphasize a point made earlier in the discussion of The Rolling Stones, this valorization of more primitive technology and marginalization of more complex technology is woven throughout the sf genre. For example, in an early pulp era story – ‘The Conquest of Gola’ (1931) – Leslie F. Stone portrays her alien Golan (i.e., Venusian) women as rejecting the construction of spaceships and travel to other planets, despite being capable of doing both. When Detaxalan (i.e., Earthling) men invade their planet, the Golans can only see the former’s invasive spaceships as ‘playthings’ given to them by their mothers, as the Golans themselves ‘give toys to [their] “little ones.”’58 And although the Detaxlans possess such sophisticated technology, the Golans categorically defeat the human men by story’s end largely by means of mental, non-technological powers. In sum, Stone’s text – as well as those by Heinlein and Anderson – extol more rudimentary forms of technology (or, in the case of Bradbury, extol a complete lack of technology, just simple walking): such rudimentary forms are often shown to be more benign, effective, and fulfilling than their excessively complex counterparts.

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Leslie F. Stone, ‘The Conquest of Gola,’ in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, ed. Justine Larbalestier (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), p. 41. The story originally appeared in the April 1931 issue of Wonder Stories.

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To return now to ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew,’ the reason why Herr Syrup insists on bringing the bicycle on board is (he tells us in his thick Danish accent) so that if the batteries that allow the beer-powered spaceship to function ‘get too veak ve can resharshe dem’ by pedaling the bike while it is ‘hooked to a simple homemade generator’ (55). And that is exactly what happens. The batteries do indeed run down and must be charged up again. Herr Syrup hops into the bike saddle and begins pedaling away while grumbling that ‘de vorst of it is…who is ever going to believe I crossed [outer space] from Grendel to New Vinchester on a bicycle?’ (64). Similar to Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, Anderson’s narrative recovers the lost significance of the bicycle as a pragmatic machine capable of aiding one’s work. Furthermore, it is the bicycle, rather than that slightly more impressive piece of technology – the ‘first beer-powered spaceship in history’ (54) – that ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ ultimately positions as the savior allowing the plucky crew to reach New Winchester and to succeed in their mission. Hence, there is indeed an appropriateness to the prominence of the bike in the story’s title, despite this novelette likely being more often remembered by readers for its eccentric and newfangled depiction of a ship propelled by kegs of beer. Shippey believes that ‘[m]ost important’ for the success of Syrup’s attempt to ‘raise the alarm, with spaceship and radio decommissioned’ is that ‘part of his cargo consists of large barrels of beer.’ However, ‘A Bicycle Built For Brew’ portrays the bicycle as doing the following vital work: facilitating Knud Axel Syrup’s movement around Grendel and hence his mission planning with Herr von Himmelschmidt and Emily Croft; saving Herr Syrup from the incarceration that his crewmates are subjected to; and rescuing the Mercury Girl in its dire moment of having lost power. Anderson’s original idea for a title – simply ‘Bicycle’ – is fitting indeed, for Herr Syrup’s bike is the most vital piece of technology for his success in the narrative.

Metallic Vitality A text that deviates from the above pattern established by Heinlein and Anderson – because it depicts the bicycle in a way that departs from the benevolent images of bikes created by those other writers, and because it is set in the present as opposed to the future – but that nevertheless gives us an unforgettable portrayal of bicycles in a 1950s sf text, is Avram Davidson’s ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ (1958). The story revolves around the characters Ferd and Oscar, co-owners and operators of F&O Bike Shop, and their debates about the aliens who may or may not be

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hiding in their midst. Drawing upon the biological concept of mimicry, Ferd at one point in the story arrives at a theory that safety pins and coat hangers might be the pupa and larval forms of an alien species that in its mature phase morphs into a bicycle, a process given memorable visual expression in an illustration by Friedman that accompanied the story when it first appeared in Galaxy (see Figure 8). Even though the story suggests that some (or most) bikes are aliens employing mimicry, the story’s bicycles always function, at least in part, as signifiers of literal bikes. And despite the villainizing of the bicycle, I argue that the story functions as a positive depiction of the bicycle, particularly for its period of the 1950s. That is, through its representation of bikes as potent entities, ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ obliquely challenges the prevalent notion of the mid-twentieth century that bikes are the impotent, useless detritus of the past. Instead, in this story, they are powerful, lively machines worthy of a continued use as they are in Heinlein and Anderson’s texts. In Davidson’s alternative history of sorts of the 1950s, the bicycle is not relegated to a mere plaything for children or, at the most, to being part of the adult world only as an exploited resource for Ferd and Oscar’s ‘big trade in renting bicycles to picknickers.’59 Instead, bicycles are machines to take note of and to be reckoned with; one ignores them at their peril in Davidson’s story. Most significant is the story’s references to bicycles as lively machines that destabilize the living/nonliving and the organic/inorganic dichotomies. As mentioned above, Ferd conjectures at one point in the story that aliens are using mimicry in their imitations of safety pins, coat hangers, and bicycles. And after smashing up a red French racer bicycle one night in a rage, only to find the next morning the bicycle has been miraculously repaired, Ferd surmises the aliens are capable of something akin to biological regeneration as well. Skeptical of such a suggestion, Oscar asserts that, unlike newts or lobsters that are capable of regeneration, a ‘bike ain’t [alive]’ (54). Further pushing his subversion of the living/nonliving dichotomy, Ferd counters Oscar’s claim by saying a ‘crystal isn’t [alive], either, but a broken crystal can regenerate itself if the conditions are right’ (54). Ferd’s suggestion that crystals and metallic bikes might be alive portends and parallels recent work done in the field known by such names as material ecocriticism and new materialism. One of the field’s primary theorists, Jane Bennett, argues for a perception of nonorganic 59

Avram Davidson, ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters,’ Galaxy 16, no. 1 (1958), p. 50. All quotations will be from this version and be cited parenthetically hereafter.

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Figure 8. The life cycle of an alien life form in ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’

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matter as possessing ‘vitality,’ which Bennett defines as ‘the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.’60 Addressing the materiality of metal in particular, Bennett invokes the postmodern French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari and their perception that metal is the ‘exemplar of a vibrant materiality,’ for a ‘metallic vitality, a (impersonal) life, can be seen in the quivering of free atoms at the edges between the grains of the polycrystalline edifice’ of which metal is composed.61 Related to Ferd’s explicit mention of the liveliness of crystals, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen – in his new materialist analysis of stone – reminds us that the ‘lithic has for too long served as an allegory for nature stilled into resources,’ whereas many of the (often medieval) texts Cohen focuses on instead render stone as ‘ecologies-inmotion…that offer alternative visions in which a gem of cold gleam touched by water explodes in sudden storm, or a rock that calls out to be held burns the hand that grasps its heft.’62 Thus, whatever the possibly nefarious reasons the aliens-as-bicycles have for being on Earth, ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ deploys a striking vision of bikes – a vision unlike what we saw in the works of Heinlein and Anderson, and one more akin to the stones in Cohen’s study – as crackling with life, with becoming, with agency, and not at all as entities that have been chastened into submissive stillness by the world around them. This emphasis on the liveliness of bicycles finds its parallel in some more recent sf. For example, in ‘A Short History of the Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D.’ (1980), Michael Bishop focuses on a xenobiologist – an investigator of extraterrestrial life forms – named Praeger who is stationed on a planet named Draisienne (named after the first ever incarnation of the bicycle, the draisine, invented in 1817 by Karl Drais of Germany). Draisienne is a planet where ‘several different species’ of ‘organic bicycles’ dominate the fauna.63 Bishop’s story shows us these living bicycles frolicking around the landscape, even flying across its skies in the case of the ‘pterocycles’ that ‘soared on Draisienne’s

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61 62

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Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. viii. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 55, p. 59 (emphasis in the original). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 10. Michael Bishop, ‘A Short History of The Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D.,’ in Interfaces, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd (New York: Ace, 1980), p. 101

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winds.’64 Similarly, in ‘To See the Stars from Above’ (2013, from the first volume of Elly Blue’s Bikes in Space series), Jessie Kwak portrays bicycles as animate and lively machines as well, even asserting at one point that they exhibit personality traits like shyness. Furthermore, the assertion by Kwak’s narrator that her bicycle’s carbon fiber parts are alive ‘because carbon is the building block of all life’ resembles Ferd’s provocative suggestion in Davidson’s story that crystals – and, by extension, the bicycles in that story – blur the distinction between life and nonlife.65 Such emphasis on the bicycle’s liveliness in the stories of Bishop, Kwak, and Davidson challenges the popular notion of bicycles as being dead, passive relics of a bygone era. Instead, their depictions portray the bicycle as a vigorous entity, and not at all the inert object that so many people commonly think of the bicycle as being or that popular culture so often depicts it as. By the end of the story, Ferd has been violently thrown off the French racer bicycle and then eventually killed by ‘an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck’ (58). The suggestion appears to be here that the alien species, including its bicycle-form, deem Ferd a threat because he knows too much about them, and therefore he must be killed by the coat hanger before he can act on his sense of urgency that ‘mankind had to be warned’ (58) about these lurking aliens. When a man named Mr. Whatney visits the bike shop after Ferd’s untimely death, he asks Oscar ‘what’s become of the French racer’ that Ferd was thrown from and had destroyed only to find it regenerated the next morning. Oscar replies that ‘I put him out to stud!’ (58), a reference to Oscar’s apparent cross-breeding of bicycles by the story’s end to sell them in his shop. Oscar’s comment implies he now possesses some sort of reproductive control over the alien-bikes. However, I would argue that Davidson’s suggestion here is that Oscar is being dishonest and that the bicycle has escaped from the shop, and thus from Oscar’s control. When Mr. Whatney inquires into the whereabouts of the French racer, Oscar’s face is described as ‘twitch[ing]’ and growing ‘bland’ (58), that is, his face is registering some clear uneasiness surrounding the topic of exactly what has happened to the now vanished French bike. Such details suggest, therefore, not Oscar possessing mastery over the bike, but instead the bicycle holding on to a mastery over itself. Thus, in the spirit of the new material ecocriticism,

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Bishop, ‘Short History,’ p. 102. Jessie Kwak, ‘To See the Stars From Above,’ in Bikes in Space: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction, ed. Elly Blue (Portland, OR: Microcosm Publishing, 2017), p. 22.

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the ‘idea of the human agent’ always being the one that ‘act[s] upon the world…is refuted’ by the bicycle’s own displays of agency in this story: its throwing off of Ferd and its apparent escape from the F&O shop (and hence from Oscar’s reproductive designs for the bike).66 By story’s end, the bicycle appears to be free of a controlling human presence; it is out there in the world, growing, plotting, breeding. In fact, ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ abounds with references not only to the fertility of machines like bicycles, but also with references to sex and reproduction in general, such as Oscar’s sexual encounters with female customers. The title of the story itself gestures toward ideas of wanton, runaway reproduction. Ever the skeptic of Ferd’s theories, Oscar at one point asks his partner how come, if the bikes are a reproducing alien species, ‘we ain’t up to our belly-button in bikes?’ (57). Ferd, referencing the idea that nature is extravagantly wasteful, reminds Oscar that ‘[i]f every codfish egg…or every oyster spawn grew to maturity, a man could walk across the ocean on the backs of all codfish or oysters there’d be’ (57). Similarly, the story, rather than portraying the bicycle as an invention of the nineteenth century that in its obsolescence is now sterile and barren, instead presents the bike as a wildly fecund piece of technology poised to flourish in the future, given the opportunity to be so. And yet, we cannot walk across the ocean on the backs of codfish or oysters, and we are not up to our belly-button in bicycles, because (as Ferd reminds Oscar): ‘So many died, so many were eaten by predatory creatures’ (57). This line raises the ominous specter of what exactly is culling the numbers of the alien-bicycles in the world of the story. The text withholds any clear answers as to if a predator in fact exists and what that predator may be, but in the era of the 1950s we know well enough what preyed on the bicycle: cars and car culture. Automobiles were literally hitting and destroying bikes (and injuring or killing their riders). Furthermore, the suburbanization of communities, the juvenilization of bikes, and the fetishization of the car were all doing their part to keep bike sales and bike use in check. ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ parabolizes, then, the potential the bicycle has always possessed to flourish and become a robust mode of transport – if only ‘invisible’ predators such as an entrenched and pervasive automobility were not preying upon and diminishing the numbers of the bicycle nearly every chance they got. 6 6

Serenella Iovina and Serpil Oppermann, ‘Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych,’ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 3 (2012), p. 465.

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Conclusion All four authors focused on above – Bradbury, Heinlein, Anderson, and Davidson – demonstrate a resistance in some of their works to the values of automobility that were further congealing in the Fifties. In place of the extensive exaltation of the automobile happening in American culture, Bradbury demonizes the car, Heinlein belittles it, and Anderson and Davidson completely ignore the machine in the works we examined. There is clearly something at stake in this challenging of the normal hierarchy, for the bicycle – then as well as now – embodies a radically different set of social and political commitments than does the car. Most relevant to the 1950s context, by forcing people who rely heavily on bikes for their mobility needs to live more localized lives, this machine resists the unimpeded growth of communities – particularly the new suburbs of the 1950s – that transport technologies like the car often foster. Furthermore, as discussed in this book’s introduction, the bicycle contributes to greater social equality, for the poor and the people of color are often stranded at the margins of large, dispersed cities without cars and without convenient public transportation. Also, the bicycle provides a materiality that is ‘emblematic of a sustainable future’ and that rejects the car’s contributions to environmental crises such as air quality deterioration and global climate change.67 We can, therefore, usefully read these sf texts from the 1950s in our own twenty-first century and employ them as a catalyst for rethinking some of our own over-infatuation with the latest technology – the latest car, the latest smartphone – just because it is new and just because it is more sophisticated. In the context of transportation, such an infatuation with the new threatens to lead us down a dark path toward a less just, less healthy, less sustainable future. These texts show in their valorization of the bicycle that we can also go back to the old to arrive at the new; we can also travel to the past to journey to the future. We exile the bicycle fully to the past at our peril. The next chapter focuses on the New Wave era (c.1960–75) to show how some authors then were also going back to the bicycle and projecting it into the future, while some other authors were embracing another old, new thing: the electric car.

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Dave Horton, ‘Environmentalism and the Bicycle,’ Environmental Politics 15, no. 1 (2006), p. 53.

Chapter 3 Electric Cars, Autoduelling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave Electric Cars, Autoduelling, and Bike Shares

By 1966, the United States was becoming increasingly mired in the Vietnam War (c.1955–75). A military conflict fought in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the war had as its primary goal to keep an anticommunist South Vietnamese government from being toppled by the communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong armies. The overarching aim, therefore, was to halt the spread of communism across Southeast Asia. Americans had been in Vietnam since 1950, advising the French in their effort to stop an anti-French insurgency. Up until 1964, American leaders favored this kind of indirect involvement in Vietnam: military advising of the French and the South Vietnamese, limited aerial bombing of the North Vietnamese, and so forth. In 1965, however, the war quickly escalated when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed 3,500 US Marines to South Vietnam, thus initiating an American ground war. Later that year, he sent in the First Cavalry, an army division consisting of 16,000 men, 435 helicopters, and 1,600 vehicles. Operation Rolling Thunder – the name of the aerial bombardment campaign against North Vietnam – greatly expanded its list of targets and its frequency of missions in 1966.1 Given the growing unpopularity for the war – its necessity was questioned by many Americans and major television networks were beginning to broadcast images of American brutality against Vietnamese peasants – it is somewhat shocking to hear the President bring up the war in remarks he gave at the White House on September 9th, 1966. On this day, Johnson was celebrating the signing of some decidedly non-military, non-Vietnam-related legislation: the National Traffic and Motor Safety Act (establishing new requirements for safety features 1

For a useful overview of the Vietnam War – and a source that this opening paragraph draws its information from – see Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). 97

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on cars) and the Highway Safety Act (establishing a national highway safety program). Yet, he brings up the war almost immediately. After his opening salutation, Johnson launches into: ‘Over the Labor Day weekend, 29 American servicemen died in Vietnam.’2 Again, for a speech celebrating two pieces of transportation-related legislation, Johnson reminding his audience right away that 29 soldiers just lost their lives over the same holiday weekend when many Americans were leisurely enjoying grill-outs, fireworks, and pools with friends and family seems baffling. But he has a strategy. Johnson then moves to reminding his listeners that the Vietnam War is perhaps not what people should be most worried about. Instead, it is the fact that ‘[d]uring the same Labor Day weekend, 614 Americans died on our highways in automobile accidents.’ The President quickly repeats these numbers for optimal effect: ‘Twenty-nine on the battlefield. Six hundred and fourteen on the highways.’ Johnson’s point here is clear: a greater scourge than war – but one that has not yet inspired the indignation that his unpopular Vietnam War has – is the one afflicting American highways.3 For him, the deaths occurring right here at home on our roads truly constitute (what he calls in another speech given five months earlier) ‘a senseless slaughter.’4 What this chapter focuses on are three works from the New Wave era (c.1960–75), the era of sf coinciding with the Vietnam War: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Harlan Ellison’s ‘Along the Scenic Route’ (1969), and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975). The primary goal of the chapter will be to highlight how sf writers of the Sixties and Seventies responded to two important events related to transportation. First, we will see the reaction of several writers to the alarming spike in annual automobile fatalities that began in the early 1960s, a spike that lurks

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Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Remarks at the Signing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act’ (September 9, 1966). Harlan Ellison, one of the New Wave authors this chapter focuses on, makes a point like Johnson’s here. In the story ‘Corpse’ (1972), Ellison shows a character reading in a publication how ‘[i]n the first nine years of the war in Indochina [i.e., the Vietnam War] 40,000 Americans were killed in combat; during the same period 437,000 were killed in auto accidents – eleven times as many.’ Harlan Ellison, ‘Corpse,’ in Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 130. Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Remarks Upon Proclaiming National Defense Transportation Day and National Transportation Week.’ April 22, 1966. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239274.

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behind the comments above by President Johnson in which he declares the highways of the United States far more dangerous places than the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia. According to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), deaths on American roads and highways rose from 36,399 in 1960 to 54,052 in 1973: an increase of nearly 20,000 deaths a year in just a little over a decade’s time.5 Additionally, by the 1960s, ‘[e]ach year 100,000 Americans are permanently disabled’ and ‘nearly 4 million Americans are injured’ on their roads.6 Second, this chapter explores how the emerging environmentalist movement of the Sixties and Seventies shaped the writings of Le Guin, Ellison, and Callenbach. In other words, the New Wave era coincided with a stark increase in awareness regarding humanity’s contributions to various types of ecological threats such as the ‘exponential growth of industrial pollution, the resource consumption of the rising world economy, or of sheer human numbers within the recently discovered limits of Earth as a “small planet.”’7 In the United States, such awareness culminated in the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970, as well as the passing of landmark environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). Appropriately, many sf texts at this time were deeply concerned about the automobile’s role in smog and other forms of pollution. Given the rise in automobile fatalities and the growing knowledge of the automobile’s unsustainability, it should come as no surprise that American sf literature of the 1960s and 1970s does not characterize the modern, internal combustion car in a particularly favorable light. More often than not, New Wave writers portray automobiles as murderous, pollution-belching monsters, and look instead to alternatives such as electric cars and human-powered bicycles.

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National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2016: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System (Washington, DC: US Department of Transportation, 2018), 200, https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/ Api/Public/ViewPublication/812554. Johnson, ‘Remarks Upon Proclaiming National Defense Transportation Day and National Transportation Week.’ Sabine Höhler, ‘“The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People:” Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction,’ in Canavan and Robinson, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, p. 101.

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Resurrecting the Electric Car The Left Hand of Darkness is one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most acclaimed works, and arguably her most famous one. Winner of the both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel, the work is most often discussed in terms of its depictions of gender. The innovative novum Le Guin creates for The Left Hand of Darkness is a race of people called Gethenians (named after their planet Gethen, also called Winter) who are biologically androgynous for most of their lives. Gethenians assume biological maleness or femaleness a few days each month for the sake of sexual fulfillment and reproduction. The protagonist of the novel and primary narrator is Genly Ai, an envoy from Terra (Earth) who has been living on Gethen for two years to convince Gethen to join a political federation of planets called the Ekumen. However, the discussion below will assert that transportation – if not equal to the novel’s more famous concerns with gender – comprises a vital topic for The Left Hand of Darkness. For Le Guin, transportation is a pressing concern, for modes of transport are in large part responsible for the overall prosperity and contentment – or overall misery and dissatisfaction – of a society. The Left Hand of Darkness opens on a scene that leads us to believe that, even though we are on an entirely different planet set in a distant future, we might be in a world like that of late twentieth-century America in terms of the dominance of automobility. The first chapter focuses on an elaborate parade organized by Argaven, the king of the nation of Karhide in which the opening chapters are set. The parade celebrates the installation of an arch which marks the completion of a new road and a new port, ‘a great operation of dredging and building and roadmaking which has taken five years.’8 Massive road-building projects that take years to complete and that politicians believe constitute evidence of strong leadership should sound as familiar to readers of Le Guin’s novel in 1969 as it does to readers today. Road repairs and new roads are often celebrated by politicians as concrete evidence (literally) that they are effective leaders who know how to get things done. As Elly Blue asserts: ‘new highway projects are still political gold. Skill at leveraging federal money for road projects in one’s district is a standard metric of Congressional electability.’9 When the parade ends, and Genly Ai tells us ‘the king’s car drove off’ (8),

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Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 2000), p. 4. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter. Elly Blue, Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy, 2nd edition (Portland, OR: Microcosm Publishing, 2016), p. 48.

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readers might be forgiven again for thinking that, at least in terms of transportation, Gethen feels like a thinly disguised version of contemporary America and other societies in which automobiles and roads dominate so many aspects of everyday life. However, across Le Guin’s New Wave-era works, even though automobiles and roads appear, they clearly have diminished roles or utilize significantly different technology compared to that of mid-twentieth-century America. For example, in The Dispossessed, Le Guin presents a capitalist planet named Urras that has largely banished the private car. The novel’s protagonist, Shevek, rides in a hired car upon first arriving in Urras, at which point the narrator informs us: ‘There were not many of [the hired cars] on the roads: the hire was expensive, and few people owned a car privately because they were heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural resources or to foul the environment with waste products were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation.’10 On Shevek’s home of Anarres, a nearby planet colonized by anarchists who fled Urras nearly two hundred years before the novel opens, automobiles (either private or for-hire) are an even rarer sight. Instead, people, food, and goods move between towns and settlements by means of trains and dirigibles.11 For their transportation needs, large cities such as Abbenay utilize omnibuses ‘crammed full of people’ and feature the occasional ‘little boy on a homemade tricycle.’12 Put simply, despite their vast political and social differences, the automobile has been relegated to a marginal role in the two worlds that The Dispossessed depicts. Instead, public transport like subways, buses, and trains and low-impact vehicles like tricycles and dirigibles thrive. In The Left Hand of Darkness, though, the diversity of modes of transport that populate The Dispossessed is not on display. Instead, befitting the harsh, barren world The Left Hand of Darkness focuses on, transportation options are minimal and are confined largely to motorized land vehicles. However, the way in which Le Guin describes these vehicles, as well as how they are used and what their status is in society, all deserve attention. First off, all motorized vehicles on Gethen appear to run on electricity, rather than the widespread use of gasoline and diesel

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Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (New York: Avon, 1974), pp. 65–66. Le Guin’s use of dirigibles as a more ecologically benign form of air transport foreshadows what Paolo Bacigalupi portrays in his The Windup Girl and Kim Stanley Robinson in his New York 2140. See Chapter 5 for more on dirigibles. Le Guin, Dispossessed, p. 81.

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familiar to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. For example, when King Argaven’s cousin Tibe leaves the parade celebrating the road completion, he departs in a ‘little black electric car’ (9). Additionally, Ai travels between two nations on Gethen in a caravan of what are called ‘landboats,’ ‘quiet-running, barge-like trucks on caterpillar treads’ (49). Ai goes on to say: ‘All shipping on the Great Continent is by these electric-powered trucks’ (49). In a sense, then, Le Guin’s various electric vehicles – like human-powered bicycles – represent another form of retrofuturism, that is, a form of traveling to the past to travel to the future. Le Guin returns to the fascination (discussed in this book’s introduction) by various fin de siècle authors with electric automobiles. Furthermore, her electric cars participate in the Gernsbackian technooptimism we saw in Chapter 1, for Le Guin and those pulp era writers all resist wholly rejecting the automobile. Instead, they see the car as redeemable – but only if some significant alterations are made to its fundamental DNA. As mentioned in my intro chapter, electric cars were technological realities as far back as the 1880s, but were obsolete curiosities by the 1930s. Yet, in a potential reversal of fate for the electric car, the growing environmental concerns of the 1960s – concerns instigated by influential texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and that climaxed in the United States with landmark legislation such as the Clean Air Act (1970) – brought renewed attention back to these vehicles.13 For example, a 1967 article muses: ‘Some experts say that even with controls on combustion-engine exhausts, the gain in reducing air pollution from internal combustion engines will be more than wiped out by the larger number of vehicles. The auto companies, already defensive about the attacks on them regarding safety of their vehicles, and cognizant of the growing Government interest in finding effective means of combating air pollution, are announcing their interest in electric sources and other means of powering vehicles.’14 In terms of sf literature, a connection between automobiles and pollution certainly is nothing unique to the New Wave. References to the polluting nature of cars can be tracked all the way back to David H. Keller’s ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ (1928). As we saw in Chapter 1, Keller’s story repeatedly references the car’s extensive poisoning of the

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First passed in 1963, the Clean Air Act was amended in 1965 to create and enforce auto emission standards, before receiving extensive and significant amendments in 1970. Nilo Lindgren, ‘Electric Cars – Hope Springs Eternal,’ IEEE Spectrum 4, no. 4 (1967), p. 49.

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air with carbon monoxide fumes, as seen when Keller, describing the streets of New York City, writes: ‘The air was filled with the dangerous vapors generated by the combustion of millions of gallons of gasoline and its substitutes.’15 We saw in Chapter 1 as well how a later text like Paul Antony Jones’ Extinction Point (2012) presents a cyclist who, after an apocalypse that has killed every motorist (and more) in New York City, can still allow herself amid all that death to ‘bask in the simple illusion’ that she is biking in rural Italy or France. This illusion is sustainable because, instead of breathing in car exhaust, she can distinctly smell for the first time Central Park’s ‘heady aroma of eight hundred acres of grass, trees, and flowerbeds.’16 Throughout the New Wave, however, a more pronounced trend emerges of writers connecting cars with degraded air quality. For example, in Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories (1975), concerns over the car’s role in pollution show up in ‘Corpse,’ ‘Along the Scenic Route,’ and ‘Bleeding Stones.’ The latter tale begins with a lengthy, quasiscientific paragraph detailing the drastically altered chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere after ‘[o]ver a hundred years of the Industrial Revolution.’ The story then proceeds to depict the emergence in New York City of murderous gargoyles, the soon-to-be inheritors of this polluted Earth who are ‘made to breathe this new air,’ whereas humanity, it seems, is about to be killed off by their inability to survive in the degraded air.17 New Wave anxiety over the car’s role in air pollution also appears in William Earls’ ‘Traffic Problem’ (1970), R. A. Lafferty’s ‘Interurban Queen’ (1970), and in Alan Dean Foster’s ‘Why Johnny Can’t Speed’ (1971, discussed at more length below). Similarly, in John Jakes’ On Wheels (1973), an overpopulated future America defined by megacities and superhighways drowns in ‘clouds of pollutants’ and reels from air that ‘smelled of the chemicals of the highway and other, more pungent ones besides.’18 To address such pollution, the government has made it illegal to operate a ‘machine powered by…internal combustion’ and ‘not equipped with the required anti-pollutant devices.’19 Most everybody in Jakes’ novel, therefore, drives electric vehicles or turbine cars, with the latter apparently running on some unspecified, cleaner alternative

15

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David H. Keller, ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians,’ Amazing Stories 2, no. 11 (February 1928), p. 1051. Paul Antony Jones, Extinction Point (Las Vegas: 47North, 2012), p. 185. Harlan Ellison, ‘Bleeding Stones,’ in Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 180, p. 182. John Jakes, On Wheels (New York: Warner, 1973), p. 59, p. 104. Jakes, On Wheels, p. 66.

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to gasoline.20 And in a 1973 article published in Analog (the retitled continuation of Astounding), aerospace engineer William J. D. Escher describes in detail the scientific possibility of a hydrogen–oxygen automobile – a car that essentially runs on water – and the potential of such a vehicle to produce ‘zero air pollution.’21 Like the hydrogen–oxygen car, manufacturers of electric cars today such as Elon Musk’s Tesla company boast how these vehicles are – at least in terms of their tailpipe emissions – completely devoid of greenhouse gasses. A problem that surrounds electric cars, though, is (as one article puts it) ‘electric cars are only as good as the electricity that charges them.’22 That is, skeptics of electric cars proclaim that if an electric car’s battery relies on electricity from predominantly coal-burning power plants to recharge, then the vehicle loses much of its ‘green’ credentials.23 But if an electric car routinely recharges its battery from a power plant that generates its electricity largely from non-carbon sources (such as from solar, wind, and/or nuclear energy), then electric cars can indeed be environmentally clean vehicles.24 20

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Chrysler produced a turbine car from 1963 to 1964, but it never went into large-scale production. This car’s turbine engine was famous for being able to run on various fuels, including peanut oil, soybean oil, and alcohol. See Paul J. C. Friedlander, ‘Gas Turbines: Present and Future,’ New York Times (April 29, 1973). Last accessed November 11, 2019. Jakes likely intends for us to imagine the turbine cars in On Wheels running on a non-fossil fuel like these. Primarily, however, his novel focuses on men who frequently use illegal gasoline cars for racing and for pleasure rides because such vehicles are faster and less emasculating. William J. D. Escher, ‘The Case for the Hydrogen–Oxygen Car,’ in The Analog Science Fact Reader, ed. Ben Bova (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), p. 146. This article originally appeared in the September 1973 issue of Analog. For more on pollution in sf, see Brian M. Stableford, ‘Pollution,’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz; updated 3 April 2015, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/pollution. Last accessed June 4, 2018. David Biello, ‘Electric Cars are Not Necessarily Clean,’ Scientific American (May 11, 2016). Some 1960s readers would have been familiar with this potential limitation of electric cars. For example, an article from 1967 states: ‘Some of the reduction in air pollution achieved by using exhaustless electrics may be offset, however, by increased exhausts from the nation’s electric generating plants.’ ‘Electric Cars: They’re Cleaner, But…’ Science News 91, no. 10 (March 11, 1967), p. 232. In a story that epitomizes the dream of electric cars and clean energy – a story often referred to as the ‘Nikola Tesla electric car hoax’ – Tesla (one of the founders of alternating current electricity) supposedly demonstrated in

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In Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the ultimate power source of its electric cars is left unspecified. However, readers appear invited to imagine it as predominantly clean energy, for, as Ai at one point says, ‘Winter hasn’t achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid’ (98–99, emphasis added). The exact nature of ‘the price that Terra paid’ is left ambiguous, although related works set in the same fictional universe as Left Hand of Darkness such as The Dispossessed provide a clearer sense of the calamity that has occurred on Earth. Near the end of the latter novel, a Terran ambassador laments to Shevek: ‘My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species…There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot.’25 Thus, Gethen in Left Hand of Darkness appears to have never suffered any notable environmental disruption (in the form of air pollution, humancaused global warming, etc.) akin to what Terra experienced and akin to what parts of our planet were experiencing at the time Le Guin was writing her New Wave works in the Sixties and Seventies. Put another way, we see in Le Guin another instance of sf’s adeptness at imagining other kinds of histories that might have unfolded, histories in which more sustainable modes of transport than the gasoline-powered car were central. Beside the potentially problematic issue of the source of an electric car’s electricity, such vehicles have historically struggled with the issue of how far the car can travel before its battery needs a recharge. ‘Range anxiety’ – the fear of running out of battery power and then being stranded out on the road with no charging station around – has hobbled the sales of electric cars since their invention. An article from around the time Le Guin publishes The Left Hand of Darkness conveys this anxiety when (quoting from a US government report) it talks about how ‘even a small car, cannot have a range of 150 miles with any presently available storage-battery systems.’26 Yet, despite electric cars possessing this limitation, Le Guin persists in populating works like The Left Hand of Darkness with such vehicles out of an apparent conviction that they still represent one of the best possible versions of automobile technology. She even acknowledges the ‘range problem’ of electric cars by referencing how, during Ai’s trip to Orgoreyn via a landboat

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1931 a modified electric car that recharged itself wirelessly. The car, it was said, charged itself by drawing electricity from out of the air surrounding it. However, no credible evidence exists that Tesla ever invented such a car. Le Guin, Dispossessed, p. 279. ‘Electric Cars: They’re Cleaner, But…’ p. 232.

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caravan, the ‘truck-batteries were recharged’ (51). Similarly, when Ai is being transported to an Orgota labor camp with a group of other prisoners, he remarks that stops occurred ‘to change drivers and recharge batteries’ (169). In another of her novels from this era – The Lathe of Heaven (1971) – Le Guin even explicitly depicts the main character’s battery-powered car (here called a batcar) running out of a charge: ‘A man in his position…of course drove a batcar. But the battery gave out and he couldn’t get to a recharger because the crowds in the street were so thick. He had to get out and walk.’27 But what the electric car might lack in terms of convenient long-range travel, it can make up for in terms of environmental benefits and in terms of its contributions to a more restrained way of living. It is this Gethenian preference for restraint that we turn to next.

Slow and Restrained Travel One of the most constant images Le Guin gives us in her The Left Hand of Darkness is that of a race of people who have embraced slow transport, even when it is fully motorized. Much of the reason for this slow movement has to do, of course, with environmental factors. Given the harsh wintery conditions on Gethen, therefore, many people – such as those living in the nation of Karhide – ‘go afoot, mostly; they have no beasts of burden, no flying vehicles, the weather makes slow going for powered traffic most of the year, and they are not a people who hurry’ (41). In short, Gethenians have not felt compelled to force their technological will upon their surroundings. They have accepted that long-distance movement between towns or between nations can only take place, for the majority of people, during small windows of time in the summer. Ai informs us: ‘During the deep-snow months, slow tractor-plows, power-sledges, and the erratic ice-ships on frozen rivers are the only transport beside skis and manhauled sledges; during the Thaw no form of transport is reliable; so most freight traffic goes with a rush, come summer. The roads then are thick with caravans’ (49–50). However, in addition to environmental limitations, it also appears that slow transport is the result of certain preferences and a particular value system entrenched within many Gethenian cultures. For example, even when people are traveling during the ‘rush, come summer,’ rush is revealed to be a distinctly relative term. Ai notes that the summer caravans ‘[move] along…quite steadily at the rate of 25 miles per hour… 27

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 114.

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Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans [Earthlings] why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?” No disputing tastes’ (50). Gethenians have asked themselves that all-important question that many sf texts depict people as – often with tragic consequences – having refrained from asking: just because we can do something, should we do it? (We never see Victor, for example, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818] asking whether, just because he can create a new life form from reanimated cadaver parts, he should. The results of such an experiment are, of course, wholly catastrophic for Victor.) Le Guin tells us her Gethenians possess the capacity to make their vehicles move faster; they have simply decided that moving faster doesn’t interest them and so they have not pursued that manifestation of technological development. We also learn in these same sections of the novel that Gethenian values extend to include a dismissal of what we often consider progress. Ai remarks: ‘Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence’ (50). Thus, in their transportation habits, the Gethenians reject the values that are highly valorized in American capitalist society: speed, efficiency, advancement. Instead, they privilege values that often sponsor a person’s decision to, say, commute to work by bicycle instead of by car. Sure, the car will likely (though not always) get people where they are going more quickly, but often at the expense of people being as ‘present’ as they might be: noticing more details about the environment along their route, feeling more fully integrated into their surroundings (instead of isolated and sealed up in a box made of metal, plastic, and glass), and so forth. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in a now-famous quote about cycling, a quote that memorably references this superior ability of the bicycle to put people in touch with the environment through which their vehicle moves: ‘It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.’ Hemingway’s musings on the bicycle continue: ‘Thus you remember them [the hills] as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.’28

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Ernest Hemingway, ‘Battle for Paris,’ in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: A Touchstone Book, 1998), p. 364. For more on Hemingway and bicycles, see William Boelhower, ‘Hemingway, the Figure of the Bicycle, and Avant-garde Paris,’ Hemingway Review 34, no. 2 (2015), pp. 52–71.

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When Ai is out driving in a car for four days while visiting another nation of Gethen called Orgoreyn, he at one point finds himself uncomfortably out of touch (in a way Hemingway would understand) with the notoriously frigid weather of this planet. Ai acknowledges: ‘Ever since I had set off by car…I had been missing something. But what? I felt insulated. I had not felt the cold, lately’ (147). Such a confession is surprising, for Ai often complains of the cold in the pages leading up to this remark. But for writers like Le Guin and Hemingway, people excessively confined to an automobile might find themselves missing even the parts of their environment – bone-chilling temperatures, leg-burning hills – that they thought they could happily do without. Later in the novel, as Genly Ai labors in Orgoreyn to try to get its rulers called the Commensals to join the Ekumen (after having failed to accomplish this goal in Karhide), we see Ai dangling the promise of space travel to an audience that has never performed such a feat before. He remarks how people in Orgoreyn, after becoming members of the Ekumen, may want to get their own Star Ship. This rhetorical strategy of Ai’s appears wise, for moments earlier in the conversation a Commensal named Yegey had belittled his own planet as a ‘not…very clever world’ because it doesn’t even ‘have Star Ships and so on’ (138). However, rather than creating the excitement Ai likely expected it to make, his suggestion that Gethenians might finally obtain a machine that would allow them to move faster than ever before and conquer some of the vast distance of outer space engenders only mockery and derision. One of the Commensals named Humery responds by ‘wheez[ing]…in disgust and amusement’ and uttering ‘You want us to go shooting off into the Void? Ugh!’ (139, emphasis in the original). The choice of the word ‘Void’ here indicates Gethenians like Humery perceive outer space as an objectionable non-place unsuited for being traversed by transportation machines. Once again, as with their privileging of presence over speed, of restraint over expansion, Gethenians demonstrate values that are strikingly at odds with those that dominate most modern Western societies such as the promotion of speed, of technological growth, and of the annihilation of distance.

