In 1963, the political thinker Hannah Arendt published “Man’s Conquest of Space,” an essay in The American Scholar that picked up certain themes developed in her magisterial opus of 1958, The Human Condition. In that book, Arendt had asserted that the recent launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, “an earth-born object made by man…launched into the universe,” had been an event “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom.”11xHannah Arendt, The Human Condition 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1. First published 1958.
Considering the figure of the astronaut floating enclosed in his space capsule (which had become a reality two years earlier), Arendt elaborated two themes in her American Scholar essay: the detachment of advanced scientific knowledge from any connection to everyday language understandable by the “layman,” and the way in which, in the technoscientific world of twentieth-century modernity, “man” had in a certain sense turned in on himself. For Arendt, the “fabulous instruments” of our civilization had the effect of making it “more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.”22xHannah Arendt, “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (1963), 537.
Those two themes led Arendt to a worrisome set of conclusions about the “Space Age”: first, that thinking about the human would become even more behavioristic; second, that, having left the earth, humankind would cease to recognize its previous accomplishments; third, that the stunning technological successes of the twentieth century would eventually lead to a world in which “speech and everyday language would indeed be no longer a meaningful utterance that transcends behavior even if it only expresses it.”33xIbid., 540. We like to think of the early Space Age as an optimistic time, and perhaps for many it was so. That may explain why Arendt’s Weimar pessimism resonates more powerfully in our own time, as countless anxious meditations on the cultural consequences of enhanced artificial intelligence make clear.
Yet it is worth pausing for a moment—amid the torrent of academic studies of the “sociotechnical imagination”—to recall that, in the period now most associated with the early Cold War in the United States, there were writers who not only asked if the human imagination had been stunted in the age of the thinking machine but also wondered what would happen to human fantasy in the age of space exploration, nuclear fear, and renewed utopian ambitions. As the historian Anders Stephanson once explained, the Cold War was not only a period in US history; it was a concept used during the period itself for thinking, in new and extreme ways, about the role of the United States in the world.44xAnders Stephanson, “Cold War Degree Zero,” in Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012): 19–50. It is no accident that this period also saw the proliferation of science fiction as both an expression and ever-renewable source of such fantasies—a flowering that historian Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi dubbed the “Cold War Fantastic.”55xSharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 93–95.
But how can exploring the creative output of this period inform our own moment in history, one characterized by both techno-optimism and cultural pessimism?
A good place to start is the short stories of the science-fiction writer Robert Sheckley (1928–2005), the best of which were republished in 2012 as Store of the Worlds, by New York Review Books. In their introduction to that volume, Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem describe Sheckley as writing stories that “operate as irresistible language artifacts, like extended puns or paradoxes: off-kilter, provocative, unsettling even if partly silly.”66xAlex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem, introduction to Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, ed. Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2012), The stories certainly share with our current moment both a sense of the absurd and a mixing of high-, middle- and lowbrow so thoroughgoing that it may be hard to detect any brow at all. But the stories also channel something uniquely distinctive of his era (especially the Jewish American intellectual milieu from which Sheckley—born in Brooklyn, raised in Maplewood, New Jersey—emerged). Suffused with the language of desire, sublimation, and projection, Sheckley’s skeptical takes on techno-optimism are phrased not as political polemics or political theories but as psychoanalytically tinged appreciations of the existential dilemmas, elemental satisfactions, and deep flaws of the human soul. If Arendt absorbed Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and worried about modernity as a loss of sense and significance, Sheckley absorbed Sigmund Freud and worried about modernity as the unleashing of fantasies old and new. In Sheckley, a surplus of volatile meanings for organizing experience, supercharged by technology, quickly exceeds what the humans who created those meanings thought they meant. Literary critic Alan Farr once called Sheckley the “Grand Inquisitor of the American Id,”77xAlan Farr, “American Doppelgängers From ‘The Gelded Age’: Robert Sheckley’s ‘Comic Inferno,’” Iwate University Repository (Japan), 2012, https://iwate-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/12909/files/sealc-p47-57.pdf; Stanislaw Lem, “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 26–33. and Sheckley’s virtuosic use of dark humor and hidden meanings made him a towering figure for the science-fiction writers of the communist bloc, including Stanislaw Lem, who saw Sheckley’s work as paradigmatic of a certain type of highly literary speculative fiction.
On their surface, the stories in Store of the Worlds operate in new ways with an old conceit: The beings possessed of superior technology turn out to be less mature and developed in their social sensibilities and cultural commitments than their supposed inferiors on less technologically advanced planets. In Sheckley’s worlds, hyper-rationalists, religious imperialists, and wealthy suburbanites addicted to the latest gadget are given their comeuppance. But this highly typified first layer, when peeled back, reveals deeper meanings. Sheckley is interested in the human mind and its aversion to the kinds of sociality that demand conformity as a condition for the achievement of peace. His picture of the mind is psychoanalytic, though also inflected by his absurdist-influenced concerns with the human use and abuse of language and his pulpy inclinations to shock, scare, and amuse the reader.
