The Future of Yesterday

The last ever space shuttle mission landed on Thursday morning in Florida, and it’s in light of this that I post this blog entry.

It’s mostly an excuse to send you to this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II7QBLt36xo

… which is a self-proclaimed love-letter to the wonder that has been the last thirty years of space travel, on which subject I have a proper rant on my own blog: www.kategriffin.net

… and which here provoked me to have a mull about how the past has written about the future!  This is, after all, a place for science fiction and fantasy writers to ramble, and what is this genre for if not to think about The Way Things Might Be? 

Interestingly, though, there is little consensus on what the future looks like even in science fiction – except that mankind really needs to get off planet in order to be cool.  If you look back through the history of science fiction writing, what you’re forced, sensibly enough to admit, is that every book about the future is essentially a mull about the present.  Naturally enough.  Take the 1960s, the era of the Apollo space missions, of men on the moon.  Think of science fiction and what you have are Brave Hearty Humans striding out across the galaxy, a universe of rocket ships and people with good teeth, where technology is the friend of man, a tool, a thing that is easily mastered so that at any given moment we might say ‘make it so’ and so it is made.  The future was flying cars, no disease, ray guns and the brotherhood of man, occasionally united against a helpfully green tentacled alien; it was bright, it was brilliant and it was probably going to arrive by the year 2010.

But this was still the Cold War, and pesky blips like the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassination of JFK, invasion of Afghanistan, the Middle Eastern conflict in general etc. just don’t contribute to that sense of universal bliss.  From the early germs of science fiction writing at the start of the twentieth century, arguably with figures like H.G.Wells, through to the dawn of comic book writing and the advent of space as a place you could really get away with writing about, you start to get writers like P.K.Dick for whom science fiction was a tool to explore much more pressing human concerns than how polished my spacesuit was going to be.  There are books like A Scanner Darkly – a meditation on drugs, identity and addiction – or Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley – a character study in a post-apocalyptic world.  A Canticle for Leibowitz tells of a world that reaches a technological peak and destroys itself, only to be rebuilt and destroyed again and again.  Your friendly neighbourhood robot, man’s next best friend at its inception, increasingly becomes in science fiction a source of fear or, more interestingly, a source of doubt about the very nature of what constitutes consciousness.  Technology begins to shift and where yesterday it was man’s friend, tomorrow it is man’s enemy and by the year 2010 it seems very likely that we, the human race, will have wiped each other out in nuclear obliteration a la Cuban Missile Crisis and only a handful of (probably sexy yet tormented) survivors will be battling their way across the surface of the globe.  Bring on the advent of modern computing and arguably this reaches its logical peak with first the Terminator movies, then The Matrix, CGI having finally caught up with the imagination of the novelists.  2001 comes and, to mankind’s great disappointment, we are not in a position to send men to Jupiter to have encounters with strange floating black monoliths; but don’t worry, because the millennium does bring its own cultural preoccupations.  Comets crash into the surface of the earth, environmental disasters sweep all before and for a few merry years we realise that not only is the future here, now, but the future is really very short.  Space, once a place to be written about where Good Guys with Big Guns take on Bad Guys with Nasty Guns begins to become a more complicated, corporate place as NASA faces budget cuts.  No longer is it the land of the brave, but the land of the rich, the corrupt, the desperate and the abandoned.  A frontier spirit which went ‘hurrah, an infinite void!’ in the mid twentieth century now starts to look out at the blackness and go ‘oh hell, aren’t we small?’  Movies increasingly step up to the bridge with a cry of ‘yeah, let’s blow that up!’ but whereas Star Wars was very much good guy vs. bad guy, even the most popcorn-crunching blockbusters of this day and age feel a certain obligation to throw a little, just a little bit of grey in there.  Yes, good may be triumphant, but with any luck it’ll be vague, oscillating and uncertain first and if we’re really lucky, it’ll be in an unexpected guise or fighting an oddly familiar enemy.  Science fiction continues to contemplate the questions of today – District 9, in which more alien body parts are splattered across the camera than can be comfortably conceived, is also a mull on the nature of apartheid.  Moon looks at cloning, Cypher at identity – hell, even X-Men in its more pretentious moments could claim to be about discrimination and fear, though we all secretly suspect it’s about pretty people hitting stuff.

And the universe has grown.  Humanity, once a great noble force stretching out across the galaxy to spread its noble ideals, is now a tiny blip in the cosmological calendar.  Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels doesn’t even consider humanity or its morality, it’s just too tiny; and if humanity must get caught up in a gun battle in space, the modern science fiction writer considers it far more likely that we’d be blasting against each other than against a drooling monster holding some inexplicable grudge.  (How many times have we all watched the obligatory monstrous alien movie and rolled our eyes at the sheer stupidity of those fatal words ‘I’m just going to check this out’…)  In many ways, the future has become almost too vast, and we look to recent movies like Minority Report to familiarise it down.  It’s the future, captain, but almost exactly as we know it… almost…

That said, there are certain aspects of the science fiction past which we could say has come to be today.  Aldous Huxley would be artistically satisfied, perhaps, observe helicopters hovering over genetic research facilities; H.G.Wells can have some joy in the fact that man has not just been to the moon, he’s been several times and very interesting it was too.  Many generations of novelists who wrote of ‘Bob The Hero Accessing His Data Port’ would feel vindication in the internet; endless TV series where actors talked to each other over screens for the sake of keeping things interesting might not quite recognize Skype as the future of technology, but it’s a start.  The world has become more inter-connected and while some of the big themes of the twentieth century haven’t quite made it – men on Mars, full genetic engineering, flying cars – the what ifs of today no longer seem quite as wild as the what ifs of the last fifty years.  Even if we cannot do it yet, there’s no reason to stop thinking about what might happen when….