Sanborn's utterly absorbing book on the intersection of politics and fiction in the cold war era gives us a new way to think about what culture itself is.

Joe Weisberg, creator of The Americans

Genre fiction is often dismissed as “mere entertainment,” but Spies, Scientists, and Cold War Fictions demonstrates that it powerfully influenced the history of the Cold War. Moving deftly between American and Soviet examples, Sanborn shows how spy novels and science fiction shaped the thinking of politicians, spies, military planners, and the public. Beautifully written and broadly conceived, this book makes a compelling contribution to work on the role of imagination in politics, diplomacy, and public affairs.

Timothy Melley, author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security

Joshua Sanborn lures readers in with fun, resonant plots from Western and Soviet science fiction or spy novels and films-From Russia with Love, The Hunt for Red October, Seventeen Moments of Spring. Then he delivers the punch: extensive historical background! Turns out the spies and scientists were reading the Cold War fictions that modeled and even influenced their professions, and this book reveals a lot about them.

Sibelan Forrester, Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures