Cul-de-Sac nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and '60s

We can better understand twentieth-century American suburbs by situating and examining the fantasies they engender within specific practices of cultural produc­ tion and consumption. Studying post-World War II suburbia as it appears in science fiction, a hugely popular multimedia genre that includes films, literature, and numerous other cultural expressions, can offer us productive insights into American culture as it is both imagined and lived. Science fiction (SF) texts not only provide us with glimpses into the ways in which these communities imaginatively construct identities and mythologies for themselves, but these narratives also, by virtue of their meticulous attention to detail, serve as rhetorical and cultural arti­ facts of lived experience. Indeed, in the latter half of the twentieth century American suburbia and science fiction have become inseparable—for the former is the lived experience of an imagined place brought to fruition in the dawn of the atomic age, while the latter is an aesthetic response to the uncanny conditions of living in a post-urban space. Postwar science fiction, with its satirical observations of society and inherently destabilizing, defamiliarizing narrative strategies, captures the alien­ ating, disconnected sense of suburban synthetic communities in a way that no other cultural expression of this period approximates.1 Nowhere is this dynamic between SF and suburbia more compelling than in the Southern California municipalities that developed during and after World War II. This inquiry will briefly consider why the Southern California cultural climate of this era proved so hospitable to SF before examining some small towns and suburbs as