Episode 105: Transcript
Episode 105: Ghosts of the Cold War
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction and the darkness that lurks at the edges of our collective will. I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction. My latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, and I'm an inverse unicorn, which means that my body is mostly made out of horns, and there's like a tiny bit of horse. Also, I'm the author of a young adult trilogy, the second book in the trilogy, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak just came out. And you know, you can get it wherever you get books.
Annalee: [00:00:35] Today, we're gonna be talking about the ghosts of history, specifically the ones that are still haunting us from the Cold War. So obviously, this is on a lot of people's minds right now, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is awakening a lot of memories of Soviet imperialism. But even before the invasion, we've noticed certain Cold War tropes popping up in science fiction. And, I mean, let's face it in US culture kind of overall.
[00:01:05] So today, we're going to talk about what those Cold War tropes are, and why this is all happening right now, 30 years after the Cold War supposedly ended. Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about a very weird theory I have about the Magneto versus Xavier conflict in X-Men and how it's about the Cold War. And Charlie is going to weigh in on whether I'm completely bonkers.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:27] I’m so excited.
Annalee: [00:01:30] Finally, I should remind you that the only reason why we're sitting here talking and having a professional producer, make this show is because of you. You are giving us money through Patreon and that's how we do everything. There's no money coming in from shadowy organizations across the sea trying to influence your minds. There's no arts grant, it's literally just you, the listeners, supporting us. So if you want this show to keep going, if you want us to be able to expand it, maybe and do more cool stuff, consider becoming a patron and you know, you can give us a couple bucks, you can give us five or 10 bucks. At every level, there's special rewards, including if you support us at 20 bucks, we'll send you free books and write whatever you want in them. I mean, within reason, we won't write an entire other book inside the book, but we will sign them. And so please consider doing that. This is entirely done for you and paid for by you and if you are supporting us, you get audio extras, you get to come into our Discord and hang out with us and hear more of our weird opinions. And you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right, let's start the show.
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Charlie Jane: [00:03:15] So, in the United States, the Cold War kind of had different phases. It was really intense in the 1950s and 1960s and then it kind of became intense again in the 1980s. And those were also periods when science fiction was hugely popular. Do you think that there's a connection between those two things?
Annalee: [00:03:35] Yeah, I really do. I think there's periods in history when things are changing so fast that the present really starts to feel science fictional. The 1950s and ‘60s were like that in the United States. You have to imagine a nation that has just witnessed the devastation caused when the US dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese, mostly civilian targets, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that was in 1945. And then there's the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, which was the first human created vehicle that was actually in orbit. And at that time, I think it seemed to people like almost anything was possible. We really might be about to live on other planets, like within a generation, but at the same time, you know, we might be about to vaporize ourselves.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:30] Yeah, very relatable. And, you know, like, that's the thing that we still have today, the thing of like, we're either going to accomplish amazing stuff, or we're just going to all die and one of those two things is gonna happen. It’s gonna be cake or death, basically and we'll see which one it is. I mean, obviously, the Cold War era, like the 1950s and 1960s were kind of considered the golden age of science fiction, and they were the time when we had a lot of the amazing space operas. There were movies like Forbidden Planet and they're very Cold War themed. The Day the Earth Stood Still. And you have a ton of writers from Robert Heinlein to Samuel Delany publishing these classic stories about space travel, in which often themes of the Cold War are being worked out, like the question of interference and other civilizations and stuff is like often a big theme and the question of like, how do we massage the kind of fabric of history?
Annalee: [00:05:32] Absolutely. And also, just on a really basic level, suddenly, outer space just feels a lot closer. But so does war. And a lot of those space operas are really, as you were hinting there about space war. So right after World War II, Isaac Asimov writes the first Foundation book, which is about how a great scientist discovers the science of psychohistory, which allows him to predict a huge war that's about to destroy civilization. So it's like, we get, really early on, this kind of wedding of space exploration and cool technology with the looming threat of war.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:14] Yeah, and of course, another thing that happens after World War II is that the United States has become an empire, right? We've become an empire in our own right. We've kind of replaced the British Empire after World War II. And the US has become one of the two main superpowers in the world, but arguably the most powerful country in the world. And so you have a lot of these space operas that are kind of dealing with that, like, how do we hold on to our empire. And so it's interesting that now, in a time when the United States is arguably losing prestige and losing power at a rapid rate, now is when we're getting the Foundation TV series, which still has all these themes about an empire that is doomed to fall.
