Jeremy Withers's "Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles"

Jeremy Withers is Associate Professor of English at Iowa State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles consists of part of the introduction to chapter three, a chapter devoted to analyzing how some science fiction texts of the New Wave Era (c. 1960-1975) depicted automobiles and bicycles. This page primarily sketches out some of the important historical background to this era, such as how it was a time when the United States experienced yet another surge in annual road and highway deaths and how it saw the beginnings of a cohesive environmental movement.

At first glance, page 99 feels related to this particular chapter, but not to the book as a whole, given that it makes quite specific historical references to New Wave era figures such as President Lyndon B. Johnson and legislation such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, this page gestures toward the book’s overall interest in historicizing the science fiction texts on which it focuses. That is, each chapter foregrounds how science fiction has engaged with larger cultural and political events related to transportation, events that shaped these texts during their creation and helped them find readers upon publication. More importantly, page 99 references two related, important points that the overall book makes: that the automobile’s deadly nature frequently alarmed American science fiction writers, as did the unsustainability of cars in their conventional form. Page 99 ends with the line: “More often than not, New Wave writers portray automobiles as murderous, pollution-belching monsters, and look instead to alternatives such as electric cars and human-powered bicycles.” Change “New Wave writers” in that line to “American science fiction writers” and you have a serviceable thesis statement for the entirety of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles.

Learn more about Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue