Time of Fear (new statesman)

[dudeness]

The time of fear
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nscoverstory.htm


Visions of apocalypse, once confined to science fiction, now dominate mainstream films and novels. They have become young, smart, even beautiful. By Jason Cowley

I was at school in the 1970s, a period I recall as one of deep social and political unease. In our old bipolar world, split between rival ideological blocs, we watched innumerable television plays about the nuclear threat or life after an atomic war; we discussed with our teachers, most of whom were anxious members of CND, the dangers of the bomb. In those days, we all lived with the threat of apocalypse. We knew that our world could end at any moment, destroyed not by natural disaster or by the intervention of a malevolent deity, but by man himself. For the first time in history, we knew that we had the capacity and the desire to enact our own mass destruction. The motif of those times was an acute watchfulness; narratives of spying and surveillance were what preoccupied us, and I remember pleading with my father to build a bunker in our garden.

Yet I also remember being told at school that once the Soviet threat was vanquished, we would enjoy the benefits of the leisure age: by the year 2000 we would be travelling around in space-age buggies, dressing in tracksuits or something equally hideous, and sitting back while a robot did most of the housework. When we were not holidaying on the moon, we would be travelling briskly across whole continents in supersonic aircraft.

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