Annalee: [00:06:57] Yeah, it's really on people's minds, isn't it? One of my very favorite 1950s space war movies is called This Island Earth, which is, I mean, at this point, I think it's basically a camp classic. It got the Mystery Science Theater treatment, you see it in a lot of gifs that are like trying to show you like, here's what cheesy science fiction looks like. But at the time, it was actually kind of a special effects blockbuster. And it's very, very much influenced by the Cold War.
[00:07:31] It's all about how these aliens come to Earth to trick our Earth scientists into helping them with a war that they're losing back home. So they're in this kind of world annihilating conflict. They also want to sucker us into giving them a bunch of uranium for some reason. So just to bring in more kind of Cold War allegory. There’s a lot of sort of running around after uranium. So partly, it's just a fun space adventure, where two scientists actually do get slurped up into a flying saucer and get to visit this other planet and see all the incredible technology, see the incredible cities, but then that planet is immediately destroyed by space war, and the humans barely make it out alive.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:18] I hate when that happens, man.
Annalee: [00:08:20] I know it sucks. It wrecks every great space opera.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:23] The other thing about this period, of course, is that World War II is hanging over everything. You have a whole generation of science fiction creators who all fought World War II or had been involved in the military in some way. This kind of cemented a lot of their ideas about the role that we could play in civilizing the universe, or whatever. And you know, in a previous episode, you and I interviewed Alec Nevala-Lee about his book Astounding. He talks a lot about this in that book, about these writers who were taking part in World War II and seeing it as confirmation of a lot of their feelings about the superiority of the rational man or whatever.
Annalee: [00:09:04] Yes, totally. A lot of science fiction in the ‘50s and ‘60s was based on firsthand observations of war. And some writers really leaned into their connections with the military. There were certainly a lot of people who were writing anti-war science fiction, but then there were people on the other side. And two of those writers who stand out especially, are Larry Niven and his frequent collaborator, Jerry Pournelle. So Niven was the author of this incredible breakout novel in 1970 called Ringworld, which won the Hugo and the Nebula and the Locus award that year, so it was the triple threat. So Jerry Pournelle was also a science fiction writer. He wrote a few novels before he started collaborating with Larry Niven. But mostly what he was known for was working in the defense industry and he's probably most famous for coming up with the idea of a space based weapon, where you would shoot giant rods of iron at targets from space. This is when he was working for Boeing and he was like, listen, this is gonna be the next big thing. You can shoot giant chunks of metal. You don't have the problem with radiation but you can still destroy things just like with an atomic bomb. And this idea was later nicknamed the “Rod from God.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:29] I feel like I saw the Rod from God play the Warfield on their reunion tour.
Annalee: [00:10:35] Yes. It's funny, because Jerry Pournelle didn't actually call it the Rod from God, but it does show up in a lot of science fiction novels after he invents this idea, under that name. So anyway, Larry and Jerry start collaborating on fiction together and in the early 1980s, both men were asked to advise then President Ronald Reagan about, you guessed it, space war. So here is Jerry Pournelle, talking about that experience in a BBC documentary from 1992, called Pandora's Box.
Jerry Pournelle: [00:11:11] We ended up as the kitchen cabinet on space and military technology. We had access to the President and because we had that access, nobody refused an invitation to come to the meetings, what it amounted to. So we ended up with a bunch of four star generals and captains of industry and the entire military industrial complex of the United States in Larry Niven’s living room. And in fact, Jim Ransom, pointed out that one RPG through the plate glass window of Larry's tank, would have pretty well crippled the United States technologically for 20 years. He was probably right.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:51] Okay. Wow. So they were directly advising the President about the missile defense system that came to be known as Star Wars. I mean, that makes sense, I guess.
