Histories of the Future, Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction
Abstract
This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines some of the ways in which writers, artists, film-makers, strategists and political thinkers have imagined the future over the last two centuries. Although a number of contributions discuss ‘mainstream’ science fiction, the collection’s emphasis is not on any single genre, but rather on the ways in which different histories - technological, cultural, military, ideological - generate and inform different modes of speculation about things to come. These histories also disclose that our patterns of expectation are much influenced by our relationship to the past.
Chapters (13)
Hard as it is to believe now, there was in the very recent past a time when not only did science-fiction criticism not exist, but there was also no academic interest whatsoever in this field of literary endeavour.
The possibility of SF depends on an awareness of the possibility of progress. This awareness in its turn arises out of the knowledge that the future can be different from the present, and — just as crucially, but often overlooked — that the present differs from the past. Humanity made progress for millennia without ever being aware of it — its ascent so gradual that the slope seemed as flat as the Earth’s surface. Indeed, catastrophic regression was a much more frequently lived experience than progress visible within the lifetimes of one or two generations: ‘When I was a youth, this was all paved’, must have been more often heard down the centuries than ‘When I were a lad, this were all fields.’
In early April 1997 it became clear that 18 years of Conservative government in Britain were about to end in the forthcoming general election. The Tory press, accordingly, in the final weeks of the protracted campaign, made a last effort to minimise the impending catastrophe. As successive members of John Major’s accident-prone government were pilloried in the tabloids for sexual or financial misconduct, The Daily Telegraph tried desperately to stem the torrent of ‘sleaze’, and Stephen Glover’s editorial for Friday 4 April even conjured up the spirit of Trollope, ‘a vigorous critic of overmighty newspapers’, who had deplored the unwholesome influence of The Times in his early, unpublished analysis of English society, The New Zealander. Trollope’s title, Glover went on,
was borrowed from an essay by Macaulay, who imagined a New Zealander visiting London in the future, and surveying the ruins of our civilisation. If Trollope could be that man, I fancy his former disapprobation of The Times would turn first to incredulity and then to apoplexy were he confronted by our newspapers.1
Roland Barthes maintained that all human creations are, in a sense, media, since they are encoded with latent messages. In this chapter I want to consider the latent messages about society’s attitudes to scientists that are encoded in the particular creative medium of film and to suggest some of the cultural background for these projections. Film-makers in several genres frequently draw on contemporary scientific discoveries or, more exactly, on popular beliefs about the interface between the technologically known and a hypothesised future knowledge; but even documentary films are never innocent of ideological, political and social overtones. In particular, they are social texts in which sub-rational hopes and fears of change, whether Utopian or dystopian, of progress, of powerful factions and of the unknown, are visualised, explored and dealt with in a cathartic way. These ‘landscapes of fear’, to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s evocative phrase, incorporate both the universal terrors that have been a cumulative part of our cultural myths over centuries, and the particular contemporary anxieties elicited by the half-formulated realisation that technological triumphs inevitably bring socio-moral consequences in their wake.
The Machine Stops’ has been largely and perhaps significantly disregarded by critics of Forster the novelist, who have been happy to consign it to the recycling bin of Utopian literature and science fiction. Rediscovered there, it reveals itself to be the first twentieth-century dystopia,1 the ancestor of the clockwork worlds2 of contemporary science fiction (SF), and a superb allegorical romance.3 It is a masterpiece which can overturn many of the critical commonplaces that have always mutilated the significance and relevance of the most authentic dystopian fiction and have thus neutralised the extent of its subversiveness.4
American juvenile military fiction between the Spanish-American and First World wars reflects an age swept up in imperialist aspiration and rapid technological innovation. Its defining theme was the rise of the navy as a world-class fighting force.2 The technology that enabled this projection of American power across the seas was also, paradoxically, a source of anxiety. While sublimated into fascination with technology itself, anxiety remains a text beneath every page, no matter how much steam, electricity and machinery are praised.3 American ships and men now criss-crossed the globe; her technological prowess propelled her to the forefront of nations. She was powerful — yet vulnerable — as never before.
