I.
First, thanks to all
concerned at the Australian Defence College for organising this event, and
especially to Professor Michael Evans for thinking of me and inviting me as
your speaker. I’m honoured to be here and delighted to discover that science
fiction is studied by a collection of people such as the college’s Perry Group.
It has been said (by the
British novelist L.P. Hartley) that the past is a foreign country – that they
do things differently there. A lesson from relatively recent human history is
that the future is also a foreign country.
When I say “relatively
recent”, we can put this in a broad perspective. Our species, Homo sapiens,
is some 300,000 years old, and earlier human species from which we descended go
back much further, millions of years, indeed, into the past. Homo sapiens
has continued to evolve since the earliest fossilised specimens that we know
of, becoming more gracile – or light-boned – in anatomically “modern” humans. The
rise of agriculture dates back about 12,000 years, and something recognisable
as civilisation, with large cities, writing, and bureaucratic social organisation,
emerged in the Middle East and other locations about 5,000 years ago, give or
take.
By contrast, what we now
call European modernity is historically recent. If we could travel back to
Europe in, say, 1500, or even 1600, CE, we’d find societies in which there was
little sense of ongoing social change, though of course there had always been
large-scale changes from specific events such as wars and conquests, plagues
and famines, and various other kinds of human-caused and natural disasters. But
changes in technology, work methods, social organisation, transport, and so on,
happened too slowly to be transformative within a single lifetime. People were
more aware of the daily, seasonal, and generational cycles of time than of
gradual, progressive change driven by technology.
In the past, some
religious and mythological systems described grander cycles of time than
seasons and generations, some societies looked back to a lost golden age from
which they thought they had degenerated, and Christian writings prophesied an
eventual end of worldly things to be brought about by the intervention of God. But
none of this resembles our contemporary idea of the future, in which human
societies are continually transformed by advances in scientific knowledge and new
technologies.
That said, the sixteenth
century in Europe was an extraordinarily volatile period – it immediately
followed the invention and development of the printing press, with all that
that entailed for distributing ideas widely, and the European discovery of the
New World. Exploration and colonialism brought the cultures of Europe into
contact with what seemed like strange – sometimes hostile – environments and
peoples. For some European intellectuals, this provoked a sense of the
historical contingency and precariousness of existing cultures and civilisations.
The practices and beliefs of particular cultures, including those of Europe,
increasingly appeared at least somewhat arbitrary, and thus open to change.
The sixteenth century began
with festering religious discontent that quickly led to the Protestant
Reformation, whose beginning we could date from Martin Luther’s famous
proclamations against Church practices, the “95 Theses”, in 1517. Europe was
soon wracked by the great wars of religion that extended, in one form or
another, deep into the seventeenth century (the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to
1648 left much of the continent in ruins). The sixteenth century also saw the
beginnings of modern science, including the radically transformative astronomy of
Copernicus.
By the early decades of
the following century, science had reached a form much more like we’d recognize
today, especially with Galileo’s observations, experiments, and reflections on
scientific methodology. (Galileo was active 400 years ago – he first demonstrated
his telescope, and turned it to the heavens, in 1609, and it was in 1633 that
he was interrogated by the Inquisition and placed under permanent house arrest
for supporting the Copernican claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun.) The
rise, consolidation, and extension of science, throughout the seventeenth-century
Scientific Revolution, and beyond, challenged old understandings of humanity’s
place in the universe. It was the early success of modern science, more than
anything else, that led European thinkers of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment
to imagine future states of society with superior knowledge and wisdom.
Enlightenment ideas of
progress involved intellectual – especially scientific – and moral advances, though
with little of our emphasis today on new technology when we try to imagine the
future. Enlightenment thinkers hoped, and worked, for societies that might be better
than their own. They looked to continued intellectual progress accompanied by
social reform. This way of thinking nourished the great political revolutions
at the end of the eighteenth century – the American Revolution and the French
Revolution – and the upheavals that these produced inspired even more conjectures
and schemes involving future societies.