Human-Powered Movement Across her New Wave-era works, Le Guin appears deeply skeptical of advanced transport machines in general, seeing them quite often as synonymous with authoritarianism (as with the helicopters and armored cars that violently repress a peaceful political march in

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The Dispossessed) and with colonialism (as with the helicopters that repeatedly murder the natives in The Word for World is Forest [1972]). And in The Left Hand of Darkness it is not advanced motorized vehicles like the road-packers or landboats that we occasionally hear about (essentially large snowplows and large passenger trucks, respectively), or even Genly Ai’s Star Ship that finally appears in the closing pages, that are portrayed in the most impressive or positive light. Instead, it is simple human-powered movement. The final quarter of the novel focuses almost exclusively on an epic trek performed by Ai and Estraven across the harsh and unforgiving Gobrin ice sheet to save Ai from the Orgota captors who had incarcerated him in a work camp and nearly killed him. At times the two travelers avail themselves of skis to traverse the snow, but at other moments it is a grueling climb up rock, march through rain, or trudge through snow using only their feet. All the time, Ai and Estraven take turns being put in harness and pulling a sledge with their supplies. When they arrive at their destination, Ai calculates they had come ‘840 miles…across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other’ (272). One might think that after such an arduous 81 day, 840 mile hike that nearly proved fatal a few times, Genly Ai would be disgusted at the idea of walking again any time soon. However, even after his Star Ship has finally descended onto Gethen and after his shipmates who were on board have ‘spread out…all over the planet’ in ‘aircars’ (297) they brought with them, we still see Ai walking. The closing pages contain Ai’s description of how he ‘walked east and south into the steep harsh country full of crags and green hills and great rivers and lonely houses’ (298) until he finally arrives at Estre, the hometown of his recently killed friend and former travel companion, Estraven. There, he visits Estraven’s father and discovers that Estraven has a son. The fact that Ai chooses to walk to Estre – instead of availing himself of the convenience that the now-readily available aircar would offer – suggests that Ai must have found something deeply satisfying about his demanding, low-tech march across the Gethenian wilderness, something that he wishes to duplicate (at least in a more modest way) in his walk to Estraven’s town. The walk might also serve as a way for Ai to feel a sense of communion with the deceased Estraven, for their friendship clearly matured and blossomed under the conditions of their formidable journey on foot and ski. In a way that resembles what we saw Bradbury depicting in ‘The Pedestrian’ and Fahrenheit 451, Le Guin reminds us that advanced mechanical transportation will never be able to fulfill all our needs. In

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the previous chapter, we saw how Bradbury’s descriptions of walking often emphasize its power to replenish our spirits and to activate our individualism. With Le Guin’s image of Ai walking to visit Estraven’s town, and to hopefully find some solace or closure over his friend’s death by journeying there, also taps into a spiritual aspect of walking. (Estraven appears to experience his own Bradbury-esque moment of spiritual fulfillment during the trek when he sees the Gobrin Glacier for the first time and, upon seeing the glacier’s ‘magnificent and unspeakable desolation,’ says to Ai: ‘I’m glad I have lived to see this’ [220]).29 But Le Guin – much more than Bradbury – also highlights the practicability and flexibility of human-powered movement (at least given certain conditions and terrains). In other words, Le Guin’s portrayal of an epic march also resembles what Octavia Butler presents in her Parable of the Sower (discussed in Chapter 5), for both Le Guin and Butler show human-powered movement to be a powerful force capable of prevailing over vast distances and inhospitable landscapes. But all three texts – Fahrenheit 451, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Parable of the Sower – accentuate walking’s ability to forge deep bonds between people: between Montag and Clarisse in Bradbury, between Ai and Estraven in Le Guin, and between Lauren and her burgeoning Earthseed community in Butler. Such bonds are unlikely to develop through the extravagant speed, relative comfort, and physical alienation (from one’s environment, from most other people, etc.) of most car or airplane trips.

Mobility and Communication Technology One of the significant ways in which Le Guin addresses problems associated with transportation and distance is through her repeated references across many of her works to an invention she calls ‘the ansible.’ First described in Le Guin’s debut novel Rocannon’s World (1966), 29

Interestingly, Faxe – a Handdara Weaver or Foreteller (a kind of prophet) – repeats Estraven’s line here word-for-word near the end of the novel. In this later scene, Faxe expresses wonder at the much-anticipated descent of Ai’s Star Ship. Thus, whereas Estraven conveys awe over a remote yet sublime feature of nature like a glacier that one has to earn the rare chance to see by employing intensive human-powered movement, Faxe appears to abandon typical Gethenian values that favor slow movement and more rudimentary machinery. That is, although Faxe might just be registering joy at the prospect of Gethen finally joining the Ekumen, his comment also strongly suggests that he might now desire advanced Star Ships for his people after seeing one in all its radiance.

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the ansible device makes instantaneous, faster-than-light communication possible between two locations and plays an important role in works like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Word for World is Forest. In The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, as Genly Ai engages in his diplomatic mission in Orgoreyn – the mission that attempts to bring all of Gethen into the Ekumen – one of the benefits he trumpets during a meeting with the Commensals (the Orgota leaders) is ‘[o]pen trade…in knowledge, technologies, ideas, philosophies, art, medicine, science, theory’ (138). As Ai acknowledges, given the vast distances of space, actual physical contact between Gethen and other member planets of the Ekumen is unlikely; thus, the ansible still allows for a robust exchange of culture and ideas between distant worlds. In The Dispossessed, one character even expresses a hope that the ansible can help bring a universal, utopian government into existence: ‘It would make a league of worlds possible. A federation.’30 What Le Guin presents with the ansible, therefore, is the hope that ‘Information Communication Technologies will destroy the need for physical mobility. So the argument goes that virtual mobilities will negate physical displacement because travelling for face-to-face communication has become unnecessary.’31 What joining the Ekumen might lack in terms of a direct, physical conquest of space and distance, it supposedly will make up for with the more benevolently indirect, immaterial conquest of space and distance offered by the ansible. As Ai goes on to describe the ansible to the Commensals: ‘With the ansible communicator, you could talk with [another world] as if by radio with the next town…The kind of trade I speak of can be highly profitable, but it consists largely of simple communication rather than of transportation’ (138). Just as the Internet and other global communications systems of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rendered a good deal of the actual physical movement of people and things (such as books, letters, and documents) obsolete, so too the ansible carries with it the promise that people might be able to abandon the potentially unsustainable and ecologically destructive necessity of moving certain physical entities across space.32 30 31 32

Le Guin, Dispossessed, p. 277. Peter Adey, Mobility, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 253. A similar belief in the environmental benefits of advanced communications technologies appears in Callenbach’s Ecotopia (a work discussed below). When describing the use of television and other communications technologies by the citizens of the environmental utopia known as Ecotopia, Callenbach’s narrator writes: ‘they employ video devices…extensively… Feeling that they should transport their bodies only when it’s a pleasure,

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Recent research in mobility studies has shown, however, that much of this promise has not been fulfilled. As David Morley argues: ‘Overall, transport and telecommunications actually feed off and fuel, more than simply substitute, each other.’33 Rather than make much physical movement obsolete, recent communications technologies actually allow people to be more on the move. No longer tethered to an office, people can now turn their cars into mobile work spaces. Rather than be confined to a landline telephone, people can now use mobile phones to carry their (sometimes very intimate) conversations out into streets, subways, and cafes. Nonetheless, even though societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not found a way to embrace the power of contemporary telecommunications to make much travel obsolete, the potential is still there. Witness, for example, how some organizations are putting on virtual conferences in lieu of physical gatherings (or, at least, are Skyping in a small percentage of conference speakers), or how electronic communication has threatened to render extinct some jobs like bicycle messengers.34 I subscribe, therefore, to the following observation by Rob Latham: Le Guin draws a distinction (a quite reasonable one in my view) between military–industrial technologies designed for violent purposes, whether warfare or resource extraction, and communication technologies, which allow for the exchange of ideas and information…Le Guin, to her credit, resists the assumption, common to some New Wave texts, that Western technoscience itself has been irreparably contaminated by its conscription for technoimperialist ends.35 As Latham points out, Le Guin sees the potential for communication technologies to represent a form of technology that could be used for some beneficial ends: to allow us to drive and fly less, to exchange

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they seldom travel “on business” in our manner. Instead, they tend to transact business by using their picturephones.’ Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Toronto: Bantam, 1982), p. 49. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter. David Morley, ‘At Home with the Media,’ in The Cybercities Reader, ed. Steve Graham (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 254. On the latter, see David Kravets, ‘Internet Endangers Big-City Tradition: The Bike Messenger,’ Wired (July 24, 2008). Rob Latham, ‘Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction,’ in Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, ed. Rob Latham (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 498–99 (emphasis in the original).

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peaceful ideas, and so forth. The fact that many of us have not allowed communication technologies to reach their fullest potential to alter our entrenched attitudes toward space, distance, and mobility does not negate Le Guin’s ideas about the constructive potential of an a­ nsible-like device.

The New Gods of the Freeway As seen above, one trait that scholars like Latham see as unifying many New Wave writers – British and American – is a general pessimism regarding technology and science. Elsewhere, Latham sums up the New Wave as constituting a ‘deliberate denial of the technological progress celebrated by [Astounding editor John W.] Campbell and his heirs.’36 Similarly, Luckhurst perceives this era as characterized by a ‘refusal of the shiny promise of technological modernity.’37 In short, an emphatic refusal of the widespread, mid-century confidence that scientists and engineers might give us a better and brighter world radiates from the works of sf writers of the 1960s and early 1970s. Arguably the most strident and influential New Wave critic of humanity’s obsession with technology in general – and with automobiles in particular – was the British writer J. G. Ballard.38 In an introduction to a French edition of his controversial novel Crash (1973) – a work that relentlessly and explicitly explores a group of people’s sexual obsession with car crashes and their mutilated bodies (both organic and metallic) – Ballard proclaims that the novel’s focus on automobiles serves as ‘a cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.’39 Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974) – a modern-day retelling of Robinson Crusoe involving a

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Rob Latham, ‘The New Wave,’ in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 210. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 143. Despite his pronounced and varied interest in automobility, Ballard was a British writer whose fiction most often appeared in UK magazines such as New Worlds and Ambit. Ballard’s work, therefore, falls outside the American focus of this book, which is why it is only given brief consideration below. J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction to Crash,’ in Re/Search No.8/9: J. G. Ballard, ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Publications, 1984), p. 98. In a later interview, however, Ballard repudiates this claim by declaring: ‘Crash is not a cautionary tale. Crash is what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn.’ Will Self, ‘Conversations: J. G. Ballard,’ in Junk Mail (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 348.

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crashed motorist stranded in the middle of a highway – is a lesserknown work than Crash but arguably a more interesting commentary on cars and the alienating urban landscapes that they produce. And in an early post-apocalyptic work like The Drought (1965), Ballard presents a desiccated landscape strewn (even though it portrays some operable vehicles early on) with abandoned and sand-buried cars, the collective wreckage of once mighty and ubiquitous machines.40 The Drought contains a particularly memorable image of humanity’s ludicrously abiding love of the automobile in the figure of Philip, a man who for the past five years has been carefully restoring an enormous black limousine hearse – its ‘metal roof and body…polished to a mirror-like brilliance, and the hubcaps shone like burnished shields.’41 The car, however, will never start because the battery no longer has any power and ‘all the electrical wiring [had] corroded.’42 Even when the automobile has become useless, Ballard shows people still caring for it with quasi-religious devotion. The American New Wave answer to Ballard in terms of controversial writings and technological pessimism was Harlan Ellison. His anthologies Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) are often hailed as definitive texts of the New Wave era. Award-winning works of fiction by Ellison like ‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ (1965) and ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (1967) reflect his suspicion of technology and his conviction that machinery and mechanization often stand in stark opposition to human freedom and human dignity. Often regarded as among Ellison’s strongest books, Deathbird Stories is a collection of his stories written over the previous ten years. This work helped further associate the New Wave with a grimmer, darker brand of sf through (what Spider Robinson calls in his review of the book) the collection’s ‘unrelieved pessimism.’43 In his introduction, Ellison states that this ‘group of stories deals with the new gods’ of contemporary American life, such as pain, neon, and money.44 The introduction also singles out for special mention the ‘God of Smog,’ the ‘gods of the freeway,’ and the gods whose ‘[o]fferings can be made at their altars in new-car showrooms.’45 Clearly, then, the American dependency on and 4 0

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The Burning World, an abridged version of The Drought, was published one year earlier in the UK. J. G. Ballard, The Drought (New York: Liveright, 2012), p. 177. Ballard, The Drought, p. 179. Spider Robinson, ‘Bookshelf’ [review of Deathbird Stories], Galaxy 36, no. 5 (1975), p. 47. Harlan Ellison, ‘Introduction: Oblations at Alien Altars,’ in Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. xiv. Ellison, ‘Introduction,’ p. xiv, p. xv.

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the deification of the automobile is on Ellison’s mind, an interest that is apparent in ‘Along the Scenic Route,’ the tale from Deathbird Stories that is the focus of this section.46 ‘Along the Scenic Route’ showcases a distrust of the automobile and embodies the anti-technological bent of much New Wave sf. In this story, a seemingly mild-mannered family man named George and his wife Jessica are out for a ‘Sunday Drive’ on the highway.47 In this story’s first line, however, we are told about how a Ford Mercury (driven by someone named Billy) going 115 miles per hour cuts their car off with only ‘a matter of inches’ (24) to spare between the two vehicles. Ellison thus immediately subverts the story’s bucolic title by thrusting his readers into this scene of a near-accident on the highway. However, this is no scene of unintentionally careless driving. Instead, ‘Along the Scenic Route’ quickly suggests that this behavior is now typical and that the highways of this story’s near-future setting have become horrific locales of violence and aggression. The story’s first sentence, for example, also informs us that the Mercury bristles with twin-mounted machine guns, and another early paragraph casually informs us that George’s vehicle brandishes ‘rotating buzzsaws’ (24) that retract into the hubcaps. Despite such fearsome weaponry, perhaps most alarming is how Ellison introduces us to a world in which the violence that these cars are capable of has received legal sanction. After being cut off, George calls from his car a ‘Freeway Sector Control Operator’ to request ‘[c]learance for a duel’ (25) with the red Mercury’s driver. The operator provides George with authorization and ends the conversation by gently admonishing him to ‘[p]lease observe standard traffic regulations’ and by telling him ‘good luck’ (26). Employing motorized transport as a means to vent anger and to assert dominance over others has been thoroughly codified and rendered permissible. Although ‘road rage’ (according to the OED) doesn’t officially enter the English language until around 1988, Ellison appears aware of earlier iterations of this tendency to use cars as expressions of our hostility and as weapons to punish others.48 The fact that ‘Along the Scenic Route’ presents such 4 6

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This story first appeared in Ellison’s collection The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969). A variant of the story appeared as ‘Dogfight on the 101’ in the September 1969 issue of Amazing Stories. Harlan Ellison, ‘Along the Scenic Route,’ in Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 29. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter. ‘road rage, n.’ OED Online. March 2018. Last accessed April 26, 2018. Some scholars have argued, however, that road rage might be more the creation of media hype than an actual commonly occurring event. For more on

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use of a car as now legal suggests Ellison felt a trend was developing whereby the automobile was increasingly becoming accepted as an instrument of violence and death. The details Ellison offers for the Mercury and for George and Jessica’s car come loaded with deeper significance. The opening words of the story describe the Mercury as ‘blood-red’ (24), thus immediately associating this car with savagery and murder. Ellison specifies George and Jessica’s car as a ‘Chevy Piranha’ (24), which hardly sounds like a tranquil and amicable family car. As with ‘blood-red,’ the ‘Piranha’ name connotes predation and violence. Furthermore, the Piranha was an actual automobile. It was a lightweight, plastic-bodied racing car built by Gene Winfield, a renowned automobile customizer.49 The Piranha received a bit of notoriety in the Sixties through its appearance in the third and fourth seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a popular American television series focusing on a fictional multi-national, secretive spy agency that ran from 1964 to 1968 and for which Ellison wrote two episodes in the 1966–67 season.50 Thus – in addition to the car’s weaponry – the fact that George and Jessica are driving a customized sports car associated with TV spies erodes the bucolic and calm nature of the typical Sunday drive. Later, we even learn that both George’s and Billy’s cars can ride atop air currents that allow them during their duel to reach speeds of 300 miles per hour, a terrifying indulgence in speed given memorable visual form in the illustration Jim Steranko did for this story when it appeared in Amazing Stories as ‘Dogfight on the 101’ (see Figure 9). Going fast and being noticed, in short, appear to be the most important aspects of the drive for these two motorists. But George’s and Billy’s cars are not just sleek and swift. Ellison’s story also portrays vehicles that boast the latest technologies designed to

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this theory, see Jeremy Packer, Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 231–66. Sf fans would likely be most familiar with Winfield’s work in the form of the flying cars he helped design for Ridley’s Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Winfield also designed vehicles for the sf films The Last Starfighter (1984) and Robocop (1987). Also, unlike the actual Piranha, George’s car is not plastic-bodied, for at one point Ellison describes it as having a ‘beryllium hide’ (30). Beryllium is a rare – but strong and lightweight – metal often used in aerospace design. On Ellison’s writing for The Man from U.N.C.L.E., see Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe, Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), p. 15, p. 107. The popularity of the show’s Piranha is attested to by the fact that a plastic models kit company called Aluminum Model Toys sold a toy model of the car during the show’s run.

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Figure 9. Dueling cars speeding along in ‘Dogfight on the 101’ (a variant of ‘Along the Scenic Route’) Copyright © 2020 Jim Steranko win duels and to kill other drivers. Besides the above-mentioned machine guns and buzzsaws, George’s car wields ‘super-conducting magnetic bumpers’ (32) that suck in other vehicles and Billy’s Mercury boasts an inductor beam that can utilize ‘strong local eddy currents’ to ‘rip a hole in the skin’ (33) of another automobile. And in one particularly memorable section of the story George recalls how ‘the salesman at Chick Williams Chevrolet had told [George], pridefully, about the laser gun’ that George’s car now brandishes, an extra ‘option’ that the salesman baldly celebrates as allowing one to ‘go straight for the old jugular. Use the beam on [another] driver. Makes a neat hole. Dynamite!’ (29, emphasis in the original). In sum, all the technological innovations that people apply to the automobiles of this near-future appear designed only to allow ‘[n]aked barbarism to take hold’ (32) and to turn a peaceful drive into a ‘kamikaze duel’ (29). Ellison’s dark and despairing representation of cars mirrors what activists like Ralph Nader were arguing about the American automobile in the mid-Sixties. In Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) – his bestselling, substantially researched critique of the American automobile industry – Nader exposes at length the ways in which cars were being built to kill and

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to harm, not to protect.51 In chapter after chapter, he castigates ‘the Big Three’ American automobile manufacturers, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, for knowingly building and selling cars whose brakes would fail or whose lights were difficult to see at night due to an excess of decorative chrome, or that lacked steering columns that would not be violently displaced into a driver’s body during a head-on collision.52 Most appallingly, car makers withheld basic safety features like seat belts that we take for granted today because they drove up manufacturing costs too much or because they served as an undesirable ‘reminder to the motorist of the risk of accident.’53 Nader repeatedly asserts that concerns over costs and style always ruled the day. ‘From instrument panels to windshields,’ Nader argues, ‘the modern automobile is impressive evidence that the manufacturers put appearance over safety.’54 Although Ellison’s story mentions safety inventions of a kind having been invented – such as ‘bulletproof screens’ and the ‘Armadillo crash-suit’ (30) Jessica dons at one point during the chase – the bulk of his tale maligns car manufacturers, car dealers, and car drivers as, ultimately, being primarily interested in what allows our road machines to nourish (at the cost of public safety) American obsessions with spectacle, speed, and competition.

Autoduelling Significantly, ‘Along the Scenic Route’ partakes in a larger New Wave trend of texts depicting various iterations of what The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls ‘autoduelling’ and defines as ‘combat between armed 51

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Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Grossman, 1965), p. 147. After articles published in the Washington Post and the New Republic revealed how General Motors had harassed and attempted to discredit Nader – revelations that eventually led to a United States Senate subcommittee hearing in which the president of GM publicly apologized to Nader – Unsafe at Any Speed shot to the top of bestseller lists. In the book’s most famous chapter, Nader argues that the Chevrolet Corvair was knowingly built and sold by General Motors (Chevrolet’s parent company) with a design that led to dangerous handling on the road. ‘By October 1965,’ Nader writes, ‘more than a hundred suits alleging instability…had been filed around the country.’ Unsafe at Any Speed, p. 9. Interestingly, the Piranha car that customizer Gene Winfield built and that George drives in Ellison’s story was based, in part, on the Chevy Corvair’s design. Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, p. 115. Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, p. 60.

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and armoured cars, motorcycles and trucks.’55 Other contributors to this trend include Roger Zelazny’s ‘Devil Car’ (1965), a story focusing on a man named Murdock as he wanders the wild spaces between ‘Fuel Stop/ Rest Stop Fortresses’ in a heavily armed, autonomous car named Jenny.56 The object of Murdock’s vengeful quest is the eponymous Devil Car, a gigantic black Cadillac that has killed more people (including Murdock’s own brother) and smashed more cars than anyone can keep track of. The story ends with the Devil Car being reduced to a ‘gutted, twisted wreck’ by Jenny’s fifty-caliber machine guns and rocket launchers.57 The New Wave also saw the appearance of Alan Dean Foster’s ‘Why Johnny Can’t Speed’ (1971), another tale of vengeance about a man zooming around in a car bristling with fierce weaponry to seek out a black Cadillac that has killed a family member. Frank Merwin’s son Bobby was killed by the Cadillac during a ‘disputed lane change,’ for in this world of overworked police the custom has become to ‘allow drivers to settle their own disputes’ in whatever way they choose, no matter how violent.58 In Jakes’ On Wheels, the occupants of large caravans of trucks, vans, and cars form clans who stay in perpetual vehicular motion, never slowing to below 40 miles per hour (and routinely moving at 80, 90, even over 100 miles per hour). When members of rival clans encounter one another, they often challenge each other to races that permit the ramming of each other’s vehicles. Early in the novel, a race is depicted in which a non-clan car using the same highway becomes ensnared in the competition. This car – with its ‘[f]aces of scared children…pressed to the rear glass’ – is clipped by one of the racing cars, then loses control, hits a wall, and ‘burst[s] into a fireball.’59 One of the earliest versions of the autoduelling tale – Chandler Elliott’s ‘A Day on Death Highway’ (1963) – follows a man referred to as Pop, who packs his family up and moves them to Jehu, a planet with ‘nary a traffic law or a traffic court’ in sight.60 For a person like Pop who loves to engage in fast and aggressive driving, and who loathes others telling him what he can or cannot do behind the wheel of a car, Jehu 55

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Neal Tringham. ‘Car Wars.’ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, April 2, 2015, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/car_wars. Last accessed May 2, 2018. Roger Zelazny, ‘Devil Car,’ in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), p. 69. This story originally appeared in the June 1965 issue of Galaxy. Zelazny, ‘Devil Car,’ p. 69. Foster, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Speed,’ p. 82, p. 87. Jakes, On Wheels, p. 26, p. 27. Chandler Elliott, ‘A Day on Death Highway,’ Galaxy 22, no. 1 (1963), p. 128.

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sounds like a paradise. In Elliott’s story, however, naked violence doesn’t break out on the roads themselves like it does in Zelazny, Foster, and Jakes. Instead, ‘A Day on Death Highway’ imagines a scenario in which ‘[i]f you merely annoyed another driver, much less bent his tin, he could challenge you’ to a fight that you are obligated to accept. The fight takes place in an arena on motorized carts called ‘whippets’ and involves the use of bull-whips. The autoduelling motif extended beyond literary sf like Elliott’s story to encompass films like Death Race 2000 (1975), a cult hit in which specialized cars kill pedestrians for points as part of a grisly new televised sport called the Transcontinental Road Race.61 Given that the New Wave was (as we saw in this chapter’s introduction) an era of soaring motor vehicle deaths – the number of annual deaths surged from 36,399 in 1960 to 54,052 in 1973 – these various texts point to a larger social anxiety that American roads were degenerating into places more associated with death and destruction than with safety and scenery.62 They envision roads as locales that seem like they were built only to allow our worst hatreds and hostilities as human beings to find an outlet. As we saw in this chapter’s opening, it was concerns like these over the state of American highways and of the cars that travelled on them that led President Johnson to create in 1966 the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act. Additionally, that same year Johnson and the United States Congress created the Department of Transportation to oversee transportation safety at the highest levels of government. ‘Along the Scenic Route’ concludes with showing George – after winning the duel and killing Billy – displaying some remorse for his behavior on the road. ‘It had been a terrible experience,’ the narrator says, ‘He never wanted to use a car that way again. It had been some other George, certainly not him’ (35). However, Ellison quickly suggests

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Death Race 2000’s portrayal of cars deliberately killing pedestrians also finds New Wave-era expression in Fritz Leiber’s story ‘X Marks the Pedwalk’ (from the April 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow). The popularity of the autoduelling motif even extended beyond the New Wave period. It went on to find expression in games like Car Wars (launched in 1981); a three-part book series published by Tor called Car Warriors (The Square Deal by David Drake [1993], Double Jeopardy by Aaron Allston [1994] and Back from Hell by Mick Farren [1999]); and the Mad Max film franchise (1979–present). Other New Wave-era sf stories that convey a concern over roads and highways becoming increasingly deadly places in the Sixties and Seventies – but are not stories depicting autoduelling – include Kenneth Bulmer’s ‘Station HR 972’ (Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1967) and George R. R. Martin’s ‘The Exit to San Breta’ (Fantastic, February 1972).

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that George is in the grips of forces beyond his control, that the way cars are being made and the way roads are being used make it essentially impossible for him to opt out of the murderous road culture that surrounds him. After telling us how George, upon vanquishing Billy, quickly receives another 15 duel challenges, Ellison writes that George ‘knew it was not good. He would have to fight. In the world of the Freeway, there was no place for a walking man’ (35–36). Similar to how many transportation activists call attention to the almost unbreakable spell our transportation infrastructure casts over our behavior, ‘Along the Scenic Route’ concludes with a pessimistic sense that individual change might be powerless to undermine the larger structural forces that influence our mobility. Until the freeways have been torn up and the cars have been taken off the road, there simply might not be a safe place for a person to walk.

The Abolition of the Car Although rarely referenced as a New Wave text, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is one of that era’s most influential works of sf. Ecotopia was originally refused by some two dozen publishers but, after eventually being self-published by Callenbach, has ‘now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages,’ including Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese.63 Written as a contribution to the literary utopia – a sub-genre often classified as sf and that in its more modern incarnations can be traced back to works like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) – Callenbach’s novel is one of the earliest works representing what political theorist Marius de Geus calls ‘ecological utopias,’ ideal societies that privilege living sustainably and simply within one’s environment over material abundance, financial profit, and overconsumption. Writing about Ecotopia, de Geus declares: ‘Ernest Callenbach makes a brilliant attempt…to portray a society based on the principle of a completely stable ecological state.’64 The novel focuses on an American journalist named William Weston who, in 1999, visits and reports on (both in the public articles and private journal entries that comprise the book) a young

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Dennis Hevesi, ‘Ernest Callenbach, Author of “Ecotopia,” Dies at 83,’ New York Times (April 27, 2012). Marius de Geus, Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society (Utrecht: International Books, 1999), p. 183.

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secessionist country named Ecotopia formed in 1980 from what was once the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Like much utopian fiction, Ecotopia is short on conflict and character development, brimming instead with lengthy expository paragraphs that detail the imaginary nation’s attitudes and practices regarding food production, sexuality, education, and so forth. Significantly, one aspect of Ecotopian society that Callenbach richly describes is its transportation infrastructure and its citizens’ mobility preferences. As Weston makes his initial entrance into Ecotopia, the reader quickly learns that this country is not on friendly terms with the automobile. To cross the border into Ecotopia in a taxi, Weston must acquire ‘special dispensation to allow an internal combustion engine to pass their sacred portals’ (7), for Ecotopia has abolished private, fossil fuel-powered cars.65 One of the primary reasons for this repudiation of automobility is a concern over that stock villain of the Sixties and Seventies that we have already mentioned: air pollution. Leading up to their secession from the rest of America, the Ecotopians were, Weston informs us, ‘literally sick of bad air’ (45). In addition to leading to a ban on cars, apprehension over both ‘air and noise pollution’ has inspired Ecotopia to outlaw ‘even international flights from crossing its territory’ (7). As with Ellison and Le Guin, for Callenbach the ability of our technology to not poison the air we breathe is of paramount importance. Although private, gas-powered cars are outlawed, that does not mean this ecological utopia has become a nation of immobile Luddites or of people who use only quite primitive, technophobic modes of transport like walking or horseback. The Ecotopians do not, as Weston points out, ‘[head] back toward a Stone Age’ (131) after excluding individually owned vehicles from the road. Instead, Callenbach presents Ecotopians as quite advanced in their technological development and as having implemented ‘a finely-woven and perfected public transportation system.’66 For example, they have constructed a large-scale, high-speed train system that utilizes magnetic levitation and magnetic propulsion. Today referred to as maglev trains, the idea of these vehicles that employ electromagnetic energy has been around since the early twentieth century. But it was only after the publication of Ecotopia that

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Two exceptions to this abolition are glimpsed in the novel: when Weston visits a logging camp, he sees the loggers are still using ‘huge diesel trucks’ (73) that supposedly they will replace with electric vehicles when they wear out, and he learns that in some of the black separatist sections of Ecotopia ‘a few private cars are still mysteriously tolerated’ (126). De Geus, Ecological Utopias, p. 184.

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actual maglev trains were first built and put into operation in the late 1970s and 1980s in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In Ecotopia, these train lines connect most all the towns and cities of the nation, and most everyone lives in a way utterly unlike most Americans today: in a high-density fashion close to a bustling transit station, thus making private car ownership unnecessary. Complementing its extensive rail system, Ecotopia also boasts free electric buses for public transit and electric trucks for commercial deliveries. Like Le Guin’s Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness, and like the characters in a sf story by Frank M. Robinson titled ‘East Wind, West Wind’ (1972), Callenbach’s Ecotopians embrace battery-powered vehicles to combat air pollution and to create a more environmentally benign transportation system.67 With its electric trains, trucks, and buses (and with its analog bikes, discussed below), Ecotopia provides a bold vision of an alternative America (or an alternative former part of America) in which sustainable machines dominate the transportation system. Furthermore, while touring an electric car factory in Ecotopia, Weston learns that the top speed of these cars is a mere 30 mph. He immediately recognizes that such slow vehicles simply would not be tolerated in his own country, for they ‘cannot satisfy the urge for speed and freedom which has been so well met by the American auto industry and our aggressive highway program’ (34). But what these electric cars lack in speed they make up for in public safety. As one researcher writing for a British Department for Transport study concluded about pedestrian–car collisions, ‘the risk of fatality increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, risk increases rapidly – the increase is between 3.5 and 5.5 times from 30 mph to 40 mph.’68 Thus, by choosing slow-moving, exhaust-free electric vehicles, Ecotopians show how they value the keeping of one’s air clean and the keeping of one’s fellow citizens safe more than they do experiencing what Weston refers to as ‘the pleasures of the open road…how it feels to roll along in one 67

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Frank M. Robinson’s ‘East Wind, West Wind’ first appeared in the anthology Nova 2, ed. Harry Harrison (New York: Walker & Co., 1972). Like Ecotopia, ‘East Wind, West Wind’ depicts a future world in which private, internal combustion vehicles have been outlawed. However, in addition to the electric cars that Le Guin and Callenbach’s texts reference, Robinson’s story also briefly references non-polluting steam-powered cars being manufactured. D. C. Richards, Relationship Between Speed and Risk of Fatal Injury: Pedestrians and Car Occupants (London: Department for Transport, 2010), p. 5. See also, Brian Tefft, Impact Speed and a Pedestrian’s Risk of Severe Injury or Death (Washington, DC: AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2011).

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of [America’s] powerful, comfortable cars, a girl hair’s blowing in the wind’ (34). The latter might be better raw material for a rock song by Bruce Springsteen or the Beach Boys, but it is not the basis for a safe and just society. But maglev trains and electric vehicles are not enough for the Ecotopians, for their transportation system also makes extensive use of the bicycle. As will be discussed in more detail below, when the Ecotopians tore up a multi-lane boulevard formerly monopolized by automobiles, one of the infrastructural alterations they made to that space was to add ‘bicycle lanes’ (14). We glimpse Weston himself atop a bicycle – although he ‘[hasn’t] been on a bike in years’ (64) – when he and his guide head out on a pair of them from a railway station town into the forest to visit a logging camp. Perhaps most impressively, Callenbach portrays Ecotopia as a place with an extensive and free bike share program. ‘Ecotopians setting out to go more than a block or two,’ Weston informs us, ‘usually pick up one of the white-painted Provo bicycles that lie about the streets by the hundreds and are available to all’ (16). Of course, bike share programs are today rather common, with almost every major city in the United States and many other cities around the world having some version of one.69 But around the time of Ecotopia’s publication, a public-use bike program was practically unheard of and was a radical idea often credited to the group that Callenbach explicitly references: the Provos. Named after their penchant for provoking others, the Provos were a 1960s Dutch anarchist group known for their anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist ideas and their creative, absurdist ‘happenings’ (weekly public events combining performance art with political protest).70 The group achieved global notoriety for their ‘White Bicycle Plan,’ a scheme to launch the world’s first ever bike share program. The Provos announced their plan in late July of 1965 by declaring in a manifesto: ‘The asphalt terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough… Provo’s Bicycles Plan presents liberation from the car-monster. Provo introduces the White Bicycle for public ownership.’71 Designed to help reverse the increasing domination of Amsterdam by cars, the Provos’ plan called for the city government to close the center of the Dutch 69

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For succinct histories of bike share programs around the globe, see the following: Tom Ambrose, The History of Cycling in Fifty Bikes (New York: Rodale, 2013), pp. 180–85; Evan Friss, On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 171–72. For a useful history of the Provos, see Pete Jordan, In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), pp. 293–325. Quoted in Jordan, City of Bikes, pp. 296–97.

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capital to all motorized traffic (including motorbikes) and to annually supply 20,000 bicycles that would be painted white, be scattered around town and left unlocked, and then be free for anybody to use.72 Although the White Bicycle Plan made it all the way to an October 1967 vote by the Amsterdam city council, it was soundly vanquished. Nonetheless, before this political defeat, the Provos had been operating for months with a modest version of their bike share program without any help from city authorities, simply by painting donated bikes white and distributing them around the streets of Amsterdam for public use. However, these bikes were almost immediately confiscated by the police, lest (it was believed) they encourage theft. As Pete Jordan sums up the Provos’ early experiment in a free bike share, ‘the Provos’ Bicycle Plan’ – despite popular belief to the contrary – ‘never came close to fruition.’73 Still, the Provos clearly inspired writers like Callenbach with their bold ideas regarding possible solutions to traffic congestion and to the overall hegemony of the car. The prospect of bikes that have been made freely available to the public being quickly stolen (the reason for the Dutch police’s swift confiscation of the White Bicycles) also occurs to Weston. When he hears about Ecotopia’s free bike share, he can’t help but declare to his guide how ‘this system must be a joy to thieves and vandals’ (16). The guide, however, counters Weston’s cynicism by pointing out ‘it is cheaper to lose a few bicycles than to provide more taxis and minibuses’ (17). As Ecotopian society knows, the true cost of something is not just the up-front money needed to purchase it, for there are often many hidden external costs attached. As the Assistant Minister of Food smugly tells Weston, the Ecotopian way of doings things ‘is considerably cheaper than yours, if we add in all the costs. Many of your costs are ignored, or passed on through subterfuge to posterity or the general public’ (23, emphasis in the original). Weston might think a free bike share is a 72

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The Provos’ attack on conventional attitudes toward automobility also found expression in their ‘White Car Plan’ (a car-sharing project involving small electric cars) and their ‘White Victim Plan’ (a plan proposing that anyone who caused death by driving be made to carve their victim’s outline at the site of the accident and fill it with white cement, thus creating a permanent warning to other dangerous drivers). Jordan, City of Bikes, p. 315. Jordon discusses how the White Bikes’ legacy inspired several bike share imitations in the 1990s and 2000s, and how often these imitations were started by people who (through a sort of urban myth phenomenon) erroneously believed that the Provos’ bike share program had been more successful than it actually was. See Jordan, City of Bikes, pp. 315–25.

