Chapter 17 - The Bomb

Summary

This chapter focuses on the atomic bomb as imagined, debated, and dissected in the fiction and criticism of the twentieth century. Long before its invention in the Manhattan Project, atomic fission was an obsessive object of speculation in fiction by writers such as H. G. Wells, Talbot Mundy, and Olaf Stapledon. Rejecting the notion that research was directed simply toward the development of clean sources of energy, such writers steered the public conversation toward the apocalyptic consequences of the employment of nuclear physics in the development of arms. Larabee focuses on how the threat of nuclear apocalypse impacted literary criticism’s sense of its social mission. Although she reads the movement known as “nuclear criticism” as a failure, she reads John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s opera Doctor Atomic as exemplary of “new critical and creative forms” that might “bring the humanities and sciences together to address threats such as nuclear weapons.”