Even when we look at the
work of great utopians and social thinkers from the early nineteenth century, however,
in the wake of the Enlightenment, there is little emphasis on technological
transformations of society. In 1800, let’s say, that thought was only in its
infancy. The idea of the future that we possess today developed slowly and
gathered force, responding to the Industrial Revolution, which commenced during
the second half of the eighteenth century, at first in Britain, but then in
other European societies. As the Industrial Revolution continued and renewed
itself, with its steam engines, factories, and railroads, Europe and its
colonies experienced something altogether new: continual – and visible – social
change that was driven and shaped by advances in science and, above all,
technology. As the nineteenth century rolled on, changes in the ways that
things were done happened on a large scale and at a pace that could not be
ignored. You could say that the nineteenth century was when humanity discovered
the future.
II.
Much later, writing in
the 1920s, the scientist and social commentator J.D. Bernal observed that human
beings normally take accidental features of their own societies to be axiomatic
features of the universe, likely to continue until supernaturally interrupted.
Bernal added: “Until the last few centuries this inability to see the future
except as a continuation of the present prevented any but mystical
anticipations of it” (Bernal, The World, The Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry
in the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, 1929). Humans
might previously have imagined supernatural events in the future, such as the
second coming of the Messiah, but they did not imagine events such as the
invention of the steam engine, the spread of the railways, electricity, the
telegraph, motor cars, and aviation. But, as Bernal goes on to elaborate, the assumption
of a relatively static society ceased to be tenable. This provided the social
ground to fertilise science fiction.
In his fascinating, if
polemical, book A Short History of Progress (2004), the archeologist and
historian Ronald Wright makes the point that a citizen of London from 1600 CE would
have felt reasonably at home two hundred years later, in the London of 1800.
The city would have looked rather familiar. But, says Wright, warnings of
threats to humanity from the rise of machines “became common in the nineteenth century,
when, for the first time ever, wrenching technical and social change was felt
within a single lifetime.” Wright immediately adds:
In
1800, the cities had been small, the air and water relatively clean – which is
to say that it would give you cholera, not cancer. Nothing moved faster than by
wind or limb. The sound of machinery was almost unknown. A person transported
from 1600 to 1800 could have made his way around quite easily. But by 1900,
there were motor cars on the streets and electric trains beneath them, movies
were flickering on screens, earth’s age was reckoned in millions of years, and
Albert Einstein was writing his Special Theory of Relativity.
Yet, it took visionaries
like H.G. Wells to grasp this, spell it out, and incorporate it in a new kind
of fictional narrative. In addressing the great changes of the nineteenth
century, Wright refers to the misgivings of many Victorians as they confronted
the rise of industrial machinery, and viewed its comprehensive social impact.
This leads him to an observation about the beginning of what was originally called
“scientific romance”:
As
the Victorian age rushed on, many writers began to ask, “Where are we going?”
If so much was happening so quickly in their century, what might happen in the
next? [Samuel] Butler, Wells, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, and many
others mixed fantasy, satire, and allegory, creating a genre known as the
scientific romance. (Wright, A Short History of Progress, 2004)
In this passage and the discussion
that follows in A Short History of Progress, Wright is concerned with both
scientific knowledge and the industrial uses of technology. The latter greatly
altered and increased production while also transforming work and its organisation,
the means of transportation, and the landscape – not in all respects, by any
means, for the better.
I have emphasised
technology to this point, but we should not lose track of science itself, which
continued to advance and to shape understandings of the world. As the sciences developed,
their practitioners were able to study a great range of natural phenomena that
had previously resisted human efforts. These included very distant and vastly
out-of-scale phenomena such as those investigated by astronomers, very small
phenomena such as the detailed composition and functioning of our bodies, and
(somewhat later, with the advent of scientific geology) phenomena from deep in
time before human artifacts, buildings, or written records. By the early
decades of the nineteenth century, the sciences were starting to imagine, and
communicate, the extreme depth of time as well as the vastness of space.
Nineteenth-century geology suggested that we live on the surface of an incomprehensibly old planet, with the implication of a similarly incomprehensible number of years still to come. As you will know, this idea has since been confirmed, elaborated, and expanded by scientists from numerous disciplines, and, all in all, a new understanding of the cosmos has emerged.
To sum up at this point, the revolutions in science and technology during the centuries of European modernity introduced new ideas about the universe, ourselves, and the future. All of this amounted to a revised world picture.
