Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America

2. "Tomorrow's Children": Interracial Conflict and Resolution in Atomic-Era Science Fiction and Afro-Futurism

CHAPTER 2 “Tomorrow’s Children” Interracial Conflict and Resolution in Atomic-Era Science Fiction and Afro-Futurism In a remarkable story called “The Equalizer” (Williamson), published in Astounding Science Fiction in early 1947, a group of space-traveling scientists and military advisors return to Earth when an abrupt halt to communication from the home planet (attributed later to nuclear war) raises concern. The repatriated men land their space craft at “Fort America,” where a president-dictator named Tyler (and likened in numerous ways to Hitler) had established his empire . At the edge of the abandoned urban stronghold, the explorers observe the warning, “Danger! Metropolitan Area” (see figure 3), but in the well-preserved rural countryside happy “peasants” engage in fulfilling farm work, dam construction , and (as the visitors note with admiration) copious energy consumption . Without provocation members of the peasant clan are gunned down by one of the crew, a maniacal “Squaredealer” who administers Tyler’s interplanetary affairs. The villain’s snide appellation takes a sniper’s shot at the “Fair Dealers” and “New Dealers” who had been running the Truman and Roosevelt administrations for the preceding decade, yet when not associated with a fascist Truman, the Squaredealer’s short stature, military garb, and slanted eyes suggest the other menace of the Axis era, General Tojo of Japan. Thus the convoluted but ultra-right politics of the story’s author, Jack Williamson, manifest in multiple forms, and Williamson contributes to the tradition of politicizing atomic-era spatial arrangements that is under investigation here: as seen on many occasions thus far, the city is the source of humanity ’s problems, while the bucolic countryside where all live blissfully with “simplicity, individualism, and complete personal freedom” (47) promises simultaneously the inevitable future and the physically impossible return to the past. Even the suburbs in this story, also destroyed in the atomic 55 explosion (27), have gone to grass, yet the survivors’ primitive enclave is incomplete without “the plastic dust and shavings” of their modern workshop, the kitchen “fitted with shining gadgets to manufacture plastic dishes and synthetic staples on the spot,” and “the cold locker stored with a rich abundance of frozen foods” (34). As one of the yeomen-survivors avers, “Most people didn’t live in cities by choice. They were huddled into them by the old division of labor—specialized cogs in a social machine grown ruinously complex” (49); FIGURE 3: Hubert Rogers . Astounding Science Fiction (March 1947) . © 2012 by Penny Publications LLC/Dell Magazines . Reprinted by permission of the publisher . 56 Reckoning Day “the cities were a product of the old technology, and they died with it” (51). In the eventful recent past, “criminals” were the last to leave (hence the signage prominent at the city gates and on Hubert Rogers’s cover illustration), “a few men and women too stupid or too vicious to use the equalizer” (51). In another , somewhat earlier story from this magazine, “Beggars in Velvet,” a merry band of “outcaste . . . outlaw” types (Kuttner and Moore 25) known as the Hedgehounds has waited in the wings for the bomb to lay waste to “New York and Chicago and a hundred other cities” that now “held only abnormal life” (14). One Hedgehound more or less blames overbuilt cities themselves for the bombs that innocently, unavoidably befell them, heat-seeking-missile-style, reminding his listeners that “the tribes that unified got dusted with the Eggs. We ain’t unifying, brother!” (26). And what is Williamson’s “Equalizer,” seemingly borrowed from another pulp genre, the hard-boiled detective story, if not a gleaming example of new technology with its own distinct political overtones: unique to this cultural debate , Williamson attempts to politicize atomic science itself; according to the truth-tellers thriving in the hinterlands, “the old technology of the Atomic Age had already reached the breaking point of over-complexity and supercentralization . . . . The old atomic pile, you know, was an enormously clumsy and wasteful and dangerous way of doing an extremely simple thing” (58). Instead, the equalizer is a model of atomic-age efficiency, providing each user with his own personally controlled, freely deployable atomic weapon: “Shaped very much like the huge guided missiles of Fort America, it was about six inches long” (53). Naturally, the weapon is used against the Truman-Tojo figure who shot the innocent peasants in the earlier scene, and any other question of racial difference is bracketed by the characters’ time...