In Store of the Worlds, then, we get a picture of technological civilization that still must deal with the three aspects of the soul as understood by Plato (logistikon, thymoeides, and epithymetikon: reason, spirit, and appetite), and one in which, with the wrong fantasy in place and spirit run amok, reason stands no chance. In 1985, the critic Thomas Dunn identified Sheckley’s fiction as focused on the type of the “existential pilgrim,” lost in a world of fear, loathing, unreasonable hope, and impending cosmic catastrophe, a pilgrim who must summon a certain amount of courage in the face of horror to avoid falling into despair.88xThomas P. Dunn, “Existential Pilgrims and Comic Catastrophe in the Fiction of Robert Sheckley,” Extrapolation 26, no. 1 (1985): 56–65. It is a picture that maps well onto our own condition, and we would do well to listen closely to this writer who looked askance, with characteristically Menschlichkeit humor, at the terrifying fantasies of his own age.
Three Sheckley Worlds
Like many science-fiction short stories, Sheckley’s often invert dramatic irony, leaving the reader to figure out the world of the fiction, always a step (or five steps) behind the characters who inhabit it. His 1957 story “Morning After,” for example, depicts a society free of want and work in which all that remains is the pursuit of pleasurable distractions, including, for “men of ambition,” the pursuit of political power and a place in government—the main function of which is the design and distribution of various pleasures. The hero of the story, Pierson, after visiting a futuristic version of an opium den, signs up for a new thrill: what we now might call a “virtual reality adventure,” set on a dangerous outer planet. But there is a catch: One in ten thousand participants are actually transported to the planet, engage in a real adventure in the wilderness, and might actually die, rather than just “die” in the VR fantasy and then wake up. This, Pierson is told, is what makes this particular pleasure really exciting.
Pierson wakes up with a hangover on a planet that is no dream—he is the one in ten thousand. Attacked by a terrifying beast and a blood-sucking plant, he is saved from death at the last minute and brought back to the planetary station. Pierson demands a ride back home to his easygoing life on Earth, and his wish is granted. But as he prepares to go, something in him tugs him toward “the fields, the buildings, the fences, and the distant edge of the jungle which he had fought and nearly overcome.” He longs for the struggle of life and death, even as he runs away from it.
“Morning After,” the reader realizes about halfway through, is both a frontier story and a sly parody of the frontier story. Only a complacent set of futuristic lotus-eaters would engage in such nonsense, Sheckley seems to imply. If you sit in your bedroom fantasizing about subduing frontiers, you are unlikely to fare well in one, and you are perhaps misguided in a deeper way. Yet at the same time, the anxiety about postwar prosperity and the end of problems as a driver of human action and satisfaction is palpable throughout the text. The suicide rate of the want-free and work-free society from which Pierson had sought respite is very high, and the life of pleasure he returns to is boring; he finds that he is chronically undermotivated. And so the reader is compelled to ask: Whether as fantasy or reality, no matter how violent, stupid, and ridiculous, was the frontier somehow a source of significance, an impetus for action? Humans need projects; without them they are but pleasure-seeking animals. And what will be the projects for channeling human aggression now?
In “The Native Problem” (1956), a typical science-fiction inversion of the old civilized-versus-savage myth is given an intriguing twist. The initial inversion is clear enough: The Christian missionaries from Earth to a new planet are barbaric, racist, and ignorant—and American. In this case, however, the “native” they hope to convert is an explorer, also an American, who got there ahead of them, Edward Danton.
As we learn in the setup to the story, Danton is lodging on the planet because “during the last two centuries, millions of psychotics, neurotics, psychopaths and cranks of every kind and description had gone outward towards the stars.” On a packed Earth with specific breeding rules, the neurotics who are irritated by sociality make their way to new worlds and new, satisfyingly lonely beginnings.
Things do not go well when members of a strictly hierarchical Christian cult arrive in their spaceships and take Edward for a member of what they assume to be a local tribe. Only by engaging in an elaborate ruse—effectively indulging the fantasies of his fellow Americans that he is a bloodthirsty savage—can he hope to marry the female missionary he has fallen for and arrange to “assimilate.” He thus ends up in the same idiotic American civilization he tried to leave. Only one pleasure remains: He constantly fools with the anthropologists who come to study him.
