Page 32 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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StorieS of Control

The General Electric Company was science fiction.

—Kurt Vonnegut

hroughout history and across cultures, civilizations have told stories
about gods and heroes who have attempted to control that which may
T be largely uncontrollable, including phenomena both above and below
the horizon. There are many sources for such stories. Myth, religion, and tradi-
tional practices form the foundations of culture and are often invoked when peo-
ple seek group solidarity—for example, when the expected rains fail to arrive or
a violent storm rages. Stories drawn from Greek mythology, the Western canon,
Native American rainmaking, and recent fiction are presented here, followed
by examples of geo-science fiction before about 1960—drawn from the pages of
pulp fiction, the stage and silver screen, and the boob tube—that serve to illu-
minate popular culture. But much more than edification is at stake. Storytelling
skirts the borderlands between fact and fantasy and acknowledges their recipro-
cal relationship. Here the comic and tragicomic genres provide fresh insights into
the speculative practices of the meteorological Don Quixotes and Rube Gold-
bergs of the past. Such storytelling clearly trumps the heroic and the tragic genres
so typical in the literature of science studies. It is an excursion that historians of
science, technology, and environment have only recently begun to take.