Futurist fiction is often represented — and offered — as an articulation of logical expectations, a form of systematic and mimetically minded fantasy. However, when viewed in hindsight, many such fictions appear more noteworthy for their unwitting penetration of the black shrouds of contemporary secrecy than for any ability to venture beyond that gossamer veil that separated their authors’ present reality from future possibilities. Indeed, narratives that anticipate innovations that have already been achieved but remain undisclosed illustrate just how problematic the once discrete concepts of past, present and future have become. Obversely, we may also discover that certain ideas and innovations which have been traditionally represented as first emerging from engineers’ drafting boards or scientists’ notebooks actually trace their inception to the humbler pages of popular magazines that included stories of imagination and anticipation.
‘The Third World War began in April 1944.’ With these startling words James Burnham opened his 1947 study The Struggle for the World where he outlined a prolonged superpower confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union. The nuclear age for Burnham signified an indefinitely prolonged state of war readiness, especially as the Cold War had entered an ‘explosive state’ where hostilities could break out any time over the next five years.1 Although George Orwell ridiculed Burnham for being ‘too fond of apocalyptic visions’ he nevertheless incorporated many of the latter’s ideas into Nineteen Eighty-Four.2 Burnham was playing his part in making familiar the concept of an imminent war and the message seemed to be getting through because soon after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1947 a Gallup poll revealed that 73 per cent of Americans believed a third world war was inevitable.3 This public expectation obviously arose from a number of factors, but one important source was the literature of imminent nuclear holocaust which became increasingly prevalent in the postwar period.
In the summer of 1945, with Nazi Germany defeated and the war in the Pacific drawing to a close (albeit a prospectively bloody one), American behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner sat down to write a now famous Utopia called Walden Two, which was published in 1948. Walden Two is a Utopia very much like a frontier community with the benefits of twentieth-century sociological and technological advances, and was a centre of controversy when it was published and has remained so since.1 However, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and the following two decades were characterised not by the production of Utopian texts, but by Utopia’s inverse: dystopia.
As I write these words, NATO forces are in the second month of an air campaign against Serbia and the remnants of the Yugoslav Federation, and by the time you read them, some resolution to this difficult and painful conflict will presumably have been reached. Whatever that outcome may be, it will remain ironic not only that in its fiftieth anniversary year, ten years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, NATO should take up arms for the first time against a nation which was never part of the opposing military alliance, the now defunct Warsaw Pact. In a richer irony still, Albania, the East European nation which was most hard-line — or most eccentric — in the application of its Marxism, has greeted an American military advance force of Apache gunship helicopters (code-named ‘Task Force Hawk’) with open arms, the government has turned over to NATO the use of all its ports and its airspace and the Albanian President has called for a ‘future Marshall Plan for the Balkans’.2 But first, the situation of 800 000 ‘deportee’ Kosovo Albanians driven out of their homes by heightened Serbian terror will need to be resolved — itself a major consequence of the air campaign, and one apparently completely unanticipated by NATO’s planners. These ironies are, of course, made to measure, given that we never do quite get either the future we imagine or deserve, but I want to argue that events in the Balkans do mark the transformation in our expectations of a collective future, and to understand what this tells us, we will need to examine not just our future lost and found, but our faith in our ability any more to make sense of the future.
The year 1971 was a watershed for the modern cultural history of Mars. When Mariner 9 sent back its stunning close-up pictures of desolate sandscapes and complex geological formations, an end finally came to what Arthur C. Clarke calls ‘the prehistory of Martian studies’. That prehistory, launched during the Enlightenment with Huygens’ drawings of Syrtis Major, Cassini’s observation of the polar caps and Herschel’s speculations about Martian seas and sailors, reached its first apex in the Mars mania that followed Schiaparelli’s report of ‘canali’ in 1877 and, even more, Percival Lowell’s relentless mapping of ever more intricate, ever more rationalised networks of waterways, the tokens of heroic resistance to planetary decline.1
I. R Clarke’s demonstration of the debt owed by H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to General Chesney’s till then forgotten best-seller The Battle of Dorking remains one of the most suggestive facts in the history of SR If science fiction is above all a ‘fabril’ mode, as I have suggested elsewhere/ then the area in which the fabril mentality first began to dominate European narratives was not that of SF exactly, but of futuristic military fiction — from which, however, there was an easy transit to the founding works of SF proper.