The abhorrence of colonialism in “The Native Problem” is clear, but the story takes sociality itself as its fundamental problematic. In this future world, people on Earth engage in a game called “Subways” in which one locks arms with one’s “team” and tries to take possession of a fake subway car before another team, storming doors on the opposite side, can. The point of the game (or is it a ritual?) is to learn to work off aggression while being intensely social at the same time. “Historians,” the protagonist’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend tells him, “say that the game of Subways averted an all-out hydrogen war.” But Edward has a special problem with the games. He keeps losing friends and girlfriends when he plays, because they realize that he is not really having fun or fitting in. The story, then, is about how technoscientific modernity cannot solve the problem of society any more than the societies that moderns denigrate as premodern could. The world will always be full of antisocial cranks, and no one will ever figure out what to do with them. So much for Anna Freud and the optimistic project of Anglophone ego-psychology. Sheckley stands with her more pessimistic father’s writing in Civilization and Its Discontents.
“The Store of the Worlds” (1959) is the story that is hardest to interpret (and perhaps not coincidentally, the darkest). The protagonist, Mr. Wayne, enters a run-down building in pursuit of an illegal medical procedure, The Store of the Worlds, that can briefly link the mind to the one universe among all the infinite possible universes that matches the patient’s “deepest desire.” The cost: everything the patient owns, plus ten years off his life. The frame for the story appears to be straightforwardly psychoanalytic: The desires mentioned by the man who invented this medical technology are, as he explains it to Mr. Wayne, id based—murder, unbridled sexuality, fame, gluttony, and so on. The protagonist learns further that he may not himself know what his “true desires” are. But this introductory frame is undermined as the story proceeds.
Mr. Wayne decides to think about it. The story then launches into an account of suburban family life, in which he plays out his role as stereotypical husband and father. He has difficult episodes at work but keeps at it, handles issues with his son’s teacher, and spends time with his daughter. He attends to a variety of seasonal chores and recognizes in a thoughtful moment that his pragmatic wife would never herself indulge in such nonsense as The Store of the Worlds. He plans to go back, though, because the pursuit of his deepest desire is something every man wants. Yet Mr. Wayne never gets around to going back—there is too much to do—until he wakes up. It turns out that he has been living in the dream that is his greatest desire. Thoroughly satisfied, he hands over his entire savings: “a pair of army boots, a knife, two coils of copper wire, and three small cans of corned beef.” Exiting the store, he returns to the real world: rubble as far as the eye can see, rats everywhere, and potato rations, all the result of nuclear war. “Well,” Mr. Wayne concludes, “at least we gave as good as we got.”
What does this story mean? The most straightforward interpretation is to separate the psychoanalytic from the historical aspects of the story. This is what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek does when he uses “The Store of the Worlds” to introduce his readers to the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. And the story does exemplify Lacan’s model of the psyche—“the very paradox of desire.” In desire, “we mistake for postponement of the ‘thing itself’ what is already the ‘thing itself,’ we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire.”99xSlavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 7. Desire is about lack, about the experience of not getting back to The Store of the Worlds to reach one’s greatest desire, but wishing one could get there.
Žižek’s argument connecting Sheckley to Lacan is sound but incomplete. In its incompleteness, it exemplifies a broader tendency of thought that places psychoanalytic theory outside history and arguments such as Arendt’s in “Man’s Conquest of Space” within it. But Sheckley’s diagnosis of the Cold War, one that is simultaneously historical and psychoanalytic, is different from Arendt’s. “The Store of Worlds” is also about a middle-class society that, unable to channel aggression in a satisfying manner, launched a nuclear war. Only after this catastrophe do members of this society fantasize about the world they have lost. What is literally unspeakable in the story—what Mr. Wayne refuses to tell the inventor of the Store of Worlds—is a very simple fact: that having achieved the good life, he participated in its destruction. Then, and only then, did he yearn for its return. Thus, Sheckley’s story asks not only whether the postponement of satisfaction is the experience of desire (or, technically, the reproduction of the lack constitutive of desire), but also whether the achievements of midcentury American modernity can in fact accommodate even the human beings most poised to enjoy them. Or will the desire to give “as good as we got” win out in the end, because it is more satisfying?
These and other stories mercilessly skewer the standard fare of an American midcentury (mostly masculine) self-concept. One can imagine Sheckley’s bemused and wickedly sarcastic reaction to the Life magazine special issue apotheosizing Ernest Hemingway qua man’s man, complete with hunting- and boxing-themed cutouts. But the stories also illustrate that the various self-concepts that operated in midcentury American culture come from somewhere and are experienced as real by those who live them. The layering is relentless: That which is mocked is also real, the basis of emotional connection, and the thread by which a desperate humanity clings to something like meaning and hopes for something like significance. Yet that which is real is also silly.
