Spies, Scientists, and Cold War Fictions
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Spies, Scientists, and Cold War Fictions
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Joshua A. Sanborn traces the relationship between adventure narratives, the emerging roles of scientists and spies, and the superpower rivalry. Drawing on works like Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, and the Soviet classic Andromeda Nebula, Sanborn shows how real events, from the rise of Soviet 'science cities' to the development of the U-2 spy plane, often felt torn from the very pages of these novels.
Blending cultural history with literary analysis, this book offers a guided tour through the Cold War imagination, revealing how fiction and fact intertwined in shaping a world on the brink of annihilation.
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Critic reviews
Sanborn’s utterly absorbing book on the intersection of politics and fiction in the cold war era gives us a new way to think about what culture itself is.
Genre fiction is often dismissed as “mere entertainment,” but Spies, Scientists, and Cold War Fictions demonstrates that it powerfully influenced the history of the Cold War. Moving deftly between American and Soviet examples, Sanborn shows how spy novels and science fiction shaped the thinking of politicians, spies, military planners, and the public. Beautifully written and broadly conceived, this book makes a compelling contribution to work on the role of imagination in politics, diplomacy, and public affairs.
Joshua Sanborn lures readers in with fun, resonant plots from Western and Soviet science fiction or spy novels and films—From Russia with Love, The Hunt for Red October, Seventeen Moments of Spring. Then he delivers the punch: extensive historical background! Turns out the spies and scientists were reading the Cold War fictions that modeled and even influenced their professions, and this book reveals a lot about them.
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