Annalee: [00:12:00] Yeah. And I would also argue that Larry Niven’s, novel Ringworld touches on a lot of key tropes of Cold War science fiction. So the novel that sort of brought him into the orbit of actual four star generals, kind of is dealing with these anxieties left over from the Cold War. So for those of you who haven't read Ringworld, it's a lot like the game Halo in the sense that it's about a giant, astonishing feat of engineering, this massive ring habitat that's been built around a star, and a group of people have been sent from Earth to investigate it and figure out what happened, how it was built, just your typical space adventure with a giant object in space.
[00:12:47] What they find when they get to this ring world is that civilization on it has collapsed. There's all kinds of problems with it. And it's sort of a vision of what might happen to high tech America if we aren't careful. But there's another thing that makes this a very Cold War novel, which is that it's full of mind control.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:12] Wait, really?
Annalee: [00:13:13] Yes. So it's not just about a fallen civilization and a giant decaying ring in space. We're following a group of people in the story who've been sent to figure out what happened. And in the process of their adventures, I mean, they crash land and so now they're stuck. And they have to try to figure out a way to get off the ring world. So they take a long trip across the ring to try to just figure out if they can find some tech. And along the way, they discovered that one of the group is this alien called a Puppeteer. They knew it was a Puppeteer, but they find out that the Puppeteers have been secretly shaping the minds of humans and these other aliens called Kzin, who were basically giant cats. So there's two humans and a Kzin on this mission with one of these Puppeteers, and they find this out and then on top of that, they find out that the Puppeteers carry these secret weapons that can shoot little bursts of pleasure into people's minds, and they do it every time someone follows one of their orders. So the Puppeteer on the mission is revealed to have been conditioning everyone to enjoy taking orders from him. It's like brainwashing.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:27] Wow. That's, I mean, that's like a whole bunch of fetish porn all rolled into one. Also, it's worth noticing that the Kzin, those cat people appeared in an episode of the animated Star Trek show in the ‘70s, written by Larry Niven, called The Slaver Weapon, and in that episode, they're basically big, adorable fuzzy cartoon misogynists.
[00:14:53] Anyway so you know brainwashing obviously was a huge fear it was like a major theme in both pop culture and in discourse during the Cold War. You had The Manchurian Candidate, you had a whole bunch of other things. Everybody was just talking about it all the time, right?
Annalee: [00:15:05] Yeah, I mean, brainwashing was a kind of buzzword in the 1950s. And it was a fear that grew out of the Korean War, partly because military analysts were trying to figure out why there had been such a high death rate of Americans in the Chinese POW camps, and also such a low escape rate as compared to in World War II. So during the Korean War, a few American soldiers defected to the other side and they would come on to Communist radio programs, and broadcast to American POWs telling the Americans to surrender, telling the soldiers to come over to the communist side, it would be much better over there. And at the time in the ‘50s, psychologists and people with the military claimed that this was happening, partly because the communists had this incredible way of controlling people's thoughts using a combination of torture and other techniques. And they called this brainwashing.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:13] Right. And so that's how we get all this paranoid Cold War science fiction, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and other movies like that, where it's basically some alien force is going to take over your body and make you conform.
Annalee: [00:16:27] Exactly. And there was a lot of anti-communist propaganda that suggested that we had to be ever vigilant about our minds, because at any moment, we might become pawns of the communists, or the Puppeteers, or whatever.
[00:16:42] So I want to play you a clip from a propaganda movie, narrated by Ronald Reagan in 1962. It’s called The Ultimate Weapon. And it's about the brainwashing that American POWs experienced during the Korean War. So in part, the movie is actually kind of factual. I mean, it explores how the prisoners were isolated from each other. They were forced to confess to fake crimes. They were made to stand outside in the cold, sometimes until they died. And so they dealt with a lot of incredibly traumatizing stuff that is brought up in this sort of propaganda documentary. And as I've mentioned before, I'm working on a book about the history of psychological warfare. So I've been reading a lot about brainwashing. And so just as a little PSA here, if you want a really excellent and non-propaganda history of how it affected Korean War POWs, I really recommend this book called Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It. It's by a journalist named Edward Hunter, and it was written in the ‘50s out of his interviews with POWs and you can read it online at archive.org. It's really incredible. It's full of compassionate commentary. It's very realistic.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:53] Cool. Yeah, I'm gonna hunt that down.