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ludicrous waste of money if a good number of those bikes are being routinely stolen, but he is momentarily ignoring externalities such as the constant influx of large sums of money required to sustain automobility. For example, Weston eventually acknowledges in his notes how expensive it is for a society’s health care system to respond to the automobile’s many deleterious health effects. Not only are there the many deaths and serious injuries car accidents cause every year, but there is also the car’s clear contribution to sedentary lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. As Weston admits, one person who habitually makes use of one of the free bicycles, by his becoming more physically fit and therefore hopefully never suffering a serious health issue like a heart attack, might indirectly ‘pay for something like 500 free Provo bikes,’ for ‘every heart attack costs the medical system, the patient’s living group, the patient’s work group, etc. something between a year and two years’ salary’ (103). Once the Ecotopian transportation system that – through its heavy reliance on public transit and freely available bicycles – so radically differs from the typical 1970s American one was in place, it meant the streets formerly dominated by cars were now freed up to embody new possibilities. For example, at one point Weston walks down Market Street in San Francisco, a road that was ‘once a mighty boulevard striking through the city down to the waterfront’ (14). But with the abolition of cars, such an abundance of asphalt makes little sense. Thus, the street has ‘become a mall planted with thousands of trees’ and has ‘shrunk to a two-lane affair.’ The boulevard’s other lanes – territory liberated from the car – is now ‘occupied by bicycle lanes, fountains, sculptures, kiosks, and absurd little gardens surrounded by benches’ (14). Similar to what we will see in later discussions of William Gibson’s Virtual Light and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and how those works challenge a necessary perception of bridges and highways as spaces ruled by the automobile, Callenbach’s novel reimagines streets as places dominated not by menacing forms of motorized transport, but by plants, bicycles, sitting areas, and public art instead.74 Ecotopia, therefore, presages changes 74

Su J. Sokol’s novel Cycling to Asylum (2014) portrays a near-future Montreal somewhat resembling Ecotopia, in that both are quasi-utopian places in which many accommodations have been created for bicycles such as abundant bike paths. Sokol’s bike paths are much more futuristic, however, for they are occasionally adorned with ‘holo-flashes’ that depict ‘bike facts.’ For example, one hologram image projects the message: ‘each year, more people are killed in car accidents [in the United States] than all the soldiers who were killed in the Vietnam War.’ Relatedly, Sokol’s New York City, depicted early on in her narrative, is akin to the America that Weston

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that have in recent years swept across places like Amsterdam, Bogotá, Portland, and New York City as those cities work to reclaim street space from cars and return it to pedestrians and cyclists.75 In sum, Callenbach’s Ecotopia provides a powerful model of a ‘green’ society that has embraced with fervor the bicycle and other alternatives to the private, gasoline-powered automobile. Ecotopia mirrors the way in which during the 1960s and 1970s a new kind of argument was being made to promote cycling, one that ‘did not prioritize fitness or personal gain but addressed environmental and sustainability concerns.’76 For this reason, Callenbach’s novel serves as a precursor to other literary ecological utopias that also share H. G. Wells’ conviction that ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.’77 Works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990) and Sarena Ulibarri’s ‘Riding in Place’ (2017) are direct descendants of Ecotopia. In the former, Robinson imagines a utopian, southern Californian town called El Modena, a place where the residents ‘bike to excess. In fact there is no public transport except for car rentals on the freeways, which are expensive. Motorbikes are even more expensive. Obviously the feeling is that your own legs should move you. People here have strong legs.’78 In the latter work, Ulibarri envisions a solarpunk Earth on which ‘Everything was made of solar panels. They were in [people’s] windows, in their clothes, in their sidewalks. Earth brimmed with the sun’s energy.’79 Complementing this widespread use of environmentally friendly renewable energy – the defining feature of solarpunk fiction – is an extensive use of bicycles. As one character

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travels from to enter Ecotopia: a loud and polluted car-centric place hostile to cyclists and pedestrians. Su J. Sokol, Cycling to Asylum (Aylmer, Quebec: Deux Voiliers Publishing, 2014), p. 158. For discussions of Amsterdam and Bogotá, see Luis A. Vivanco, Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 69–83. For discussions of Portland and New York City, see Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), pp. 141–94. James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), p. 192. On bicycles and Sixties-era environmentalism, see also Margaret Guroff, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), pp. 132–34. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, ed. Gregory Claeys and Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 38. Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge (New York: Orb, 1995), p. 87. Sarena Ulibarri, ‘Riding in Place,’ in Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Extreme Futures [Bikes in Space: Volume Four], ed. Elly Blue (Portland, OR: Microcosm, 2017), p. 11.

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in ‘Riding in Place’ describes her hometown: ‘there are tree-lined bike paths you can ride through the whole city. The bike paths even spiral up the outsides of the buildings so you can ride all the way to the rooftop parks.’80 For all three of these authors – Callenbach, Robinson, and Ulibarri – human-powered transportation is an essential component of any utopia deserving of the name.

Conclusion Writers like Harlan Ellison impressed upon their readers the sorry state of American roads and highways during the New Wave era. These places were, as the story ‘Along the Scenic Route’ reminds us, dangerous environments corrupted by a worship of speed, selfishness, and spectacle. Some key New Wave texts, however, represent a return to the pulp era belief that the automobile is not completely beyond redemption. Novels like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia suggests that if only a different power source (like electricity) and a different value system (like one that privileges presence over speed) came to characterize cars then maybe such machines would be worth keeping around. Yet, these same novels also flaunt the supremacy of human-powered forms of mobility like walking and cycling in terms of their versatility, sociability, and spirituality. Particularly with Le Guin and Callenbach, we find sf writers imagining other trajectories of history that might have unfolded, trajectories in which bicycles and other more environmentally sustainable forms of transportation became central to American society. In the next chapter’s focus on several postcyberpunk works of the 1990s we will see a less equivocal condemnation of the automobile and the environments it has helped create, in addition to seeing an interest in alternatives to the car beyond the bicycle and walking, such as the skateboard.

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Chapter 4 Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes

At one point in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) – the definitive text of the cyberpunk movement (c.1982–88) in sf – the main characters are engaged in final preparations for their raid on Villa Straylight. The group needs to break into this labyrinthine mansion owned by the Tessier-Ashpools to access a computer terminal that will allow two artificial intelligences to merge, thus completing their mission. The Villa Straylight is located on one end of Freeside, a cylindrical, Vegas-style space habitat. As Armitage (the leader of the group) projects for Case, Molly, and Riviera a hologram map of Freeside, he casually mentions that one end of Freeside features a ‘velodrome ring.’ The word seems completely foreign to Case, but Molly quickly educates him that a velodrome is a place where people ‘race bicycles.’ On Freeside, with its lower gravity in space, the cyclists can even ‘get up over a hundred [kilometers] an hour’ (i.e., over 60 miles per hour). Armitage quickly shows impatience with this digression on velodromes and bicycles, telling the group: ‘This end doesn’t concern us.’ Molly’s response is to tell him: ‘Shit…I’m an avid cyclist.’1 It is meant to be a humorous exchange between Molly and Armitage – Gibson tells us that Riviera’s reaction to this exchange is he ‘giggled’ – because Molly, clearly, is not an avid cyclist.2 In fact, she is not a cyclist at all. Like most characters in the classic cyberpunk literature of the 1980s (hereafter, abbreviated as CCP), Molly’s technological and mechanical interests lie elsewhere: she is captivated primarily by cybernetic modifications to her body. For hackers like Case, computers and their cyberspace worlds represent the most compelling technology. As Mark Bould affirms: ‘computer networks and cyborging technologies…[constitute] the essential furniture of 1 2

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 2000), p. 106. Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 106. 129

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Cyberpunk futures.’3 Other characters in Neuromancer such as the Tessier-Ashpools and Riviera display intense fascination with other technology such as cryogenic preservation and holographic projection. However, the mention of a velodrome indicates that, amid all the dazzling high-tech of that world, cycling is to some degree alive and well, enduring in the margins. Another indication that bicycles are still being used in the world of Neuromancer is a quick mention of Riviera’s penchant for using his deceptive holographic technology to harm cyclists. One character tells Case about how he had followed Riviera on a street in Turkey ‘and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever…’4 But Neuromancer is not going to spend more time than these two quick mentions discussing bicycles. In general, the novel – and CCP in general – conveys little interest in everyday transportation technology. Of course, Neuromancer does mention a couple of times people in the Sprawl using a form of superfast hovertrain, and Case and Molly are seen driving around in a rented Mercedes in Turkey when they are there to abduct Riviera. And in one of Gibson’s earliest stories – ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981) – he ruthlessly mocks the pulp era sf of the Twenties and Thirties for its dreams of cars like ‘whizzing chrome teardrops with shark fins’ and of super-highways that ‘fanned out like an origami trick’ into ‘a dozen minilanes.’5 Such dreams, Gibson believes, are appallingly ignorant of the reality of cars, whose pollution would likely lead to a world in which ‘the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal’ of the pulp era’s imaginary architecture, and whose energy needs would in reality be entangled in ‘the finite bounds of fossil fuels’ and in ‘foreign wars.’6 Outside scattered moments like these, however, the texts that comprise CCP appear to share the perspective of Armitage when it comes to bicycles (and cars): this type of commonplace technology ‘doesn’t concern’ them. The end of the 1980s found American sf moving beyond the brief flowering of CCP. Much of the celebrated sf of the 1990s – dubbed ‘postcyberpunk’ in a 1998 essay by Lawrence Person – was largely erected upon the foundations of the CCP written by Gibson, Bruce 3

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Mark Bould, ‘Cyberpunk,’ in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 218. Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 87. William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum,’ in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (New York: Ace, 1986), p. 9. This story was first published in a 1981 anthology titled Universe 11. Gibson, ‘Gernsback Continuum,’ p. 5, p. 9.

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Sterling, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear.7 As Kelly and Kessel argue in ‘Hacking Cyberpunk,’ their introduction to an anthology of postcyberpunk fiction (hereafter, abbreviated as PCP), CCP and PCP share several key concerns. Two of the four ‘signature obsessions of cyberpunk’ singled out by Kelly and Kessel that PCP shares with CCP will be important to this chapter. First, CCP and PCP often ‘[strike] a gleefully subversive attitude that challenges traditional values and received wisdom.’ Second, both eras of sf favor ‘engaging with developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.’8 This chapter will focus on several PCP texts – predominantly Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Gibson’s Virtual Light (1993), but also (to a far lesser extent) Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995) and Sterling’s ‘Bicycle Repairman’ (1996) – that exalt transportation technologies such as skateboards and bicycles, technologies that serve as antidotes to American car culture. In other words, these texts portray simpler, more restrained machines like skateboards and bikes as challenging the car’s attempts to dominate the road and challenging people’s sense of the car as one of the foremost technologies of movement in our society. Thus, we can see one way in which PCP engages with the first ‘signature obsession’ of CCP listed above: it subverts traditional American values that glorify automobiles and perceive them as desirable, beneficial technologies. The second ‘signature obsession’ identified above by Kelly and Kessel is invoked here to address its limitation or its incompleteness. That is, this chapter argues that – in addition to a fascination with infotech and biotech (a fascination PCP shares with CCP) – important PCP texts written by Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling are also deeply interested in transportation technologies of the road (an interest, I argued above, we do not see much evidence of in CCP). PCP texts even perceive transportation technology – like infotech and biotech – as being able to ‘transform the human body and psyche.’ In addition to the above shared concerns among CCP and PCP outlined by Kelly and Kessel, certain key differences exist between the 7

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Lawrence Person, ‘Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto,’ Slashdot  9 (1999), http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/10/08/2123255/Notes-Toward-aPostcyberpunk-Manifesto. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, ‘Hacking Cyberpunk,’ in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2007), p. ix. The other two ‘signature obsessions’ they highlight are ‘[p]resenting a global perspective on the future’ and ‘[c]ultivating a crammed prose style that takes an often playful stance toward traditional science fiction tropes’ (p. ix).

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two eras of American sf. For example, PCP texts tend to focus more on middle-class life and families and to contain more humor and satire. Also, PCP negates the overall dystopian grimness of CCP by maintaining some optimism regarding ‘the utopian potential of technology.’9 Such utopian potential can be glimpsed in technologies like the Primer and the Seed in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, both of which Stephenson portrays as possibly ‘becoming the key for the development of socialist interventions’ in the social inequalities that abound in the world of the novel.10 This optimism regarding technology will be important for the discussion below. An additional way in which PCP sets itself apart from CCP is through the former’s characteristic depiction of robust communities existing at the margins of society. Thus, my analysis will foreground how machines like the skateboard and the bicycle function in PCP fiction as positive technologies that not only enrich an individual’s experience of her world but that also nourish communities and social relationships. Put another way, this chapter will show how the various works under examination portray bikes and skateboards as helping PCP avoid ‘demonizing…technology’ wholesale, and instead show ‘the development of useful technologies’ that have attained ‘a more humane ground.’11

Burbclaves and Minivans After failing to make much of an impression with his first two published novels, Neal Stephenson’s third outing, Snow Crash, has become one of the most canonical sf novels of the 1990s. An audacious mix of virtual reality, Sumerian mythology, and 1990s pop culture, the work is an at times hilarious, at times grim portrayal of a Southern California overrun by greedy corporations, racial tensions, failed governments, and menacing technologies. In particular, Snow Crash is a scathing indictment of late twentieth-century American suburbs: its fear of cultural diversity, its acceptance of mind-numbing monotony, and (most importantly for this chapter) its love of the destructive automobile. Automobiles – especially in the form of minivans and RV campers – are nothing short of agents of devastation in Stephenson’s novel. Acting as a counter-balance to this

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Kelly and Kessel, ‘Hacking Cyberpunk,’ p. ix. Rafael Miranda Huereca, ‘The Age of “The Diamond Age”: Cognitive Simulations, Hive Wetwares and Socialized Cyberspaces as the Gist of Postcyberpunk,’ Atlantis 32, no. 1 (2010), p. 148. Huereca, ‘Age of “The Diamond Age,”’ p. 143.

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rampant, harmful automobility are the alternative mobilities represented first and foremost by the skateboarding, teenaged, female messenger named Y.T. (short for ‘Yours Truly’).12 She – and the other skateboarding ‘Kouriers’ of RadiKS (Radical Kourier Systems) – embody a hopeful politics of resistance to an oppressive car culture that promotes values like conformity, aggression, personal comfort, and speed above all else. Snow Crash quickly announces in its first few pages that automobiles and their frequently attendant values of speed and aggression will be primary concerns. In these opening paragraphs, we are introduced to the Deliverator (a portmanteau apparently combining the benign word ‘deliverer’ with the more menacing word ‘terminator’). The Deliverator is a pizza delivery driver for CosaNostra Pizza, whose real name is Hiro Protagonist. We witness him in this early scene frantically trying to deliver a pizza to a customer within thirty minutes. In his desperate attempt to deliver on time, Hiro finds himself speeding through a gated community called a ‘burbclave’ (another portmanteau combining the more benign ‘suburbia’ with the more ominous ‘enclave’) only to crash into an empty swimming pool as he is taking a short cut through a house’s side yard. As Lisa Swanstrom has pointed out, this early scene is certainly a ‘hyperbolic treatment of the “real world” position of pizza delivery guy or gal forced to hustle to honor Domino Pizza’s 90s-era “thirty-minutesor-its-free” offer,’ a campaign started by the fast food pizza chain in the 1970s (but later reduced to just a discount on the pizza in the 1980s and early 1990s).13 However, this thirty-minute guarantee was discontinued altogether in 1993, right after Snow Crash appeared, due to bad publicity over lawsuits brought against the company by people who were injured by speeding and reckless Domino’s delivery drivers (including by the family of one woman killed by a delivery driver in the state of Indiana). What is of particular note about this scene, therefore, is its indictment of America’s fetishization of speed at all costs. The Domino’s campaign – and Snow Crash’s hyperbolic rendition of it – serves as a microcosm 12

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The implications of Y.T. (and Chevette from Gibson’s Virtual Light, the other text this chapter focuses on) being female will be addressed in Chapter 6, the chapter that most explicitly engages with the topic of gender and mobility. At the time of writing this, two films that combine sf and skateboarding are supposedly in the works: one by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge based on his Strange Times book franchise and another film directed by Alexander Garcia called Skate God. Lisa Swanstrom, ‘Capsules and Nodes and Ruptures and Flows: Circulating Subjectivity in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash,’ Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (2010), p. 57.

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of the larger social problem of people demanding things be done with the upmost quickness and personal ease, even if it endangers others in the public sphere. This social problem continues in our current era of thriving on-demand delivery services like Amazon Prime, Grubhub, FreshDirect, and so forth, services that continue to put lives at risk (in addition to exacerbating air pollution and traffic congestion).14 Besides speed itself, a technology of movement that Snow Crash heaps scorn and ridicule upon is the minivan. The novel dismissively refers to such vehicles as ‘bimbo boxes,’ a clear nod to the minivan’s associations by the early 90s with ‘soccer mom’ drivers who were often belittled in popular culture as ‘banal, boring people who mindlessly overscheduled and overstressed their kids while forfeiting any intellectual life of their own.’15 More than any other vehicle, the minivan was an icon of 1990s mobility, for sales of the minivan soared in that decade. Invented by Chrysler in 1983, the minivan was seen by many as ‘[s]maller, sleeker and nimbler than the vans of the 1970s’ and eventually replaced the station wagon as the family hauler of choice.16 But by the end of the 1990s, minivans were the rolling embodiment of middle-class conventionality and uncoolness. They were perceived by many as ‘a symbol of the soul-crushing conformity that was the price Americans paid for suburban comfort.’17 We first glimpse a minivan early on when Y.T. has altruistically taken over Hiro’s pizza delivery for him after the latter’s car crash into an empty swimming pool. Y.T. spots a bimbo box ‘grind[ing] its four pathetic cylinders into action.’18 She soon ‘poons’ (i.e., harpoons) it with her MagnaPoon, a device utilizing a magnet to grip passing vehicles. Not only does this minivan have ‘four pathetic cylinders’ propelling 14

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On the effects upon American streets of services like Amazon Prime’s two-day delivery (soon to be one-day delivery), see the following: Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu, ‘1.5 Million Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to N.Y. Streets,’ New York Times (October 27, 2019). Last accessed October 28, 2019. Patricia Callahan, ‘Amazon Pushes Fast Shipping but Avoids Responsibility for the Human Cost,’ New York Times (September 5, 2019). Last accessed October 28, 2019. Paul Ingrassia, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), p. 238. Pat Hinsberg, ‘Why Car Makers Are on the Wagon; Open Road for Minivan Sales Seen Driving Ads,’ Adweek Western Edition (June 4, 1990), p. 1. J. Peder Zane, ‘Hail to the Minivan, Dowdy but Not Out,’ New York Times (October 30, 2013). Last accessed September 18, 2019. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 28. All quotations from the novel will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter.

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it, but it also has a ‘congenital lack of steel or other ferrous matter’ (28, 29). Frail aluminum comprises most of the bodywork; much of the rest of the vehicle is a feeble ‘nebula of air, upholstery, paint, and marketing’ (30). Stephenson’s dismissal of the minivan is reminiscent of Heinlein’s mocking of cars in The Rolling Stones (1952) as ‘mechanical jokes,’ machines that ‘[d]espite their mad shortcomings…were the most characteristic form of wealth and the most cherished possession of their time.’19 Similar to Heinlein, Stephenson presents the minivan as a piece of unspectacular technology, as a machine lacking in authentic power and strength and, therefore, unworthy of any respect or admiration.

Cyborg Vans Mockery of the American love of motorized transport finds memorable expression not only in Snow Crash’s minivans, but also in the character of Ng, the head of Ng Security Industries. In the cyberspace world of the Metaverse, Ng assumes the avatar of a ‘small, very dapper Vietnamese man in his fifties’ (221). But his biological body outside the Metaverse takes a radically different form, as Y.T. learns when Ng arrives to pick her up so they can go buy some Snow Crash in the hopes of analyzing it. To Y.T.’s surprise, Ng has merged, cyborg-like, with the vehicle he drives around. While fleeing Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975, Ng was horribly injured in a helicopter accident. After initially using motorized wheelchairs for his mobility needs, he soon finds them ‘tiny pathetic things’ (226). He eventually buys a firetruck and converts it into his new ‘wheelchair,’ essentially turning the vehicle into ‘an extension of [his] body’ (226). His biological body is now contained in ‘a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling [of the van] by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines’ (225), hardware that connects him to his van as well as to the equipment he uses to access the Metaverse while driving.20 (Voice commands allow him to control his vehicle.) This unforgettable character of Ng speaks to several issues related to the problematic worship of automobility. Ng’s dissatisfaction with the ‘pathetic’ mobility of his commonplace wheelchair gestures toward the distinctly American love of big, powerful vehicles. Rarely content in

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Robert A. Heinlein, The Rolling Stones (New York: Ace Books, 1952), p. 54. Although it is at one point said to be a firetruck Ng purchases for his mobility needs, this section of Stephenson’s novel consistently refers to Ng’s new vehicle-body as a ‘van.’

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large numbers with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars (except, fleetingly, during times of high gas prices), Americans have preferred instead their minivans, SUVs, Hummers, pick-up trucks, luxury sedans, and so on. This need for power – as well as for a conspicuous display of power – manifests itself in several of the details Stephenson provides for Ng’s van: the ‘tires are huge’; the ‘engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it’; and the ‘grille alone probably weighs more than a small car’ (225). Additionally, if America is increasingly becoming a drive-through society, that is, one in which ‘you can get anything on a drive-through basis’ including ‘funerals’ (226), the novel satirically suggests it only makes good sense for people to merge their bodies with their cars and trucks. Using the exaggeration of typical sf extrapolation, Stephenson gives us a character literally fused with his vehicle to call the reader’s attention to the many ways in which Americans already embody that reality: we are spending increasing amounts of time in our vehicles due to longer and longer commutes, and our sense of identity and of self-worth are often deeply yoked to what we drive. As Sheller writes: In societies of automobility, the car is deeply entrenched in the ways in which we inhabit the physical world. It not only appeals to an apparently ‘instinctual’ aesthetic and kinaesthetic sense, but it transforms the way we sense the world and the capacities of human bodies to interact with that world through the visual, aural, olfactory, interoceptive and proprioceptive senses. We not only feel the car, but we feel through the car and with the car.21 Ng’s van–body fusion contests, therefore, the limited set of interests with which scholars see PCP authors being concerned, such as this key concern of PCP we saw Kelly and Kessel identify: ‘developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.’ Clearly, with the character of Ng, Stephenson asserts that motorized vehicles are also a potentially ‘invasive technology’ that might fundamentally alter our identities. Ng’s powerful vehicle alters not only the nature of his body but also the nature of his psyche, for it clearly fuels feelings of aggression while he is out driving it. In a scene that resonates with our current problem of people using smartphones while driving (but not always accepting responsibility for accidents and near-accidents caused by such behavior), 21

Mimi Sheller, ‘Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,’ Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 4/5 (2004), p. 228.

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before Ng arrives outside the truck stop to pick up Y.T. he complains to her about a ‘[f]ucking bitch’ in a ‘bimbo box [that] cut me off’ (224) while Ng was simultaneously driving and talking to Y.T. in the Metaverse. People do not understand, he complains (or possibly enthuses), that with his vehicle, he ‘could crush them like a potbellied pig under an armored personnel carrier’ (224). As scholars have shown, certain vehicles often contribute to overly aggressive behavior on the road. For example, Paleti, Eluru, and Bhat found that ‘those who drive a sports utility vehicle (SUV) or a pick-up truck (PUT) are likely to drive more aggressively… This is presumably because of the powerful engine capability combined with the versatile handling ability of SUVs and PUTs.’22 Vehicles with excessive size and excessive power might, in short, enhance hostility in people. This scenario of machinery fueling humanity’s baser emotions and behaviors such as aggression is, of course, a central motif found across much sf, from early pulp stories like Edmond Hamilton’s ‘The Man Who Evolved’ (1931) to the many nuclear apocalypse tales of the Cold War era, such as Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (1967). Later, as Ng and Y.T. are close to their destination for purchasing the Snow Crash drug, Y.T. observes some ‘Asians or South Americans’ tending a vegetable garden and she ‘gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves away from them’ (239). Again, the power and massiveness of Ng’s van appears to contribute to his feelings of aggression toward not only other road users, but also toward people not even on a road: in this case, the socially marginalized and therefore vulnerable ‘Asian or South American’ vegetable gardeners. This one particular driver, Ng, imperiously wants to rule the road – and even the space beyond the road.

Environmental Degradation Snow Crash also implicates the character of Ng and his vehicle-body fusion in another sin of automobility: its harmful effect on ecological health. Ng’s particular form of destruction is aimed at the ozone layer, part of the Earth’s stratosphere that protects the planet from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. As Y.T. is driving around with Ng, she suddenly realizes that Ng’s van is air-conditioned, but ‘[n]ot with one of 22

Rajesh Paleti, Naveen Eluru, and Chandra R. Bhat, ‘Examining the Influence of Aggressive Driving Behavior on Driver Injury Severity in Traffic Crashes,’ Accident Analysis and Prevention 42, no. 6 (2010), p. 1848.

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those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bone-chilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon’ (240). Ignoring environmental treaties such as 1987’s Montreal Protocol – an important piece of international legislation restricting the use of refrigerants like Freon that contained chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) because they damaged Earth’s ozone layer – Ng selfishly insists on still using this harmful type of Freon because it is the coldest. This character functions yet again as a scathing parody of the completely self-interested driver, this time one who cares only about his own comfort even if it comes at the cost of immense environmental harm – ozone depletion – that threatens many people. Snow Crash highlights automobility’s role in environmental degradation several times. The novel hyperbolically asserts that a skateboarder ‘could probably navigate from L.A. to New York by coasting from one parking lot into the next’ (193). This image of countrywide, interconnected parking lots parodies a well-known quote describing America before European settlers completed their westward expansion in the nineteenth century. This quote is found on numerous websites and in numerous books (but with many variations). In one source, the quotation reads: ‘It has been said that a squirrel starting on the east coast could traverse the country without touching foot on the ground if it were so inclined.’23 In Stephenson’s dark vision of automobility run amok, an endless terrain of concrete and asphalt, instead, now blankets the United States from coast to coast. However, Snow Crash’s most memorable portrayal of environmental degradation occurs in its alarming image of the ‘Alcan – the Alaska Highway,’ a massive superhighway that is two thousand miles long, a hundred feet wide, and bulging with ‘mobile homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs’ (292). People, in their attempt at flight from the ecological wreck that America has become, are fleeing up north to what they think are still the wild places of Canada and Alaska. But in this desperate attempt to find some vestige of rugged nature – an attempt, ironically, wholly reliant on motorized campers and trucks – they are destroying what they now seek. Stephenson writes: ‘The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect…But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream’ (293). The ozone layer; the boreal forests of North America; the woods, deserts, and prairies that stretch from L.A. 23

Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 222.

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to New York: these places appear in Snow Crash as perpetually abused and forever threatened by the American love of motorized movement. Hillman, Bird, Keller, Le Guin, Callenbach, and now Stephenson: repeatedly in this study we have seen how sf castigates the internal combustion automobile on environmental grounds by either depicting it as an inveterate polluter of its surroundings or by suggesting that only cleaner, electric-powered versions can redeem car technology.

Assertive and Sociable Skateboards Set in opposition to the harmful automobility depicted in Snow Crash we find, at the core, the messenger Y.T. and her skateboard (which she refers to as her ‘plank’). Y.T. is a character who sees herself as proudly defiant toward the cars and trucks that dominate the road and that often attempt to force perceived interlopers like her off it. Early on, the narration informs us that Kouriers like Y.T. thrive in their profession by refusing to be docile and passive around the larger vehicles with which they share the road. The novel informs us that ‘Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary randomness. Keeps people on their toes, makes them react to her, instead of the other way around’ (53, emphasis added). What is interesting about this passage is how much it resembles what is commonly referred to today as ‘vehicular cycling,’ an aggressive, ‘take the lane’ ethos made famous by John Forester in his popular book Effective Cycling (1976). As Longhurst sums it up, vehicular cycling advises cyclists to reject separate accommodations like bike lanes or bike paths, and instead to ‘rid[e] steadily in the center of the lane, like a vehicle, to avoid the dangers of the right-hand side of the road, to increase visibility, and to demand the attention of drivers.’24 Like an assertive vehicular cyclist, Y.T. insists on claiming a right to the entire street, and appears to enjoy nettling drivers and reminding them that their cars and trucks aren’t the only types of vehicles on the road. In the world of Snow Crash, it is not clear how much of any legal right – if any – skateboarders like Y.T. ever have to the road. One clue Stephenson gives us, however, is when we are told that in Y.T.’s own burbclave of

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James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), p. 222. For a negative discussion of vehicular cycling, see Mikael Colville-Andersen, Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), pp. 258–60.

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Blooming Greens ‘it’s legal to carry [skateboards] but not to put them on the ’crete [concrete]’ (101). Riding a skateboard anywhere in this burbclave, it seems, is prohibited. Given the fact that streets in Snow Crash have become increasingly privatized through the cancerous spread of gated burbclaves like Blooming Greens, roads appear to have largely lost their status as a public ‘commons.’ As I have already mentioned in other chapters, a perception of roads as a commons dates all the way back to ancient Roman law and is a perception of roads that sees them as ‘a commonly held resource’ that should ‘[serve] all comers.’25 But in Snow Crash, the road-as-commons is increasingly under assault. Despite this increasing privatization of roads in her society, and despite the danger that motorized vehicles might pose to her personal safety, Y.T. still persistently and bravely asserts a right to the entire road. One of Y.T.’s main forms of mobility (and that of many other Kouriers) is to ‘poon’ passing cars and trucks to be pulled by them like a water skier pulled by a speedboat. As the narrator puts it regarding Y.T. and her practice of pooning: ‘The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it’ (33). Thus, like the quintessential cyberpunk hero – the computer hacker – who lives off the greed and excess of postmodern capitalism by, say, stealing a bit of data or a piece of software from a corporation and then selling it on the black market or to a criminal employer, Y.T. steals excess kinetic energy from a culture awash in it. She steals from a society that irresponsibly wastes energy in the name of moving people around in what are often single-occupied, multi-ton vehicles (like Studley the Teenager driving solo in his parents’ minivan to return a video). It is this subversive ‘energy theft’ that leads to a moment of identification between Y.T. and the villain Raven. The latter tells Y.T. that he and his fellow Aleutians often kayak between islands by surfing the waves. Raven tells Y.T., ‘if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places’ (378). Several types of mobilities, then, all coalesce in cyberpunk and postcyberpunk fiction around this verb ‘to surf’: Raven’s surfing the waves, Y.T.’s surfing the traffic, and the hacker’s surfing cyberspace to steal data. Such alternative, unconventional, subversive forms of movement stand in opposition to dominant mobilities like automobility, the latter of which Stephenson again and again characterizes by its wastefulness, greed, environmental destruction, aggression, self-interest, and so forth. As opposed to these negative qualities of automobility, one of the benefits depicted in Snow Crash of a machine like the skateboard is its 25

Longhurst, Bike Battles, p. 11.

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contribution to enhanced social connections. Such a depiction aligns, of course, with what some scholars have identified as key distinctions between CCP and PCP: the latter emphasizes and believes in the possibility of authentic, fulfilling communities coming into being, whereas the former much more emphatically depicts a world of alienated loners. Also, as we saw in this chapter’s opening, PCP is often perceived as not rejecting technology as completely as CCP does; instead, PCP holds out hope that some technologies might lead to more just societies or more enriched lives for some people. In Snow Crash, the robust community on display is Y.T. and her cohort of fellow skateboard messengers. We first glimpse the impressive size of this community when Hiro and his friend Vitaly Chernobyl go to a punk rock concert happening on an appropriated freeway overpass. The crowd is variously described as consisting of a ‘swarm of thrashers’ and of ‘massed skateboarders’ (121). This gathering of people with a shared love of skateboard mobility – as well as punk music – obviously provides a sense of community missing from the burbclaves. We never see a similar scene of automobiles bringing people together in such numbers and with such zeal. This social isolation caused by the automobile fits the dominant trend being observed now by transportation scholars whereby cars and their infrastructure such as multi-lane roads ‘contribute to the atomization of individuals and families’ and foster a ‘privatized social life enclosed within vehicles and homes.’26 Conversely, the robust sense of community shared among the skateboarding Kouriers is on full display in Snow Crash, and reveals itself perhaps most memorably in the novel’s climactic ending. Here, as Y.T. finds herself kidnapped aboard L. Bob Rife’s helicopter, she looks down to see another Kourier exiting a highway. After, significantly, first identifying herself as a Kourier too, she cries out to him, quickly explaining her predicament. This other Kourier, realizing that a fellow messenger is in trouble, consequently pulls out his phone and issues a widespread call for help. The result is that ‘a swarm of Kouriers’ (451) eventually arrive to start pooning the helicopter, eventually bringing it down in a forced landing that helps Y.T. to escape the clutches of Rife. Other important PCP works foreground this relationship between community and certain modes of transport. Stephenson’s follow-up to Snow Crash – The Diamond Age – focuses in large part on the New

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George Martin, ‘The Global Intensification of Motorization and Its Impacts on Urban Social Ecologies,’ in Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility, ed. Jim Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 224.

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Atlantans (also called the Vickys and the neo-Victorians), a group of people living in twenty-first-century Shanghai. To stave off what they see as the excessive moral relativism and social decay of the twentieth century, the New Atlantans have chosen to model much of their society and their individual behavior on the original Victorians of the nineteenth century. This imitation extends to the level of transportation. Several times throughout The Diamond Age, Stephenson references neo-Victorian characters riding ‘velocipedes,’ the name for the mid-nineteenth-century forerunners of the more modern safety bicycle that emerged later in the Victorian era. For example, we see the important New Atlantan character of Hackworth riding velocipedes as he goes about his business in Shanghai early in the novel and in the Victorian community in Vancouver, Canada, later in the novel after Hackworth has been sent there after his theft of the Primer has been exposed. And after Hackworth visits his estranged daughter, she rides after him on a velocipede. Admittedly, The Diamond Age often shows the neo-Victorians ‘cheating’ a bit when it comes to emulating Victorian ways of moving around: Hackworth’s bike sometimes has an electronic-assist motor for hills, his daughter’s velocipede has ‘smart wheels’ similar to Y.T.’s skateboard (discussed below) for dealing with rough terrain, and sometimes a Vicky character is shown outright using a car or a fully motorized, robotic horse called a chevaline.27 Nonetheless, the bicycle clearly functions as an important material object that helps the New Atlantans forge their unique and highly successful social identity.28 Characters from other groups in Stephenson’s novel – the Confucius-quoting Chinese Coastal Republic, the low-tech Dovetail community – also ride bicycles and use them to help forge their collective identities. Similarly, Gibson’s Virtual Light portrays the bicycle his character Chevette and her fellow messengers use as providing a strong sense of

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Y.T. appears to make a cameo appearance in The Diamond Age as Miss Matheson, the elderly, wheelchair-using teacher of Nell. At one point Miss Matheson tells Nell: ‘I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I’m still on wheels, but a different kind.’ Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam, 2008), p. 321. The Diamond Age often shows the New Atlantans using other technologies of movement that – if not invented in the nineteenth century – were developed in the Victorian era, such as airships (discussed in the next chapter) and roller skates. (Although, again, characters often ‘cheat’ with the latter by employing small motors on the skates.) On the Victorians and roller-skating, see Susan Cook, ‘Roller Derby’s Victorian Prehistory,’ Journal of Victorian Culture Online (September 17, 2013); Justin Parkinson, ‘The Victorian Craze that Sparked a Mini-Sexual Revolution,’ BBC News (April 6, 2015).

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community. In fact, as discussed at more length below, both Stephenson and Gibson appear to be drawing upon the well-documented sociability and conviviality of messengers. Another PCP text – Bruce Sterling’s ‘Bicycle Repairman’ – also represents people whose lives revolve around more low-tech machines like bicycles as having more robust social connections. Lyle, the eponymous bicycle repairman, lives in ‘the zone,’ the fire-gutted three floors of a high-rise building and a place now populated with anarchists and other squatters. Even though Lyle appears to prefer being alone most of the time to work on his bikes, when he finds his repair shop broken into one night, all he needs to do is pick up the phone and call some of the City Spiders for help. As Lyle describes the City Spiders: ‘They were some of the very first people to squat the zone, and they’ve lived here ever since, and they are pretty good friends of mine.’29 One of the Spiders who comes over to assist Lyle is a fellow cyclist who, when she leaves, ‘leapt outside, unlocked her bicycle, and methodically pedaled off’ (32). Even within that same high-rise building – called the Archiplat in the story – people seem more isolated, such as Lyle’s mother, a three-time divorcée who lives higher up in a non-firedamaged part of the building and frequently calls to implore her son to come visit and have dinner with her. Unlike the bicycle, Stephenson and Sterling see more-sophisticated technologies like automobiles and virtual reality as more divisive to the social body. Sterling, for example, gives us this memorable description of a virtual reality romance taking place between Lyle’s ex-roommate Eddy in Tennessee and a woman in Germany: ‘A virtual romance in its full-scale thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness’ (6). Such virtual sex, in short, is a shadow of the more authentic and fulfilling social relations that flourish between repairmen, anarchists, squatters, and others in the zone thanks, at least in part, to a shared use of and appreciation for less-complex technologies like the bicycle.

Metaverse Mobility Of course, within Snow Crash mobility is not just an issue for ‘the real world’ (26); concerns about movement also heavily influence and shape the cyberspace world of the Metaverse. As scholars like Swanstrom have

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Bruce Sterling, ‘Bicycle Repairman,’ in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (San Francisco, CA: Tachyon, 2007), p. 25. Sterling’s novelette was first published in 1996 in Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology.

