The Map of apocalypse: Nuclear war and the space of dystopia in American science fiction

Abstract

In the summer of 1945, with Nazi Germany defeated and the war in the Pacific drawing to a close (albeit a prospectively bloody one), American behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner sat down to write a now famous Utopia called Walden Two, which was published in 1948. Walden Two is a Utopia very much like a frontier community with the benefits of twentieth-century sociological and technological advances, and was a centre of controversy when it was published and has remained so since.1 However, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and the following two decades were characterised not by the production of Utopian texts, but by Utopia’s inverse: dystopia.