War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

War Stars by Bruce Franklin

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it.

Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton’s eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by “weapons of mass destruction,” real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon―guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals―has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

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  • Isaac Asimov

    “In WAR STARS, H. Bruce Franklin writes American history from a new angle . . . It astonished me–but it was totally convincing throughout.”

  • Carl Sagan

    “A searing and penetrating history of the American obsession with finding a technology that will end wars forever . . . . Its analysis of American fiction and films provides a new dimension to the subject.”

  • John Seelye, Graduate Research Professor, U. of Florida

    “If there is a future, and perhaps Franklin’s book will help to insure there is one, then WAR STARS will be a classic. This book should be placed on the desks of all public officials, elected or appointed.”

  • Michio Kaku, Professor of Nuclear Physics City University of New York

    “Thought provoking–insightful–brilliant. Franklin’s analysis marks a watershed in the debate over nuclear weapons and Star Wars. He has broken new ground in this book, which will be talked about for years to come.”

  • Paul Boyer, the Merle Curti Professor of History University of California, Los Angeles

    “A wide-ranging, highly readable, and thoroughly stimulating book. Franklin’s provocative study is essential to an understanding of the ideological and popular-culture dimensions of our long national obsession with superweaponry.”

  • Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter

    “[One of the two] most significant studies ever published in science fiction scholarship.”

  • John Mascaro, American Book Review

    “H. Bruce Franklin’s most recent work is an insightful and at times chilling analysis of the relationship between technology and the imagination. . . By surveying the genre he terms `future-war fiction’ Franklin reveals the intertwined destinies of our collective cultural imagination . . . and our military history. . . The book is structured to allow Franklin to play his analysis of the imaginations that first conceived of superweapons against the stories of a select handful of visionaries who occupied central roles in making these imagined instruments of war real. . . . the book ends on a guardedly optimistic note, as Franklin ponders the future, much like a character in the novels he so skillfully analyzes. . . .”

  • Christopher Sharrett, Film Quarterly

    “Franklin has emerged as an outstanding voice among radical critics of science fiction, and War Stars represents an important step in placing the genre within a political and historical context. The flip-flop word play in the title suggests this book’s major focus; Franklin is concerned primarily with American ideology–particularly the place of technology within an aspect of the American belief system–and its effects on foreign policy and the arms race of the postwar period. While Franklin shows the dialectical relationship between the fictive products of imagination and American history, his emphasis here . . . is on the political and material consequences of an ideological position and national self-image. This book might be seen as a radical response to contemporary meditations on the nuclear bomb, including the ballyhooed PBS documentary War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Franklin’s work is by far more outspoken and compelling . . . . War Stars’ well-documented and rigorous argument . . . gains a specific and original force by its marshalling of evidence . . . .

  • Paul Brians, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

    “WAR STARS is so crammed with fascinating facts and ideas that it should interest people of all political persuasions. The author’s rigorous scholarship and analytical insights are delivered in an appealingly vigorous and pungent prose. And for those trying to comprehend the powerful effect of the SDI concept on the public imagination, it should be required reading.”

  • Choice

    “A marvelous study that weaves together some of the most important developments in US military history, a survey of popular literature, and an overview of American culture. . . . The story of America’s conversion to belief in the efficacy of air power . . . is told better here than anywhere else. Franklin concludes with a penetrating discussion of the current debate over Star Wars . . . no source provides so profound a historical perspective to the debate as this one.”