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pointed out, the Metaverse appears to have originally been a much more egalitarian, emancipatory space. Swanstrom argues: ‘While the outside world, with its burbclaves, conglomerates, and competing organizedcrime rackets and nation states, forces individuals into narrow corridors of identity that are based upon principles of fragmentation, isolation, and encapsulation, the Metaverse allows its inhabitants to experiment with multiple identities.’30 However, by the time the reader encounters this virtual world it appears corrupted by practices of economic and racial exclusion. This fallen state extends to issues of movement as well in the Metaverse. Originally, freedom of movement appears to have been emblematic of this virtual space. Before the Metaverse became the cluttered, overpopulated space it is in Snow Crash, one could zip around as quickly as one wanted because, in cyberspace, ‘[t]here’s no physics to worry about’ (354). Furthermore, initially Hiro and the other early architects of the Metaverse favored ‘enormous, bizarre vehicles…Victorian houses on tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming chariots drawn by dragons’ (354). But this wildly creative diversity of modes of transport eventually becomes impracticable once masses of people begin to flock to this virtual space. And, like the non-virtual world outside the Metaverse, the increasing privatization and build-up of the environment begins to greatly reduce the range of mobilities possible. One of the first things that interferes with people’s movement is the creation of a monorail. Given how much praise public transportation such as buses and light rail receives today from urban planners and social activists, the arrival of a monorail in the Metaverse might sound like a positive, socially enlightened change. But Stephenson suggests that the arrival of this mode of transport, which is ‘free’ (27), comes at a hidden cost. First off, the monorail – its very name suggestive of monotony – has greatly reduced and made repetitive people’s movement in the Metaverse. As Snow Crash informs us, a ‘lot of people just ride back and forth on [the monorail], looking at the sights’ (27). Additionally, the infrastructure supporting the monorail – the pillars and stanchions – have become obstacles that significantly impede people’s freedom of movement, for one cannot pass through them in the Metaverse.31

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Swanstrom, ‘Capsules and Nodes,’ p. 66. This illusion of free movement in virtual realms shows up again in a later work like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011). Access to this novel’s virtual space – called the OASIS – is free ‘but traveling around inside it wasn’t.’ Quick trips as well as trips to the more exciting parts of the OASIS both require paying money to a company to teleport, to ‘purchase virtual fuel to

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Contrasted with this lack of freedom of movement caused by the monorail and found on the monorail itself (because it only travels a fixed course), Hiro and his friends used to ‘write car and motorcycle software,’ and then race those virtual vehicles ‘in the black desert of the electronic night’ (27). These early hackers and coders relied upon their own creativity to invent modes of transport; furthermore, they could move about in them as fast and freely as they wanted. Put another way, the nightmarish world of social and cultural homogeny that Stephenson depicts in Snow Crash finds expression not only in the dominance of burbclaves and minivans in ‘the real world,’ but also in the monorail mobility of the Metaverse. The monorail only offers up an illusion (like we saw with the minivan) of empowered movement, whereas the motorcycles, the ‘flaming chariots drawn by dragons,’ and so forth that were invented early on for use in the Metaverse are akin to Y.T.’s skateboard: they represent more versatile, more individualistic, more creative, and more emancipated forms of movement.

Armored Rent-a-Cop Cars William Gibson’s Virtual Light (the first part of his ‘Bridge Trilogy’) continues the scorn for automobiles we saw in Snow Crash. Like Stephenson, Gibson ridicules the contemporary American love for motorized transport while simultaneously valorizing more marginalized modes of transport such as the bicycle. As Gary Westfahl observes, in Virtual Light we find Gibson moving away from his intense interest in ‘computers and computer-constructed worlds’ that defined Neuromancer and other works set in the ‘Sprawl’ to instead being ‘most intrigued by the real world and its variegated phenomena.’32 Therefore, in Virtual Light – a work only slightly interested even in futuristic technology like the glasses that project images directly into the brain and that provide this novel with its title – Gibson gives an inordinate amount of attention to an array of ‘real world…phenomena’ such as, notably, transportation technologies.33 From the bicycles used by Chevette and

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power virtual spaceships,’ and so on. Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), p. 48, p. 49. Gary Westfahl, William Gibson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), p. 120. The Bridge Trilogy wraps up with an emphatic interest in bold, new transportation technologies when at the end of All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) the Lucky Dragon stores that are located worldwide simultaneously unveil teleportation devices that eliminate the need for costly shipping. The

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her fellow messengers, to Rydell’s armored black Ford Patriot he drives in San Francisco, to the Russian cops’ grey car, to Sublett’s electric car and the insidious RV driven by the little old lady, to fleeting references to a German cargo rig ‘that burned canola oil’ and to Rydell’s landlord’s second-hand BMW, Gibson consistently gives abundant attention to the vehicles that characters use and notice around them.34 In fact, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge that gives Gibson’s trilogy of works its name places issues of cars and automobility at the heart of this series of novels, especially Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), the works that, respectively, commence and conclude the trilogy (the bridge doesn’t appear in the second work, the 1996 novel Idoru). Before the trilogy opens, an earthquake has structurally damaged the bridge beyond repair and so it is abandoned and closed off to cars by the authorities. However, the lower classes spontaneously take the bridge over one night and subsequently turn it into a large shantytown that practices self-governance and is a place where people like them can live, buy, sell, trade, and so forth. Gibson writes of Chevette, one of the denizens of the bridge, that she had ‘seen pictures of what [the bridge] had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been’ (145). In this central image of the reconfigured, now-carless bridge, Virtual Light assails automobility and its apparent inevitability and invincibility. Even multi-deck suspension bridges designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day might one day not contain a single car on them. But this attempt to build a kind of carless, utopian community on the bridge – one that functions outside normal hegemonic power structures – is still hemmed in, Gibson repeatedly reminds us, by motorized vehicles and the nefarious authority figures like Warbaby, Freddy, Loveless, and the Russian cops who use them. In the novel’s first chapter – a prologue of sorts to the overall work – we meet the courier who will eventually bring the virtual light glasses to San Francisco where the bike messenger Chevette will steal them. The dystopian imagery of this opening suggests to the reader that third world countries like Mexico have become ravaged by disease, pollution,

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computer-generated character Rei Toei uses this technology to not only somehow, miraculously, create a physical body for herself, but to instantly create identical copies of herself across the world inside these ubiquitous Lucky Dragon stores. William Gibson, Virtual Light (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 63. All quotations from the novel will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter.

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and poverty. Here, we also encounter a distressing image of an ‘ancient American car creeping’ (3) along the streets of Mexico City. It is not altogether clear who is driving this Cadillac – and whether the driver is even American or Mexican – but it is clear that the car serves as an emphatically ominous presence. One of the first details Gibson provides about the car is that ‘gouts of carbon [are] pulsing from beneath a dangling bumper,’ a fact that leads the narrator to rhetorically ask in indignation: ‘Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air?’ (3). In this Mexico City so awash in pollution that most people are described as wearing respirator masks when venturing outside, the car represents an egregious attack on the social and communal values embodied by a place like the post-earthquake bridge that is vividly depicted in Virtual Light. We can only imagine that this carbon-spewing Cadillac – an ‘oil-burning relic’ (3) – originated in a pre-dystopian time when healthy, prosperous nation-states still existed and when it was perhaps more permissible to find one’s personal mobility in such an inefficient machine. But, given the state of the world in Virtual Light – especially of developing countries like Mexico – driving such a garish vehicle around (the Cadillac is described as having ‘shattered mirror’ (3) glued to its every surface, making it something of a giant moving disco ball) is an affront to the larger social body. Someone continuing to drive it only embodies the worst kind of egotism and self-indulgence. This opening assault on automobility continues in ‘Cruising with Gunhead,’ the second chapter of Virtual Light that introduces us to Rydell, one of the novel’s central characters. Functioning as a clear homage to the opening of Snow Crash, this first glimpse of Rydell shows us – like Stephenson’s pizza-delivering Hiro Protagonist – a character who loves driving at fast speeds and crashing through barriers in big, powerful vehicles. The Gunhead of the chapter’s title is ‘an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway’ (8) and is the vehicle that Rydell drives as part of his job as a rent-a-cop working for the security company IntenSecure.35 From all the clues we are given, Rydell thoroughly cherishes driving Gunhead. For example, he loves the docility this vehicle inspires in other drivers, as ‘people almost always let you cut in’ (23). The vehicle also, oddly, seems to help Rydell find serenity and contemplation too, for the narration informs us that what Rydell had ‘come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon’ (26). 35

The name Gunhead is an allusion to the Japanese sf-action film Gunhed (1989). In this film, Gunhed is a futuristic tank-like vehicle bristling with guns.

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But in a parody of the intoxicating power and unabashed aggression many people feel behind the wheel of large vehicles like Hummers, SUVs, and pick-up trucks, what Rydell appears to really appreciate is the raw, masculinist potency of Gunhead. This appreciation comes to the foreground the night that Rydell and his partner Sublett respond to a domestic violence call at a subscriber’s house (a call that is actually a false alarm created by the shadowy hacker group the Republic of Desire). As Rydell and Sublett approach the subscriber’s front gate, Rydell notes how solid the gate appears, as well as that it was ‘locked and armed. Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it’ (33). Partially out of a sense of duty to help the subscriber in her apparent moment of distress, but also (I would argue) due to an irresistible urge to plow such an extravagantly massive, hyper-masculine vehicle through a barrier, Rydell annihilates the gate. He also propels Gunhead right into the subscriber’s house, essentially parking his large Land Rover in the living room. As mentioned in the above discussion of Ng’s aggressive driving of his van in Snow Crash, some scholars have argued that large vehicles tend to foster more hostile forms of driving. Driving Gunhead, Rydell gives in to his baser aggressions, essentially risking killing the subscriber and her family by smashing into their house at the same moment that he and Sublett are, supposedly, trying to save those very people’s lives.

Just a Driver For most of his life, Rydell has been closely associated with driving and with cars. For example, late in the novel we learn that as a high school student Rydell had loved to design virtual cars utilizing a popular device set up in department stores, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and so forth, called Dream Walls. Although primarily used by other youths to play first-person shooter games, Rydell always liked to use Dream Walls to design ‘dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted’ (316). We hear in Rydell’s very name the word ‘ride’ – a word suggestive of ‘riding in a car’ and ‘going for a ride’ – and we might even see his name as a portmanteau formed by the merging of ‘ride’ and ‘well,’ an appropriate name given his reputation as a ‘decent driver’ (96).36 Rydell’s superiors reprimand 36

Conversely, Westfahl – when discussing Virtual Light’s interest in people’s fixation on the media and celebrities – offers this theory for the significance of Rydell’s name: ‘Berry Rydell’s name recalls two stars of early rock n’

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him for his hyper-aggressive response to the supposed situation at the subscriber’s house, but they allow him to keep his job. However, IntenSecure forbids him to drive Gunhead or any other vehicle again. This is an option that Rydell – interestingly, for it shows his deep devotion to automobility – absolutely cannot and will not accept. Rather than agree to an assignment where he can’t drive, and instead would have to sit in a guard shack at a gated community or walk around a mall, Rydell quits. He is eventually approached – thanks to a good word put in by his friend Hernandez – by agents of IntenSecure to help track down the stolen glasses, a job he accepts not just ‘because he needs a job,’ as Westfahl believes, but more importantly because (I would argue) he gets to drive Warbaby and Freddy around while the latter two characters search San Francisco for the glasses.37 That is, this job in San Francisco represents a vital return to driving for this keen lover of automobility. From the moment Rydell takes this job driving Warbaby’s car, it is made clear to him that he is expected to be a driver – and nothing else. Whenever Rydell attempts to take a more active role in the search for Chevette and the missing glasses, Freddy or Warbaby often quickly chasten Rydell by reminding him that he is ‘just drivin’’ (124). Because he is just the driver, Rydell is sometimes looked at by characters such as the Russian cop Svobodov ‘like he was something crawled out from under a rock’ (212). In short, several characters in Virtual Light position driving as an activity for the more passive, marginal, dim-witted members of society. But when Freddy learns that Rydell is actually quite intelligent and has learned a lot about criminals and crime scene investigation during the latter’s brief stint as a Knoxville police officer, he tells Rydell: ‘I think Mr. Warbaby’s right…He says we’re wasting you, just letting you drive that four-by-four [the Ford Patriot]’ (164, 165). Although many films and car commercials want viewers to believe driving is synonymous with agency, power, and adventure, being a driver in Virtual Light is often synonymous instead with invisibility and insignificance. It is only when Rydell and Chevette flee together and Rydell sheds his identity as ‘just the driver’ that he begins to show some robust agency in the novel: he helps Chevette escape a certain death and he puts into motion the elaborate plan that recruits Sublett and the Republic of Desire hacker group to help neutralize Warbaby, Freddy, Loveless, and the two Russian cops as threats to Chevette and Rydell’s safety.

37

roll, the teen idol Bobby Rydell and the singer-songwriter Chuck Berry.’ Westfahl, William Gibson, p. 119. Westfahl, William Gibson, p. 118.

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Ornate and Ecological Automobiles Although Rydell and his connections to cars (especially his early scenes behind the wheel of Gunhead) embody Gibson’s most scathing portrait of late twentieth-century automobility, Virtual Light contains many other strikingly detailed references to various cars that serve as memorable satires of automobility. For example, after Rydell has resigned from IntenSecure, he is visited by his former co-worker Hernandez. Hernandez visits Rydell to try to help him find another job, but it is the car Hernandez drives there that first grabs Rydell’s attention: ‘a white Daihatsu Sneaker with an animated hologram of a waterfall on the hood’ (76). The vehicle turns out to be Hernadez’s daughter’s car, and Hernadez is incensed that the ‘fucking waterfall’ is supposed to be a depiction of ‘Costa Rican animals…Ecology theme’ (76, emphasis in the original). Here, Gibson anticipates the paradox of people who drive ‘green cars’ to show their devotion to environmentalism. Toyota, for example, in an ad called ‘Man and Nature’ for the Prius – their hybrid car that is very popular among environmentalists – suggests that Toyota has built (in the language of the commercial) ‘a car that can help save the planet.’ But, of course, all vehicles operating on the road today – even hybrids – contribute their share of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. Whether it is Rydell’s Land Rover or Hernandez’s daughter’s Daihatsu, cars and trucks in Virtual Light are synonymous with undesirable behaviors and qualities like violence, aggression, and hypocrisy. But the only thing Herndandez is concerned about regarding his daughter’s car is how it is supposed to be a ‘fucking sloth’ with ‘[s]ome lemur’ (81, emphasis in the original) on the hood of that car. Thus, not only is the oxymoron of an ‘environmental car’ under assault in this satirical portrait of Herndandez’s daughter’s car, but Virtual Light is also critiquing the overall mania for non-functional vehicle ornamentation here (a trend that reached something of a zenith in the 1990s with underbody lighting, neon trim, chrome accessories, and so forth being very popular at that time). Similarly, this critique of vehicle ornamentation is taken one step further in ‘Bicycle Repairman’ when Sterling mocks even cyclists who overly worry about the decoration on their bikes instead of showing any concern for understanding and enhancing its mechanical performance. As we learn in that text, Lyle spends most of his time enameling customers’ bikes because it pays well and there is a lot of demand for such work. But, as Sterling writes: ‘It lacked authenticity. Enameling was all about the owner’s ego…But flash art didn’t help the bike. What helped the bike was frame alignment and sound cable-housings and

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proper tension in the derailleurs.’38 In addition to the cars and trucks in Gibson’s world, therefore, bicycles too can be reducible to avatars of ostentation and superficiality when they are not treated as the mechanical marvels and socially beneficial machines that they can be. It is to such a portrayal of bicycles in Virtual Light that we turn to next.

Sociable Bicycles Similar to what we saw in Snow Crash with Y.T.’s use of her skateboard, in Virtual Light more marginal modes of transport such as the bicycle are set up as preferable alternatives to automobility. Chevette atop her messenger bike is, of course, the central avatar of this alternative mobility in Gibson’s novel.39 Like Rydell’s name, Chevette’s name is significant. The Chevette was a small hatchback car produced by Chevrolet between 1975 and 1987. Therefore, given Chevette’s devotion to her bicycle – and the fact that we never see her drive a car – her name overflows with irony. In fact, her commitment to cycling runs so deep that the machine has thoroughly seeped into her unconsciousness; she dreams about riding it at night. During one particular sleep, she dreams of being on her bike spurning traffic laws, performing minor tricks, and nearly taking flight off a hill. In this dream, she ‘thumbed her chain up onto some huge-ass custom ring, too big for her derailleur, too big to fit any frame at all, and felt the shining teeth catch…She was at the crest, lifting off – ’ (83). This way in which the bicycle has infiltrated Chevette’s unconsciousness gestures once again toward one of the four key concerns of PCP that Kelly and Kessel highlighted: PCP ‘engag[es] with developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.’ We saw above how Stephenson – particularly with his character Ng – suggests transportation technology can also fundamentally transform us. Like Ng, Chevette appears altered by her mode of transportation in terms of both her psyche and her body (at 38 39

Sterling, ‘Bicycle Repairman,’ p. 7. The world of bicycle messengers functions as a major component of another sf novel: The Courier’s New Bicycle (2011) by the Australian writer Kim Westwood. Also, in John Barnes’ Caesar’s Bicycle (1997) – a time travel novel in which bicycles have been introduced into the era of Julius Caesar – the first glimpse of bicycles is of a Roman messenger riding a bike with ‘pannier baskets…carrying dispatches’ and ‘on the back of his tunic was the phrase…It is essential that correspondence pass.’ John Barnes, Caesar’s Bicycle (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 104 (emphasis in the original).

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least in terms of what she herself perceives as constituting her body). Her bicycle paradoxically both liberates her of her body and takes her deeper into an awareness of embodiment – albeit a body of a fundamentally changed nature. The novel informs us: ‘Sometimes, when she rode hard… Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time…The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine’ (131, emphasis in the original). Both Ng and Chevette’s bodies meld, centaur-like, with their mode of transport.40 Yet, Chevette’s feelings of fusion with her bicycle certainly represent a more benign version of human–machine hybridity than Ng’s merger. Unlike with Ng, Chevette’s mixing with her machine does not stimulate more violent and aggressive emotions. Rather, her bike – like we saw above with Y.T.’s skateboard – instead awakens humane feelings of community and sociability. Similar to what we saw in Snow Crash, Virtual Light portrays Chevette’s fellow messengers as providing a strong sense of community. For example, Bunny Malatesta, the dispatcher at Allied messenger service where Chevette works, is renowned for being a preserver of stories that helps messengers know they are part of a community. Gibson writes of Bunny: ‘he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing’ (111). And the second time Chevette sees Sammy Sal, a bike messenger known for his peerless cycling skills and who gets Chevette hired on at Allied, she notices him hanging out with a group of bike messengers on a square and notes that they were often ‘just goofing, hanging, drinking coffee’ (153). Chevette and Sammy Sal eventually become close friends, and it is his dedication to his friend and fellow messenger Chevette that nearly leads to his death, for he agrees to go with her to help her retrieve the virtual light glasses she has hid in Skinner’s shack atop one of the bridge’s towers. It is here that Chevette and Sammy Sal are ambushed by the villain Loveless, and Sammy Sal is shot at, falls from the tower, and nearly dies. Further showing the bike’s role in fostering community, just before Gibson shares with us the above flashback of Chevette’s second meeting with Sammy Sal, he tells us that Chevette has only really known ‘three 4 0

The ideas of cyclist-as-centaur and of a bodily melding with bicycles can be seen in such texts as H. Ansot’s ‘A Modern Centaur: A Chapter on Bicycles,’ Overland Monthly (October 1893), pp. 121–29; and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999). On O’Brien’s ‘atomic theory’ of bikes and people interchanging atoms, and on the novel as science fiction, see Henry Wessells, ‘Physics or Biology? Two Science-Fiction Approaches to Bicycles,’ New York Review of Science Fiction (February 2001), p. 18.

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really good, that was to say seriously magic, times’ (148, emphasis in the original) in her life, the first of which was when Sammy Sal got her hired on at Allied. In addition to allowing her to ride her bike often – an experience she clearly relishes for its own sake – the messenger job at Allied also appears to be magical due to the friendships and keen sense of community it provides. Around the time that she began working there, ‘she started hanging out after work with a couple of the other Allied girls, Tami Two and Alice Maybe’ (156). This messenger community – its rides, its showing off of tricks, its hanging out – resembles the one she has found on the bridge where she lives, the latter being a place ‘where she felt best’ because of ‘all the people hanging and hustling and doing what they did’ (150). Both Stephenson and Gibson are clearly drawing upon the well-known sociability and conviviality of messengers. Sociologists Ben Fincham and Jeffrey L. Kidder have analyzed bicycle messenger culture in the United Kingdom and the United States (respectively) and both scholars highlight the intensely communal nature of most messengers’ lives. In his ethnographic interviews with messengers in London and in Cardiff, Fincham found that, despite the low pay, the constant risk of accidents and collisions, and the grueling physical labor in year-round weather, the ‘sociality of messengers was identified by many as a key component’ of what they relish about messenger culture and what, therefore, makes the job so appealing.41 Although the work can often be quite solitary while out making deliveries or pick-ups, messengers often meet up and socialize at places like coffee stands throughout the day. But messengers are most notorious for their after-work hanging out: their partying and communal participation in informal and formal events such as alleycat races (races in open traffic that mimic the messenger job) and the Warriors Fun Ride, the latter an annual race in New York City that Kidder describes as ‘part bicycle race, part scavenger hunt, and all party’ and that often consists of ‘messengers from across the country and around the world: Boston, Chicago, London, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Toronto (to name a few places).’42 A deep sense of community, therefore, can extend even beyond one’s immediate work colleagues and include a global community of messengers. Snow Crash and Virtual 41

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Ben Fincham, ‘“Generally Speaking People are in it for the Cycling and the Beer”: Bicycle Couriers, Subculture and Enjoyment,’ Sociological Review 55, no. 2 (2007), p. 194. Jeffrey L. Kidder, Urban Flow: Bike Messengers and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 1. On bike messengers and their strong sense of community, see also Evan Friss, On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 126–27.

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Light demonstrate a similar understanding to what Finchman and Kidder arrive at regarding how machines like skateboards and bicycles and their alternative mobilities can deeply nourish social relationships. Such machines, rather than being actors that weaken social relations and drive people apart (as machines often are in so much sf), instead help bring people together to form strong bonds in these two novels.

The Sophistication of Bikes and Skateboards One further commonality shared between Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Gibson’s Virtual Light that I want to highlight is the way in which Y.T.’s skateboard and Chevette’s bicycle are both portrayed in strikingly sophisticated ways. In other words, these are not mundane, everyday, low-tech machines that these messengers ride. Y.T.’s skateboard has what Stephenson calls ‘smartwheels,’ a technology that allows segments of the wheels to move on telescoping spokes and that permits the wheels to better conform to the shape of cracks, curbs, and bumps. Such technology allows for the smoothest ride possible. Her plank also can run ‘self-maintenance procedures’ (308) and has a sort of onboard computer that allows the board to correct itself to accommodate shifts in Y.T.’s balance. Additionally, her board has a Shock Wave Projector that can blow out glass windows and that Uncle Enzo uses as a weapon on Raven during the novel’s climactic ending. Regarding Virtual Light, Westfahl argues: ‘The novel’s most intriguing piece of technology is the Bridge itself – a vast, intricate machine, created and maintained by thousands of disparate individuals, each following their own course.’43 However, I would argue that Sammy Sal and Chevette’s bicycles could lay claim to being the novel’s most intriguing pieces of technology, for they are anything but basic and banal machinery. Chevette’s bike possesses an advanced anti-theft system that includes a hand-activated ‘recognition-loop behind the seat’ (51) and is remarkably light due to its ‘paper-cored, carbon-wrapped frame’ (50). It also relies on particle-brakes that utilize frictionless electromagnetic force to stop the bike and that then recover and store the energy used to slow the bike as electricity inside capacitors.44 Both Chevette and Sammy

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Westfahl, William Gibson, p. 113. It becomes abundantly clear when Chevette hurls her bicycle at Loveless and electrocutes him in chapter 18 that her bicycle is storing recovered energy as electricity in capacitors that, unlike batteries, can dump their entire charge in a fraction of a second.

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Sal’s bike contain stereos built into the frame and Sammy Sal’s tires throb with ‘Fluoro-Rimz strobing, fading’ (132) – the recovered energy from the particle-brakes apparently being the energy source for both the music and the luminescent wheels. The luminescent wheels might seem superficial in a manner reminiscent of the enameling Lyle does for rich kids in ‘Bicycle Repairman,’ but Sammy Sal assures Chevette they have a functional purpose of hopefully enhancing visibility on the road. Regarding the wheels, he jokingly says to Chevette: ‘Lets some motherfucker see you ’fore he runs you over’ (154). So sophisticated are Sammy Sal’s and Chevette’s bikes that as Chevette holds and contemplates the mysterious, advanced technology of the novel’s eponymous glasses in Chapter 8, the construction and building materials of the glasses keep reminding her of her own bicycle. What we have in both novels, then, is far from a simple dichotomy of high-tech automobile versus low-tech bike and skateboard, for the technological sophistication of both Y.T.’s and Chevette’s modes of transport destabilizes such a neat binary. Furthermore, I see the technological accoutrement of Y.T.’s skateboard and Chevette’s bicycle functioning as a form of shorthand for the sophisticated technology that skateboards and bicycles already are. They are intentionally superfluous accessories and add-ons to their respective machines that mischievously tempt the reader to momentarily lose sight of the fact that skateboards and bikes are highly efficient and effective transportation technologies even without standard sf embellishments such as smartwheels and particle-brakes. It is this everyday, understated mechanical sophistication of machines like bicycles that Sterling subtly celebrates when he has his bicycle repairman, Lyle, tell a customer who has just walked into his shop with a bike in need of repair: The first thing we have to do…is fit [the bike] to you properly; set the saddle height, pedal stroke, and handlebars. Then I’ll adjust the tension, true the wheels, check the brake pads and suspension valves, tune the shifting, and lubricate the drivetrain. The usual. You’re gonna need a better saddle than this – this saddle’s for a male pelvis.45 Lyle also dreams of developing a regenerative braking device similar to what Chevette’s bicycle possesses, a device that ‘transmute[s] braking energy into electrical-battery storage’ and that is ‘almost, but not quite, 45

Sterling, ‘Bicycle Repairman,’ pp. 16–17.

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magical.’46 But, again, standard sf adornments such as regenerative brakes only partially obscure the fact that the bicycle is already a paragon of mechanical efficiency and (as Lyle’s short speech to the customer indicates) a model of mechanical sophistication.47 Similarly, something as seemingly mundane as a typical skateboard’s wheels are quite sophisticated in their own way. It was the transition away from attaching clay wheels on skateboards (which were often just removed from roller skates) to the use of specially made polyurethane wheels in the late 1970s – wheels that were tougher and more resilient, and that had better traction and shock absorption – that allowed skateboarders to radically transform what they could accomplish on their machines in terms of mobility. Such everyday ‘smartwheels’ on a normal skateboard and the everyday sophistication of the bicycle encapsulate a key idea of these works by Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling: that even in a world in which awe-inspiring technologies like the Metaverse, virtual light glasses, and A.I. ‘mooks’ are possible, the skateboard and the bicycle are awe-inspiring machines in their own right and, given their more benign uses in the worlds of their respective texts, are arguably even superior technologies to those more extravagant ones.

Conclusion For both Stephenson and Gibson, then, the modern day automobile (as we saw in previous chapters, it was for some pulp era and Golden Age authors too) is hardly a remarkable machine that exemplifies progress. Rather, these authors portray motorized modes of transport as, more often than not, only contributing to such unsavory characteristics as

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Sterling, ‘Bicycle Repairman,’ p. 15. As many commentators have pointed out, compared to the car, the bicycle is among the most efficient, well-designed transportation machines humans have developed so far. Harnessing the power from your own muscles in an amazingly effective energy source: according to the classic study Bicycling Science, a bicyclist riding at 20 mph could travel more than 1,350 miles per US gallon ‘if there were a liquid food with the energy content of gasoline.’ A bicycle can convert around 90 percent of the energy a cyclist supplies at the pedals into kinetic energy that powers the bike along. Compare that to a car’s internal combustion engine, which converts only about one-quarter of the energy stored in gasoline into useful power (while, of course, emitting all kinds of harmful pollution and greenhouse gases in the process). See David Gordon Wilson (with contributions by Jim Papadopoulos), Bicycling Science, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 153.

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selfishness, hypocrisy, and aggression toward other drivers, in addition to aggression toward nondrivers and even the very environment (both built and natural) that surrounds the car. So deep, in fact, runs the influence of automobility in our lives by the 1990s that both Stephenson and Gibson represent the very bodies and psyches of people being transformed by their motorized vehicles. Alternatives to the car such as the skateboard and the bicycle, on the other hand, are portrayed in Snow Crash and Virtual Light (and Sterling’s ‘Bicycle Repairman’) as much more socially benevolent and socially useful technologies. In keeping with one of the primary differences that scholars have noted between CCP and PCP, some key sf works of the 1990s produced by Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling optimistically emphasize the potential of machines like skateboards and bicycles to contribute to community-building and more robust social connections. As we will see in the next two chapters, this demonizing and dismissing of the car continues in some of the American sf of the twenty-first century, such as postapocalyptic cli-fi and 1980s-nostalgia sf. In this more recent sf, a positive and optimistic representation of bicycles (but not one without its problems) endures as well.

Chapter 5 Staying Mobile in Postapocalyptic Cli-Fi Staying Mobile in Postapocalyptic Cli-Fi

As Andrew Tate points out, ‘apocalyptic stories are as old as narrative itself.’1 With roots stretching all the way ‘back to ancient Babylon’ and ‘to Hesiod…in the eighth century BC,’ the apocalypse has a long genealogy indeed.2 In recent years, a prodigious number of films, television shows, and novels (in particular, young adult novels) have drawn heavily upon apocalyptic motifs and scenarios.3 Such vitality means that by the time we reach the twenty-first century, the apocalypse can take many forms. The agent of destruction might be a pandemic, an asteroid, a flood, an alien invasion, rebellious artificial intelligence, oil depletion, a nuclear holocaust, or anthropogenic climate change. Whatever the cause, though, certain features prevail in many literary and cinematic depictions of apocalyptic events: society breaks down, law and order are abandoned, acts of violence and murder soar, technology stops working, and people ransack the ruins of cities and towns to salvage anything that will assist in their survival. Additionally, as Tate has noted, in many apocalyptic texts, ‘survival depends on the ability to keep moving.’4 Countless apocalyptic texts portray survivors needing to flee murderous thieves or cannibalistic zombies, or needing to travel to locate food and shelter, to stay alive. Herein lies the nature of the apocalypse survivor’s predicament: if most 1 2

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Andrew Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 2. Heather J. Hicks, The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 11, p. 12. The recent surge of apocalyptic texts includes films like Pandemic (2016) and A Quiet Place (2018); television shows like The Walking Dead (2010– present) and The Last Man on Earth (2015–present); and bestselling novels like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy (2008–10) and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (2011–13). Tate, Apocalyptic Fiction, p. 90. 159

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apocalyptic scenarios involve a frightening lack of (working) technology, and yet people must remain mobile to survive or to begin rebuilding civilization, how might a vital modicum of mobility be preserved? In Cormac McCarthy’s brutally bleak novel The Road (2006), a nameless father and son must stay in motion to evade cannibals and to reach a more temperate climate.5 Amid the detritus of various modes of transport – rusting cars, a wrecked tractor-trailer truck, sunken fishing boats, a stalled train, an abandoned ship – these two desperate survivors of some unspecified catastrophe remain mobile only by means of walking.6 It is a ruined world in which good shoes are almost as valuable as food. As a supplement to walking, The Road conveys the usefulness of wheelassisted mobility in its repeated references to the father and son relying on a shopping cart in which to haul most of their meager possessions and food supplies around. Even the simple joy that non-motorized forms of movement can provide is briefly highlighted when the novel early on describes the father and son taking the cart for a ride. The father, McCarthy writes, ‘put the boy in the basket and stood on the rear rails like a dogmusher and they set off down the hills, guiding the cart on curves with their bodies in the manner of bobsledders. It was the first time that he’d seen the boy smile in a long time.’7 But what if the survivor of an apocalypse wants – or needs – to move around faster than walking allows? What if a mechanical aid like a shopping cart is not available or is not sufficient? Even if abandoned yet functional cars are present, what if – as in Paul Antony Jones’ novel Extinction Point (2012) – the survivor of an apocalyptic scenario has never learned to drive a car, and to start learning in that moment of crisis could mean ‘crash[ing] the damn car and end[ing] up dead’ or could mean wasting time that might be better spent ‘gather[ing] supplies’ needed for survival?8 What if – as in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) – the decay of a large city and the collapse of its central government, 5 6

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Tate discusses McCarthy’s novel in his Apocalyptic Fiction, pp. 83–101. The Road does contain one brief scene in which motorized transport is still functioning. Early in the novel, a pickup truck loaded with armed men (who are likely predatory cannibals) rumbles down the road that the father and son are traveling on. The truck promptly breaks down though. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage International, 2006), p. 19. Paul Antony Jones, Extinction Point (Las Vegas: 47North, 2012), p. 172, p. 173. In this novel, the main character, Emily Baxter, originally plans to bike from New York City to Alaska – a distance of about 4,500 miles – where she knows some other rare survivors of the apocalyptic event can be found. However, in the second book of the series – Extinction Point: Exodus (2013) – we learn that Emily only makes it via her bicycle to upstate New

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police force, and conventional economy has meant ‘it has been years since [some people] had seen a working car,’ for ‘[w]ho could afford gas, batteries, tires’ in such trying times?9 What if – as in Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind (2017) – murderous Martians invading Earth are targeting motorized transport because they perceive it as threatening?10 Put simply, automobility is not a viable or a prudent option for many people living through postapocalyptic scenarios. As Hopkinson writes of her postapocalyptic Toronto: ‘Most people only travelled as far as a bicycle could take them.’11 In such grim and desperate circumstances, the bicycle can be very beneficial indeed. The possession of one of these machines might mean the difference between life and death. This chapter continues the chronological organization of this book by examining a few sf works that comprise part of the genre known as ‘cli-fi’ (also called ‘climate fiction,’ ‘climate change fiction,’ ‘anthropocene fiction,’ and so forth) that has exploded in size and popularity since the 1990s when the threat of climate change finally entered the political and cultural mainstream.12 Goodbody and Johns-Putra define cli-fi as the ‘significant body of narrative work broadly defined by its thematic focus on climate change and the political, social, psychological and ethical issues associated with it.’ It is a genre that ‘took off in the first years of the new century, paralleling Al Gore’s success in raising

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York before she eventually concedes to learning to drive a Dodge SUV to complete her journey. Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012), p. 23. One character, we are told, believes the ‘Martians generally didn’t interfere with cyclists’ because the aliens did not identify ‘that most democratic of vehicles with war-making capabilities.’ Stephen Baxter, The Massacre of Mankind (New York: Crown, 2017), p. 246. Hopkinson, Brown Girl, pp. 23–24. For a short intro to the flourishing of cli-fi, see Rodge Glass, ‘Global Warning: The Rise of “Cli-Fi,”’ Guardian (May 31, 2013); Pilita Clark, ‘Global Literary Circles Warm to Climate Fiction,’ Financial Times (May 31, 2013). The genre’s rise in prominence is apparent as well from the many scholarly books published on it in recent years, such as the following: Cli-Fi: A Companion, ed. Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018); Adeline Johns-Putra, Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Marc DiPaolo, Fire and Snow: Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018); Antonia Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in the Age of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

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the profile of climate activism.’13 Prominent sf examples of cli-fi would include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy (2004–7) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–13). Although cli-fi works need not be science fictional or postapocalyptic in nature, quite often they do portray characters living in a future time of political, economic and/or social collapse, a collapse that has been caused by (or is intensely exacerbated by) a form or several forms of ecologically related catastrophe such as violent storms, rising sea levels, crop failure, wildfires, species extinctions, and so forth. Significantly for this book’s interests, some cli-fi texts portray the survivors of these catastrophes employing bicycles to alleviate their suffering in some way or to help them maintain some semblance of order and normalcy in their lives. After first briefly discussing the rise of climate-oriented post-apocalypse texts and then analyzing a work that is often hailed as an important early cli-fi novel – Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) – this chapter then jumps ahead to focus on two more recent, twenty-firstcentury examples of cli-fi: Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and Benjamin Parzybok’s Sherwood Nation (2014). In all three novels, bicycles (alongside walking, dirigibles, and clipper ships) routinely become a preferred form of movement, for they are adopted by many characters as the most stalwart, sustainable, and versatile modes of transport left amid the debris of collapsed societies.14 Cars and other gasoline-powered vehicles, on the other hand, are routinely portrayed as either the tools of oppressors and of the depraved, or as immobile machines that have been incapacitated by the postapocalypse conditions. Transportation and mobility, in short, are vital concerns in these works that are so interested in exploring what is necessary to keep a society functioning and to keep individuals from slipping into complete despair and disempowerment.

The Changing Nature of the Apocalypse As warfare evolved in the early twentieth century to embrace horrific new machines and technologies, and as the Cold War intensified between 13

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Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Introduction,’ in Cli-Fi, p. 2, p. 4. We might point out here that the use of bikes during and after the apocalypse also appears in earlier sf works like H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) and The War in the Air (1908), as well as Walter M. Miller Jr.’s story ‘Dumb Waiter’ (1952). For a more in-depth discussion of bikes in those two Wells novels, see Jeremy Withers, The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

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the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century, many texts of those eras assumed the ‘end of days’ would likely be a result of some new form of military weaponry such as the nuclear bomb. But the nature and causes of the imagined apocalypse take a noticeable shift in the last few decades of the twentieth century. Starting around the 1960s and 1970s, writers and filmmakers increasingly portray the apocalypse as an environmental catastrophe of some kind: the depletion of global oil reserves, a mass extinction of species, widespread flooding or widespread drought, and so forth. Although precursors of the environmental apocalypse can be found in sf as early as the 1912 novel The Second Deluge by Garrett P. Serviss and the 1928 story ‘Reprisal’ by Thomas Richard Jones, this subgenre of sf finds its fundamental form being hammered into shape by the influential catastrophe novels of J. G. Ballard such as The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1965), as well as by works such as Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay (1978).15 As Trexler observes, ‘early climate change novels [such as those by Ballard and Cowper] drew on enormously popular post-apocalyptic novels from the 1950s and 1960s that dealt heavily with nuclear fallout and plagues.’16 The basic form and aesthetic of the environmental apocalypse further coalesced with the arrival of Mad Max (1979). Regarding this low-budget film that was a surprise blockbuster, screenwriter James McCausland has explicitly stated he extrapolated from his own observations of how Australians dealt with the 1973 oil crisis (caused by an Arab-nation-led oil embargo) to imagine a future in which peak oil has been reached. Writing in the Courier-Mail in 2006, McCausland states: [In 1973] there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility. A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank. Long queues formed at the 15

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The Second Deluge was first serialized in the magazine Cavalier from July 1911 to January 1912 before being published as a novel later in 1912. This work tells of an Earth submerged by water due to the effects of Earth’s encounter with a spiral nebula. ‘Reprisal’ (Amazing Stories, October 1928) tells the story of a vengeful scientist who disrupts the Gulf Stream to plunge England into a deep freeze. A slightly later story, ‘The Sixth Glacier,’ by Marius (Amazing Stories, January–February 1929), depicts our planet overrun by rapid glaciation. We might point out as well that references to climate change (of a non-apocalyptic nature) are present in what many consider to be a founding text of the entire sf genre, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 90.

