Atomic-Antarctic Terminal Zone

This article proceeds to investigate Antarctica as a preparatory zone for the Cold War and closed-world techno-power to come. Particularly, the essay steers in the direction of incorporations between the animate and the inanimate: flesh, ice, machine, combining into a new, cyborgic entity that emerges in the pre-Cold War Antarctic. The material under consideration includes Heroic Age exploration narratives and science fiction (SF) texts published prior to the Cold War, but rather than anachronistic, the point is to establish continuity between imperial, geopolitical and technological strategies that absorb white space—an ‘emptiness’ as promise of colonization—into its sphere of operations. The thrust of the argument centres on the formation of a ‘figure of steel’—the ‘Stahlgestalt’ —that develops in and against a space of erasure also experienced, paradoxically, as a process of emollition, or depletion: ice-cold, unyielding territoriality prompts a softening of the (male) body, whose movement and mind turn sluggish, slow. The modes of polar being as proto-cyborgic, then, arise in response to a corporeal inteneration in what figures, across expedition and SF texts, as a dream-space associated with ‘beyonds’: infinite absence, immeasurable time, both past and future, the far side of the ‘human’, shaping into a ‘fortified totality’