Annalee: [00:17:55] Yeah, it's really great. But anyway, so let's get back to the propaganda. Sorry, I just wanted to have a side note for if you actually want the true story of what happened.
[00:18:03] So in this propaganda movie, The Ultimate Weapon, Reagan wants us to understand that it's really hard to resist this brainwashing treatment. And this is what he says.
Ronald Reagan: [00:18:12] Communism is designed to control human beings through coercion, cutting off information, isolate the individual, submerge in the mass, encourage conformity and passive, uncritical acceptance of authority. All this we saw in communist handling of prisoners. Communism has been a singularly successful tyranny so far, as it has engulfed more than a third of mankind.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:38] Basically, they're kind of describing Fox News there, to some extent. Isolating people from reality and submerging them in this alternate kind of bubble universe, but it is also this weird paranoia thing. And I know adults who were alive in the ‘50s, who were around then, who still have this idea of brainwashing that somebody can basically soak your head for a while, or bombard you with stimulus or break you down and then rebuild you as a completely different personality and make you kind of do whatever they want. And I feel like this is a thing that a lot of science fiction writers who came up during that time, a lot of baby boomers especially, were really marinating in, that kind of shaped their feelings about individualism and about trying to be resistant to these kinds of malign influences.
Annalee: [00:19:31] Yes. Okay. I'm gonna punish you by talking about this movie a little bit more, though, because it's really a perfect example of how the brainwashing trope worked, both in reality and in science fiction. So this movie, by the end, with Reagan's beautiful narration, it deals with what we would basically call PTSD now and explains that a lot of the men who returned home from these POW camps were in this state of extreme apathy. They didn't want to go out. They didn't want to talk to anyone. They just kind of wanted to stay in bed. And instead of treating this like trauma, instead of realizing that what they were suffering was because of the horrible experiences they'd had, Reagan explains, very helpfully to us, that it's actually kind of the fault of the soldiers, because they've been raised in this culture that is too open minded. So listen to this.
Ronald Reagan: [00:20:32] Our enemies are largely within ourselves, indifference, passiveness, a lack of standards and values about right and wrong, good and bad. Though these things are often excused as universal or even extolled as virtues, broad mindedness, tolerance, or sophistication, they can be as deadly and destroy us just as surely as any nuclear device or a missile or other hardware. They constitute the true fallout, the moral fallout against which free men must forever give battle, if our freedom and its manifold blessings are to endure. The ultimate weapon for this battle…
Annalee: [00:21:08] So it basically sounds like he's talking about wokeness. You could almost hear the word wokeness in there, and about how it's destroying our moral fiber.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:21] Yeah, and when do you think about writers who kind of came up out of that time, I think about like Philip K. Dick, who obviously still has a huge influence on science fiction and pop culture, generally, his work has been adapted for a ton of movies and a couple of TV shows. And you know, Philip K. Dick frequently has this kind of paranoid sensibility where kind of nothing is real but also your consciousness is fragmented. If you think about like the book, A Scanner Darkly, where this person has two different personas who kind of don't talk to each other. And that's a frequent motif in his work, I feel like, of people who are kind of at odds with themselves, or like their minds have been messed with in some way. Or they're being bombarded with strange things that kind of destabilize their sense of reality. And I feel like Philip K. Dick was very much shaped by this paranoia about brainwashing and about the idea that your personality could just be broken down if you were bombarded enough.
Annalee: [00:22:21] Yeah, I feel like that Reagan propaganda movie is so paranoia-inducing, because you are left feeling like the enemy is inside you. It's about to take over your brain. It’s not a terror of troops coming in from outside and occupying your nation. It's a fear that there's something wrong with you, something wrong with your moral fiber, or maybe the moral fiber of your whole nation, that's going to allow you to be literally turned into a different person. And I think we're still kind of living inside that fear. And after the break, we're going to talk about the Cold War returning today.