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stations with petrol—and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence…[Director George Miller] and I wrote the [Mad Max] script based on the thesis that people would do almost anything to keep vehicles moving and the assumption that nations would not consider the huge costs of providing infrastructure for alternative energy until it was too late.17 As McCausland’s comments indicate, the environmental apocalypse often demonstrates a profound interest in the connection between ecological collapse and issues of mobility. This connection is further explored by the various Mad Max sequels – particularly The Road Warrior (1981) and Fury Road (2015) – with their intense and memorable portrayal of people’s desperate (often ludicrous) attempts to cling to automobility and to continue fetishizing the car in a slowly dying, resource-starved world. Rather than tenaciously cling to automobility, however, some survivors of ecological collapse turn to the bicycle instead. Given that some historians believe the very first bicycle was the result of a moment of ecological stress, the close relationship between bicycles and environmental disruption portrayed in the novels this chapter focuses on – Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and Parzybok’s Sherwood Nation – is fitting indeed.18

Race, Class, and Mobility With its repeated references to a warming world, to years-long drought, to water scarcity, to frequent wild fires, and so forth, Butler’s Parable of the Sower (appearing during the postcyberpunk era discussed in the last 17

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James McCausland, ‘Scientists’ Warnings Unheeded,’ Courier-Mail (December 4, 2006). Baron Karl von Drais invented his two-wheeled, pedal-less, self-propelled machine – subsequently called the draisine – in Mannheim, Germany in 1817. The draisine is often hailed as the first incarnation of the modern bicycle and several cycling historians have argued that Drais invented his ‘substitute horse’ after ‘the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia had kicked up a persistent dust cover over the Northern Hemisphere that significantly cooled parts of the continent – causing freezes throughout 1816 – the so-called year without a summer – and famine beyond that. In 1817, a feed shortage in Germany forced the slaughter of many horses.’ Margaret Guroff, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), p. 6. See also Paul Smethurst, The Bicycle – Towards a Global History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 23.

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chapter) constitutes an important early example of the then-incipient genre of postapocalyptic cli-fi. It is a novel, therefore, that helped set the stage for when in ‘the first decades of the 2000s climate fiction steadily expanded.’19 Parable of the Sower is set on the western coast of the United States in the 2020s and describes a nation shattered by ‘slow-motion apocalypse,’ an apocalypse caused not only by climate change but also ‘economic depression’ and ‘neoliberalism’s accelerative hollowing-out of the public sphere.’20 It is a nation in which small communities survive by building walls and collecting weapons to protect themselves from the murderers, thieves, and rapists that roam the lawless places just beyond those walls. Furthermore, Parable of the Sower showcases a world in which low-tech forms of movement such as cycling and walking prove effective for allowing the characters to maintain a modicum of normalcy in their lives and for helping them eventually relocate to places where they can recover their lost sense of community. Parable of the Sower focuses on a young woman named Lauren Olamina and roughly the first half of the novel is set in Lauren’s walled neighborhood located in Robledo, a small city on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It is a community that has been forced to abandon the automobile (like Butler herself, but for very different reasons).21 Lauren informs us: ‘most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic.’22 A neighbor’s three-car garage that has now been converted to a rabbit house represents for Lauren an emblem of a vanished richness, one might even say a vanished excess. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she says, ‘any household once had 19 20

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Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 8. Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), p. 132. For more on Butler’s politics in Parable of the Sower and its assault on neoliberal values, see Alex Zamalin, Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 123–36. Butler never learned to drive because she had dyslexia, a type of reading disorder that would have made comprehending road signs difficult, particularly at high speeds. She says in one interview: ‘dyslexia hasn’t really prevented me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do, except drive.’ Joan Fry, ‘“Congratulations! You’ve Just Won $295,000!’” Conversations with Octavia Butler, ed. Conseula Francis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 127. Butler relied on busses, walking, and the occasional car ride from neighbors to get where she needed to go. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000), p. 18. All quotations will be from this edition and be cited parenthetically hereafter.

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three cars’ (73). Automobile infrastructure such as roads have largely fallen into disuse and disrepair. As Lauren informs us, ‘[n]o one’s been building new roads lately’ (171) and ‘many street signs were fallen or gone’ (215). Clearly, in this futuristic world in which climate change has disrupted the availability of life-sustaining necessities like food and water – and therefore dramatically increased their costs – automobility is no longer a priority for many people or even something they appear capable of preserving if they wanted to. As a replacement for the lost and abandoned automobiles, Parable of the Sower routinely describes people in Lauren’s neighborhood – both children and adults – as relying on bicycles for their daily transportation needs. For example, they ride bicycles into the canyons that they use for target practice and Lauren’s dad rides a bike to and from his job outside the neighborhood’s walls. One resourceful neighbor – Richard Moss, the same neighbor who converted his garages into rabbit houses – has even adapted bicycle technology to power the ceiling fans in his home to help deal with the increasing heat of this climate changed world. Lauren tells us: ‘He’s hooked [the fans] up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans’ (73–74). Bicycles, then, provide Lauren and her family and neighbors with several benefits: they provide a form of transport safer than mere walking (because the streets outside her neighborhood are so dangerous); they provide an alternative power source to gasoline; they provide people with access to places to work and to practice vital shooting skills; and so forth. As is typical of most of Butler’s fiction, issues of race play a prominent role in this novel. Unlike what we have seen in most all of the texts already discussed in this book, Parable of the Sower accentuates the intersections of race, social class, and mobility. Thus, rather than celebrating this more restrained mobility of Lauren and her neighborhood, Parable of the Sower is likely extrapolating from a trend that was well developed by the time Butler was writing her novel and that endures on up to the current day. This trend is the fact that most African Americans and other people of color (Lauren’s family and most of her neighbors are black) have, historically, owned fewer cars due to the costliness of their purchase and upkeep, and therefore have often been forced to rely upon slower forms of mobility such as that provided by bicycles and public transit such as buses and subways.23 23

Sf has made this connection between involuntary slow mobility and blackness since W. E. B. Du Bois’ ‘The Comet’ (1920). In this story, Jim – a black survivor of an apocalyptic event – at one point liberates a car

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As Sikivu Hutchinson argues: ‘The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy estimates that only 4 to 5 percent of trips in the United States utilize public transportation. Yet this figure does not adequately account for rates of use in communities of color,’ communities where reliance on public transportation is much more prevalent.24 As Parable of the Sower makes clear, swift forms of transportation such as cars and trucks are still operating in Lauren’s world, albeit in a diminished way. We even learn at one point how in some desperate communities, ‘the rich are escaping by flying out in helicopters’ (246). But that passage encapsulates the nature of the problem: only the wealthy have access to such agile and fast technologies of movement. The people that Lauren knows must rely on their feet and legs to move around. Therefore, in Parable of the Sower Butler does not glorify alternative, non-motorized forms of transport like (say) Ernest Callenbach does with the bike in Ecotopia or like Bradbury does with walking in Fahrenheit 451. The racist history of American transportation – whereby people of color have more often than whites been forced by economic disparity and institutional racism to adopt slower and less reliable modes of transport – prohibits Butler from overly romanticizing the necessity of people in Lauren’s neighborhood to adopt slower forms of movement such as walking or cycling. As Lauren bluntly states, after she and a couple of survivors from her destroyed neighborhood have started their trek north, ‘Walking hurts. I’ve never done enough walking to learn that before, but I know it now…Nothing eases the pain except rest’ (178). Furthermore, the disappearance (and likely murder) of Lauren’s dad, for example, while riding his bike home one day from work suggests Butler associates slower modes of travel like cycling with, to some degree, vulnerability. However, Parable of the Sower does still, in large part, continue the trend we have been tracking thus far in the chapter:

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from its dead, white driver and drives around New York City in it. The assumption the reader is supposed to make, it seems, is that this is the first time (or one of the very few times) in which Jim has been able to avail himself of the swiftness and convenience of automobility. This story was first published in Du Bois’ collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Sikivu Hutchinson, ‘Waiting for the Bus,’ Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000), p. 108. For more on race and transportation, see the following: Melody L. Hoffmann, Bike Lanes are White Lanes: Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016); Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equality, ed. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004); Sikivu Hutchinson, Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

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the recurrence in some postapocalyptic works to portray the bicycle as a highly dependable machine that seems almost custom-made for the conditions of a world that has been reduced and ripped apart by some form of apocalypse. When gasoline supplies have all but disappeared in Lauren’s society, the bicycle still survives as a vital form of self-powered movement. After a gang of drug addicts overrun and destroy Lauren’s neighborhood, the second half of Parable of the Sower focuses on the attempts of Lauren, a couple of survivors from her old neighborhood, and a motley crew of other people they encounter along the way to head north together up the Pacific coast of the United States to try to start a new community that Lauren names Earthseed. All the bicycles from Lauren’s old neighborhood seem to have been stolen or destroyed during the attack, for she and her group of followers simply walk. Again, Butler extrapolates from the common plight of socially vulnerable people like the poor and like people of color to be forced to adopt slower forms of movement. Yet, given the fact that Lauren is a nascent religious leader (she is creating her own religion that she also names Earthseed), her walking and the walking of her ‘disciples’ take on a Christ-like luster. As one scholar describes Jesus’ connection to walking: His very message sprang from his peregrinations. On the road he met his disciples and encountered the Samaritan woman at the well. He told his parables of the prodigal son, who had to leave home to be found, and the good Samaritan, who kindly treated the robbed and beaten stranger he found alongside the road as if he were a brother.25 Butler’s novel, in short, sanctifies the need to walk at the same time as it deplores it.26 25

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Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 45. As mentioned in an earlier footnote, Butler never drove a car due to dyslexia, so (like Lauren and many other people in Parable of the Sower) she was compelled to walk a lot, yet she clearly saw value in walking too. One former neighbor recalls of Butler: ‘I would often pass Butler on her walks to and from the grocery store and would stop to offer her rides, which she didn’t always accept; she was an inveterate walker, and walking even factored into her house purchase…She said that she desired only that a grocery store, a bookstore, and a bus stop be located within walking distance.’ Sheila Liming, ‘My Neighbor Octavia,’ publicbooks.org (December 15, 2016). Last accessed July 20, 2019.

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Once Lauren’s group commences their walking of the highways of California, Parable of the Sower again makes it clear that the dominance of the automobile has passed away. Although when the group gets further north into California they find that certain highways like the I-5 have ‘more trucks’ (271), large motorized vehicles constitute a rare sight upon the more southern highways that the group travels along for most of the narrative. For example, when describing California State Route 118 – found down near Los Angeles – Lauren says: ‘We saw a few trucks – most of them run at night – swarms of bikes or electric cycles, and two cars…It’s against the law in California to walk on the freeways, but the law is archaic. Everyone who walks walks on the freeways sooner or later…Dad walked or bicycled on them often’ (176). Similarly, when the group moves a little further north and changes over to the US 101 highway, Lauren immediately notices that ‘there were even more walkers. Even clumsy thieves would have no trouble losing themselves in this crowd’ (203). Like William Gibson does in Virtual Light with suspension bridges, Butler does with freeways: both authors take a piece of automobile infrastructure that seems like it will forever and always be associated with cars and then they disrupt and denaturalize that association. Gibson turns a bridge into a place where society’s marginalized people sleep, eat, buy, sell, and play; Butler turns a highway into a place where bicycles and pedestrians outnumber cars and trucks. This experience walking north marks Lauren’s first time on a freeway, and one of the things she quickly notes is ‘the freeway crowd is a heterogeneous mass – black and white, Asian and Latin, whole families are on the move with babies on backs or perched atop loads in carts, wagons or bicycle baskets, sometimes along with an old or handicapped person’ (177). Despite the hardships of this postapocalyptic world and despite the danger that persists on its roads due to their general lawlessness (and, in the case of the Californian roads of the novel, due to the wildfires raging all around), one of the road’s achievements is its return to being a ‘commons,’ that is, to being a communal resource available to all members of society. As Longhurst asserts: ‘The road was traditionally a shared property and safeguarded as such.’27 This perception of roads as a commons was (as mentioned in Chapter 1) a long-standing one that roads possessed for nearly two thousand years. However, it was undermined by the growing hegemony of the car during the pulp era of the 1920s and 1930s. 27

James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), p. 10.

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But, in Lauren’s time, a perception of roads as communal spaces is once again possible. As Lauren muses about halfway through the novel: ‘Earthseed is being born right here on Highway 101 – on that portion of 101 that was once El Camino Real, the royal highway of California’s Spanish past. Now it’s a highway, a river of the poor. A river flooding north’ (223). Lauren’s invocation of El Camino Real calls to mind again the unfixed and contingent nature of a road: El Camino Real began as the original King’s Highway during the Spanish colonial period but it was little more than a horse trail at that time. Next, it became an auto route during the twentieth century. But then Lauren registers a shift in this road’s identity again as it has, in her time, now become a place associated with walking. And although Butler often presents the highway as a dangerous place – thieves and gangs routinely prey upon people there – she also presents highways like El Camino Real as transformed by the near-absence of cars into a place of creation for a new community, a place of broader racial and economic acceptance. In sum, Parable of the Sower marks an important moment in which a prominent sf text weaves together issues of climate change, racial and economic disparity, and mobility. Lauren and those she knows must ride bikes in the first half of the novel, and then walk in the second half, because they are poor and most of them are people of color. However, far from depicting such forms of mobility as thoroughly humiliating and wretched, Butler instead uses bicycles to show the resourcefulness and fortitude of Lauren and her community before it is destroyed. People like her father can still hold onto a steady job and the people of Lauren’s neighborhood can practice vital survival skills in the nearby canyons because of their use of bicycles. And then when the neighborhood is destroyed, and Lauren and the burgeoning community of Earthseed must rely on walking to head north, that mode of transport takes on luminous associations with Christ’s peregrinations around Judea.

Bicycles, Dirigibles, and Clipper Ships Winner of several of sf’s most distinguished awards – including a Hugo, a Nebula, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Locus Award – Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is set in a futuristic world (an exact date is never specified) teetering on the brink of collapse. Global warming has raised the world’s sea levels and, as a result, water has submerged many coastal cities. Agricultural mega-corporations have ruthlessly engineered destructive plagues and pests to create new markets for their genetically modified crops. As a consequence of this

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bioterrorism, mass starvation has shattered many parts of Asia. The precarious state of the world has contributed to entire countries such as Malaysia disintegrating into violence. However, thanks to a closely guarded seed bank, to successful feats of engineering such as a massive dike-and-pump system that keeps the ocean at bay, and to a rigorous policing of its borders and airfields that keeps most of the dangerous crops and pests out, the country of Thailand (the main setting of The Windup Girl) has thus far been spared the spectacular brutality of a quick and total apocalypse. Like Parzybok’s Portland, Bacigalupi’s Thailand has managed to endure, but also like Portland it is experiencing a version of a slow apocalypse. Pests have decimated the Thai countryside and cities like Bangkok brim with towers containing starving refugees and with neighborhoods tormented by poverty and pollution. Most compellingly for my purposes, The Windup Girl constitutes what Heather I. Sullivan calls a ‘post-oil urban tale,’ that is, a narrative that presents a fully fleshed out world in which fossil fuels are no longer readily available.28 Gasoline and oil have all but vanished from the Earth in Bacigalupi’s novel. Coal clearly still exists, however, for it is coal that powers the pump system that keeps the seawater out of Bangkok. But coal is a rare and highly prized resource that the narrative repeatedly references people waging war over outside of Thailand. In short, most people across the globe are living in what The Windup Girl refers to as the ‘Contraction,’ an agonizing and humbling era of human history in which all the conquests over time and distance that carbon-based fuels gave us are slowly but steadily being reversed. As ‘The Calorie Man’ (2005) – another of Bacigalupi’s tales set in the Contraction – puts it, this time period is defined by even an American suburb, that environment so intimately associated with expansionist values, falling into ruin. ‘The Calorie Man’ describes one particular suburb thus: ‘it now sprawled in an advanced state of decay…willingly abandoned when the expense of commuting grew too great.’ The bridge leading to the suburb has deteriorated into ‘a hazy network of broken trusses and crumbling supports.’29 Like we have seen already with Gibson and Butler, Bacigalupi exposes the seemingly eternal infrastructure and built 28

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Heather I. Sullivan, ‘Material Ecocriticism and the Petro-Text,’ in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, John Christensen, and Michelle Niemann (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 419. Paolo Bacigalupi, ‘The Calorie Man,’ in Pump Six and Other Stories (San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2010), p. 103. This story was originally published in the October/November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

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environments that automobility created as being fragile and transitory at their core. The era of the ‘old Expansion…when petroleum was cheap and men and women crossed the globe in hours instead of weeks’ is over, possibly never again to return.30 But a memorable achievement of Bacigalupi’s work is how it ‘regales us with creative energy options, whether new or revised’ that people must utilize to adapt to the collapse of fossil fuels.31 The Windup Girl provocatively conjures up a world in which biopower – power harvested from human and other animal bodies – now provides a widespread energy source to replace fossil fuels. As opposed to a vision of a postapocalyptic world that has been reduced to a neo-medieval simplicity, Bacigalupi’s Thailand still uses sophisticated technology such as working computers. However, these computers now require foot-pumped treadles to supply their power as sewing machines once did in the nineteenth century. Phones endure too, but require hand-cranking. Similarly, just as ‘beasts of burden’ like oxen and horses formerly provided vast amounts of power before the extensive use of internal combustion engines, animals such as huge genetically modified elephants called megodonts now propel machinery such as a factory’s assembly line. Additionally, the text frequently references people using flywheels and ‘kink-springs’ (objects akin to the wound-up mainspring that powers a mechanical clock or watch) as devices for energy storage. Of course, with the collapse of fossil fuels, societies will have to privilege other types of mobility beyond those provided by automobiles and passenger planes. Even more so than with Butler’s California or Parzybok’s Portland, internal combustion engines are scarce in Bacigalupi’s Thailand. In the wake of the collapse of fossil fuels, humans in the world of this novel have created ‘innovative alternatives’ for their mobility needs. Like Sullivan, I perceive such alternatives as revealing Bacigalupi’s text to be ‘optimistic’ at its core, for its vision of people enduring a post-oil future ‘does not require the annihilation of virtually the entire human population [as represented by the engineered pandemic in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake] or the civilizational dead-end of nothing but human ‘fuel’ remaining [as represented by the rampant cannibalism in McCarthy’s The Road].’32 30

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Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2010), p. 16. All quotations from the novel will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter. Sullivan, ‘Material Ecocriticism,’ p. 419. Sullivan, ‘Material Ecocriticism,’ p. 420. Other scholars take a dimmer view of Bacigalupi’s vision of creative energy use. Trexler, for example, asserts: ‘Instead of presenting a sustainable utopia, critical environmental

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Instead of those dark scenarios, The Windup Girl imagines a more constrained version of civilization enduring through the extensive use of alternative sources of energy, for it is a world in which ‘[w]ind power and simple flotation have been renewed.’33 For example, the text references clipper ships (multiple-mast sailing vessels) prowling the seas to move people and goods around the globe in this future world. When describing Hock Seng, a formerly successful Chinese businessman who had to flee to Thailand to escape religious and ethnic persecution, Bacigalupi writes: ‘He misses his clipper fleet and crews…who sailed Mishimoto clippers to the far side of the world, sailing even as far as Europe, carrying tea strains resistant to genehack weevil and returning with expensive cognacs that had not been seen since the days of the Expansion’ (69). In Ship Breaker (2010) – the follow-up novel to The Windup Girl – Bacigalupi continues his project of making innovative, sustainable forms of transport appear stylish and exciting. Ship Breaker describes brilliantly engineered clippers that utilize carbon-fiber hulls, high-altitude parasails, extendable hydrofoils, and advanced computer systems.34 Compared to the derelict oil tankers that the main character Nailer and his crew tear apart to sell for scrap, these clipper ships that do not require a drop of oil seem like ‘something else entirely, a machine angels had built.’35 Bacigalupi expands upon this interest in less-resource-gluttonous modes of transport in other ways throughout The Windup Girl. Similar to how clipper ships have replaced freighter ships and ocean liners, dirigibles (airships utilizing some form of lifting-gas such as hydrogen or helium) have replaced the passenger and cargo planes of the former Expansionist era. Dirigibles captivate Bacigalupi, as they do Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age (1995) and Kim Stanley Robinson in New York 2140 (2017). However, Stephenson mainly portrays airships

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measures impoverish the city, creating shadow economies that serve only the powerful.’ Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 217. I agree that The Windup Girl’s Thailand falls far short of being a ‘sustainable utopia.’ But I (and Sullivan too, I think) affirm that the novel gives us a memorable vision of what a more sustainable transportation system than our current one might look like. Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, p. 216. The role that sailing might play in future transportation was underscored in 2019 by Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg when she crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a zero-emissions yacht to attend a United Nations summit on global warming. Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), p. 80.

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being used by his New Atlantans as part of that group’s overall project of imitating the original nineteenth-century Victorians (even their transport inventions) to help the New Atlantan society achieve a greater sense of order and stability. In other words, we never get a sense that energy scarcity or environmental concerns sponsor the New Atlantans’ use of airships. In contrast, dirigibles interest Robinson and Bacigalupi as a vital way to keep humanity mobile in the skies after traditional nation-states, economies, and resources have collapsed. Robinson, for example, informs us that, after the people of his futuristic world abandoned carbon-burning transport because the perils of climate change had become too obvious, ‘millions of…airships wander[ed] the skies.’36 The main advantage of the dirigible is like that of the clipper ship: low energy consumption. Compared to an airplane, airships require far less energy to lift off the ground and to stay aloft. For example, a new airship being developed by Lockheed Martin at the time of my writing ‘carries the same load capacity as a Boeing 737 cargo aircraft, albeit with a third of the fuel consumption and a third of the carbon footprint. Its range is 1600 miles.’37 Lockheed Martin’s airship uses ‘a 4-liter piston engine (essentially a car engine)’ that only ‘uses one-tenth the power of a fixed-wing aircraft.’38 With regards to lifting gas, Robinson’s airships use helium, but Bacigalupi’s dirigibles apparently employ hydrogen for their lifting-gas, as suggested by the narrator’s comment at one point that a character’s ‘hilarity leaves him like hydrogen gusting from a dirigible’ (178).39 In the years after the infamous Hindenburg explosion of 1937, hydrogen fell into disrepute, due to it being extremely flammable. However, some people perceive hydrogen’s many advantages in areas 36 37

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Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (New York: Orbit, 2017), p. 98. Mike Kendrick, ‘A New Age of Airships is Ready for Lift-Off,’ Daily Telegraph (March 31, 2016). Last accessed March 10, 2019. ‘Hybrid Airship: Big Impact, Small Environmental Footprint,’ 3blmedia. com (August 31, 2017). Last accessed March 10, 2019. For an overview of where airship development stands in the early twenty-first century, see Jeanne Marie Laskas, ‘Helium Dreams,’ New Yorker (February 29, 2016). Last accessed March 10, 2019. Stephenson’s airships avoid lifting-gas altogether. In the world of The Diamond Age – a world radically altered by nanotechnology – twenty-firstcentury airships ‘are filled literally with nothing at all. High-strength nanostructures make it possible to pump all the air from an airship’s envelope and fill it with a vacuum.’ Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam, 2008), p. 122. A vacuum floats best because hydrogen and helium still have some mass to them, whereas a vacuum is completely devoid of mass.

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such as abundance, sustainability, and low environmental impact as acceptable trade-offs for its combustibility.40 In short, although the era of the ‘Contraction’ in which The Windup Girl is set has led to much suffering and hardship for many people, Bacigalupi appears cautiously optimistic that at least transport might benefit from a time of scarcity and constraint. As odious as most any form of compulsion can be, The Windup Girl portrays people as being forced to adopt more environmentally benign and sustainable modes of transport to stay mobile in a fragile world. However, as Andrew Hageman rightly points out, some modes of transportation in The Windup Girl allow aspects of the old Expansionist world to problematically reemerge. In other words, vehicles like clipper ships and dirigibles constitute one of the ways in which The Windup Girl ‘brings…inherent contradictions distinctly into view’ such as ‘the belief that capitalism can readily be retrofitted into a sustainable economic system.’41 Clearly, characters like Hock Seng (with his former fleet of clipper ships) and Carlyle (with his current fleet of dirigibles) have appropriated such vehicles for the larger social goal of trying to ‘revive the neoliberal objective of unhindered global trade.’42 Bacigalupi’s text, therefore, endorses that old maxim that no form of technology is inherently benevolent or evil, for such assessments depend on the ways in which that technology is actually utilized in the world. (A hammer, for example, can be both a deadly weapon that bludgeons someone to death or it can be a kind tool that builds houses for the poor.) But whereas the clipper ship and the dirigible have their environmental credentials 4 0

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See, for example, Adeel Ahmed, et al., ‘Hydrogen Fuel and Transport System: A Sustainable and Environmental Future,’ International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 41, no. 3 (2016): 1369–80; Sonal Singh, et al., ‘Hydrogen: A Sustainable Fuel for Future of the Transport Sector,’ Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 51 (2015), pp. 623–33. Certain questions do linger, however, about Bacigalupi’s dirigibles. Although the novel suggests hydrogen is what keeps these airships afloat, it leaves unclear what the power source might be for propelling the airships horizontally. Any of the options – coal, methane, kink-springs, etc. – would affect the degree to which these dirigibles can lay claim to being environmentally benign and sustainable. On a side note, Stephenson states his novel’s airships run on battery-power (see Stephenson, Diamond Age, p. 51) and Robinson states his airships are powered by a ‘photovoltaic outer skin’ that makes ‘the craft[s] effectively autonomous in energy terms’ (see Robinson, New York 2140, p. 98). Andrew Hageman, ‘The Challenge of Imagining Ecological Futures: Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl,’ Science Fiction Studies 39, no. 2 (2012), p. 284. Hageman, ‘Imagining Ecological Futures,’ p. 288.

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somewhat tarnished by their repeated associations with a burgeoning ‘new Expansion’ built on commerce and profit, another technology of movement – the bicycle – also frequently appears in The Windup Girl, yet it embodies more restraint and less entanglement in the values of globalized capitalism than those other two vehicles. As we saw above with the treadle-powered computers, humans once again must supply vast amounts of energy to get some kinds of work done. This vital role of human power extends to the worlds of mobility and transport as well, for the streets of Bacigalupi’s Bangkok swell with bicycles. An early scene describing the character Anderson Lake commuting to his job at SpringLife (a kink-spring factory that he oversees) sets the stage for the importance of bikes to this world of the future. As Lake enters a streetscape, the narration informs us: ‘A seethe of traffic greets him, morning commuters clogging Thanon Rama IX like the Mekong in flood. Bicycles and cycle rickshaws, blue-black water buffaloes and great shambling megodonts’ (4). After Lake climbs into his usual cycle rickshaw operated by the elderly Lao Gu, Bacigalupi continues: ‘The old man stands on his pedals and they merge into traffic. Around them bicycle bells ring’ (4). Not only do bicycles saturate the street, but some of them are even newly manufactured machines, as suggested by how, as his kink-spring factory comes into view, Lake also catches a glimpse of the building across the street from it: ‘a Chaozhou bicycle factory’ (8). Bicycles, in short, flourish in this world defined so much by exhaustion and attrition. Not only do common, everyday people use them – as suggested by the many references to the streets brimming with bikes – but also powerful figures such as Jaidee and Kanya, high-ranking members of the Ministry of Environment that works to protect the country from unauthorized energy use, illegal imports, and so forth. For example, at one point a messenger informs Jaidee as the latter is shutting down a factory in violation of exceeding its coal allotment that Jaidee has been summoned for a meeting with his superior, General Pracha. To return to the Ministry building as quickly as possible, Jaidee takes the messenger’s bike. The novel even suggests that Jaidee and his lieutenant, Kanya, often employ a tandem bike as they are making their rounds to patrol Bangkok, for Jaidee tells the messenger as he is mounting his bike that Kanya will ‘give you a ride back on our tandem’ (119). Later in the novel, after Jaidee’s tragic murder at the hands of his archrival – Akkarat, the head of the Trade Ministry – we see Kanya still putting the bicycle to regular use. For instance, when going to visit Jaidee’s family, she ‘cycles down bricked paths between teak and banana trees to the housing quarters’ (192) where Jaidee’s widow and children live. While

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there, she collects a box of Jaidee’s belongings from his family and, as she is leaving, she ‘straps the box…to her cycle’s cargo rack and pedals across the compound’ (195). Thus, like the leaders of Sherwood Nation in Parzybok’s novel, Jaidee and Kanya do not perceive the bicycle as many people unfortunately do today: as an undesirable machine because, to be seen upon it, signifies weakness, emasculation, poverty, lack of authority, and so forth. As glimpsed in the one of the quotes above, not only are regular bicycles abundant on the streets of Bacigalupi’s Bangkok, but also cycle rickshaws.43 The Windup Girl never describes these vehicles in detail, but it appears that readers are supposed to envision the typical cycling rickshaw (also called a pedicab or bike taxi) of many Asian countries: a for-hire tricycle with a pedaling driver in the front and a seat in the back for one or two passengers. Anderson Lake appears to have his own personal rickshaw pedaled by Lao Gu that he regularly uses. Jaidee and Kanya occasionally avail themselves of a rickshaw. In addition to these scenes showing important characters using pedicab transport, the narration is sprinkled with many general descriptions of the Bangkok streetscape such as ‘[o]ut on the street, cycle rickshaws clatter over cobbles’ (107) and of the scene around the Environment Ministry such as ‘[s]ervants and rickshaw men and carriages clog the outer gates, waiting for their patrons to return’ (142). One memorable scene depicts Hock Seng desperately turning an ordinary rickshaw into an ambulance for taking two men who have become sickened in the SpringLife factory to a hospital. Scholar like Frans Sengers have argued that Thailand – unlike other Asian countries like China and India – has not done much to embrace the bicycle in the past. Instead, like what decades of suburbanization have done to the majority of American cities, many Thai cities ‘present a challenging habitat for the bicycle to flourish,’ for cities like Bangkok have been historically overrun by ‘unrestrained motorisation’ and ‘congested inner-city highways and urban sprawl.’44 However, just as the resurgence of cycling has swept up many cities across the world, Sengers 43

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An earlier novelette of Bacigalupi’s – ‘Yellow Card Man’ (2006) – functions as a prequel to The Windup Girl and focuses on an early version of the character Hock Seng, who is here named Tranh. Set in Bangkok like The Windup Girl, ‘Yellow Card Man’ also contains many references to streets teeming with bicycles and rickshaws. The novelette was originally published in the December 2006 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Frans Sengers, ‘Cycling the City, Re-Imagining the City: Envisioning Urban Sustainability Transitions in Thailand,’ Urban Studies 54, no. 12 (2017), p. 2768.

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finds that, at present, ‘there are signs that cyclist numbers are increasing in Thailand as well. A new vibrant subculture of cycling enthusiasm and advocacy has emerged to reestablish the bicycle as an integral part of an envisioned future cityscape.’45 In some ways, then, what Bacigalupi describes in The Windup Girl isn’t very futuristic at all. The abundance of bicycles and rickshaws resembles the changes occurring in countries like Thailand and resembles the current reality of many Asian cities today. Geographer Glen Norcliffe has studied the widespread use of what he calls ‘working tricycles’ (taxi bikes, cargo tricycles, etc.) in parts of Asia. By his estimate, a country like China might have ‘between 40 and 60 million working tricycles.’46 The advantages of such a machine, for Norcliffe, are many: ‘It does not pollute very much, is silent yet fairly swift, it costs little to manufacture and maintain, is flexible in where it can go and in the loads it can carry, is a safe vehicle with minimal risks, technological innovation is improving its performance, and it provides meaningful work for people with limited skills by supporting millions of city micro-enterprises.’47 What Norcliffe demonstrates and what Bacigalupi appears to know is that many Asian countries (despite their rising rates of automobile ownership and use) stand better prepared to confront the challenges of a world that is warming and running out of accessible fossil fuels if these countries can resist the urge to push bicycles and tricycles off the streets and to reconfigure their cities in ways that don’t accommodate human-powered transportation.48 As Norcliffe asserts: ‘an inclusive approach combining public transit and 45 4 6

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Sengers, ‘Cycling the City,’ p. 2764 Glen Norcliffe, Critical Geographies of Cycling: History, Political Economy and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 221. Norcliffe, Critical Geographies, p. 227. In his prequel to The Windup Girl – ‘Yellow Card Man’ – Bacigalupi at one point depicts street workers using tricycles in the following way: to ‘shovel the day’s animal leavings [i.e., dung] into sacks and throw them into tricycle carriers’ (175). The dung is being collected so it can be turned into a fuel source. Bacigalupi, ‘Yellow Card Man,’ in Pump Six and Other Stories (San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2010), p. 175. In his earlier story, ‘The Calorie Man,’ Bacigalupi portrays an American city – New Orleans – that has reached a similar post-fossil fuel state as Bangkok. Like its Far Eastern counterpart, New Orleans also brims with ‘cycle rickshaws and bicycles, slipp[ing] through the midmorning gray, pulses of green and red and blue as they passed the alley’s mouth draped under rain-glossed polymer ponchos.’ Bacigalupi, ‘Calorie Man,’ p. 96. Most people, however, would see American cities like New Orleans as having a lot of catching up to do compared to many Asian cities to be prepared for a post-automobile future.

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motor vehicles for longer journeys with bicycles and tricycles for local movement and commerce holds promise of a more sustainable future not just for China’s cities, but for the cities of most nations.’49 But when those ‘longer journeys’ become next to impossible due to the disappearance of cheaply available fossil fuels, at least ‘local movement and commerce’ can still be sustained if a city has not already ceased promoting alternative technologies of movement like the working tricycle.50 Notably, the world that The Windup Girl shows us is not completely devoid of motorized vehicles, despite the near-collapse of fossil fuels. Several scenes memorably impress upon us the idea that some people, no matter what the circumstances, will tenaciously cling to automobility as a necessary form of conspicuous consumption and as a vital material performance of their strength and importance. Like we will see below with Parzybok’s Sherwood Nation, Bacigalupi too portrays domineering characters as reliant on extravagant forms of motorized transport to bolster their authority.51 A character named the Dung Lord owns the first car shown, his name derived from his dominance over the conversion of dung into the methane that he then sells to people for fuel. Hock Seng is outraged when, as he is trying to sell industrial secrets from the SpringLife factory where he works as Lake’s subordinate, a car owned by the

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Norcliffe, Critical Geographies, pp. 227–28. For a discussion of cycling in Asia that focuses more on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Smethurst, The Bicycle, pp. 105–31. The redemptive power of pedaling is mirrored at times in the pedaling of a treadle-powered computer. Bacigalupi’s ‘The Calorie Man’ is set in a world very similar to The Windup Girl. In this story, Bowman, a rogue scientist whose skill with genetically modified organisms threatens the cruel monopolies of the large agricultural corporations, says of his treadle-powered computer, ‘Everything in that machine came from me… My calories pedaled into data analysis.’ Bacigalupi, ‘Calorie Man,’ p. 110. Shortly thereafter, in response to another character’s incredulousness that Bowman can really ‘break the calorie monopolies,’ the latter replies, ‘If one is willing to burn the calories for such a project…to pedal a computer through millions upon millions of cycles,’ it is ‘[m]ore than possible’ to challenge the dominance of the agricultural corporations. Bacigalupi, ‘Calorie Man,’ p. 111. Similarly, in Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Nalo Hopkinson presents a crumbling futuristic Toronto in which people rely mainly on bicycles to get around. However, a villainous gangster named Rudy drives a Bentley limousine, one of the only cars seen in the novel. In one scene, Rudy shows more concern about the leather on his car seats than about a wounded general of his whose bleeding body has been placed inside the Bentley.

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Dung Lord (a potential buyer of these secrets) drives to the factory to fetch Hock Seng. The Dung Lord intends for his car to impress and intimidate Hock Seng before the two negotiate a deal. But Hock Seng perceives the car as an unnecessary spectacle that draws unwanted attention to the fact that he is meeting with the shadowy Dung Lord. Furthermore, Hock Seng can only see this car that runs on coal-diesel as an ‘extraordinary waste’ due to the ‘exorbitant cost of turning this steel behemoth into acceleration’ (134). People on the street turn and gape in astonishment at the rare sight of an automobile, but Hock Seng finds the ‘speed of the machine…appalling’ (134). As Furness reminds us: ‘the broader popular culture in the United States is…invested in pronouncing the stereotypical bonds between straight masculinity and driving. As a case in point, there are now tens of thousands of drivers attaching fake testicles, or “truck nutz,” to the rear bumpers of their vehicles, symbolically transforming their SUVs and trucks into giant phalluses.’52 Through the Dung Lord and his car, Bacigalupi satirizes the necessity of some people – like the males who put ‘truck nutz’ on their pick-ups or Hummers – to yoke their sense of power and authority to big, raucous machines. Interestingly, upon seeing and riding in the Dung Lord’s car, Hock Seng registers no envy over this effortless and convenient mode of transport, and he conveys no sense of longing for the world to return to an era of abundant cars. He still seems to prefer walking or cycling everywhere he needs to go, and cannot move past seeing the Dung Lord’s car as the epitome of reckless energy use. Inside the car, Hock Seng also feels as if ‘he’s locked inside one of SpringLife’s safes, isolated from the world beyond’ (134). As battered and dilapidated as the world around him has become, Hock Seng still wants to feel connected to that environment. But, like many people have complained about with the car, a ride in such a machine can be an alienating experience. People can feel completely cut off from their surroundings, as if they are entombed in a box of glass, metal, and plastic. The next appearance of a car is even more egregious than the appearance of the Dung Lord’s automobile. The powerful Trade Minister Akkarat also owns a vehicle, but unlike how Bacigalupi leaves the type of car the Dung Lord owns unspecified, Akkarat’s one is described as a ‘coal-diesel limo’ (150, emphasis added). Thus, this second automobile looms as an apparently more massive (and therefore more extravagant) vehicle than the Dung Lord’s. Akkarat appears in his car in a scene in which he is confronting Lake, the American who runs the SpringLife 52

Furness, One Less Car, p. 114.

