Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America

"In Welcome to Mars, Ken Hollings details how Cold War politics, altered states of consciousness, extraterrestrial beings, postwar optimism and imagination came together in a strange maelstrom during the 1950s… Hollings approaches each year of the decade like a midcentury radio broadcaster, stitching together the various myths, facts and events into a brilliant cultural and scientific history… A highly entertaining examination of the postwar decade's obsession with the weird and otherworldly, which shaped both science and culture."—Shelf Awareness"Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings. Welcome to Mars offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots of the strange humanoid culture we live in today."—Adam Curtis, director of The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares "Ken Hollings is a master at connecting the dots between avant garde art history, outré culture, weird science, and basically everything that interests me."—David Pescovitz, coeditor of Boing Boing  "Welcome to Mars is a map of the post-war Zone, a nonfiction Gravity's Rainbow that follows the arc of Germany's V2 rocket to the end of the rainbow—to America."—Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information"A searingly accurate and deeply disturbing exposé of the fantasies of American modernism that have inspired the many nightmares and the few hopeful visions of our new Millennium."—Dr. Jacques Vallée, computer scientist and astronomer