As a result, it is now established – and
was known in outline to educated Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth
century – that we inhabit a vast universe whose origins lie deep in time. Like
other living things, we are the product of natural events taking place over
many millions of years. In all meaningful ways, so Darwinian evolutionary
theory revealed, we are continuous with other animal species. Anthropocentrism
and human exceptionalism have been challenged from all directions. Furthermore,
our particular societies and cultures are significantly mutable. Human
societies have changed dramatically in the past – and we can be sure that this
will continue.
III.
All known social and cultural forms, and
specifically those we have experienced in our individual lifetimes, are now
revealed as contingent and temporary. Technological developments continually
revolutionise the ways we work, play, plan, organise ourselves, and move from
place to place. Even the relatively near future may turn out very strange by
the standards of those now living. Not only is our origin as a species deep in
time, our eventual destiny is unknown and perhaps lies in the very remote
future (assuming we don’t find a way to destroy ourselves more quickly, or perhaps
fall foul of a disaster such as a collision with an asteroid). This set of
claims is the new worldview embraced, since the era of Queen Victoria, by most
educated people in Europe, the Anglosphere,
and other industrially advanced countries. It seems almost commonsensical, when
considered by secular-minded people from the vantage point of 2019. But let me
make two important points about that.
The first is that these claims are not pre-scientific
common sense. The overall picture constitutes a dramatic historical shift in
human understanding of the universe and our place in it. Not so long ago, historically,
such ideas would have been viewed within European Christendom (and most other
parts of the world) as intolerably radical and heretical. They met with much
resistance, and they still meet with resistance from some quarters.
The second point is that even now we tend
to live without being fully aware of the implications of deep time and the new
worldview that we’ve inherited from the Victorian generation. We live from day
to day, and consider politics, social issues, and the like, forgetful of the deep
past behind us, and we ignore the implication of a similarly deep future ahead of
us. Indeed, what can we even do with that sort of knowledge in everyday
situations?
Nonetheless, as Wells knew, the rapid
changes of the nineteenth century implied the likelihood of rapid – perhaps more
rapid – changes to come. That reasoning applies equally to us. We should assume
that the current century, and the many centuries to follow, will see great changes
to the world and to human societies. Our own society has not reached a point of
stability, though again it’s not obvious what we can do with that sort of knowledge.
Historically, this was all difficult to digest – and it remains difficult. But
it offered new opportunities for storytelling.
In more than one sense, science fiction is
the fiction of the future. In his 1975 book, Structural Fabulation: An Essay
on Fiction of the Future, the American critic Robert Scholes produced a
short account of science fiction that influenced me when I was young and
remains, the best part of half a century after it was published, a remarkably shrewd
introduction to the genre. Scholes covers some of the ground that I am dealing
with in this paper, in describing how science fiction relates to human history,
and especially to the history of how we’ve conceived of time and history
themselves.
Scholes writes of science
fiction as a kind of fiction that is about the future, but he also explains
why that kind of fiction is inevitable in a world with a new conception of
time, history, and progress, one in which the future will be, as it were, a
country foreign to us, one where they do things differently. For Scholes, it
seems, science fiction will thrive in the future, perhaps become a
dominant narrative form, and produce great things. Science fiction has become
far more visible and popular since 1975, and in my assessment Scholes has
turned out to be right.
IV.
When
did science fiction begin? Some proto-science fiction narratives appeared even
in the seventeenth century, such as a strange little book by Johannes Kepler,
called Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris
(this was completed around 1608–1609, but not formally published until 1634). Somnium
is sometimes called the first science fiction novel, but it has none of the
characteristics that we normally associate with novels, such as telling a
complex story and including characters with at least some appearance of
psychological plausibility. It is really just a geography (if that’s the right
word) of the Moon’s surface, based on the best observations that had been made
prior to astronomical use of telescopes. The scientific lesson is framed by a
thinly developed fictional narrative that showcases the discoveries of the time
and allegorises the scientific quest for knowledge.
Somnium
is not a fully fledged science fiction novel, but it foreshadows themes that SF
writers have explored ever since. There is a trust that science can obtain knowledge
of kinds that had previously eluded human efforts. At the same time, there is
the sense that Kepler wants to portray a physically greater cosmos than was
previously imagined. Along with this goes a recognition of our relative
smallness in the total scheme, and of our limited understanding. Kepler seems
to suggest that things are not always as they appear to us from our vantage
point on Earth.