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factory, about the latter being an undercover agent of one of the reviled American agricultural corporations. Like the Dung Lord’s car, therefore, Akkarat employs his vehicle to project an intimidating aura of power in important situations. Before he even opens his mouth to accuse Lake of working for one of the companies responsible for manufacturing ‘calorie plagues’ (150) that have contributed to the misery of so many Asian countries, Akkarat strategically uses the mere sight of his mighty car to threaten and humble Lake. The irony, however, is that during this moment when he is accusing Lake of being a corporate demon, Akkarat also lectures him on how ‘[d]uring the old Expansion your kind tried to take every part of us. Chopping off the arms and legs of our country’ (150). But – alongside airplanes – unnecessarily large cars like the one Akkarat owns exemplify the old Expansionist values of the gluttonous conquest of space and distance that Akkarat pretends to condemn. Lastly, during the riots that break out in the climactic final chapters of The Windup Girl, we see a third appearance of motorized transport: the unleashing by the Thai military of a cache of tanks and soldier transport trucks. Characters like Kanya and Hock Seng are both mesmerized and appalled by the speed, stench, loudness, and power of these machines that, like Akkarat’s limousine, also run on coal-diesel. For Kanya, the sight of one of the tanks – ‘a metal monster…belching smoke from its furnace’ (310) – conjures up horrific memories of her own childhood experience of watching ‘tanks roaring through villages’ (310). Of Hock Seng’s encounter with a tank, the narration tells us: ‘It appeared so suddenly. So much faster than anything he has ever seen. Old Expansion technology’ (313). These tanks and transport trucks render overt what the Dung Lord and Akkarat’s cars keep more covert: the intimate connections between (on the one hand) large machinery and swift transport, and (on the other hand) attempts to project unquestionable power and authority no matter what the cost in terms of waste and destruction. As with both the Dung Lord and Minister Akkarat’s cars, the trucks and especially the tanks that roll across the streets of Bangkok in the novel’s climax all emphasize how tenaciously and ridiculously some people will cling to automobility, for the masculine pride and the sense of mastery over space and distance that so often adhere to motorized forms of transport will not die easily.

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A Brave Little Utopia The Windup Girl’s interest in how global warming, resource scarcity, and transportation intersect is mirrored in Sherwood Nation, Benjamin Parzybok’s second novel and one that envisions a United States tormented by climate change. In the novel’s preface, Parzybok sets the stage for the reader: ‘It happened slowly…Winds came from differing directions, currents looped back on themselves, temperatures fluctuated.’53 Due to gradual changes in oceanic circulation, global climate is profoundly disrupted. Thus, Sherwood Nation focuses on the potential effects of an apocalyptic event quite different from the swift and spectacle-driven cataclysms of, say, nuclear war. Instead, Parzybok’s work focuses on what ecocritic Rob Nixon calls a catastrophe defined by ‘slow violence,’ which Nixon defines as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’54 One of Nixon’s frequent examples of slow violence is the disruption being caused by climate change. Sherwood Nation imagines a scenario in which the western half of the United States has been hard hit by climate change, for droughts now blanket the West and endure for years. Consequently, rivers have dried up, desertification has spread, farms have failed, and people have begun migrating in droves to the East. However, ‘anger over the millions of incoming refugees escalated,’ Parzybok writes. ‘Finally, borders along the Rocky Mountains were sealed to Westerners and a meager aid strategy was conceived by the bankrupt government for many millions abandoned to their dry fates out west’ (1). Sherwood Nation is set in a near-future Portland, Oregon, devastated by drought; it is city in which the poor disproportionately bear the burden of the drought, ‘for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence.’55 In its opening sections, the novel strongly suggests the citizens of the more impoverished Portland neighborhoods are dying more frequently from the collapse of social stability, and they are dying more anonymous deaths. Sherwood Nation focuses in particular on the exploits of a character named Renee. Early in the novel, Renee participates in a plan hatched by a small group of

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Benjamin Parzybok, Sherwood Nation (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2014), p. 1. All quotations from the novel will be from this edition and cited parenthetically hereafter. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2. Nixon, Slow Violence, p. 4.

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activists to stop an illegal shipment of water from reaching an affluent neighborhood. Renee’s role in this act of protest against the unequal distribution of water based on economic status is caught on film by a news crew and then widely shown on television, a bit of notoriety that quickly earns her the nickname of Maid Marian (the legendary woman from English folklore who helped Robin Hood to ‘steal from the rich to give to the poor’). In order to avoid arrest, Renee and her roommate Bea retreat to the Northeast part of Portland, a poorer section of the city that has deteriorated into chaos and lawlessness quicker than the rest of the city, but which therefore offers a better chance of evading detection by the police. Here, Renee – who gradually embraces her Maid Marian persona – collects a group of followers and eventually creates Sherwood Nation, a new country that secedes from the rest of the United States. The drought-ravaged Portland that Parzybok creates is one defined by the breakdown of many basic city services: for example, the increasingly weak city government rations water and implements nightly blackouts. In addition to water and electricity, Sherwood Nation characterizes Portland as a place in which transportation has also been radically altered by the drought. The text informs us that there were now ‘far fewer cars’ (12) in the city and that ‘[l]ike everything else, gasoline had gone up many times in price and wasn’t reliably obtained’ (23). The combination of fuel scarcity and lawlessness means that Renee’s neighborhood of Cully in Northeast Portland has a good number of ‘burnt-out cars’ (65). Also, the Portland light rail – one of the centerpieces of the city’s public transit system today – is described as ‘rust-dusted’ and ‘long closed down’ (55). One of the few reliably functioning pieces of motorized transport that we see is the one used by Mayor Bartlett, thus associating automobility with an unsavory figure of authority in the novel (albeit a figure of diminished authority due to the decline of his city). Sherwood Nation often represents the mayor being driven around in a ‘shiny black car’ (56). Similarly, motorized transport is intimately connected with other authority figures of dubious ethical character like the National Guard (most often depicted as using jeeps but also, late in the novel, a tank) and police officers (often depicted using squad cars). At one time or another, Sherwood Nation shows all these figures associated with cars, jeeps, and a tank as threatening the bold social experiment that Maid Marian (in one of her open letters to the citizens of Sherwood) calls a ‘brave little utopia’ (324). In contrast to the many derelict transport machines and the few cars and jeeps that the novel associates with authority figures (figures who are not portrayed as very benevolent or helpful), many of the other characters are linked to bicycles. Almost from the moment we meet

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Renee, Parzybok describes her as atop a bicycle. She relies upon her bike to pull off the theft of water that earns her the nom de guerre of Maid Marian (an orchestrated bike crash is what her and her friends use to halt the water delivery truck) and Renee and Bea utilize their bikes to flee to Northeast Portland where they hope to evade arrest. It is the speed of their bikes that allows them to feel relatively safe as they begin moving around and exploring this section of the city that has fallen into social chaos. Other people in Renee’s Cully neighborhood – because of the prohibitive cost of gasoline and because of Portland’s tattered transit infrastructure – depend on bicycles for many of their mobility needs.56 Like how we saw Pohl Anderson – a writer of Scandinavian heritage who lived briefly in Denmark during his childhood – drawing upon the Danish connection to cycling in his ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew,’ Parzybok draws upon the robust cycling culture of a place he has lived in since 1998: Portland, Oregon. As Mapes asserts: ‘Portland residents use the bike for transportation more than any other large city in America, and the city has gained an international reputation for encouraging bicycling. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find any city with as rich and varied a bike culture, from jam-packed cyclocross events at the local raceway to what has become North America’s largest annual naked bike ride.’57 A city like Portland (and others in the United States like Minneapolis and Davis) is indeed a remarkable outlier among the car-focused metropolises that define most of America. The Rose City has done much in the last two decades to overhaul its transportation infrastructure to better accommodate the needs of cyclists. For example, the city has ‘tripled the mileage of its bikeways’ and ‘renovated most of the bridges over the Willamette River…to make them safe for cyclists.’ Additionally, Portland

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Another text depicting a ‘slow apocalypse’ – this one defined by declining fertility, power outages, energy rationing, etc. – is The Courier’s New Bicycle (2011) by the Australian writer Kim Westwood. Like Parzybok, Westwood presents a city in which some cars still operate, but many people are achieving mobility through more low-tech, low-energy alternatives such as horse-drawn buggies, scooters, and (as the novel’s title emphasizes) bicycles. Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009), pp. 142–43. As Mapes discusses here, the percentage of people in Portland who claim the bicycle to be their primary mode of transportation is around 5 percent to 8 percent, depending on the survey and its methodology. Such numbers are impressively high for an American city; however, they certainly lag well behind the rates of cycling in, say, Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Groningen (places where the percentage of people who claim the bicycle to be their primary mode of transport can be more around 40 percent).

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‘is dotted with directional signs and pavement markings for riders.’58 Thus, if any American city is going to adapt to the collapse of motorized transportation, it is Portland, Oregon. In place of cars, the burgeoning nation of Sherwood performs some of its most vital services through an ambitious and widespread use of the bicycle. When Renee creates a security force – dubbed the Green Rangers – to help protect their new nation and to help maintain order across Sherwood, the newly formed Rangers are first described as a ‘mass of uniformed people, each standing straight with one hand resting on his or her bicycle’ (146).59 After Sherwood Nation announces to the rest of Portland its secession, Rangers patrol the new borders that divide Portland and Sherwood. (Two such border guards on bikes intercept and take Renee’s boyfriend Zach into custody when he tries to sneak into Sherwood to visit Renee.) In addition to security, bicycles also assist the critical work of water distribution. Formerly, people in Portland had to walk to water distribution sites. But, upon the creation of Sherwood Nation, Renee forms a new contingent of water carriers, water carriers who ‘stacked their unit gallons on bikes with customized trailers – some hacked together from grocery carts and other wheeled vehicles, others made from scratch – and then set off for delivery’ (175). The use of a trailer also allows Bea to turn her bike into an ambulance at one point for a wounded man whom Zach had rescued off the street beneath his apartment. In addition to assisting critical services like security and water distribution, whenever one of the leaders of Sherwood – Renee, Bea, Jamal, Gregor – needs to move around their territory or attend a meeting with a leader from Portland like Mayor Bartlett, more often than not Parzybok describes them as depending on the bicycle for their mobility needs.60 When Renee decides to engage in a ‘victory parade’ of sorts after Sherwood successfully seizes more territory from Portland, 58

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Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, p. 144. Scholars like Hoffmann, however, have published research exposing the racism and classism that unfortunately taints the bicycle revolutions embodied by cities like Portland. See Hoffmann, Bike Lanes are White Lanes, pp. 81–109. Somewhat resembling Parzybok’s Green Rangers, we see another kind of army making effective, large-scale use of bicycles in John Barnes’ Caesar’s Bicycle (1997), a time travel novel that imagines bicycles having been introduced to Julius Caesar and his soldiers. Only once is a leader of Sherwood shown utilizing motorized transport. Gregor – the general of the Sherwood Rangers – drives a captured National Guard jeep late at one point because he had been shot in the leg and therefore ‘could no longer ride [his bike]’ (368).

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she employs the bicycle for this very public spectacle celebrating her triumph. ‘It was a proud day,’ Parzybok writes, ‘and she rode [on her bike] through the neighborhoods slowly and with her head up’ (325). Significantly, Renee never feels as if being seen on a bicycle diminishes her status as a powerful leader. Her use of the bicycle as a tool to help her display confidence and authority refutes the dominant perception of the bicycle in contemporary American mass media, a perception that Zack Furness – in his analysis of mainstream Hollywood films like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) – sums up as one that sees the bike as ‘childish, undignified…[not] a feasible option for most able-bodied Americans…a joke.’61 For Renee, however, the bicycle is important to her public performance as a leader. In fact, so integral is the bicycle to this new nation’s sense of identity that the machine appears in the ‘Sherwood Anthem’ that one creative citizen writes. The anthem boasts of Sherwood’s people: ‘We make, we build, we farm / we teach, we bike, we love!’ (189, emphasis added). One of the qualities that aligns Parzybok’s vision with the ones by Butler and Bacigalupi already discussed in this chapter is its conviction that times of apocalypse might also serve as important opportunities to try to wipe the slate clean and to start a society anew. In other words, an apocalyptic event need not always be wholly bad; it can sometimes be akin to a ‘refresh’ or ‘control+alt+delete’ function on a computer. A long history of portraying apocalyptic scenarios in such a hopeful way exists in sf. H. G. Wells, for example, in his The World Set Free (1914), stages nuclear warfare as a curiously redemptive force capable of releasing the world from its entrenched habits and of cleansing it of evil social and political institutions. Additionally, in an earlier story called ‘The Star’ (1897), Wells conceives of a comet that grazes Earth’s atmosphere and, consequently, unleashes storms and floods of biblical proportions. And yet, at the end of tale, the text informs us that, among the ragged survivors, a ‘new brotherhood…grew presently among men.’62 More recently, writers like Margaret Atwood envision scenarios such as the one in her Oryx and Crake (2003) in which a brilliant geneticist, Crake, creates a pandemic that wipes out most all of humanity. Crake performs this act of unprecedented mass murder to make room on the planet for his Crakers, a kind of ‘Humanity 2.0’ who have been bio-engineered

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Zack Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), p. 110. H. G. Wells, ‘The Star,’ in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. John Hammond (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 289. The story was originally published in the December 1897 issue of The Graphic.

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to live more peacefully on the planet and in greater harmony with the natural world. Similar to what Wells and Atwood depict happening, Maid Marian and her followers attempt to transform a historical moment that feels like the end of the world into an ‘end-time that allows for the reinvention of everything’ (129). Relatedly, Sherwood Nation never suggests that Renee and the other citizens of this new nation are merely biding their time until cars and gasoline become readily available again. No character ever expresses any sense of hope or anticipation that their county will one day be able to shed its burdensome reliance on bikes and return to an era defined by automobility. Instead, Sherwood Nation gives us a striking vision of a society that welcomes ‘reinvention,’ and one form such reinvention takes is that of a society not organized – like so many American cities and communities today – around the automobile. Instead of holding a central position in Sherwood Nation, cars and trucks have been relegated to such passive uses as being ‘lined up into [border] walls’ (165) and turned into obstacles that render Sherwood’s streets so narrow that ‘nothing beyond the size of a bicycle could pass’ (122). Sherwood Nation is certainly striving to get back to some of the familiar forms of stability and order its people knew before a horrific drought consumed the western United States: reliable water, less crime, and so forth. But Sherwood Nation emphatically shows no interest in returning to a dependence on fossil-fuel-guzzling, motorized transport. For this new nation, such a step would represent one away from – not toward – a ‘brave little utopia.’

Conclusion As shown in one of the earliest and most famous apocalyptic stories in Western civilization – that of Noah and the Great Flood found in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis – the ability to avail oneself of a working vehicle can mean the difference between life and death.63 Noah, his family, and the representatives of all the animals on earth survive the flood because the ark – the vessel that Noah built per God’s specifications – keeps them safe atop the churning water. Similarly, in cli-fi works by authors like Octavia E. Butler, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Benjamin Parzybok, the ability to find a functional vehicle is of 63

The story of the Great Flood finds parallels, of course, in the mythologies of many other ancient cultures such as those of Mesopotamia, Greece, China, India, and so forth.

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paramount importance. But amid the detritus of collapsed societies and collapsed ecologies cars rarely flourish. Instead, such vehicles have often been defeated by their own extravagant mechanical complexity and fossil fuel dependency. Bicycles (and walking), on the other hand, emerge as being well suited to the stressful and challenging conditions of the postapocalyptic, climate-ravaged world. The use by feet and bikes of human power means they are often up to the task of keeping people mobile in the wake of droughts, fires, and floods. In the next chapter we will see how this greater mechanical simplicity of bikes has also meant that they have become increasingly synonymous with children (especially boys) in some twenty-first-century American sf texts. Such a trend helps increase the presence of bikes in American culture at the same time, however, as it threatens the bicycle’s ability to position itself as a serious transportation alternative to the automobile.

Chapter 6 Kids on Bikes in Twenty-First-Century Nostalgia Science Fiction Twenty-First-Century Nostalgia Science Fiction

Evidence in literary texts of a human urge to return to an earlier time is almost as old as literature itself. As far back as c.750–650 BCE – around the time of Homer – the ancient Greek poet Hesiod was writing about a lost ‘Golden Age’ in his poem Works and Days (c.700 BCE). Later works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c.8 CE), Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (c.524 CE), and Chaucer’s ‘The Former Age’ (c.1380–1400 CE) continued this trend of yearning for a past in which, supposedly, peace, prosperity, and happiness reigned. In the twentieth century, this long-standing nostalgic urge finds expression in that century’s new media forms. Films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With The Wind (1939) pined for the sanctioned racism of the antebellum Old South, and American television shows like Happy Days (1974–84) and The Wonder Years (1988–93) craved a return to the seemingly more benign or more interesting decades of the 1950s and the 1960s. Continuing this long and rich tradition of nostalgic texts – texts that embody ‘a bittersweet longing for former times and spaces’ – scholars such as Katharina Niemeyer and Daniela Wentz identify a distinct and noteworthy ‘trend towards the nostalgic in modern television.’ The notable success of television series like That ’70s Show (1998–2006), Mad Men (2007–15), Boardwalk Empire (2010–14), and Downton Abbey (2010–15) suggests that nostalgia is, if not more popular than ever, certainly as popular as it has ever been and that it satisfies something important in the psyche of contemporary audiences. In particular, American society has experienced a surge in the last decade of screen texts that showcase nostalgia for the 1980s, as seen in films like Adventureland (2009), Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), It (2017), and It Chapter Two (2019), as well as in television shows like The Americans (2013–18), The Goldbergs (2013– present), and G.L.O.W. (2017–present). Additionally, in recent years, a wave of decidedly nostalgic sf texts has appeared. In particular, this twenty-first-century nostalgic sf often 189

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takes the form of what I call ‘1980s nostalgia science fiction’: sf texts from c.2010 to the present with a distinct fondness for or interest in the American 1980s. This wave would include such texts as the film Super 8 (2011), the web television series Stranger Things (2016–19), the comic book series Paper Girls (2015–19), the episode ‘San Junipero’ (2016) from the web television series Black Mirror, the album Simulation Theory (2018) by the band Muse, and the book and film Ready Player One (2011, 2018, respectively). The discussion that follows will focus on the first three texts mentioned above to show how these exemplars of sf Eighties nostalgia – as well as Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982), a famous Eighties film from which most of these texts draw inspiration – frequently demonize motorized transport while simultaneously exalting the bicycle and its ability to augment the joy, freedom, and sociability in our lives. Moreover, as cycling historian Paul Smethurst points out, a bicycle’s appeal often lies in how it constitutes something of a ‘nostalgia machine’ (my phrase) because ‘[i]t is surely true that as adults we are liable to be taken back to a world of childhood whenever we mount a bicycle.’1 Yet, this chapter asserts (as did Chapter 2, in its discussion of Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones) that if a text does nothing to disrupt or complicate a connection between kids and bikes it is a potential setback for cycling as a whole, for it suggests the problematic notion that bikes are appropriate for kids – not for adults. The three texts that comprise much of the focus of this chapter – Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls – do, unfortunately, bolster a connection between kids and bikes. Moreover, these texts maintain unpalatable gender assumptions about mobility machines like bicycles, although Paper Girls (and, to a lesser extent, Super 8 and seasons 2 and 3 of Stranger Things) do acknowledge and interrogate these assumptions in some rather provocative ways.

Trucks in the Forest and Vans in the Suburbs This chapter begins by focusing on what is a foundational text of the kids-and-bikes motif that has been so popular in some recent sf texts: Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. This blockbuster film focuses on the relationship between ten-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas) and the eponymous alien whom Elliott befriends after the alien is left behind on Earth. E.T. has often been considered by scholars and critics as part of a ‘suburban trilogy’ of films – one that also includes Close Encounters of 1

Paul Smethurst, The Bicycle – Towards a Global History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 59.

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the Third Kind (1977) and Poltergeist (1982) – that Spielberg was involved in making during the late Seventies and early Eighties. Featuring a suburban setting and a child protagonist like E.T. does, then, it should come as no surprise that one of the fixtures of suburban childhood – the bicycle – is prominently featured in the film. However, as cycling historian Evan Friss points out: ‘Ironically, considering the place of the bicycle in America society today, children… rode at disproportionately low rates’ during the era of the modern bicycle’s emergence, the late nineteenth century. Friss notes that ‘many manufacturers did not even make wheels [i.e., bikes] for children’ at that time and that ‘[m]ostly, children did not ride because the bicycle was popularly understood as meant for adults.’2 But, as another cycling scholar, Robert Turpin, has demonstrated, already by the first half of the twentieth century the bicycle industry in the United States was heavily promoting its product to families in the suburbs, ‘a setting that offered safer cycling on sidewalks and streets with a lower volume of traffic and slower speeds.’3 Even by the 1930s, argues Turpin – and certainly by the 1980s, when E.T. was released – bicycles had become ‘a boy’s primary means for adventure and exploration’ and ‘were capable of assisting boys in their pursuit of knowledge about their surrounding neighborhood.’4 Even though Spielberg’s film on one level celebrates the bicycle as a facilitator of children’s first taste of independence and adventure within their dull, over-protected suburban environments, the next several pages will show how Spielberg employs various modes of transport – not only bicycles, but also spaceships and motorized vehicles like vans – to articulate and develop some of E.T.’s key themes and tensions. To state it more bluntly, in E.T. modes of transportation are never mere insignificant background. Instead, Spielberg uses different kinds of vehicles to set up some of the key binary oppositions that undergird the film.5 Bicycles function for Spielberg as indelible symbols of the freedom, purity, friendship, and wonder that he perceives as defining childhood but are increasingly threatened as we grow up. Conversely, the film associates cars and other forms of motorized transport with the law and order, corruption, separation, and cynicism that Spielberg 2

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Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 41. Robert J. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom: A Cultural History of Bicycle Marketing in the United States (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018), p. 134. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 150. See Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 93 for a chart listing some of the key binary oppositions in E.T.

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sees as suffusing the adult world. However, the discussion of E.T. below will also foreground some problematic elements of the film’s depiction of bicycles: its emphatic association of bikes with children, in particular, with boys. This connection between boys and bikes is an aspect of the film that is unfortunately recycled by later, Spielberg-influenced texts such as Super 8 and Stranger Things, but one that is at least partially subverted by Paper Girls. The opening scene of E.T. sets up well the film’s use of transportation machines to express some of its main ideas and central conflicts. The film opens in a forest at night – a setting, as several scholars have noted, suggestive of fairy tales and magic – where E.T. and his fellow aliens have landed in their spaceship to collect botanical samples.6 Even though it is an extravagantly advanced and powerful piece of technology, the alien spaceship does not disturb the serene, pastoral mood of the forest, as evidenced by how Spielberg presents rabbits calmly feeding near the aliens and their ship. Like Elliott’s bicycle and E.T.’s makeshift communicator that both show up later in the film, this spaceship represents benevolent and wondrous technology. These are all machines that foster connections, and contribute to an aura of adventure and magic in the world around them. However, certain kinds of sophisticated machines in E.T. associated with adults – such as surveillance equipment, metal detectors, and even medical technology like EEG monitors and defibrillators – disrupt social connections and cast a pall of selfishness and excessive rationality over the environments in which these machines are found. The most prominent among these more negative types of machines is the automobile. Spielberg makes apparent his distrust and cynicism toward motorized transport all the way back in his first feature-length film, Duel (1971), which tells the story of a man driving in his car along remote desert roads to a business meeting when he becomes inexplicably and relentlessly hunted by a largely unseen man driving a rusty oil tanker truck.7 Spielberg 6

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For a useful analysis of the film’s opening sequence – and its resemblance to fairy tales – see Andrew M. Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), pp. 78–81. The film sets up a clear contrast between this ‘magical’ forest with the stultifying world of the suburb in which Elliott and his family live. Originally a made-for-TV film that aired in 1971 on the American network ABC, Duel was well received. Therefore, it was slightly expanded by the filming and inclusion of four new scenes, given some new voiceover narration, and then shown the following year in theaters across Europe and elsewhere.

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makes a similarly menacing use of trucks in the opening of E.T. In this scene, as the alien botanists busily collect samples and as E.T. wanders over to admire from a hilltop view the gleaming suburb below, a convoy of off-road trucks suddenly swarms in, their harsh lights and strident engines piercing the tranquility of the forest. The trucks move fast and aggressively, violating places where they don’t belong, for no roads appear even to exist here. When Elliott visits this forest in the daylight the next day – after he has seen E.T. for the first time the night before in his backyard – Spielberg prominently shows the deep lacerations left in the ground by the trucks’ tires, further associating motorized vehicles with violence and corruption. Furthermore, when the trucks converge on the forest in the film’s opening, Spielberg provides a close-up of the exhaust spewing out of their tailpipes, a shot repeated later in the film when an ominous, black government van searching for E.T. pulls up in front of Elliott’s house. Like we saw with some of the New Wave authors in Chapter 3, Spielberg foregrounds the connection between cars and pollution.8 The emphasis on tailpipe exhaust and the tire gouges left in the forest floor both highlight E.T.’s perception that gasoline-powered vehicles are corrupters and contaminators of their environments.9 The opening scene of E.T. is also important for its introduction of the character known as Keys (Peter Coyote). A government scientist whose real name is never revealed in the film, Keys acquires his moniker from the conspicuous ring of keys that are almost always dangling from his belt. These keys could be interpreted in several different ways: as phallic imagery connoting the masculine power and authority a scientist like Keys possesses, as suggestive of Keys-as-jailer due to his apparent drive to trap and capture aliens like E.T. (at least in the first half of the film), and so forth. But what the keys arguably most connect this character to is automobility, for E.T. often connects Keys and his fellow government scientists to a menacing use of cars and trucks. From the invasion of the forest by off-road trucks in the opening scene, to the spying on 8

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Similarly, in Duel, the menacing oil tanker that terrorizes the film’s protagonist is repeatedly associated with plumes of dirty, black smoke coming from its exhaust stacks. In fact, when the protagonist David Mann first encounters the truck, he notices it belching smoke and remarks aloud: ‘Talk about pollution!’ The aggression by adult scientists toward the natural world is usefully contrasted with the aliens’ gentle investigation of the forest in the opening scene, with E.T.’s miraculous healing of dead chrysanthemums, and so forth.

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Elliott’s neighborhood in a black windowless van packed full of invasive surveillance equipment, to the white van that tries to carry E.T.’s body away from Elliott for good when the alien is believed dead: all these uses of vehicles reveal Spielberg connecting adult modes of transport with aggression, intrusion, and separation. And by foregrounding the keys to be found on the belt of the lead scientist in pursuit of E.T., Spielberg establishes a link between the various forms of corruption and cynicism the film identifies with automobiles, science, and adulthood.10

(Flying) Bicycles In contrast to motorized vehicles and their many unsavory associations in E.T. stands the bicycle. Elliott’s bicycle is a BMX (bicycle motocross) bike, a most suitable choice for a young boy in the 1980s, for these were newly invented machines of the era that ‘became iconic of youth and adventure by the mid-1980s.’11 For Spielberg, Elliott’s frequent use of his BMX bike serves as an oblique way of referencing the character’s innocence and potential for deep compassion and empathy. We see Elliott riding his bike whenever he is out on some kind of adventure on E.T.’s behalf. For example, we first see Elliott on his bike when he is heading up to the forest to find E.T. after their first encounter in the tool shed behind Elliott’s house. Rather than submit to fear and suspicion of the alien, Elliott senses that his backyard visitor might be friendly and in need of help, so Elliott rides his bike to where he thinks E.T. might be hiding. Similarly, we see Elliott utilizing his bike when he and E.T. ride to the forest later in the film to try to contact E.T.’s home with the makeshift communicator and when in the film’s finale Elliott is

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Of course, by the end of the film Keys appears as a less threatening, more humane character. He stands next to Elliott’s mother in the closing scene, resisting the urge to try to stop E.T. from leaving forever in the spaceship. Notably, this reformed character is no longer associated with automobility at the film’s end. He is nowhere near a car or truck in this final scene, and his previously prominent keys have vanished from sight. As he passively looks on in wonder at E.T.’s spaceship, Keys does finally resemble a child such as Elliott, just like Keys told Elliott he did in the medical tent scene. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 204. Turpin reminds us here that BMX bikes also play a ‘supporting role’ in such popular films of the decade as The Karate Kid (1984) and The Goonies (1985), and even have a starring role in a film that was a box office dud called Rad (1986). On the BMX bike, see also Tom Ambrose, The History of Cycling in Fifty Bikes (New York: Rodale, 2013), pp. 162–65.

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Figure 10. E.T. and Elliott on flying bicycle in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg) rushing E.T. to the forest to rendezvous with his returning spaceship. In short, the bicycle encapsulates some of the sentimental, romanticized qualities that Spielberg’s films often project onto children: qualities like innocence, kindness, and curiosity. Of course, bicycles also represent in E.T. other qualities that characterize Spielberg’s often rosy depiction of childhood, qualities like wonder, magic, and imagination. In what is one of the most iconic images in the history of film, Elliott and E.T. – on their way to test out E.T.’s communicator – soar over a forest and across the night sky on Elliott’s bicycle, silhouetted against a full moon (see Figure 10).12 Formerly just a normal kids’ bike propelled by pedal-power, the machine now takes flight due to E.T.’s incredible powers of telekinesis. In the climactic chase scene near the end of the film, E.T. again makes bicycles fly, this time not just Elliott’s bike, but also those of Elliott’s older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and Michael’s three teenager friends. In these two scenes of flying bicycles, the bike represents the enchantment and adventure that supposedly suffuses the world of childhood before it

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For example, in 2003, the British film magazine Empire ranked this scene number one on its list of the most magical movie moments of all time. So enamored of this image was Spielberg himself that he chose it to be the symbol for his production company, Amblin Entertainment.

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ultimately gives way to the world of adulthood, a world that smothers wonder and imagination. Situated between children like Elliott and adults like Keys is Michael, Elliott’s older brother. In one early scene, Michael helps his mom by backing the family car out of the driveway in preparation for her to leave with his little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore). Michael’s nervous demeanor as he backs the car up makes it clear that he is a novice driver, likely one on the cusp of getting his driver’s license. Thus, Michael is poised precariously between the cycling of childhood and the automobility of adulthood. Furthermore, this scene depicting Michael backing up the car renders him initially ambiguous as to whether he will be a friend or foe to Elliott and E.T. That is, due to Michael’s association with automobiles – an association we have already seen connected to menacing authority figures in the film’s opening scene – the audience doesn’t know at first whether Michael would hand E.T. over to the government or be too self-absorbed to see E.T. (like his mother, played by Dee Wallace). However, Michael soon reveals himself to be, like Elliott and Gertie, a friend and protector to E.T. Significantly, after E.T. disappears up in the forest when Elliott and E.T. spend the night trying to ‘phone home’ with E.T.’s makeshift communicator, Michael speeds away the next morning on Elliott’s bicycle – while evading government agents pursuing him in cars – to find and help the missing alien. The agility of the bike allows Michael to easily evade the cars chasing him. But, more importantly, his use of the bicycle signifies that, like his younger siblings, Michael still possesses the wonder, trust, and innocence needed to serve as a valuable ally to E.T. Later in the film we see Michael more explicitly reject automobility in favor of the bicycle and what it represents. After stealing and driving away the government van that E.T.’s ‘dead’ body has been loaded into, Michael abandons the van in a park (for no clear reason since the van is a decidedly faster mode of transport) in exchange for a bike that his trio of teenager friends have brought for him. Once again, Michael’s preference for the bicycle signals his allegiance to the values of childhood that Spielberg often associates with goodness, purity, and innocence. And, by choosing bikes over cars and vans, and by choosing to help E.T. as opposed to helping adults like Keys, Michael and his friends are rewarded with a sublime telekinesis-powered flight on bicycles across the twilight sky and an equally sublime witnessing of E.T.’s magnificent ship when it lands to carry E.T. home.

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The Problem with Boys and Bikes A common critique of Spielberg’s corpus involves his depiction of children. Film critic Peter Biskind, for example, has attacked Spielberg for what Biskind asserts is the filmmaker’s overly romanticized view of childhood. As Lester D. Friedman sums up these attacks: ‘Such critiques [as Biskind’s] condemn Spielberg for wasting his considerable technical skills on childish stories, for enticing audiences to wallow in sentimental illusions, and for turning the American cinema into an intellectual wasteland of pretty pictures and adolescent fantasies.’13 Related to these potential problems with Spielberg’s version of childhood is another issue with E.T.: its complicity in the assumption that bicycles and children are intimately linked and are synonymous with one another. Put another way, we certainly see plenty of kids on bikes – especially Elliott – in E.T., but at no point do we see any adults dare to debase themselves by having anything to do with a bike. As Turpin has demonstrated in detail, by the 1980s, a tight connection between children and bicycles was well established and was decades in the making. Turpin quotes one bicycle industry leader, W. T. Farwell, as already lamenting in 1928, ‘Everybody – almost – owns a car, and to ride a bicycle is considered out of date. It’s alright for kids, but just a bit beneath the dignity of the kids’ parents.’14 As Turpin goes on to argue, this identification of the bike with childhood was a deliberate marketing strategy of bicycle manufacturers and bike shop owners throughout the early decades of the twentieth century as they attempted to increase sales in the wake of the collapse of the late nineteenth-century bicycle boom and in the wake of the arrival of the automobile by preying upon a new source of profit: the child consumer. But, of course, an unfortunate and long-lasting legacy of this branding of the bicycle as a ‘kids’ toy’ is that the bike has been dismissed as a serious mode of transportation for adults by many Americans for most of the twentieth century. For example, conservative political satirist P. J. O’Rourke, in a 1987 essay titled ‘A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace,’ asserts: ‘Bicycles are childish…[They] have their proper place, and that place is

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Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 32. Peter Biskind criticizes Spielberg’s depiction of childhood in – among other places – his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugsand-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 124.

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under small boys delivering evening papers.’15 Because of beliefs similar to O’Rourke’s that bicycles connote childishness, a trend – noted by cycling scholar Zack Furness – has developed in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American films and television shows whereby adults who ride bicycles are often ‘endowed with childlike characteristics.’16 As we will see in subsequent sections of this chapter, then, one of the unsavory legacies of E.T. is that some of the recent 1980s nostalgia texts that are so popular and that draw inspiration from Spielberg’s film also uncritically present bicycles (with one fleeting exception in Stranger Things, discussed below) as a machine that belongs only in the possession of children, not of dignified, self-respecting, mature adults. To be fair, some truth imbues the notion that kids and bikes shared an intimate link in the 1980s. The BMX-style bikes favored by Elliott and the older boys did sell astonishingly well throughout much of the decade. Turpin cites evidence that bicycles with smaller, 20-inch wheels (the standard size for BMX bikes) fluctuated between accounting for one-third to one-half of all bicycle sales throughout the Eighties.17 However, the excessive or exclusive focus by films like E.T. on kids and their BMX bikes conceals the fact that starting in the 1960s and 1970s more adults were riding ten-speed bicycles for reasons of personal health and environmental consciousness.18 A focus on BMX bikes also conceals another remarkable bicycle trend that flourished in the 1980s and that was an important trend related to adult cycling: namely, the rise of mountain biking. First built in 1977 by Joe Breeze as a purpose-built machine that could handle the challenging conditions of ‘racing down the fire roads of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California,’ the mountain bike experienced brisk sales throughout the 1980s.19 Mountain bikes eventually became common

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P. J. O’Rourke, ‘A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace,’ in Republican Party Reptile: Essays and Outrages (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987). O’Rourke’s perception of the bike here is by no means uniquely American. For instance, a letter published in 2002 in a UK newspaper proclaimed: ‘There is something seriously sick and stunted about grown men who want to ride a bike.’ Tony Parsons, ‘I Just Don’t Lycra These Cycling Yobs,’ Daily Mirror (August 5, 2002). Zach Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), p. 111. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 205. See Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, pp. 199–202. Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 204. Turpin cites evidence that mountain bike sales rose from around 400,000 bikes sold in 1980 to around 5,400,000 bikes sold by decade’s end. See Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 205. On the

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sights in other environments besides the off-road trails of California, for urban commuters and utilitarian cyclists soon embraced this style of bike for its hardy frame and stout tires, its upright riding position, and so on. To reiterate the main point here then: when E.T. – and the later texts Spielberg’s film helped spawn such as Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls – focus almost wholly on BMX bikes, they eclipse the important way in which innovations like the lightweight ten-speed bike sparked a resurgence of adult cycling in the 1960s and 1970s and how the mountain bike kept the fire of adult cycling burning bright during the 1980s. Put another way, the focus on childhood cycling by E.T., Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls contributes to an audience’s perception that bikes are trite and trivial toys. We might, then, usefully compare how E.T. represents cycling with how Heinlein represented it in The Rolling Stones (1952). As we saw in Chapter 2, Heinlein’s novel – although also frequently associating bicycles with Castor and Pollux, the young twins of the family – references Roger, the twins’ father and the ship’s captain, as helping his sons spruce up bicycles that the boys intend to sell. Furthermore, we saw another adult and another spaceship captain connected with bicycles in the character of Captain Vandenberg, the person to whom the twins make their first bicycle sale. In short, The Rolling Stones does not shun a correlation between adults and bicycles. That affiliation is as much a part of the world of Heinlein’s novel as is the affiliation between kids and bicycles. But a similar relationship between adulthood and cycling is exactly what E.T. (and most all the 1980s nostalgia texts that draw so heavily upon Spielberg’s film) notably lacks. Another problematic legacy of E.T. is its promotion of bikes being not only just for kids, but also just for male kids. Put simply, we see Elliott, Michael, and Michael’s male friends on bikes; yet, E.T. never shows us a girl riding a bicycle. Although Elliott and Michael’s little sister Gertie is five years old, and thus much too young to go off on extended cycling adventures like Elliott does, she is referred to in the screenplay as a ‘tomboy.’20 Yet, we still never see her (or any other girls, for that

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rise of the mountain bike and its eventual transformation into a popular urban commuter bike, see also Ambrose, History of Cycling, pp. 156–61. On Gertie as ‘tomboy,’ see the screenplay included in Melissa Mathison and Linda Sunshine, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: From Concept to Classic (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), p. 62. The one possible exception to viewers not seeing any girls on bikes in E.T. is during the trick-or-treating scene on Halloween in which a few kids at various times are shown riding down the street on bikes. However, Halloween costumes and Spielberg’s use of a long shot obscures the gender identity of these cyclists.