One can conclude that Sheckley’s work also mocks the illusion that one can clear away all these illusions and still have something human left afterward. His is a science fiction of fantasy as an elemental aspect of the human, no matter how technologically advanced. To be sure, Sheckley shares the sociological and sociotechnical concerns of other writers of his time, and he does not seek a static eternal in his depiction of human dilemmas. In his stories, history moves, often far too quickly, and technoscientific modernity reconfigures human experiences radically. But the problems that arise amid the chaotic dynamism of the modern—especially under the looming threat of the bomb—are the problems of the flawed mind, driven as much by appetite and a demand for recognition as by rational calculation or reasoned judgment. Sheckley writes science fiction that is manifestly, and sometimes hilariously, “sci-fi”—it is the fiction of the spectacular, and of the animated short film—yet it is also fiction that blurs the line between science fiction and an older, and grander, form of literature: the epic novel, with its problems of life, death, and the search for transcendent grounds for moral action.
Are We All Lotus-Eaters?
I share Arendt’s trepidation. For her, the risk is that the view from Sputnik threatens the world-in-common on Earth. But as I re-read Arendt reaching for a style of thinking that can counter the eerie combination of fear, competitiveness, and blasé techno-optimism that marked certain discourses in Cold War America, I start to wonder whether her focus on meaning lost and behavioralism triumphant—drawn from the tradition of German letters, with Friedrich Nietzsche hovering in the background and Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment almost regulative—is helping or hindering our attempts to grapple intellectually with the vertigo of the present moment. The problem is not only that space travel, as an imaginary, covers over a reduction of the human with its articulation of “to the stars and beyond” ambition. It is also that a society that cannot generate new and more ameliorative fantasies for the individual will end up favoring pernicious and ill-suited fantasies of old instead of living with no fantasies at all. I’m sure the reader can think of a few examples from our own time and political milieu.
Science fiction has always been didactic, and its critics have long noted that its cognitive estrangement from the world-as-it-is makes it an ideal candidate for the role of a theology for the modern age. But which fantasies should its didacticism provide? This is, of course, a question one could ask of all art. But in science fiction, a literature that only really came into its own in a recognizable way with the advent of industrial society, the contradictions of the modern are pulled so taut that one learns quickly how the world can break.
This is where Sheckley’s stories help us. In his writing, social dilemmas and political conflicts are never just a matter of collective struggles for power or ideological adherence. They pose existential questions that demand an answer and expose human desires that demand satisfaction. Our late-modern condition features not only the dangerously volatile vicissitudes of doing politics in a technological age severed from traditional authorities (as we learn from Arendt), but also those dangers attendant upon the sublimation of desire—sublimation that is guided, ordered, and rendered legible to others in society via the fantasies on offer in the culture at large.
Sheckley participated in the making of these fantasies, but he also reflected deeply and critically on them in his stories, and in a way that went beyond politics. He showed Americans the strangeness of their own everyday lives not by projecting a previously better world (in a conservative way) or by looking underneath ideology to find social truth (in a progressive way), or even by affirming the basic principles of the postwar order in the American republic (the liberal way). Instead, he did so by putting a question to the reader: Can you think of a better fantasy to live by than the one in this story?
The problem for our moment, in other words, is not just the problem of the loss of meaning. It is the problem of creating new fantasies, new projections, and thereby projects that are worthy of our emotional investment. That we are struggling, as a collective, to articulate what the American project is or should be is exemplified by the recent blockbuster movie Dune: Part Two. Itself based on Frank Herbert’s classic Cold War allegory, published in 1965, the film is notoriously ambivalent about the fantasies it projects so masterfully on the screen. A white savior of the brown masses? The story runs that way, but it reminds its audience repeatedly that this is not a great look. A religious sect whose far-sighted view of leadership seeks to guarantee order? These wise guardian mothers might just be scheming women in a sex cult. Environmental destruction as primary threat to all of humanity? For sure, but space travel is cool. The film also travels through a stunning list of visual citations, factual and fictional, from the American archive: the mujahideen taking on the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan; the ancient Roman Empire as model for modern fascism; the family politics of good and evil in Star Wars. Denis Villeneuve’s visual vocabulary is still the Cold War Fantastic. It is a stunning and impressive film. But it is also characteristic of our age in its return to themes from an era when there was still a clear and distinct American project, however one wishes to judge it and however suffused it may have been by dangerous fantasy. One imagines Sheckley asking Hollywood: Can you not come up with something new, or are we all lotus-eaters?
Fantasy-as-history, one might say, occurs first as tragedy, second as farce, third as deconstruction, and fourth as mere repetition. It turns out that The Store of Worlds is not infinite. It is not even that large. Perhaps it is time to do an inventory and put new products on the shelves.