Notwithstanding Somnium
and some other early works, science fiction is very much a child of the
nineteenth century. As has been said by others, it could not have existed as a
field “until the time came when the concept of social change through
alterations in the level of science and technology had evolved in the first
place” (Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction, 1981). As a result, we
see little or nothing in the way of recognisable science fiction novels and
stories until the nineteenth century, beginning with works such as Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus in 1818. Frankenstein famously depicts Victor
Frankenstein’s use of scientifically based technology to create something entirely
new in the world: a physically powerful, but unfortunately repulsive,
artificial man. As is well known, the actual term “science fiction” was not coined
for another century or so, with the rise of specialist SF magazines in the
United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
Meanwhile, some of Edgar
Allan Poe’s stories from the 1830s and 1840s have science fiction elements, and
the SF author and critic James Gunn regards Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” (1848) as
possibly the first true story of the future (Inside Science Fiction,
second ed., 2006). Unlike earlier narratives of future disasters, such as Mary
Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), it portrays a future society with
unfamiliar ideas and practices. “Mellonta Tauta” is set in the year 2848 – thus,
one thousand years after its date of composition – and its Greek title can be
translated as “future things” or “things of the future” (or it might, I dare
say, with H.G. Wells in mind, even be translated as “things to come”). It’s a very
peculiar story, even by Poe’s standards, taking the form of one character’s
rambling, gossiping, speculation-filled letter to a friend. In fact, it is more
like a series of diary entries, beginning on April 1 – April Fools’ Day, of
course – and it is composed by a well-educated but deeply misinformed
individual, who reveals that she is on a pleasure excursion aboard a balloon.
In
Poe’s version of the future, humanity has explored the Moon and made contact
with its diminutive people. However, much knowledge from the nineteenth century
has become garbled and (at least) half lost. The story thus sheds doubt on
historians’ confident interpretations of the practices of other peoples living
in earlier times. It is full of jokes, many of which are puzzling for today’s
readers, and even when they’re explained it is often difficult to be sure
exactly what ideas Poe is putting forward and which he is satirising. (Other
material that Poe wrote about the same time suffers from the same problems of
interpretation.) Nonetheless, Poe laid a foundation for the development of
satirical science fiction set in future, greatly altered societies.
A more substantial body
of work that resembles modern science fiction emerged around 1860, particularly
with the French author Jules Verne, who is best known for novels in which
highly advanced (for the time) science and technology enable remarkable
journeys – to the centre of the Earth, around the Moon and back, beneath the
sea, and so on. H.G. Wells’s career as a writer of what were then known as
scientific romances commenced two or three decades later, with a group of short
stories that led up to his short novel The
Time Machine (1895). The importance of this work for the later development
of science fiction cannot be overstated. That great theorist of the genre, Darko
Suvin, writes, without hyperbole, that “all subsequent significant SF can be
said to have sprung from Wells’s The Time
Machine” (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 1979). Wells followed up
with his first full-length scientific romance, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and his extraordinary career was
underway.
In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, science fictional elements appeared in many
utopias, dystopias (such as Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (serialised 1898–99)),
and lost-world novels set in remote locations or even beneath the ground. The
use of interplanetary settings took the idea of lost worlds and races a step
further. The first published novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (originally in serial
form in 1912), epitomised the trend. Planetary romance of the kind favoured by
Burroughs defined one pole of early science fiction, emphasising action and
adventure in an alien setting.
Another approach was the
near-future political thriller. Works of this sort, most notably “The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a
Volunteer”, by George Tomkyns Chesney (not a full-length novel, but a
novella originally published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1871), were a
prominent component of the literary scene in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. They portrayed future wars and invasions, often involving
racial conflict. These political thrillers typically contained melodramatic and
blatantly racist elements, but they are noteworthy as serious speculations
about near-future possibilities.
All of these forms of
early science fiction have continued, in one way or another, to the present
day. Literary scientific romances, particularly inspired by those of Wells, and
by those of authors who reacted to him, have maintained a pedigree partly
independent of, and parallel to, what I call “genre science fiction” (or “genre
SF”), by which I mean science fiction aimed at a relatively specialist audience
of SF fans and aficionados. Genre science fiction is a phenomenon dating from
the 1920s, and there is an interesting story to tell about its development
under the leadership of its first great editors – Hugo Gernsback and John W.