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Charlie Jane: [00:23:09] Yeah, so Annalee, how do you feel like the Cold War is kind of… the themes of the Cold War are coming back in pop culture and in politics, today, in the early 21st century?
Annalee: [00:23:21] I really think we have to start by talking about modern day paranoia about brainwashing. And I think it's taking a whole bunch of different forms. The one that comes to mind immediately, partly because I've been watching this show, is Severance, which is a new TV series about, at first, something that doesn't really seem like brainwashing. Because the plot of the show is that this company Lumen has developed a technology that allows you to split your work memories from your home memories. So you go into work, you do a bunch of stuff. Maybe it's like stuff that's under NDA. And as you leave and go down the elevator, the memories of your work day vanish and you kind of go back out into the world and all you know is that you've kind of been at the office. So you don't know anyone you work with, you don't know anything you work on. And of course, the point of the show, which is extremely paranoia inducing, is that actually, this system of dividing your consciousness isn't really foolproof, you actually have this weird brain implant that can be messed with. There's a whole conspiracy. I'm not going to give spoilers, but we learn that there's this much larger political conspiracy at stake or corporate conspiracy.
[00:24:39] I really think that this is a show that is both stylistically indebted to the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, because we see these interiors of the office, at Lumen that are absolutely like they're supposed to look like 1960s style kind of government offices, just plain white. Everything is you know, squares and boxes and incredibly minimalistic. Nothing has nice paint or anything other than… the only kind of paintings and art we see are sort of propaganda about the guy who founded the company.
[00:25:17] But the other part of it is this sense that you're doing work for an organization whose goals you don't really understand and an organization that essentially is controlling you. And one of the key moments in the show is when we do start to learn how the people at work are controlled by their bosses, through a system that is basically like mind control. They're forced to do things that are frickin’ horrible, and that are designed to break down their personalities and make them more obedient. And so it's not about, necessarily, a fear of governments, it's much more fear of corporations. But it's still that sense that when you go to work, that fear or that paranoia, that something's being taken away from you, and the thing that's being taken away from you is your frickin’ personality and your identity.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:18] Yeah, and of course, the 1950s, the sort of the height of the Cold War, the original OG Cold War time.
Annalee: [00:26:26] OG!
Charlie Jane: [00:26:26] The kind of cold war 0.1, or whatever, 1.0, was the time when the kind of modern corporation as we know it was becoming kind of a thing. And you had a lot of talk about, like, what belonging to these big, giant corporations was doing to us. You had a book that was hugely influential in 1956, called The Organization Man, which was kind of like, I mean, at the height of us defending capitalism against communism, it was kind of arguing, in a way, that capitalism was also turning us into members of a collective, who were unable to think for ourselves. And at the same time, you had the rise of a new kind of psychology, I feel like that was obsessed with how our consciousness was being splintered. You had The Divided Self by R.D. Laing and a bunch of other works that kind of deal with the idea that we are being forced to split off parts of ourselves. And I feel like this all comes back to the idea of brainwashing. It all comes back to the idea of, there are forces that are trying to take over your mind. And some of them are from Communism, and some of them are for capitalism. And I feel like actually, this is something I'm kind of coming up with as I'm saying it, but I feel like the concepts that were originally created to kind of be a weapon against communism, were then turned and weaponized against capitalism as well, in the popular consciousness, because, wait a minute, in both systems, there are large institutions that are trying to control our minds. And, gosh, that's bad.
[00:28:00] You see mass media science fiction of the ‘60s, and also early ‘70s. You have this constant theme of like mind control and brainwashing. and like people who have been taken over by some alien influence. I feel like in Doctor Who of that era, there's a million scenes where the doctor is facing someone who's got like an alien slug, or cybernetic implants, or they're being turned into a Cyberman. In the case of like, you know, that Doctor Who story, Tomb of the Cybermen, and the Doctor has to be like, remember who you are. You're a human being, you can think for yourself. And then of course, the person remembers and thinks for themselves at the last possible minute and saves everybody because humanity wins through. I feel like there was this question of how do we remain human in the midst of this giant, epic conflict between two implacable opposing sides, and the idea of mind control was central to that.