What if (the basic SF opening move) there will be no human history, no ensemble of possible histories to be modelled by fiction or futurism? What if the start of the third millennium sees a phase change into some altogether unprecedented state of being, neither Apocalypse nor Parousia but some secular mix of both? What if, as Vernor Vinge and a few other extravagant SF writers have proposed, exponentially accelerating science and technology are rushing us into a Singularity, or what I call the Spike? Then there is no pattern of reasoned expectation to be mapped, no knowable Chernobyls to deplore in advance. Merely — opacity.
... According to Lynch (2016), one of the major characteristics of sustainable leadership is that it involves planning and preparation for succession. In short, we are now in an era whereby superior leadership should focus on turning every situation into a learning experience (Sandison & Dingley, 2016). Leadership is the style a leader adopts in which he/she has the ability to influence subordinates to cooperate and work effectively in accordance with company precepts (Susilo, 2018). ...
Purpose of the study: The aim of this study was to determine if leadership style (transformational style, transactional style, and laissez-faire style) predicts human resource management (HRM) competencies (strategic positioner, credible activist, culture and change champion, human capital curator, technology and media integrator, compliance manager, total rewards steward, paradox navigator, analytics designer, and interpreter). Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative study within positivism was conducted, and a questionnaire using a four-point Likert-type scale questionnaire was developed. A purposive sample was used. There were 205 questionnaires returned from the initial 520 questionnaires distributed, providing a response rate of 39.42%. The relationships were investigated using correlation analysis and regression analysis. Findings: The results of the presented research indicate that transformational leadership has a significant relationship with HRM competencies. There was a medium correlation for transactional leadership, with a small correlation for laissez-faire. It was also found that leadership predicted HRM competencies.
... Naučno predviđanje kada je reč o pronalascima, zapravo iz srca razuma, čija tehnička postignuća s nesmanjenim optimizmom slavi, progovara ne samo nepredvidljivom nedoglednošću, nego i iracionalnošću. Motiv "ludog naučnika" je slika rezervisana za tu opomenu (uporediti Abrams 2008;McMahon 2008;Sontag 1966;Toumey 1992: 414;Haynes 2000). kojima se odigravaju orijentacije pitanja i formulišu odgovori, u kojima se tek dakle artikulišu ideje, problemi, njihova probna rešenja i tek s obzirom na taj kontekst razabirljive i uvek mesne akumulacije podataka. ...
This paper presents and validates opposing notions regarding possibility of
knowing the future. The medium for this enquiry is science fiction production
in the literature, television and film. It finds that potential for knowing
(in this production) demonstrate, illustrate, provokes, but also encounters
the same epistemological, ethical and metaphysical quandaries that modern and
contemporary philosophy deals with. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike
Srbije, br. 43007: Istraživanje klimatskih promena i njihovog uticaja na
životnu sredinu, pracenje uticaja, adaptacija i ublažavanje - podprojekat:
Etika i politike životne sredine: institucije, tehnike i norme pred izazovom
promena prirodnog okruženja i Projekat br. 41004: Retke bolesti: molekularna
patofiziologija, dijagnosticki i terapijski modaliteti i socijalni, eticki i
pravni aspekti - podprojekat: Bioeticki aspekti: moralno prihvatljivo u
biotehnoloski i drustveno mogucem]
... Physical artifacts of " science, " all pieces of equipment, all experiments, laboratories, narcotics, rays and similar tools are presented, as a rule, " ambiguously, illogically, and mysteriously, in other words, irrationally. " They are linked together incoherently and are justified no better than " material junk of alchemists, " if at all [13, 18]. Still, the conviction remains: science can – perhaps at too costly a price – make a better being. ...
