ABSTRACT
In an interview with Locus magazine on ecoscience fiction Kim Stanley Robinson said, 'I completely believe in art as a political act. But it never works unless it works as art first'.2 But which truly does come first, the artistic impulse or the political impetus? The conclusions drawn in this essay are based on cultural materialist assumptions which emerge from the complex interrelation between socio-political events and aesthetic development. Within this theory of the history of ideas aesthetic developments and novelistic themes gain currency as a direct response to dramatic changes in culture. Though oversimplified, this can be most easily traced in the aesthetic development of the novel over the past 150 years. Broadly, realism developed in response to the social changes effected by the industrial revolution of the first half of the nineteenth century. Naturalism was an amplification of realism that emerged from the social hardship experienced by the new industrial working class of the second half of that century. Modernism, in its most simple form, was a subsequent reaction to rapid and unsettling changes in urbanization and military technology at and after the turn of the last century. Finally, the postmodern period is characterized by an amplification and extension of the same stresses that occured in the modern era. The twentieth century created a human shock in the face of the unimaginable (the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic bomb) which resulted in a loss of fixed points of reference. During the Cold War, when global annihilation could occur at any moment from genocide or nuclear war, all eventualities created by humankind, anxiety became paramount and solutions to these problems dire.
