The Private Supershelter

Abstract

The private supershelter as a space proposes an artificial environment sufficiently palatial, high-tech, and heavily fortified to render permanent underground living worthwhile despite the constraints and hardship entailed by the separation from nature. The supershelter permutation of the bunker fantasy mostly appears in satirical and critical form rather than as an affirmative space. We find this fantasy of an alternate space of power explored more realistically in Philip Wylie’s ironic 1963 novel Triumph, and in full-fledged fantasy mode in the myriad underground high-tech strongholds of Silver Age comic heroes and of a few villains who choose pure modernity over cave-bound strongholds masking villainous technology. In its capacious size and design, the supershelter affords a utopian promise of survival on favorable terms. Necessary in the American context to insulate the owners from any charge of communism, the private origins of the shelter equally militate against any equitable terms of survival. Unlike the cave shelterer, the master of the supershelter is civilized and technologically advanced; however, he (nearly always) also remains inevitably an isolated elitist, apart from the dying world around him.