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matter) biking on the driveways, sidewalks, or streets of their suburban neighborhood. As Turpin has also shown, this association of bicycles predominantly with boys is another effect of a deliberate marketing strategy of bike sellers and manufacturers. Turpin writes of the bike ads that appeared all the way back in the 1910s that they referenced a bicycle as serving as ‘an initiating device in which boys attained adolescent forms of masculinity and thereby prepared for manhood.’21 Girls, in short, were almost always excluded from bike advertisements. When they were mentioned, it was as an afterthought. The exclusion of girls from mobility-related activities such as skateboarding, BMX competitions, and bicycle messengering is well-documented. Thus, it is unfortunate that films like E.T. (even while celebrating bikes on many levels) promotes the assumption that bicycles are somehow gendered machines, ones more suited for contributing to fun and adventure by boys and not by girls.22

The Bicycle as a Nostalgia Machine As already mentioned in Chapter 2, nostalgia can be both a productive and a counterproductive force. Nostalgia ‘can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.’23 For example, nostalgia can function positively by presenting to an audience a past that might be usefully employed as a counter-example to help question and critique the conditions of the audience’s own present. David Pierson perceives this more positive form of nostalgia operating in a text such as Mad Men, a TV show set in a fictional 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency 21 22

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Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 88. We will see below how some sf texts reject this trend of correlating males with bikes by choosing to put females on bicycles instead. Some notable texts, however, push the connection between gender and bicycles in a different direction entirely due to their portrayal of gender fluidity or their resistance to gender duality. Such texts would include E. L. Bangs’ ‘From an Interview with the Famed Roller Sara Zephyr Cain’ (in volume 2 of Elly Blue’s Bikes in Space series), a story about a formerly male bike courier in a post-apocalyptic world who chose to become female. Another example would be Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle (2011), an Australian sf novel that frequently correlates transgender and gender-fluid characters with bicycles (as is the case with the bike courier Sal and the bike mechanic Albee). Relatedly, the theme of volume 7 of Elly Blue’s Bikes in Space series is bicycles and transgender/nonbinary characters. Titled Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, it is scheduled to appear in 2021. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 354.

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named Sterling Cooper. For example, Pierson argues that the show’s version of a more ‘paternalistic’ 1960s corporation functions as a useful counter-example to the many corporations that since the mid-1970s have replaced ‘job security, steadily rising wages, solid benefits and a guaranteed pension’ for their employees with an ‘intensified focus on bottom-line profits.’24 But, of course, nostalgia does not always function positively. A darker and more menacing side of it can often frequently be detected; for some nostalgic texts can express ‘a dubious emotion carrying with it implications of escapism and a dangerous longing for the mythical past.’25 Frederic Jameson sees this form of nostalgia as constituting a distortion of history, for Jameson asserts that nostalgic films like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) offer up cinematic depictions of the past that focus excessively on the surface-level ‘atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities’ of an era, rather than on the deeper complications, contradictions, and ambiguities of history.26 For Jameson, the ‘nostalgic past…[is] beyond history’ and is ‘an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.’27 As an example of this nostalgic distortion, we might reference how Stranger Things ignores key events of the American 1980s such as the AIDS crisis, the War on Drugs, and the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan – as well as the homophobia, racism, and classism that sponsored these events and/or were spawned by them.28 Or, we might cite how Ready Player One – both Ernest Cline’s original novel and Steven Spielberg’s 2 4

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David Pierson, ‘AMC’s Mad Men and the Politics of Nostalgia,’ in Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, ed. Katharina Niemeyer (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 143. For a nonfictional example of what Pierson means by a more ‘paternalistic’ corporation, see Nelson D. Schwartz and Michael Corkery, ‘When Sears Flourished, So Did Workers,’ New York Times (October 23, 2018). Pierson, ‘AMC’s Mad Men,’ p. 140. Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society,’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 2009), p. 7. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism,’ p. 9, p. 10. Stranger Things only hints at issues of racism and homophobia, even though they were probably quite common in most small, Midwestern American towns of the 1980s. The main character of sensitive Will Byers – gentle, sensitive, and art-loving – seems vaguely coded as queer but none of the bullies ever calls him ‘faggot.’ Similarly, the high school bully Billy Hargrove (introduced in season 2) has a particular animus toward the black character Lucas, but such hatred is never explicitly revealed as stemming from an underlying racism.

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film adaptation – have been charged with an ‘erasure of black culture,’ that is, with presenting a distorted version of the 1980s in which Prince, Grandmaster Flash, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Whitney Houston (and so forth) seem never to have lived.29 The analysis below unfolds by charting how Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls tenuously straddle the line between these positive and negative forms of textual nostalgia. On the one hand, these texts do capture and remind us of a past in which one type of bicycle in particular – the new BMX bike of the 1980s – was selling well with kids. Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls are performing, then, a more positive form of nostalgia when they portray a time in which kids were permitted to practice more of what social geographer Clare Holdsworth calls ‘independent mobility.’ As Holdsworth informs us: A central motif in both academic literature and popular discourses about children’s mobility is that their opportunities for independent mobility have diminished in recent years. This decline in independent mobility has been concomitant with greater mobility [in general] but also increasing reliance on car travel as well as other institutionalised mechanisms for child-specific mobility, such as school buses.30 The childhood depicted in Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls serves as a potentially preferable alternative to what writer and education consultant Sue Palmer calls ‘toxic childhood.’ This more recent form of childhood is defined by (among other things) insufficient physical activity and insufficient outdoor play, and Palmer believes it can lead to a raft of emotional and intellectual disorders in young people. Instead of being ‘free-range’ children who are given ‘opportunities to make judgements, take risks, [and] learn how to make friends and elude enemies’ on their own and without excessive adult supervision, kids living in a state of toxic childhood are kept cocooned indoors because of the overprotection of helicopter parents and the distraction of diverse screens.31 29

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Jason Johnson, ‘Ready Player One and the Unbearable Whiteness of ’80s Nostalgia,’ theRoot.com (March 30, 2018). Last accessed March 1, 2019. See also Jazmine Joyner, ‘Why “Ready Player One” and its Erasure of Black Culture is Harmful,’ okayplayer.com (March 28, 2018). Last accessed March 1, 2019. Clare Holdsworth, ‘Child,’ in The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey, et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 426. Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It (London: Orion, 2006), p. 59, p. 60.

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Related to that last point referencing diverse screens, the bikes in sf 80s nostalgia films might also be interpreted as representing a form of (what one scholar calls) ‘analogue aesthetics’ and a type of technology that at present feels more humane and more accessible.32 In other words, the bike partakes in the current vogue of perceiving more ‘warmth’ and ‘humanity’ in older forms of technology like scratchy vinyl records and grainy Super 8 films; it is a technology that counterpoises all of the cyber forms of technology that threaten to alienate us today with their ubiquity, complexity, and immateriality.33 As Smethhurst theorizes with regards to bicycles, ‘in the electronically induced simulacra of the present digital age we are experiencing nostalgia for machines which display openly their working parts.’ Along these lines, bicycles represent ‘an antidote to the online world.’34 In sum, sf 1980s nostalgia can function positively by reminding us of what some of the things are we love (or should love) about bicycles – the creativity, adventure, freedom, and health to which they contribute – and by depicting machines that appeal to us due to their perceived greater warmth and greater technological simplicity. These more accessible and more transparent machines can help us feel less alienated from technology, less dependent on the knowledge of technical experts. However, we find aspects of the more negative, Jamesonian form of nostalgia in Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls when they propagate a version of the 1980s in which kids and kids only (or in which boys solely or mostly) rode bicycles. That is, all three texts are guilty to some degree of distorting the past and of mythologizing a certain version of history, because obviously some girls and some adults did ride bikes in the 1980s, just like they do now. But you would not necessarily know that to be the case from watching the various E.T.-influenced versions of the 1980s presented by these three sf nostalgia texts. We turn next to a discussion of these texts, and to a discussion (in the case of Stranger Things and Paper Girls) of the most recent sf that this book will analyze. 32

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The phrase ‘analogues aesthetics’ is used in Guiseppina Sapio’s ‘Homesick for Aged Home Movies: Why Do We Shoot Contemporary Family Videos in Old-Fashioned Ways?’ in Niemeyer, Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, p. 45. On the perception of more ‘warmth’ and ‘humanity’ in older forms of technology like vinyl record players, see Emily Chivers Yochim and Megan Biddinger, ‘“It Kind of Gives You That Vintage Feel”: Vinyl Records and the Trope of Death,’ Media, Culture & Society 30, no. 2 (2008), p. 188. Smethhurst, The Bicycle, p. 59. Of course, philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard have been talking about a nostalgia for the real in a postmodern world increasingly inundated by media images, computer codes, and so on since his Simulacrum and Simulation (1981).

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Zombie Films and Tanks One text that clearly falls in the category of 1980s sf nostalgia (although it is set in the summer of 1979, about six months before the 1980s proper began) is one Steven Spielberg played a role in making: Super 8. Released in 2011, Super 8 was directed by J. J. Abrams but Spielberg shares a producer credit with Abrams and Bryan Burk. Additionally, this film explores classic Spielbergian themes such as the trauma of broken homes and the deviousness of government authorities, and contains direct visual shout-outs to Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the form of wide shots of towns as seen from wooded locations and finales in which all the major characters convene, wide-eyed, to witness a spaceship blast off into the night sky. One further aspect of E.T. that Abrams embraces is that film’s correlation of childhood with bicycles. One of Super 8’s earliest scenes, in fact, is set during the last day of school, a scene that features a throng of kids yanking their bikes off a rack to begin their summer break as quickly as possible. Relatedly, throughout the majority of Super 8, viewers see the main characters Joe (Joel Courtney), Charles (Riley Griffiths), Preston (Zach Mills), Martin (Gabriel Basso), and Cary (Ryan Lee) riding around their fictional town of Lillian, Ohio, on their bicycles. Initially, these bike excursions revolve around the boys’ attempt to shoot a homemade zombie movie for a film competition using a low budget, Super 8 camera. However, after witnessing a train wreck during one of their clandestine filming sessions at night – a wreck quickly and suspiciously swarmed upon by a group of United States Air Force soldiers – the boys begin to uncover a government conspiracy involving a crashed spaceship and a captured alien. Thereafter, the boys continue to use their bikes to work on their film, but they also – Joe and Charles in particular – employ their bicycles to move around the town and attempt to learn more about this conspiracy. We can readily see, therefore, Super 8 tapping into the DNA of E.T. in several ways. First, we see Abrams’ film, like Spielberg’s, associating bikes with the world of imagination and adventure that supposedly saturates childhood. The boys in Super 8 use bikes to assist their imagination and to help give expression to their creativity, as seen by the fact that their bicycles are integral machines for helping them make their own zombie movie. Bicycle technology and Super 8 technology overlap here with one another in Abrams’ film: both machines represent relatively simple forms of technology that are embraced for their cheapness and ease of use, as well as for their vital contributions to imagination and

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artistic expression.35 Moreover, the enhanced freedom and independence provided by their bikes – the way, for example, their bikes allow them to secretly film at a train depot in the middle of the night – positions them for an adventure with the derailed train and its marvelous freight of an imprisoned alien and its disassembled spaceship. Super 8 also imports E.T.’s distrust of adult authority figures like government scientists and military personnel. Similar to E.T.’s character of Keys, Super 8 too includes a scientist – Dr. Woodward, the boys’ biology teacher – who shows himself to have a noble side. Mostly, however, both films present scientists and soldiers as heartless, duplicitous people. Above all, both films equate corrupt adults with an abuse of advanced technology in general and advanced modes of transport in particular. We discussed E.T.’s frequent portrayal of malevolent scientists using off-road trucks and windowless vans above. In Super 8, the group of Air Force soldiers – that film’s primary villains – frequently avail themselves of the aggressive and invasive mobility provided by a variety of motorized vehicles such as trucks, tanks, and helicopters. For example, during the film’s climax, tanks roll into a neighborhood, crushing a playground and destroying the wall of a house. It is up to the group of kids, then, to use their low-tech bicycles, walkie-talkies, and Super 8 camera to thwart (like Elliott in E.T.) the machinations of selfish, unfeeling adults and to help a hunted alien who just wants to go home.

Girls Become Mobile In terms of mobility, Super 8’s most intriguing character is arguably Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning). We meet Alice in the early scene in which the boys are filming at the train depot (we learn later that Alice has been invited to be in the film because the director, Charles, is attracted to her). She arrives ‘on set’ in a muscle car borrowed from her father without his permission and being driven by her without a license. Thus, like we saw in Chapter 4 with Y.T. in Snow Crash and Chevette in Virtual Light, and like we will see below with the character of Max (Sadie Sink) in Stranger Things and with the eponymous characters in Paper Girls, Alice boldly challenges the unstated assumption of films like E.T. that to be a female (especially a young female) is, largely, to be rendered immobile. As historian Georgine Clarsen reminds us:

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On the enduring popularity of Super 8 film and its aesthetics, see Sapio, ‘Homesick for Aged Home Movies.’

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Feminists have long asserted that mobility, as a social value and material practice, has been more available to men than to women. Men have been overwhelmingly associated with mobile activities such as warfare, the exploration of new worlds, pilgrimage, sports, adventure quests and flâneurie. They have been more closely engaged with the material technologies and infrastructures of mobilities such as bicycles, railways, steamships, automobiles and information systems.36 But Alice’s early mobility that assumes this form of subversive automobility is problematic. That is, both her alluring arrival in a car and her quasi-heroic departure after the train derailment in the same car (with the terrified boys now inside her vehicle, being whisked to safety by her) threaten to glamorize adulthood’s cars at the expense of childhood’s bicycles. However, while continuing to help with the zombie movie, Alice forsakes cars and joins the boys on a bicycle. Initially, Super 8 does not make this fact very clear. We see, for example, a couple of scenes in which all the boys and Alice are standing beside a group of bicycles lying around on the ground while they work on their film, but it is not clear if one of those machines belongs to the only girl in the group. But a later scene strongly suggests that one of those bikes must indeed be hers. Here, Alice engages in a heated argument with her dad at their house over her growing friendship with Joe. We next watch a frustrated and upset Alice bolt through the front door, grab a bike from her front yard, and sprint off down the street on it. Once again, we see Alice’s refusal to have her mobility and her freedom restrained by overbearing males like her father. Such a spirited rejection of immobility, however, very soon meets its match in the powerful alien who abducts Alice from her bike and then confines her in its underground cavern. In such an incapacitated state, Alice requires a rescue from a male savior in the form of Joe. Super 8’s ending, therefore, disappoints in its insistence on stripping Alice of her formerly impressive mobility. But in the film’s beginning and middle, Alice Dainard personifies a respectable amount of movement in a world in which she is surrounded by assertive males like her father and the group of boys led by Joe and Charles. Other female characters, however, that we meet in two texts that appeared after Super 8 – Stranger Things and Paper Girls – match, or, arguably, surpass Alice’s achievements in terms of free movement. 36

Georgine Clarsen, ‘Feminism and Gender,’ in Peter Adey, et al., The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, p. 96.

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Freedom and Vulnerability Created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer (known professionally as the Duffer Brothers), the sf-horror web television series Stranger Things has been a smash hit and a critical darling since its appearance on Netflix in 2016. In addition to its gripping storylines and its strong acting, viewers have praised the show’s three seasons (with more planned at the time of writing) for their meticulous and affectionate recreation of the period in which the show is set: the 1980s. Stranger Things, in short, is drenched in nostalgia. From recreating that era’s fashion to its music to its films to its games, the Duffer Brothers (who also write and/ or direct many of the episodes) have crafted a show that serves as an extended love letter to the decade in which they were born. In particular, Stranger Things – like E.T. and Super 8 – displays a profound fondness for the bicycles of that era. In fact, the essential role that bicycles will play in the show was previewed all the way back on the cover of a booklet titled Montauk (the show was originally set in Montauk, Long Island instead of Hawkins, Indiana) that the Duffer Brothers created to pitch their project to various television networks. The cover of this booklet featured a picture of Will Byers’ bicycle. In many episodes of Stranger Things’ three seasons, viewers see bicycles rolling across the screen. Usually these bikes are ridden by one of the show’s four main boy characters – Will (Noah Schnapp), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) – characters who nearly always personify virtues such as loyalty, bravery, and kindness. Also, as in E.T. and Super 8, the bicycle of choice for these boys is the BMX bike – that eventual icon of 1980s childhood – although in seasons 1 and 2 Mike favors another kind of kids’ bike: a 1970s-era Schwinn Sting-ray featuring a banana seat and high-rise chopper handlebars (the show depicts Mike growing into a more mature-looking ten-speed in season 3). All these texts, then, celebrate the vital role the bicycle played in the mobilities of late twentieth-century suburban children. In that context, bikes function as a machine that provides kids with one of their first important tastes of freedom, for (like walkie-talkies, another machine that frequently appears in Stranger Things) bicycles provide kids with a means to evade the observant eyes and alert ears of parents. They help children enjoy with their friends a bit of private socializing in a pre-Internet, pre-smartphone world. As mentioned above in the discussion of E.T., bicycles also serve as ‘a boy’s primary means for adventure and exploration.’37 That is, bikes 37

Turpin, First Taste of Freedom, p. 134.

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provide a means to begin investigating and testing the boundaries of their known world (i.e., their neighborhood or town) and to begin having adventures in these newly discovered frontiers. But, like we will see below with Paper Girls, the emancipation and empowerment of the bicycle lends itself to experiencing not only adventure but also danger. The bicycle’s association in Stranger Things with freedom that comes at a cost is most prominently on display in the show’s first episode. Here, while bicycling home alone at night from his friend Mike’s house, 12-year-old Will encounters a mysterious monster known as the Demogorgon and becomes trapped in the place where this creature resides, a bleak and harrowing alternative dimension called the Upside Down. In this early scene, the bicycle contributes to a state of vulnerability for young Will and is a piece of technology that unfortunately proves unable to protect him at this crucial moment of crossing paths with the creature. However, as the show progresses, it increasingly depicts the bicycle in a more potent light. Instead of being associated with vulnerability, the bicycle instead becomes associated with the righteousness of characters and with utility when it comes to battling the forces of evil, be they human or monster. In contrast to the bicycle and its connections to morally upstanding characters (like the four young boys), Stranger Things frequently affiliates automobiles with human villainy.

White Vans and Blue Camaros Like E.T. and Super 8, the human villains in Stranger Things are often adults who embody a ruthlessly scientific mindset. In season 1, the villains in Stranger Things emerge from the Hawkins National Laboratory, a place that ostensibly performs research for the US Department of Energy. But the laboratory is actually engaged in secret experiments into the paranormal and supernatural, including unethical experiments on human test subjects like the girl Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) who possesses telepathic and telekinetic powers. In a display of human arrogance and scientific near-sightedness that resembles that of classic sf characters such as Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Griffin in H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), lead scientist Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) and the other researchers at Hawkins Laboratory inadvertently create a portal to an alternate dimension that the boys eventually name the Upside Down. It is this careless act of scientific experimentation that unleashes a horrific Demogorgon monster (and a multitude of Demogorgon monsters in season 2) into the town of Hawkins. Like the other government

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scientists and doctors who eventually capture E.T. in Spielberg’s film, Dr. Brenner and those assisting him appear motivated by a cold rationalism that only wants to control and to understand things no matter how much this desire undermines their ability to care about and empathize with others. Stranger Things eventually tempers the first season’s relentlessly harsh view of scientists with the introduction in season 2 of the character Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser), the new head of Hawkins Laboratory who has been tasked with trying to clean up the interdimensional mess started by Dr. Brenner, who is killed in season 1’s finale. An avuncular character who displays genuine concern at times for characters like Will and Bob Newby (Sean Astin), Dr. Owens still manifest moments of questionable morality – such as when in the episode ‘The Spy’ Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) pleads with Dr. Owens to send her recently sickened son Will to a ‘real hospital’ for medical care and Owens refuses, clearly more concerned at that moment about maintaining the secrecy of what has happened at Hawkins Lab than about Will’s well-being. Season 3 returns to a more unequivocally negative portrayal of scientists by now presenting Russian scientists (alongside Russian soldiers) as the season’s main villains, for they are foolishly trying to reopen the gate to the Upside Down. In sum, the idea conveyed across the show’s three seasons is that scientists are chiefly defined by their pursuit of knowledge at all costs and by their devaluing of the lives and well-being of others who stand in the way of that knowledge. In addition to a shared depiction of scientists who lack sufficient compassion and moral integrity, E.T. and Stranger Things also portray these scientists as in possession of advanced technology and advanced machinery that they are incapable of wielding responsibly. For instance, both Spielberg and the Duffer Brothers’ texts portray government scientists as quite enchanted with and quick to use hi-tech surveillance equipment that allows them to intrude upon and monitor people’s private conversations in their homes (as in E.T.) and on their telephones (as in Stranger Things). Season 3 shows Russian scientists wielding a high-energy machine that is attempting to break into and keep open the sealed-up gate to the Upside Down. Additionally, and most importantly for our purposes here, both texts often associate their adult villains with a threatening use of motorized vehicles. As with E.T., the use of nondescript or deceptive vans is a frequent form of mobility for the nefarious scientists in season 1 of Stranger Things. At the end of the episode ‘The Bathtub’ and the beginning of the episode ‘The Upside Down,’ these vans make their most unforgettable appearance. Here, an ominous convoy of white vans leaves Hawkins

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Laboratory, heading to Mike’s house, where the scientists now know Eleven is hiding. Lucas, who saw the vans leave the laboratory, warns Dustin and Mike of the approaching threat via walkie-talkie while pedaling furiously on his bicycle to rejoin his friends. The boys (with Eleven riding on Mike’s seat) ride away on their bikes and are pursued by the vans. What follows is a blatantly E.T.-inspired chase pitting kids’ bicycles against adult motorized vehicles, a chase that (also like E.T.) shows the ‘lowly’ technology of a kid’s bike outmaneuvering and outperforming the supposedly superior technology of a van. In another E.T.-inspired detail, Eleven utilizes telekinetic powers while on a bicycle. But, instead of making bikes elegantly soar like Spielberg’s alien did, Eleven compels a van heading straight for the cyclists to lift into the air before plummeting to its destruction on the road, thus creating a roadblock for the other vehicles pursuing the kids. The important point is that in these remarkable scenes from Stranger Things the bicycles – propelled by young boys and assisted at one point by a telekinetic girl – triumph over the white vans. Human-powered movement in the service of helping and protecting people defeats carbon-powered movement in the service of capturing and abusing people. In season 2 of Stranger Things, a new character is introduced – Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) – who continues this trend of connecting human villainy with an invasive and aggressive use of motorized vehicles. Billy is a new high school student in town, and one who the show frequently depicts driving his blue Chevrolet Camaro – a classic muscle car oozing machismo – in an enraged, reckless, and strident manner. In one key scene from the episode ‘Trick or Treat, Freak,’ Billy encounters Dustin, Lucas, and Mike riding their bicycles on the road and nearly runs the three of them over because Billy is suddenly feeling over-protective of his younger stepsister Max whom the boys have recently started befriending. Billy forces the three boys to take to a ditch and crash their bikes to escape his nearly murderous use of a sports car. In the eyes of this one motorist, the lives of cyclists (even when they are young kids) do not carry much moral significance. In season 3’s finale, Billy again (but this time under the influence of the Mind Flayer) drives his Camaro in a murderous fashion when he tries to ram Nancy’s station wagon that is filled with people in the parking lot of Starcourt Mall.38

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Some viewers have noted about this episode that Billy’s car visually echoes another screen text about a villainous car: John Carpenter’s Christine (1983), a film adaptation of the Stephen King novel (1983) by the same name. See Brian Tallerico, ‘“Stranger Things 3”: A Guide to the Major Pop Culture References,’ New York Times (July 4, 2019). Last accessed September 17, 2019.

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Of course, automobility is not inherently evil in Stranger Things. A noble character like Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour), for example, regularly uses his rugged Chevy Blazer SUV to help the people of Hawkins and to combat the evil forces of the Upside Down. Ignoble characters like Dr. Brenner and Billy, however, regularly twist the capabilities of motorized transport toward darker ends. White vans and a blue Camaro serve as useful tools to spy on, threaten, intimidate, and endanger people for them. Dr. Brenner and Billy reveal that the automobile always comes loaded with this insidious potential to be swiftly transformed into a machine of oppression and malice. It is a potentiality that the bicycle simply does not possess, at least nowhere near on the scale and to the degree that automobiles do.

The Persistent Problem Involving Gender and Age For the most part, Stranger Things continues some of the problematic aspects in terms of transportation of E.T. and Super 8. Like Spielberg and Abrams’ films, the Duffer Brothers’ show overwhelmingly promotes the idea that bicycles belong to the world of childhood. In many episodes of the three seasons of Stranger Things, viewers witness kids riding bikes (usually one of the four main boy characters). Further establishing a connection between E.T. and Stranger Things, bicycles and boys in particular are equated in both texts.39 As alluded to above, the character of Eleven – who essentially becomes a fifth member of the boys’ group in season 1 of Stranger Things – never gets to ride a bicycle on her own (the character of Max, introduced in season 2 and discussed at length below, complicates the show’s handling of gender and mobility). Instead, on several occasions we glimpse Eleven riding on the back of Mike’s bicycle while he pedals and steers. In short, Eleven is reduced at these moments to a passive female passenger sharing mobility second-hand from a more active male counterpart.40 39

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We see this link between boys and bikes also appear in ‘A Boy and His Bicycle’ by Carl Frederick. This story – about a 14-year-old boy whose best friend is a talking, technologically enhanced bicycle – won a first prize in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest in 2003. One might quibble here that Eleven couldn’t be expected to ride a bike because she has been incarcerated in Hawkins Lab for most of her life and, therefore, has never learned to ride a bike. However, if Stranger Things was interested in providing Eleven with mobility equal to that of the boys around her, this problem would be an easy one to work around. The show, for example, could have included a scene or montage in which Mike teaches

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Additionally, Stranger Things promotes the notion that bikes belong to the world of childhood through some of their marketing and product tie-ins. As scholars such as Gary Cross and Kayla McCarthy have noted, commodity consumption and nostalgia are intimately linked. As McCarthy states: ‘nostalgia is primarily experienced by consuming materials from one’s childhood.’ Therefore, ‘media texts and business ventures strategically deploy specific consumer goods to exploit nostalgia for 1980s geek culture.’41 To date, Stranger Things has partnered three times with bicycle manufacturers to sell bicycles based on ones that have appeared in the show: Mike’s cruiser, Lucas’ BMX, and Max’s BMX (Max and her bike are discussed below). All these bikes, however, have been released only in children’s sizes. In her review for Bicycling magazine of Max’s BMX bike, Jessica Coulon writes: ‘While I momentarily felt like a kid again riding Max’s bike, I could tell that it was not designed with me in mind. Though I’m on the shorter side (at 5’ 4”) and managed to cover two miles, this is definitely sized for children.’42 Yet, on some cycling blogs and websites one can find people in articles and in the comments sections lamenting the lack of adult-sized versions, for clearly adults love the show and are interested in riding these attractive retro-style bikes as well. On a cycling website named Gear Junkie, another writers observes that ‘while the product page lists [Max’s] Mongoose for “riders ages 6 and up,” the specs show it can hold riders up to 250 pounds. So if you’re anything like us, this may make a great bike for your own inner child.’43 Straining the limits of these bikes’ components and the limits of their own discomfort levels,

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Eleven to bike as part of their growing romance. Or, given the fact that Eleven possesses telekinetic powers, she could be shown mentally propelling and keeping upright a bike on which she was riding. Or, she could just be depicted in the show riding a bike at some point with no explanation provided (films and television shows gloss over logical minutiae like this all the time). Kayla McCarthy, ‘Remember Things: Consumerism, Nostalgia, and Geek Culture in Stranger Things,’ Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 3 (2019), p. 665. McCarthy defines geek culture as one that ‘demonstrates dedicated fan behavior for media genres like science fiction and fantasy, and for media forms like cult films, comic books, and video games’ (p. 665). See also Gary Cross, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Jessica Coulon, ‘The Third “Stranger Things” Bike is a Throwback Mongoose from Season 3,’ Bicycling (June 18, 2019). Last accessed September 19, 2019. Adam Ruggiero, ‘“Stranger Things” Bikes Hit Target: Invoke Your Inner 80s on this Mongoose BMX,’ Gear Junkie (July 2, 2019). Last accessed September 19, 2019.

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some adults are intent on trying to force these kids’ bikes into being non-kids’ bikes. Assuming the makers of Stranger Things have some leverage with the bike manufacturers they partner with regarding which bikes are made and in what range of sizes, this use of product tie-in (like the show itself) further reinforces a persistent correlation between childhood and cycling, as well as between consumer goods and nostalgia. The fact that all three bikes have sold out with breathtaking speed (five days for the first bike to go on sale, only several hours for the second one) makes clear the intense interest in these bikes. It is almost a certainty, given the popularity of the show, that adult-sized versions would sell briskly too. Still, the bikes keep being released only in sizes for kids. Adults who also admire these bikes really only have two options then: take them for cramped and uncomfortable short distance rides, or just ‘turn them into a great collectors’ item,’ that is, into bikes that aren’t even ridden.44 Stranger Things does, however, display a few noteworthy moments of subverting some of these unsettling trends regarding bikes, age, and gender established by E.T. and some other non-sf films of the 1980s such as The Goonies and The Karate Kid. First off, the show does include one fleeting but significant visual reference to an adult cycling in season 1’s episode ‘The Monster.’ Here, Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) – the middle school science teacher who repeatedly shows himself to be an important friend and ally to the four boys – is presented as owning a bicycle. In this scene, as Mr. Clarke is receiving a knock on his front door from one of the sinister government agents looking for the boys and Eleven, we see a yellow bike parked just outside his house (thus suggesting the teacher has recently been out for a ride). This detail constitutes another instance of bicycles in sf texts often being associated with more dignified and righteous characters, whereas cars, vans, and other motorized vehicles often belong to people who lack moral integrity. Mr. Clarke’s bicycle demonstrates that – unlike its predecessors E.T. and Super 8 – Stranger Things is willing to (at least in a very quick way) associate a mature and intelligent adult with a bike. Additionally, by season 2 of the show, the Duffer Brothers appear to have become aware of the first season’s questionable representations of gender and mobility. They tried to rectify the situation somewhat through the introduction of a new character in this second season: Maxine ‘Max’ Mayfield. Max is a tomboy who is new to Hawkins Middle School and whose preferred mode of transport in season 2 is (like Y.T. in Stephenson’s Snow Crash) a skateboard and in season 3 a Mongoose 4 4

Coulon, ‘Third “Stranger Things” Bike.’

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BMX bike. The character of Max, then – like Alice in Super 8, and like Y.T. in Snow Crash and Chevette in Virtual Light – performs a useful destabilization of some of the norms related to gender and transportation. Additionally, a new character introduced in season 3 of Stranger Things, Robin, is briefly shown riding a bike in the episode ‘The Sauna Test’ when she is out working to procure the floor plans that will help her, Steve, and Dustin understand the strange happenings in progress at the mall. All these female characters refuse to accept the more constrained range of mobilities with which society often expects their gender to be content.45 Instead of such passive contentment, they actively appropriate the mobilities of bicycles and skateboards because they are often faster, more profitable, more fun and playful (and so forth) than alternatives like walking or driving. However, in the last few episodes of season 2 and in some of the episodes from season 3 of Stranger Things, the narrative complicates the show’s portrayal of female mobility. In season 2’s episode ‘The Spy,’ Max’s skateboard is broken in half (presumably by her fury-filled stepbrother Billy as punishment for lying to him in the previous episode), never again to be seen in the remaining one-third of the season. In season 3, we only see Max skateboarding in one brief scene in the episode ‘The Mall Rats’ (although she verbally references skateboarding a couple of times elsewhere in this season and, as discussed above, she does now ride a bicycle). Furthermore, in ‘The Spy’ we witness Max ride off with Lucas on the back of his bike, an image that recalls another female reduced to the role of passive passenger: Eleven when riding on Mike’s bicycle. To further complicate things, the few times we see Max on her Mongoose bicycle, Eleven is often shown riding on the pegs attached to the back wheel. Throughout the three seasons of Stranger Things, then, Eleven – a powerful female character in so many other respects – is curiously reduced to a passive female passenger. Despite these complications to female mobility that Stranger Things displays at times, the show still represents noteworthy progress over Spielberg’s E.T. and Abrams’ Super 8 (especially over the former) in terms of its representation of both adults on bikes and girls on bikes (and skateboards). The final text this chapter analyzes – the comic book

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Another noteworthy character to add to this list would be Pacifa from Piers Anthony’s Mercycle (1991). This novel – about five people cycling on the bottom of the ocean as part of a mission to save Earth from future destruction – repeatedly references Pacifa (one of two women in the group) as the most vigorous of the five cyclists, as well as the most knowledgeable about bicycles, for she is a bike mechanic.

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series Paper Girls – also displays a notable understanding that young girls might like bicycles too, and that they desire and deserve independent mobility just as much as boys do.

Mocking Cars of the Future Written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, with colors by Matt Wilson and letters by Jared K. Fletcher, the comic book series Paper Girls (2015–19) tells the story of four newspaper delivery girls who, on the morning of November 1, 1988, find themselves swept up in an epic conflict involving time travel machines and flying dinosaurs. In addition to its prominent sf elements, Paper Girls – like Super 8 and Stranger Things – also brims with references to 1980s American culture. The comic book series features shout-outs to that decade’s video games, news stories, comic strips, bands, films, mall stores, and so forth. Compared to the other sf 80s nostalgia texts discussed in this chapter, however, Paper Girls appears to be the least influenced by Steven Spielberg. But the series does embrace a key element of Spielbergian films such as E.T.: the association of childhood with bicycles. Despite this problematic association, however, Paper Girls does go further than any text we have seen with its undermining of entrenched gender assumptions about bicycles by showing girls relying on bikes for many of their mobility needs (see Figure 11). Furthermore, the series continues the trend we have seen so often in American sf of belittling the car. Significantly, the four paper delivery girls – Erin, MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany – show little interest in automobility, even though it is such a desirable signifier of maturity and freedom for many teenagers. Put simply, the girls appear quite content with their bicycles, or when without their bikes, with walking. The only time we witness the girls in a car is when they are still in 1988 during the series’ opening (Paper Girls follows the girls as they time travel between different epochs). Here, they take Mac’s stepmother’s car – with Tiffany driving, probably for the first time ever – to rush Erin to the hospital, for she had just accidentally been shot. This is certainly an urgent situation that is not conducive to a group bike ride. But even here KJ can’t help but snidely remark, ‘Can’t this half a station wagon go any faster?’46 Tiffany responds that she is intentionally refraining from revving the ‘ancient engine’ so as not to alert any of the ominous dinosaurs soaring overhead 4 6

Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, and Jared K. Fletcher, Paper Girls. Book One (Portland, OR: Image Comics, 2017), n.p.

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Figure 11. Paper Girls cover, with delivery girls on their bikes

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to their presence. In this scene, neither of these two teenagers seems particularly impressed with automobile technology, instead finding it sluggish, noisy, decrepit. This condescension toward automobiles manifests itself again when the girls travel to 2016, become separated from their friend KJ, and encounter Erin’s future self. The girls attempt to find KJ in a car being driven by ‘Big Erin’ (as Mac calls future-Erin at one point). Big Erin’s automobile appears to be a Fortwo, a popular two-door, two-seat microcar manufactured by Smart, a division of the German company Daimler AG. However, instead of marveling at how small cars of the future have become, Mac can only exclaim: ‘These shitty Future Cars are the size of Hot Wheels. I told you, we should have gone after KJ by —.’ Mac is interrupted by an exasperated Big Erin shouting ‘Enough!’47 Yet, it sounds like Mac was about to say they should have ‘gone after KJ by bicycle,’ instead of using the faster (but much less comfortable) car. Later, when Mac and Tiffany have returned to riding bicycles (taken from Big Erin’s garage) and they stumble upon a Smart car parked in an abandoned mall’s parking lot, Mac asks Tiffany ‘That’s Big Erin’s glorified bumper car, right?’48 Once again, Paper Girls presents its main characters as unimpressed with the motorized vehicles around them, even when the vehicles are exotic futuristic cars and even though the girls are at the age when most teenagers start longing for a car and the respect and freedom it can bestow.49 Even when the girls eventually arrive in twenty-second-century Cleveland – a dazzling futuristic city straight out of a pulp era illustration – the girls convey little by way of awe or admiration for the many flying personal transport vehicles they see soaring among the sleek and radiant buildings. In addition to belittling cars, Paper Girls continues the trend we have been tracking the past few chapters of associating complex, imposing modes of transport with less-than-noble characters. Most prominently, the antagonists of this comic book series – known as the Old-Timers – fly around in an immense ship called the Cathedral. From this imposing vehicle, the sinister soldier-mounted flying dinosaurs emerge, as well as 47 4 8 49

Vaughan, et al., Paper Girls. Book One, n.p. Vaughan, et al., Paper Girls. Book One, n.p. One exception to this typical lack of interest in or amazement over cars on the part of the four girls is when, in Chapter 7, Tiffany and Mac are riding down the street on the bikes taken from Big Erin’s house and Tiffany exclaims ‘Oh rad…Check out this boxy one!’ Tiffany is referring to what appears to be a ‘futuristic’ Nissan Cube parked on the street. But a still unimpressed Mac responds: ‘Tiffany, unless it can fly, I don’t really give a rat’s ass.’ Vaughan, et al., Paper Girls. Book One, n.p.

