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Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century, 1947-1959
 
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Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century, 1947-1959 (Paperback)

by Ken Hollings (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £11.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 200 pages
  • Publisher: Strange Attractor (14 Nov 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0954805488
  • ISBN-13: 978-0954805487
  • Product Dimensions: 21 x 14.4 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 94,448 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

A story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless, Welcome to Mars offers a fascinating, detailed chronology of where it all went wrong.

In his own inimitable style, Ken Hollings draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified government archives, old movies and newsreels from the period to depict an unsettled time in which the layout of suburbia reflected atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously indeed. After Welcome to Mars, you ll never be able to think about the 1950s the same way again.

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Cabaret Voltaire album that never was, 9 May 2009
By Earthshaker (London, UK) - See all my reviews
In this book Ken Hollings examines several key strands in American culture immediately following the Second World War: the fear of nuclear annihilation, the proximity of space (taking the form of flying saucer panics, alien contact fantasies and the more mundane space race against the Soviet Union), the growth of suburbia and the studies of human consciousness that included LSD research and investigations of "brain-washing". As well as narrating events in these areas during the late 40s and the 1950s, he examines the way in which a society's concerns and self-image were fed back to it through the medium of popular culture, in particular science-fiction B-movies (the image of the feedback loop, of course, itself derives from the new science of cybernetics).

There are connections between these spheres, of course: to pluck one example from many, the developer of some of the earliest planned suburban communities had begun his career building secret housing, not appearing on any maps, for workers in the atom bomb programme. Personnel appear and reappear in the different strands of the story to the extent that it can be difficult to keep track, which is perhaps the point. Hollings' modus operandi is the rapid shuffle between narratives, the jump cut that juxtaposes two strands: his chronological framework commits him to this rapid switching, but it is also one of the means whereby he builds up a convincing structure. In the end, this is perhaps not so much history, or at least orthodox "balanced" history (in which one would be required to look more closely at how representative certain figures actually were), as one history, one possible use of the facts, a paranoid riff in which images from reality are selected and juxtaposed in cut-up fashion. Hence the Cabaret Voltaire comparison: both subject matter and technique are closely analogous to the Sheffield Dadaists' work in music.

The caveats about the extent to which this is "history" are not to say, I hasten to add, that what Hollings tells us is untrue - and there are some stories in here that make the blood boil even without the addition of sinister conspiratorial overtones, such as the use of disabled children as guinea-pigs in the ingestion of radioactive substances, or the work of Dr Ewan Cameron (and his British associate William Walters Sargent) in attempting to wipe and reprogramme the human mind, using mental hospital patients as raw material (both men shared what could be described as a robust approach to patient rights, something that Sargent's personal papers, deposited in a public archive and freely available for consultation, bear out). However, history as understood in the academy is not really the point here: the objective is a forensic analysis of a culture, western scientific capitalist consumerism; the way in which, as Ballard told us all along, the public domain is a reflection of inner wants and fears, the stated justification for public actions often a long way from the real motivation; and the way in which this environment shaped the children who were born into it and grew up to be the sixties generation. The experience of all this is rather reminiscent of reading Pynchon's fictions (a comparison Hollings himself draws in the introduction) - a bewildering web of connections, forever on the verge of taking shape and resolving themselves into a clear picture of the big conspiracy, but never quite doing so. Non-fiction novel, paranoid history, prose Cabaret Voltaire LP: read it yourself and decide for yourself (if "they" haven't already planted in your head what they want you to believe....).
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