This article stems from the impression of being condemned to late and moralizing reactions in regard to advances in the life sciences. We suggest a return to a speculative and theoretical approach in posing the question(s) of the limit of possible thinking of the enhanced human. This return allows for the possibility to show, not just inductively, but “clearly and distinctly,” the specific justifications and lines of reasoning of anthropocentric prejudice or species narcissism. It also enables us to move freely and precisely along the limits of thinking the human/non-human. In this way, we hope to put forward a few markers or guideposts that would further the debate about notions of human enhancement.
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
The prophesy that King Arthur will return has come true. This legendary icon of Western civilization lives again in the popular culture novels of contemporary and futuristic literature. While the king’s personality has changed little since Malory, the monarch is now often found as a superhero in new world settings: he has become a Celtic space traveller among the stars, a modern politician fighting corruption, a WWII fighter pilot, a battler of aliens, and even returns as a teenage boy.
Wherever he goes, King Arthur encounters a variety of personalised evil opponents from his medieval past as well as futuristic aliens and monsters. The authors and publishers of Arthurian popular culture have commodified the Arthurian legend, turning the king into an Americanised romantic superhero who overcomes his opponents but mostly fails to meet the reality of modern socio-economic challenges.
The king has a limited understanding of what constitutes evil in the modern world so that despite his worthy character as a role model, his grasp of action required to overcome injustice constitutes a major shortcoming. The reasons for this are sought among the authors and publishers that produced these novels, and among the literary critics and the sociological literature focusing on the linkages between literature and society.
In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Riddley enters ‘the woom of Cambry’, the epicentre of the nuclear blast that reduced England to a neolithic state over two thousand years earlier. Walking through the crypt of the devastated cathedral, he experiences a numinous revelation of the power that was at once the apex of civilization’s achievement and the architect of its destruction. Riddley struggles to articulate the sense of annihilation, of absence, he feels: ‘Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try and word the big things and they tern ther backs on you’ (Hoban 2002, 161). Riddley finds it difficult to come to terms with the nuclear holocaust that constitutes his primitive society’s point of origin. But his problem is also that of narrative: faced with the empty space that lies at the centre of this apocalypse, Riddley finds that the blank page expresses the totality of the annihilation better than any words could. Riddley’s experience illustrates the extent to which nuclear holocaust resists representation, defies narrative structure and eludes the very words with which we write.
Using the representations of science, fiction and science fiction, this article attempts to sketch out a certain line of development in the history of representation of the enhanced human. First it was thought that chemicals could temporarily or permanently improve his natural abilities, then artificial substitutes, inserts and accessories dominated the vision of his improvement. The most recent possibility announced is the fundamental morphological transformation of his biological composition into a completely unrecognizable, amorphous “entity” capable of taking any form. This trajectory of “improvement” of human capacities could be regarded as a gradual advancement in the realization of the pledge of traditional humanism: that man is special precisely for being able to become anything he chooses. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 41004: Retke bolesti: molekularna patofiziologija, dijagnostički i terapijski modaliteti i socijalni, etički i pravni aspekti]
In his article "Portrayal of Physicists in Fictional Works" Daniel Dotson analyzes how physicists (including professors, teachers, physics students, and amateur physicists) are portrayed in novels, films, and television programs. Eighty characters are analyzed to see if they possessed any of ten personality traits: obsessive, having major mental health problems, withdrawn, brave, timid, socially inept, arrogant, too career-focused, out of touch, and stubborn. Dotson lists a summary of the characters with their traits followed by an overview of the traits and select examples of how characters possessed that trait. Male and female characters are compared to determine if one gender received a better portrayal (i.e., fewer negative personality traits) than another. In addition, characters possessing several personality traits are described in detail, as well as the few characters not possessing any of the traits.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.