Annalee: [00:28:00]It really is. And also, of course, you know, as we get into like the late ‘60s, telepathy becomes a huge theme in Cold War—
Charlie Jane: [00:29:06] Yes, ESP.
Annalee: [00:29:05] ESP, telepathy, mind control, they all kind of fit together. But to pull it back to the present day, I wanted to mention a couple of modern superhero stories that are also playing with this mind control theme. First of all, there's the Loki TV show, which I really loved. And one of the big issues in that show is, once again, there's this faceless corporation that's taking care of maintaining the timeline. And everyone who works for that corporation sorry, spoiler, turns out to have had their memories nuked by that corporation, and they're actually people who come from the timeline, but now they're being kind of mind controlled into doing what this organization wants. And there is the struggle of like, whether they'll remember who they really were, and do the right thing.
[00:29:54] But then there's also Venom, which is a story of a superhero who gets occasionally taken overbuy a weird slime creature alien. I'm not sure?
Charlie Jane: [00:30:05] It’s like a goo monster. It's like an alien symbiote that's kind of a goo monster.
Annalee: [00:30:08] Right. It's a symbiote. I love symbiote stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:13] Mm, same.
Annalee: [00:30:13] And so that's another example of a character who's basically got a divided consciousness. And now we have Moon Knight, which I'm constantly referring to as Moon Moon Knight, to go to a meme that's really old. I'll link to that meme in the show notes in case you've forgotten the important Moon Moon meme. But in Moon Knight also, we have an even more bizarrely divided character, because he has two personalities plus, there's an Egyptian god who's also semi controlling him, but only controlling part of him. I'm sure, as the show goes on, it will be kind of dealt with. But the point is that it's basically three people being in one head.
[00:30:59] And ultimately, all of these stories, the Loki story, Moon Knight, Venom, they're all stories about losing your memory or being controlled by this powerful force that you're not entirely sure has your best interests in mind?
Charlie Jane: [00:31:13] No, indeed. And meanwhile, I feel like I've seen some articles recently suggesting that we're kind of in a new era of McCarthyism. Because Republicans will explicitly compare the teaching of critical race theory, which basically means anybody talking about racism in any way, or acknowledging that racism has ever existed, as basically, the new communism, and so we have to root out the communist sympathizers who are spreading these terrible ideas. And similarly, if you tell kids that homosexuality exists or that you acknowledge that you yourself might be gay or transgender or lesbian. That's also like, you have to be rooted out in some new McCarthyist kind of purge. I do feel like, you know, there are people who are nostalgic for the Cold War, and for that ability to have that much like paranoia about the enemies within. And I think they're trying to drag us back to that, in some ways.
Annalee: [00:32:13] Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that there's echoes of these freakouts over critical race theory in that speech, we heard from Reagan from the propaganda movie in 1962. Where, at the very end, he says… he's sort of talking about the weaknesses in the American character that allow us to be open to brainwashing. And he says, but sometimes, you know, people think of them as good things like tolerance, and broad mindedness. But these things can actually destroy us. They're like the nuclear fallout of the human mind. And when he talks about tolerance and broad mindedness, he is absolutely talking about the Civil Rights Movement and feminism, which would have been on people's radar at that time, and would have really been heating up in the news. And so it's a dog whistle. He’s saying the things that make us weak are basically giving rights to Black people and women. And yeah, we're seeing that come back.
[00:33:14] And indeed, in some of these speeches about critical race theory that you're hearing now, from politicians and pundits, the word brainwashing gets used and the word thought control. It's really funny because J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, who actually becomes a bad guy in Legends of Tomorrow, which is really great. But in real life, he was also a bad guy. And he was obsessed with thought control. And so he wrote a lot about how do you defend against thought control. So this was, you know, it was a serious part of political discourse in the ‘50s, and ‘60s, and it has come back to be to be part of our political discourse, now.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:51] Things just never go away, they really don't. It's interesting, because, part of what's going on, I think, is just that we're constantly rehashing old pop culture, as we kind of have talked about in other episodes. And a lot of our most popular pop culture was created in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘80s. There's a lot of Cold War pop culture that just is like IP that has to be re-re-microwaved, or whatever, by corporations, and it has all these Cold War assumptions within it. There are these bad guys that are basically like the Soviets, but we're going to try to make them not the Soviets for the present day. I think it's just, we keep coming back to this stuff, because it's popular among a certain fan base and there’s sort of a baby boomer science fiction that we're never gonna get rid of.
