The New Nuke Porn
Ron Rosenbaum, Slate: Something interesting is happening in the realm of airport “bookstore” best-sellers. I’m not talking about the self-help “You can become a sales genius” genre, but the thrillers. I’ve long been fascinated by their appeal and the shifting signals their subjects offer about often unspoken fears in the heart of our culture.
Sure, some of their success undoubtedly derives from their surface glitter — the glaring, fool’s-gold-loaded cover lettering on a background of what looks like high-tech, super-reflective, virtually radioactive titanium. Some of it lies in their size. (I wouldn’t rule out the subliminal reassurance they offer the nervous traveler of their ability to serve as additional emergency flotation devices.)
But I love airport best-sellers because I see them as our Nostradamuses, the literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia. They sniff out and serve up fictionalized but “realistic” prophecies of coming doom of one sort or another. Perhaps it’s that in their visions of total world immolation they diminish in the mind of said traveler the possibility of something so trivial as a 757 engine malfunction.
The nature of the doom these books threaten us with has recently undergone a subtle shift, especially in the realm of what I’ve called in the past “nuke porn.” I coined the term (in a Harper’s article) at the height of the Cold War to characterize the way nuclear war novels and films from Fail-Safe to Strangelove and the like adapted or imitated the techniques one could find in conventional porn: the excitement of arousal and buildup, the finger on the trigger as the world was brought to the trembling brink of a consciousness-obliterating climax. And the post-coital tristesse of “survivor novels” like On the Beach, where the onrushing end of the species licensed a doom-inflected licentiousness.
