UC Davis

“Speculating space: science fiction and the Atlas ICBM” examines the role of science fiction (sf) in the shaping, stabilizing, and interpretation of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Adapting Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to the relation between sf and its readers, I argue that sf interpellates sf subjects and places them within a particular situated perspective I call the ‘sf stance,’ from which the present may be interpreted by its relation to an imagined sf future. Engaging conventionally literary texts such as the Buck Rogers comics and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz alongside technical documents, scientific texts, and other conventionally non-literary texts, I show how both conventionally literary and non-literary texts deploy the mechanisms of sf to present visions of the future, spark urgency in the present, and make sense of the past. Chapter 1 follows a team of engineers at Convair Astronautics as they imagine the ICBM into existence, using the iconographies and rhetorical affordances of the sf of their childhood—Buck Rogers—to create and coordinate a working consensus on what sort of thing the yet-unformed Atlas was to be. Chapter 2 traces the confluence of the sf stance and rocket science back to its beginnings in the early 20th century, revealing how the so-called ‘fathers of rocket science’ leveraged the impulse of sf interpellation in order to establish the young discipline as a valid, coherent scientific field. Chapter 3 returns to Convair Astronautics as the Atlas ICBM verges on obsolescence, soon to be supplanted by the solid-fuel Minuteman ICBM. The Atlas survives by transforming from a weapon of Armageddon into a bloodless space launch vehicle, an ontological shift guided by the sf stance’s capacity to project the moral logics of the future onto the activity of the present. Throughout the three chapters, I build a history of the Atlas ICBM as science fictional from its very inception and argue that there is no way to think about modern technology without sf.