[00:34:39] But also, I think that another part of it is that, as is our habit, we never really dealt with the trauma of the Cold War. In the early ‘90s, there was like a switch was flipped. I remember it at the time, I was in school and I had some classes in international relations. I was taking some graduate classes, and professors would talk about what had been the dynamic during the Cold War, and we would all sit there being like, that doesn't make any sense. You're just making this up. That's not real. Because by like the early ‘90s, it felt like the Cold War was this weird thing that had never happened. And it felt like in pop culture, we just kind of forgot about it right away. It was like, we just, it didn't happen. And when what happens when you decide to kind of just pretend things didn't happen is that they do eventually come back and in a new form, or just in the same form, but with new bells and whistles, maybe?
Annalee: [00:35:29] Yeah, I mean, it's the classic return of the repressed problem where you repress it and actually, it turns out repressing things doesn't make them go away, it just means that they go into a little box and get like, incredibly stinky and really angry. And when they reemerge they just fart the place up with bombs and stuff.
[00:35:52] So another thing I wanted to mention that I think is really returning in our pop culture that has a very Cold War flavor to it is the new generation of space war stories. I think the most obvious popular example of this is the Expanse television series, which is of course, based on the amazing novels. And this is a story that shares, in some ways, a lot of the same themes as Ringworld. Although Ringworld tended to lean conservative, The Expanse tends to lean liberal. But what's happening in The Expanse is, of course, we're seeing space war. A huge part of the series is about the different factions who are at war with each other in the solar system, different human factions who want economic advantages or strategic advantages. Certain groups who've been disenfranchised, like the Belters are just hoping to even have a seat at the table when there's a kind of a futuristic UN meeting.
[00:36:58] But the other thing that's going on in the show, is there's this proto molecule that's come from an ancient, presumably collapsed civilization, although we don't actually know if they're completely collapsed. And the proto molecule gets inside people's heads and bodies, and changes them and takes over their bodies, and gives them new thoughts, turns them into a collective entity, it seems like. I mean, the proto molecule has like a million powers, and we don't even fully understand what all of them are. But one of them really is this kind of mind control capability that it seems to have. And it really reminds me of these moments in Ringworld, where the humans realize that they've been part of this breeding project. The Kzin have been bred to be docile, allegedly. And they're like, oh, all this stuff has been going on to control us from this alien force, the Puppeteers.
[00:37:57] And another story that I wanted to mention really quickly, is Ann Leckie’s series that starts with Ancillary Justice, which is, again, another huge space war story between superpowers. It's about ancient crumbling empires, once again, how they are going to maintain power or not. And at the same time, it has a huge subplot about mind control, because the way that these superpowers have built their militaries is to create troops who are part of a hive mind spawned by these massive artificially intelligent space vessels. And so the space vessel basically inhabits hundreds or thousands of bodies of the troops who serve within the ship.
[00:38:45] And so again, there's this fear of mind control, of being subsumed within a political system or a military system. And at the same time, there's these macro space battles. So we've got the space war happening in this broad canvas and we also have the threat of mind control happening, back on a planet. There’s like outer space battle and inner space battle. And I think it's that combination of, like I said, outer and inner space battle, that really makes Cold War science fiction different and it makes the Cold War different from other periods of intermittent warfare. The fact that it wasn't just… the Cold War wasn't just about fear of the atomic bomb. It was also fear for our very minds. It was a fear of being like having our consciousness invaded, and that, I'm sure there are other there counter examples and you could find examples in history where that was happening, but I think that combination is always going to feel Cold War to me.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:53] Yeah, that all makes total sense to me. And you know, I feel like part of what is happening is that the ghost of Philip K. Dick is haunting science fiction. And he gave us this way to be paranoid about stuff that kind of remains, embedded in the fabric of science fiction and embedded in the fabric of our pop culture that is kind of explicitly informed by a Cold War kind of ethos.