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the mysterious alien-looking creatures known as Editrixes. Similarly, in twenty-second-century Cleveland, the girls are confronted by belligerent police officers who fly in hover cars with retractable wheels. FutureTiffany dies when trying to protect the other girls from one of these trigger-happy officers atop his soaring vehicle. In short, like the nefarious scientists, soldiers, and government agents in E.T., Super 8, and Stranger Things, villainous figures of authority in Paper Girls also utilize complex, menacing forms of transport.

Putting Girls Back on Bikes Paper Girls is perhaps most praised and well-known for its handling of gender issues and its representation of female characters. As Laura Hudson puts it, ‘instead of the boy heroes that typically dominate ’80s adventures, Paper Girls is centrally concerned with the lives and relationships of adolescent girls. It is an unfamiliar sight in a medium that has historically felt like one long failure of the Bechdel test.’50 Rare for a comic book (and for a sf text too), the focus of the series is squarely on the relationship among girls; they are not characters who are defined in any way by their relationships to male characters such as boys who serve as (potential) love interests. Furthermore, the bicycle – rather than functioning as an inconsequential, nostalgic prop – plays a crucial role in Paper Girls’ overall interest in gender politics and in the lives of girls growing up in a typical American suburb. The gender significance of the bicycle in Paper Girls would likely be apparent to most readers before even opening the first issue of the series and before viewing a single panel of the comic. Many people are familiar with a ‘paper boy,’ a juvenile male who in earlier incarnations sold newspapers on city sidewalks while bellowing attention-grabbing headlines but who in later-twentieth-century iterations is someone who rises early in the morning to deliver newspapers to the driveways of neighbors by means of walking or cycling. By getting jobs as paper girls, therefore, the four female protagonists disrupt the status quo. They use a job and its standard mode of transport – the bike – to access environments and to have experiences typically reserved for males. Erin, MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany have found in their work and in

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Laura Hudson, ‘The Paper Girls and the Alien Invaders,’ Slate.com (June 7, 2016). Last accessed July 18, 2018. The Bechdel test was created in 1985 by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel and is a method for evaluating the portrayal of women in a film, a work of fiction, etc.

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their bicycles a mobility, a sense of social belonging, and an access to adventure from which young women are often excluded. This disruption and breaking down of gendered spaces by means of the bicycle is apparent from Paper Girls’ opening pages. Here, we see Erin waking up around 4:30 in the morning to start her paper delivery job. The first two-page illustration in Paper Girls portrays Erin confidently riding down the street on her bike, a strong-willed and determined expression suffusing her face, even though it is dark and she is all alone on what a calendar depicted on the preceding page refers to as ‘Hell morning’ (the morning after Halloween).51 Like the bicycle did for late Victorian women who found in the machine a means to less supervision and more freedom, Erin and the other paper girls find they can gain access to places and to times of day when usually only males are out.52 But, as we saw with Will Byers in the first episode of Stranger Things, with increased freedom often comes increased risk, a lesson Erin quickly learns if she did not already know it. While out delivering her papers, she comes across three teenage boys still engaging in some Halloween mischief with eggs and shaving cream. They accost Erin, and one of them makes a couple of inappropriate sexual comments before another boy grabs Erin’s bike and demands a free paper. It is at this point that the three other paper girls – MacKenzie, KJ, and Tiffany – swoop in to help Erin by scaring off the boys and by accepting Erin into their group.53 In sum, in Paper Girls we see the bicycle perform several important functions. The bike assists the girls in attaining an experience of youthful freedom that (as we saw in E.T., Super 8, and Stranger Things) is often associated only with boys in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Also, the paper girls’ bicycles function – similar to Chevette’s bike and Y.T.’s skateboard – as a catalyst for increased social cohesion. Because they are all young girls on bikes, the four of them feel a sense of kinship and team up in the series’ opening to complete their deliveries during this particularly risky post-Halloween morning when there are (as Tiffany says) ‘so many crazies…out.’ Paper Girls emphasizes this comradery through cycling again in the series’ conclusion when, as the 51

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This two-page image of a confident and determined female cyclist is repeated almost exactly in the series’ conclusion – in which the girls finally return to 1988 and relive this same Hell morning all over again – but this time it is Mac’s face, not Erin’s. On the bicycle’s role in gaining Victorian women more access to the public sphere, see Friss, Cycling City, pp. 162–64. When this scene plays out again at the conclusion of Paper Girls (see previous note), it is KJ who is threatened by the boys (not Erin) and who is the one the other three girls help.

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girls are splitting up to head home because their papers are all delivered, Erin calls out: ‘I don’t have to start getting ready for school for, like, another hour. Want to ride a little longer?’ The other girls accept Erin’s offer and Paper Girls concludes with a scene of all four main characters cycling side-by-side down the street at dawn. Lastly, and related to the first point above, the bicycle serves the important function of being not only a vehicle that transports one to a particular destination but that also has the potential to transport one to adventure and to an experience of the extraordinary. Put another way, in E.T., Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls, bicycles are not all that dissimilar from the all-too-familiar spaceships of sf: they can carry their riders to places where mundane reality breaks down and where marvelous adventures burst forth. This blending of the two machines – bicycle and spaceship – appears across the history of sf. For example, John Kendrick Bangs’ ‘Bikey the Skicycle’ (1902) is a work about a boy who fills the tires of his talking bicycle with a lifting gas so he can travel into outer space. The bike and boy journey to Saturn whose ring offers the ‘finest bicycle track you ever saw’ due to a lack of other types of vehicles such as carts, trucks, or trolley cars being there too.54 The ring also provides a smooth surface that is akin to ‘riding on glass.’55 Saturn’s ring, in short, constitutes a perfect road from a cyclist’s point of view. Similarly, The Green Machine (1926), a novel by the British writer Francis Ambrose Ridley, follows the adventures of Jinks, an explorer who travels with the aid of a flying bicycle (the titular ‘green machine’) to Mars where he discovers an advanced civilization run by gigantic, bipedal ants. Near the end of the novel, one of the ant-creatures accompanies Jinks on a whirlwind tour of our entire solar system before they both crash land back on Earth. The bike-as-spaceship also appears in Bernard Fischman’s fantasy-sf hybrid The Man Who Rode His 10-Speed Bicycle to the Moon (1979), a lyrical and poignant novel about a ‘numb’ man named Stephan whose ‘whole life lacked color’ and who ‘felt content only when he rode’ his bicycle.56 One day, Stephan magically takes flight into space on his bicycle, ‘rocketing through the Pleiades, past Taurus, past giant, full-blown red stars, and dying white ones’ before finally landing on Earth’s moon (where he is 5 4

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John Kendrick Bangs, ‘Bikey the Skicycle,’ in Bikey the Skicycle and Other Tales of Jimmieboy (New York: Riggs Publishing Company, 1902), p. 26. Although many rings with gaps between them surround Saturn – a fact that astronomers had observed for quite some time – Bangs describes Saturn as possessing a single ring. Bangs, ‘Bikey the Skicycle,’ p. 31. Bernard Fischman, The Man Who Rode His 10-Speed Bicycle to the Moon (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), p. 38.

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briefly reunited with his beloved but recently euthanized dog Sam).57 In Mike Sirota’s Bicycling Through Space and Time (1991), the main character’s mountain bike contains an alien-installed ‘Vurdabrok Gear.’ When engaged, this miraculous gear grants bicycles and their riders access to a kind of wormhole named the ‘Ultimate Bike Path’ that allows them to travel across space and time.58 Tim Sullivan’s ‘Dinosaur on a Bicycle’ (1987) also portrays time traveling by means of a special bike. Instead of becoming like a spaceship or time machine, sometimes the bicycle morphs into a wondrous transportation vehicle resembling Captain Nemo’s submarine from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). Such is the case in Piers Anthony’s Mercycle (1991), a novel that portrays a group of people encountering sunken cities, giant squids, and beautiful mermaids as they pedal bikes along the ocean floor with the aid of sophisticated alien technology that allows them to breathe and helps keep them safe.59 Although they never ascend into the sky on their bikes as in some of the above mentioned works, for the four main characters in Paper Girls their adventure begins when they are out on their bikes on that particular ‘Hell morning’ and they begin interacting with time travelers slinking around their neighborhood streets and with time machines hidden in construction site basements. The bicycle, put simply, becomes for these paper girls a machine that helps them begin encountering people, creatures, and environments every bit as strange and enchanting as those of the deep sea, outer space, or another planet.

Conclusion The problem that Paper Girls fails to evade, then, is the one we have identified above with E.T., Super 8, and Stranger Things: its contribution to the trend established by many original 1980s texts and by 1980s nostalgia texts of equating bikes with kids. As previously noted, the underlying issue with this trend is how it reinforces the notion that cycling as a form of 57 58

59

Fischman, Man Who Rode, p. 77 Sirota followed this novel with two sequels: The Ultimate Bike Path (1992) and The 22nd Gear (1993). Returning quickly to Super 8, this connecting of bicycles with spaceships is depicted in an almost literal fashion near the end of that film when the alien’s transformation of the local water tower into an improvised spaceship begins drawing metallic objects toward the ship. Among the metallic objects we see being incorporated into the spaceship are some bicycles, including one – in a clear nod to Spielberg’s E.T. – with a milk crate on the front.

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everyday transport for adults is socially inappropriate, for cycling is deemed a children’s activity. In the fondness of these 1980s nostalgia texts for recurring images of children riding bicycles – images clearly inspired, for the most part, by a film like E.T. – these texts render themselves guilty of an uncritical and superficial fixation on some of the motifs of those earlier films. The recurring images of kids cycling in many of these 1980s sf nostalgia texts resemble Frederic Jameson’s concept of postmodernist pastiche, which he contrasts with parody. ‘Pastiche is,’ writes Jameson, ‘like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse.’60 For Jameson, pastiche is troublesome because it accesses an earlier era through superficial stereotypes. Pastiche constitutes a shallow form of history grounded in shallow images produced by popular culture and the mass media. The fact that all the texts discussed above engage in frequent imitation of the kids-on-bikes imagery canonized by Spielberg, and the fact that these texts never counter the notion that cycling is just for kids (except for Stranger Things’ very quick visual suggestion that the science teacher Mr. Clarke cycles) renders these scenes an apolitical, ‘neutral practice of…mimicry.’ Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls fail to create new portrayals of 1980s cycling that would question and complicate the version of the history of cycling provided by films like E.T., The Goonies, The Karate Kid, and so forth. Such new portrayals would allow the twenty-first-century nostalgic texts to be more relevant to the current state of cycling (where growing numbers of women and adults are indeed riding bikes). Yet, we must not lose sight of the fact that all the texts focused on in this chapter perform useful cultural work by revering the bicycle to the extent that they do. E.T., Super 8, Stranger Things, and Paper Girls: each text correlates bikes with positive things like adventure, imagination, creativity, moral integrity, pragmatism, and so forth. They all mourn the loss of a time when people – even if it was just kids – roamed around outside on bicycles with their friends, instead of being cocooned inside houses by the abundance of electronic devices and virtual worlds that now surround us. Each of these texts may struggle with imagining grown-ups riding bikes as part of their everyday transportation needs, but they also excel at reminding adult audiences of the love of riding bikes that most of us experienced as kids. If audience members can recapture that feeling and find that inner child lurking within them, maybe there is hope for the future of adult cycling after all. 6 0

Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 17.

Conclusion Conclusion

We live in an exciting time defined by a proliferation of innovative personal mobility technologies. Many of these devices seem like they were ridden right out of the pages of a classic sf text gushing with gadgetry such as Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (serialization, 1911; novel, 1925). In the university town where I live, and on the campus where I teach, a walk to the library or to a coffee shop often – particularly on a pleasant day – features a myriad such ‘micromobility machines’ rolling across the landscape. Of course, many bicycles glide by, as do many conventional four-wheeled, foot-powered skateboards. Yet, the streets, sidewalks, and bike paths also teem with brisk electric skateboards whose motors are controlled with a small hand-held device. Students scurrying to class or heading back home also avail themselves of the speedy mobility offered up by self-balancing one-wheeled electric skateboards (with footrests on the front and back) and self-balancing electric unicycles (with footrests on the sides). Riders elegantly coast from point to point while standing on machines resembling truncated Segway scooters called hoverboards. Some people forgo the need to recharge a mobility machine and instead attach twenty-first-century versions of roller skates called free skates onto their shoes, then dash off down the street. Children on sidewalks might be glimpsed shifting their weight to the back of their feet, rolling on the nearly invisible wheels embedded in their Heelys shoes. And although they have not appeared (yet) in my town, electric scooters manufactured by companies like Bird and Lime are flourishing in cities elsewhere across the United States as part of a vast (too vast, many would say) dockless scooter-share system.1 Arriving with the same mixture of approval and aversion as scooters, dockless 1

On the controversy surrounding dockless scooter-share systems, see Jasmine Garsd, ‘Scooters: Sidewalk Nuisances, or the Future of Local Transportation?’ npr.org (July 28, 2018). Last accessed April 9, 2019. See 223

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moped-sharing programs have been introduced in cities like New York and Washington, DC.2 Most of the bicycles I see riding around consist of common types such as mountain bikes, road bikes, and cruiser bikes. However, cycling scholar Peter Cox has pointed out how we have begun to ‘see a growing market in, and use of, a range of non-standard bicycles, tricycles, and other human-powered vehicles.’3 These ‘unconventional cycle designs’ represent a lively and fascinating disruption of the ‘technological closure’ that the bicycle has experienced ‘for most of the past century’ and since the arrival of the safety bicycle in the late nineteenth century.4 Cox finds various benefits in the newfangled cycles of the twenty-first century, cycles such as folding bikes, cargo bikes, recumbent bikes, velomobiles (fully enclosed pedal-cycles), and electrically assisted bikes.5 More people with disabilities taking up cycling has led to seeing more handcycles – bicycles or tricycles cranked by the hands instead of the feet – too. These exceptional and intriguing designs call to mind the experience of Jack Miller – the main character in Mike Sirota’s Bicycling Through Space and Time (1991) – as he cycles the inter-dimensional Ultimate Bike Path that connects worlds near and far, past and present. Periodically when traveling the Path, Jack encounters alien life forms riding unfamiliar kinds of bikes, encounters that force Jack to quickly realize it is ‘presumptuous to suppose that every “bicycle” had two big wheels with spokes, derailleurs, and Vetta gel seats.’6 In other words, Jack learns to dislodge the paradigms that have congealed in his mind. Of course, we have not arrived yet at bicycles like the one Jack glimpses at one point that is ‘short, without handlebars,’ a machine where you ‘sat on a round, cushiony stool and steered with your feet while pumping two bellows.’7 But the human-powered vehicles Cox writes about underscore

2

3

4 5

6 7

also Margaret Renkl, ‘Scooter Madness,’ New York Times (June 17, 2019). Last accessed August 13, 2019. See Aaron Randle, ‘Now Crowding New York’s Streets: Rented Mopeds Going 30 M.P.H.,’ New York Times (August 9, 2019). Last accessed August 13, 2019. Peter Cox, ‘The Role of Human Powered Vehicles in Sustainable Mobility,’ Built Environment 34, no. 2 (2008), p. 140. Cox, ‘Role of Human Powered Vehicles,’ p. 140, p. 141. On the potential of electric bikes in particular for helping us reach more sustainable societies, see also Frauke Behrendt, ‘Why Cycling Matters For Electric Mobility: Towards Diverse, Active and Sustainable E-Mobilities,’ Mobilities 13, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1–17. Mike Sirota, Bicycling Through Space and Time (New York: Ace, 1991), p. 28. Sirota, Bicycling Through Time and Space, p. 106 (emphasis in the original).

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the thrilling nature of the era we are living in, an era of captivating new forms of mobility and new types of transport machines. But, of course, all this innovation and all this subversion of technological paradigms is not centered exclusively on human-powered machines like bicycles or strap-on skates, or on small engine-powered devices such as electric skateboards and self-balancing unicycles. As discussed periodically in this book, ‘macromobility machines’ like automobiles are about to undergo some of the most radical metamorphoses of their hundred-plus-year existence. First and foremost, the widespread arrival of self-driving cars (they are, indeed, already among us in some cities) that has been prophesied since Miles J. Breuer’s novel Paradise and Iron (1930) could be the most far-reaching transformation to effect automobility since the invention of the car itself. As Lawrence D. Burns declares: ‘For the first time in 130 years, we’re in the midst of a major transformation in automobile transportation.’8 Autonomous vehicles, hopefully, will lead to exponentially safer cars and far fewer automobiles on the road (the latter occurring if cars shift more toward efficient for-hire machines rather than something people feel compelled to own privately). On the other hand, autonomous cars could potentially lead to more unsavory scenarios. For example, some experts forecast that many more vehicles could appear on the road if autonomous cars become cheaper to own privately and if they give automobility to people who previously could not operate a car themselves (such as children, the disabled, the elderly, and so forth). Also, new kinds of infrastructure designed to accommodate self-driving vehicles could push cyclists and pedestrians further to the margins of – or even completely off – our streets.9 Automobiles – both autonomous and non-autonomous – are also expected to transition away from internal combustion engines powered by fossil fuels and move to electric engines powered by battery technology. As discussed in Chapter 3, however, several problems arise with electric cars. One is that electric cars are only as environmentally friendly as the power source being used to recharge their batteries. If owners of electric cars are nightly recharging batteries from coal-fired power plants, the ‘green’ credentials of that car are severely undermined. So-called ‘range anxiety’ (the fear a battery will die and leave a car stranded in

8

9

Lawrence D. Burns (with Christopher Sullivan), Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car – and How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 1. See Samuel I. Schwartz (with Karen Kelly), No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), pp. 89–90.

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the middle of nowhere) also arises as a concern with electric cars, but at this moment the ability to make quick-charging batteries capable of powering a car for a couple of hundred miles is emerging as a technological reality.10 In sum, American roads of the future feel like they are paved with an uncertain mixture of utopian and dystopian potential. They shimmer with many exciting and productive possibilities but are also darkened by the shadows of some dismal and distressing ones. We do not yet know how the constantly evolving relationship between conventional, highly privileged modes of transport like automobiles, and alternative, increasingly marginal modes like cycling, walking, skateboarding, scootering, and so forth will unfold. This uncertainly is one of the things that makes sf so relevant to our reflections on transportation (in addition to so many other aspect of our world), for, as astrophysicist and sf writer Gregory Benford asserts, ‘SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future,’ an ‘integration of the mood and attitude of science…with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious.’11 Affirming Benford’s statement, this book demonstrated how sf allows us to conjure up imaginary futures to reflect on what kinds of transport technology – and what kinds of norms or laws regulating that technology – we dread or desire the roads of the future will possess. And yet, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles has also emphasized how present-oriented sf is. That is, as frequently as sf turns its gaze toward the future, it just as often – if not more often – surveys the present-day world. In this sense, sf can be usefully read as a window into the concerns related to road transport of that time when a text was written: concerns over motor vehicle fatalities, over pedestrian rights, over suburban sprawl, over air pollution, over gendered mobility, and so forth. For this reason, because sf’s interest so often focuses on technology of all kinds, the genre serves (much more than mainstream literature or other genre literature such as fantasy) as a vital archive of how people have felt about the various mobility machines spinning down the roads that surround them.

10

11

See David Stringer, ‘Fastest Electric Car Chargers Are Waiting For Batteries to Catch Up,’ Bloomberg.com (April 3, 2019). Last accessed April 11, 2019. Quoted in James Patrick Kelly, ‘Slipstream,’ in Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction, ed. James E. Gunn and Matthew Candelaria (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 343.

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Index Index

Abbott, Carl, Imagining Urban Futures 6 Abrams, J. J. 204, 211 Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 65–66 Adventureland (film) 189 Aguiar, Marian, Mobilities, Literature, Culture 6 airships (dirigibles) 170–81 Aldiss, Brian, ‘All Those Big Machines’ 17 Anderson, Poul 23, 67, 95 ‘A Bicycle Built for Brew’ 76–78, 81, 85–89, 184 Anthony, Piers, Mercycle (novel) 214n45, 221 Archer, Neil 6n15 Ashley, Michael 29 Asimov, Isaac 11 The Caves of Steel 4 ‘Sally’ 56, 58 Astor, John 16, 20 A Journey in Other Worlds 14, 19–20 Atwood, Margaret MaddAddam trilogy 162 Oryx and Crake 172, 186–87 autoduelling 118–21 automobile 47–55 alternatives 99–100 anti-car narrative in science fiction 28, 65–96, 121–28 autonomous cars 55–60, 225

car-centric infrastructure 34, 51 changing perceptions in 1920s and 1930s 29–31, 48–53, 64 cultural expression in films and music 67 cyborg vans 135–37 gender and mobility 213–15 harmful effect on environment 9, 18, 48–50, 97, 103–4, 137–39 intersections of race, class, and mobility 166–68, 170 relationship to environmental issues 9, 18, 48–50, 97, 103–4 safety reforms 3–4, 8–9 slow travel movement 106–8 spike in annual road fatalities in early 1960s 97–99 synonymous with violence and aggression 150 traffic fatalities 2n6–3 see also autoduelling; bicycle; electric car Bacigalupi, Paolo 24, 186, 187–88 ‘The Calorie Man’ 171n29, 178n48, 179n50 Ship Breaker 173 The Windup Girl 21, 162, 164, 171–81 ‘Yellow Card Man’ 177n43 Ballard, J. G. 22, 76, 113–14n18 247

248

FUTURISTIC CARS AND SPACE BICYCLES

Concrete Island 113–14 The Drought 114, 163 The Drowned World 163 Bangs, John Kendrick, ‘Bikey the Skicycle’ 220 Barnes, John, Caesar’s Bicycle 49–50, 151n39, 185n59 Baxter, Stephen, The Massacre of Mankind 49, 62n86, 161 Beach Boys ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ 5 ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ 5 Bear, Greg 130–31 Bellamy, Edward 20 Equality 20 Looking Backward 2000–1887 13n39, 20, 121 Benford, Gregory 226 Bennett, Jane 90–92 bicycle 176–77 contribution to healthy lifestyle and social equality 10–11 depictions in science fiction 60–64, 65–68, 130, 151–54, 190 design iterations in nineteenth century 12 as gendered machines 199–200 juvenilization in popular culture 66–67, 186, 188, 189–222 as nostalgia machine 200–3 public bike share schemes 124–27 retrofuturism of 76–78, 194–96 sociability of bike messenger culture 152–54 sophistication of human-powered vehicles 154–56 Bird, Arthur 20, 138–39 Looking Forward 12–13, 14, 16 Bishop, Michael, ‘A Short History of the Bicycle’ 92–93 Biskind, Peter 197 Black Mirror (web TV series) 190 Blanke, David 35

Bleiler, Everett F. 26–27, 60–61 Blue, Elly 100 Bikes in Space 93, 200n22 ‘Night of the Living Machines’ 57, 60 Boardwalk Empire (TV series) 189 Bould, Mark 129–30 Boys’ Life (magazine) 79, 84 Bradbury, Ray 23, 67–76, 95, 110 Dandelion Wine 69 Fahrenheit 451 68, 70, 72–74, 109, 110, 167 ‘The Fireman’ 70–71, 76 ‘The Highway’ 68–69 The Martian Chronicles 69 A Medicine for Melancholy 69 ‘The Pedestrian’ 70–71, 72, 76, 109 Braun, Robert 6n15 Breuer, Miles J., Paradise and Iron 55–56, 57, 225 Burk, Bryan 204 Burns, Lawrence D. 225 Butler, Octavia E. 24, 165n21, 168n26, 171–72, 186, 187–88 Parable of the Sower 21, 110, 126, 162, 164–70 Cadigan, Pat 130–31 Synners 21, 43 Callenbach, Ernest 23, 99, 138–39 Ecotopia 98, 111n32, 121–28, 167 Campbell, John W. Astounding 113 ‘The Safest Form of Transportation’ 1–4 ‘Unsafe at High Speed’ 3, 4 Canavan, Gerry, Green Planets 7 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring 102 Caryl, Charles W., New Era 12 Chaffee, Roger 1 Chambless, Edgar, Roadtown 12 Chiang, Cliff 215 Clareson, Thomas D. 78–79 Clarke, Arthur C.

index

Rendevous with Rama 4 ‘The Wind from the Sun’ 4 Clarsen, Georgine 205–6 cli-fi see climate change fiction climate change fiction 24, 155–88 Cline, Ernest 201–2 Ready Player One 144n31 clipper ship 175–76 Clute, John 87 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 92 Collins, Suzanne, Hunger Games trilogy 155n3 communication technology 110–13 Coulon, Jessica 212 Cowper, Richard, The Road to Corlay 163 Cox, Peter 224–25 Craig, Alexander, Ionia 20 Cross, Gary 212 cyberpunk movement (c.1982–88) 129–32 Davidson, Avram 23, 67, 95 ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters’ 89–94 Deleuze, Gilles 92 Dick, Philip K. 81n45 ‘Autofac’ 56 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 21 Dinello, Daniel 21 Technophobia 6 DiPaolo, Marc, Fire and Snow 7 dirigibles (airships) 170–81 Doctorow, Cory, ‘Car Wars’ 57 Donitz, Harold 34 ‘A Visitor from the Twentieth Century’ 32–33, 34, 40, 42 Doolittle, James 16 Downton Abbey (TV series) 189 Du Bois, W. E. B., ‘The Comet’ 166–67n23 Duffer, Matt 207, 211, 213 Duffer, Ross 207, 211, 213 Dunn, Thomas P., The Mechanical God 6

249

Earls, William, ‘Traffic Problem’ 103 Edison, Thomas 13 Edson, Milan C., Solaris Farm 12 electric car 100–6 electricity, potential for utopia 13–14 Elliott, Chandler, ‘A Day on Death Highway’ 119–20 Ellison, Harlan 23, 99 Again, Dangerous Visions 114 ‘Along the Scenic Route’ 98, 103, 114–18, 128 ‘Bleeding Stones’ 103 ‘Corpse’ 103 Dangerous Visions 114 Deathbird Stories 103, 114–15 ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ 81, 114, 137 ‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ 114 Erlich, Richard D., The Mechanical God 6 Escher, William J. D. 104 Evans, Arthur B. 37–38 Fincham, Ben 153–54 Fischman, Bernard, The Man Who Rode His 10-Speed Bicycle to the Moon 220–21 Fletcher, Jared K. 215 Ford, Henry 16–17 Forester, John, Effective Cycling 139 Forster, E. M., ‘The Machine Stops’ 81 Foster, Alan Dean, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Speed’ 103, 119, 120 Frederick, Carl, ‘A Boy and His Bicycle’ 211n39 Friedman, Lester D. 197 Friss, Evan 191 Furness, Zack 22, 180, 186, 198 Gavin, Adrienne E., Transport in British Fiction 6 Gernsback, Hugo 22–23, 25n2–26

250

FUTURISTIC CARS AND SPACE BICYCLES

Amazing Stories 22, 25, 28–29, 31, 44, 53, 61–62, 64 Forecast 25n1 ‘Future Transportation’ 26–27, 40, 42 Ralph 124C 41+ 25n2, 223 technological perfectibilism 26–28, 33–34, 42–43, 54–55 Wonder Stories 22, 25, 28, 31, 44, 64 Geus, Marius de 121 Gibson, William 23, 130–31, 156–57, 171–72 All Tomorrow’s Parties 145n33, 146 ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ 77–78, 130 Neuromancer 129–30, 145 Virtual Light 21, 126, 131, 142–43, 145–54, 169, 205, 214 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland 121 G.L.O.W. (TV series) 189 Gone with the Wind (film) 189 Goodbody, Axel 161 Grissom, Virgil ‘Gus’ 1 Guattari, Félix 92 Guffey, Elizabeth E. 78 Hageman, Andrew 175 Hamilton, Edmond, ‘The Man Who Evolved’ 137 Hanstein, Otfrid von, ‘Utopia Island’ 41–47, 61 Happy Days (TV series) 189 Heinlein, Robert A. 23, 56, 67, 82n47, 95 Methuselah’s Children 56 ‘The Roads Must Roll’ 42–43, 79–80 The Rolling Stones 76–84, 88, 89, 135, 190, 199 Hemingway, Ernest, on cycling 107

Hillman, Harry W. 20, 138–39 Looking Forward 19 Holdsworth, Clare 202 Hopkinson, Nalo, Brown Girl in the Ring 160–61, 179n51 Horton, Dave 10 Hot Rod magazine 67 Hot Tub Time Machine (film) 189 Howells, William Dean, Through the Eyes of the Needle 20 Hudson, Laura 218 Humphries, Andrew F., Transport in British Fiction 6 Hutchinson, Sikivu 167 It Chapter Two (film) 189 Jakes, John, On Wheels 103–4n20, 119, 120 Jameson, Frederic 222 nostalgia 201 Postmodernism 77 Johns-Putra, Adeline 161 Johnson, President Lyndon B. 97–98 Jones, Paul Anthony, Extinction Point 49, 103, 160n8 Jones, Thomas Richard, ‘Reprisal’ 163n15 Jordan, Pete 125 Keller, David H. 138–39 ‘The Living Machine’ 55, 56, 57–60, 71 ‘The Revolt of the Pedestrians’ 34, 47–55, 58, 60, 61, 102–3 Kelly, James Patrick 131–32, 136, 151 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road 5, 67 Kessel, John 131–32, 136, 151 Kidder, Jeffrey L. 153–54 Knight Rider (TV show) 57 Lafferty, R. A., ‘Interurban Queen’ 103 Lake, Simon 5n14

index

Landon, Brooks 17–18 Latham, Rob 112–13 Le Guin, Ursula K. 21–22, 23, 99, 138–39 The Dispossessed 101, 105, 108–9, 111 The Lathe of Heaven 106 The Left Hand of Darkness 98, 100–2, 105–6, 109–11, 123, 128 Rocannon’s World 110–11 skeptical of advanced technology for mobility 108–10 The Word for World is Forest 108–9, 111 Longhurst, James 66, 84, 139, 169 Bike Battles 61 Lucas, George, American Graffiti 5, 201 Luckhurst, Roger 113 McCarthy, Cormac, The Road 160n6, 172 McCarthy, Kayla 212n41 McCausland, James 163–64 McCoy, John, A Prophetic Romance 14, 16 McLociard, George 37–38, 39–40, 47 ‘The Terror of the Streets’ 34–40, 42 Mad Max (film series) 163–64 Mad Men (TV series) 189, 200–1 Mapes, Jeff 184n57 Mathieson, Charlotte Mobilities, Literature, Culture 6 Mobility in the Victorian Novel 7–8 Miller Jr., Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz 81, 137 ‘Dumb Waiter’ 162n14 mobility development of personal mobility technologies 223–26 see also airships; automobile; bicycle Morley, David 112

251

Mugnaini, Joseph 74n31 Musk, Elon 17, 104 Nader, Ralph, Unsafe at Any Speed 3, 117–18 Niemeyer, Katharina 189 Niven, Larry, Ringworld 4 Nixon, Rob 182 Norcliffe, Glen 82, 178–79 Norton, Peter D. 29–31, 33, 37, 39, 51, 60 ‘nostalgia’ science fiction 24, 189–222 Okorafor, Nnedi, Lagoon 8n20 O’Rourke, P. J. 197–98 Otto, Eric, Green Speculations 7 Palmer, Sue 202 Pandemic (film) 155n3 Paper Girls (comic book series) 24, 190, 192, 199, 202, 215–21, 222 Parzybok, Benjamin 24, 187–88 Sherwood Nation 162, 164, 171, 177, 179, 182–87 Pearce, Lynn Drivetime 7–8 Mobilities, Literature, Culture 6 Person, Lawrence 130–31 Pierson, David 200–1 postcyberpunk movement 130–32 Provos (Dutch anarchist group) 124–25n72 bicycle plan 124–25 A Quiet Place (film) 155n3 Ready Player One (book and film) 144n31, 190, 201–2 Ridley, Francis Ambrose, The Green Machine 220 Robinson, Frank M., ‘East Wind, West Wind’ 123n67 Robinson, Kim Stanley 128 Green Planets 7 Mars trilogy 4

252

FUTURISTIC CARS AND SPACE BICYCLES

New York 2140 173–74, 175n40 Pacific Edge 127 Science in the Capital trilogy 162 Robinson, Spider 114 Rogers, Hubert 73–74 Roth, Veronica, Divergent series 155n3 Russell, Eric Frank 22, 73–74 ‘And Then There Were None’ 73–74 Sanders, Joe 78–79 science fiction ‘1980s-nostalgia’ 24, 189–222 climate change fiction 24, 155–88 ecocritical studies 6–8 ‘Golden Age’ (1950s) 23, 64 humanities-focused mobility studies 7–8 impact of bicycle and automobile on American sf 11 New Wave era (c.1960–75) 23, 97–128 postcyberpunk era 23–24 pulp era (c.1926–40) 22–23, 28, 130 scope and terminology of text 21–22 transportation models 5–6 Seed, David 43, 71 Seiler, Cotten 22 Sengers, Frans 177–78 Serviss, Garrett P., The Second Deluge 163n15 Shea, Daniel P., Culture on Two Wheels 6 Sheller, Mimi 136 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 107, 208 Shiner, Lewis 130–31 Shirley, John 130–31 Sikorsky, Igor 5n14 Simulation Theory (music album) 190

Sirota, Mike, Bicycling Through Space and Time 221, 224 skateboards 131, 133, 139–43 Smethurst, Paul 190, 203 Smith, Clark Ashton, The Great God Awto 30 Smith, E. E. ‘Doc,’ The Skylark of Space 4 Sokol, Su J., Cycling to Asylum 126n74 Solnit, Rebecca 72 space travel 1–2 Spielberg, Steven 209, 211 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 190–91, 204 Duel 192–93 E.T. The Extra Terrestrial 24, 190–200, 204, 205, 214–15, 220, 222 Poltergeist 190–91 Star Trek franchise 4 Star Wars franchise 4 Stephenson, Neal 23, 142–43, 156–57 The Diamond Age 131, 132, 141–42, 173–74, 175n40 Snow Crash 21, 131, 132–35, 136, 137–39, 140–41, 144–45, 151–54, 205, 213–14 Steranko, Jim 116, 117 Sterling, Bruce 23, 131, 156–57 ‘Bicycle Repairman’ 131, 143, 150–51, 155–56 Stockton, Frank R., The Tricycle of the Future 14–16 Stone, Leslie F., ‘The Conquest of Gola’ 88 Stranger Things (web TV series) 24, 190, 192, 198, 199, 201, 202, 207–15, 220, 222 streets, early social construction as democratic commons 31, 37, 51–53, 140, 169 Sturgeon, Theodore, Killdozer! 56 Sullivan, Heather I. 171, 172

index

253

Sullivan, Tim, ‘Dinosaur on a Bicycle’ 221 Super 8 (film) 24, 190, 192, 199, 202, 204–6, 214, 220, 222 Swanstrom, Lisa 133, 143–44

The Steam House 37–38 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 37–38, 221 Vietnam War (c.1955–75) 97–99 Vint, Sherryl, Animal Alterity 7

Tate, Andrew, Apocalyptic Fiction 159–60 The Americans (TV series) 189 The Birth of a Nation (film) 189 The Goldbergs (TV series) 189 The Goonies (film) 213, 222 The Karate Kid (film) 213, 222 The Last Man on Earth (TV series) 155n3 The Minority Report (2002 film) 57 That ‘70s Show (TV series) 189 The Walking Dead (TV series) 155n3 The Wonder Years (TV series) 189 Thompson, Sir Henry 48, 50–51 Thoreau, Henry David 72 Tom Swift series 17–18, 78 Total Recall (1990 film) 57 transportation slow travel movement 106–8 technological perfectibilism 26–28, 33–34, 41–47 Trexler, Adam 163 Turpin, Robert J. 66–67, 191, 197, 198, 200

Weller, Sam 69 Wells, Christopher W. 65 Wells, H. G. 22, 127, 186–87 Anticipations 86–87 The Invisible Man 208 A Modern Utopia 121 ‘The New Accelerator’ 61–62, 64 The Sleeper Awakes 32 ‘The Star’ 186 ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ 32, 62, 63–64 The Time Machine 4, 47–48, 163n15 The War in the Air 162n14 The War of the Worlds 49, 62, 162n14 The World Set Free 186 Wentz, Daniela 189 Westfahl, Gary 29, 145, 148n36, 154 Westwood, Kim, The Courier’s New Bicycle 151n39, 200n22 White, Ed 1 Wilson, Matt 215 Winfield, Gene 116 Withers, Jeremy Culture on Two Wheels 6 The War of the Wheels 62n86, 162n14 Wooldridge, C. W., Perfecting the Earth 12

Ulibarri, Sarena, ‘Riding in Place’ 127–28 Urry, John 22 Varley, John, ‘Air Raid’ 4 Vaughan, Brian K. 215 Verne, Jules 37–39, 47 The Master of the World 37–39, 40, 45 Robur the Conqueror 37, 38

Zelazny, Roger, ‘Devil Car’ 56, 119, 120 Zoline, Pamela 65