The Buck Rogers Background: Science Fiction and the Early Development of the Atlas ICBM

Abstract

This article explores how science fiction (sf) furnished a common set of beliefs about the future and about technology that shaped the development of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the United States’ first operational ICBM, drawing on corpo rate archival research, oral history interviews, and close textual analy sis of primary sources. It introduces the concept of the “sf stance”: the shared and situated subject perspective to which sf calls us, and from which real-world questions of possibility, expectation, and ontology are made permeable to the logics of sf. Convair’s initial design work for the Atlas’s predecessor, the MX-774, used rhetorical and representa tional strategies borrowed from sf comics to bolster the feasibility of an ICBM. Later, as the Atlas was being deployed in silos all over the United States, Convair again relied on the interpretive affordances of sf to de pict the Atlas as necessary, intelligible, and inevitable.