[00:40:18] When I think about the Cold War, I think about like spy stories, and I think about stories of people who are double agents or triple agents, or who are trying to get over the Berlin Wall. There's a bunch of tropes from the Cold War that, part of why it was the Cold War is that a lot of this stuff was being done kind of under the table by the CIA and the KGB and other security organizations that were doing dirty tricks behind the scenes. And you know, we've had a, I feel like, there's been like a little bit of a shift of the Zeitgeist back towards that. The James Bond movies had tried really hard in the 2000s, to kind of modernize and become more kind of gritty and realistic. And then at a certain point, they, about 10 years ago, I guess, they decided to start pivoting back towards the kind of old school 1960s James Bond movies with Spectre, with more ridiculous gadgets and more ridiculous… there’s good spies and evil spies, and everybody's spying on each other. And ooh, lots of spy tropes are getting kind of regurgitated again.
[00:41:26] I feel like that's just is a thing that is very comforting to Americans, because it's a thing where our paranoia gets to be kind of channeled into something that's part of a great struggle between opposing sides. And of course, now as you’ve mentioned, with the invasion of Ukraine, it does feel like we're kind of back to a kind of a confrontation with a quasi Soviet regime.
Annalee: [00:41:53] Yeah, I mean, so much of what you said was just so right on the mark. I mean, one thing I wanted to add was that part of what James Bond is doing in the newer films is bringing back conspiracies. Instead of it being a kind of a bad guy who's doing some particular thing, it’s a giant, shadowy conspiracy. And of course, conspiracies and paranoia go together, like, I don’t know, marmalade and toast, right? You have to have one to have the other because conspiracies breed paranoia, and paranoia always wants a conspiracy. So I think paranoia is back, baby. That is part of what's going on in terms of our science fiction aesthetic right now. I think that partly, it's coming from this sense of uncertainty that we're facing about the future, as well as the idea that threats are coming from weapons, but also, threats are coming from our own minds thanks to election meddling on social media, the escalation of really intense targeted propaganda on various kinds of social media platforms.
[00:43:15] I think the thing that we have to remember is that the Cold War wasn't just spy stuff. It wasn't just paranoia. Maybe in the United States, it was a period of unusual peace in the sense that there were very few attacks on US soil. But the Cold War wasn't cold. There were hot wars happening the entire time.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:41] For sure.
Annalee: [00:43:41] People’s lives were being ruined. I mean, we were just talking about the Korean War. There was Vietnam. And there were tons of other conflicts, including conflicts in Afghanistan that are still being felt today. So it isn't as if the Cold War was this period of like, unprecedented peace that was like brought on by the fact that we were all doing spy stuff instead of like nuking each other. And I think that's the same thing, again, that we're experiencing right now, is that the great power conflict that's brewing between, the US and Russia and China is not going to just be an ideological conflict. It's not going to just be a fight for our minds. It's going to cause things like the Ukrainian invasion, where people are dying and losing their homes and losing their cities. It's not a bloodless affair. It's not cold. We call it cold because we wish it was cold, but it's actually quite warm.
[00:44:43] So to return to what we were saying in the beginning, we live in an era where it's really hard to separate fact from fiction because things are changing so quickly, because we are dealing with kinetic conflicts and with this heightened propaganda. And so, we're turning to science fiction to explain our reality, and it's something that we did in the Cold War, and that's coming back too.
[00:45:06] All right, on that note, let's pack up our paranoia. And thank you so much for listening. Remember, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thank you so much to our amazing producer Veronica Simonetti and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and we'll talk to you next week. Unless you're a patron and then we'll see you on Discord. And we're gonna just do our best to keep building amazing conspiracies for you so you can just be terrified and hide in your basement. I think that's our goal. Right, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:45:47] Yeah, for sure.
Annalee: [00:45:50] I like yeah, it seems good. All right. Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:56] Bye.
[00:45:55] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.