Campbell – through to the present day. But for current purposes, we’ll have to
skip over that. For more, see the opening chapters of my 2017 book, Science
Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics. Suffice to say
that the pace of social, scientific, and technological change continued to accelerate.
In response, as the twentieth century unfolded and segued into the
twenty-first, narratives of technological innovation and humanity’s future prospects
became even more culturally prominent.
I’ll
also make short work here of the much-debated question of how we should define
science fiction, and how, if at all, we can fence it off from other narrative genres
or modes such as technothrillers, horror stories, and fantasy. In summary – see
Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination again if you want more – I identify
science fiction as combining three elements that we may call “novelty”,
“rationality”, and “realism”.
I
intend each of these in a specific and rather narrow sense: novelty, in
that the narrative depicts some kind of break with the empirical environment of
the author’s own society and historically recorded societies (this is what Darko
Suvin refers to as the novum); rationality in the sense that whatever
is novel is nonetheless imagined to be scientifically possible (at least by the
standards of some future body of scientific knowledge), rather than magical or
otherwise supernatural; and realism in the minimal sense that the events
described are imagined as actually happening within the internal universe of
the story – that is, the events, including the problems confronted by the
characters, are to be interpreted literally, even if they have a further
allegorical or metaphorical level of meaning. In other senses, of course,
science fiction is not a variety of literary realism, but nor does it have the
qualities of straightforward allegory, dream, or psychodrama.
Science fiction, then, is a kind of
fictional narrative that is characterised by novelty, rationality, and realism.
It typically and centrally imagines future developments in social organisation,
science, and/or technology, though I hope I’ve said enough for it to be clear
why it sometimes depicts amazing inventions in the present day, present-day
invasions from space, or events that happened in the deep past, in prehistoric
times. Science fiction can take many forms, but at its core it is
fiction about the future.
V.
Although science fiction has
a central concern with future societies, SF writers are not prophets and they
cannot simply provide a transparent window that opens upon the future. Hence,
the title of this paper refers to a lens into the future: something more
probing – and perhaps more difficult to use, requiring more activity,
interpretation, and skill – than a window overlooking a future vista. In some
cases, setting narratives in the future (much like the use of extraterrestrial
settings) merely provides writers with exotic locales for adventure stories, something
that came in handy as a plot device during a time when the surface of the Earth
was increasingly being explored and mapped. To be clear, there’s nothing
terrible about adventure stories in exotic locales – I love them as much as
anybody – but science fiction writers often engage more meaningfully than that
with ideas of the future, or of possible futures.
Wells certainly thought –
at least for most of his career – that it was possible to consider and imagine
the future of humanity with some prospect of making successful predictions. He
discussed exactly this topic in a famous lecture that he delivered to the Royal
Institution of London in January 1902. This lecture, entitled “The Discovery of
the Future”, helped to establish his reputation, and it was published as a
small book not long after he delivered it. In “The Discovery of the Future”, he
put the problem like this: “How far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions
about the future of man?” (We’d now say something more like: “How far can we have
a reliable science of the future of humanity?”)
For Wells, speaking and
writing in 1902, the present had arisen from the past through the deterministic
operation of scientific laws, and the future would follow from the present in the
same deterministic way. However, he suggested that there was an asymmetry
between the past and the future, or at least in how we perceive them. That is,
we can be certain about many events that happened to us personally in the past,
and which we remember clearly, whereas we do not know what lies in store for us,
as individuals, in the future. We have no future-oriented equivalent of personal
memory.
However, Wells said,
things are different when it comes to future events involving large
populations. By analogy, he argued, we can’t predict where individual grains of
sand will fall if we shoot them from a cart, or even the shapes of the
individual grains, which will vary greatly. But we can predict which grains –
of what sizes and shapes – will tend to be found in different parts of the
resulting heap. Wells considered the possibility that individual people of great
energy and ability might be less predictable, and have greater effects on human
destiny, than exceptionally large grains of sand. Nonetheless, he was strongly inclined
to think that larger forces operating in history determined broad historical outcomes.
For example, if Julius Caesar or Napoleon had never been born, someone else
would have played a similar role in the history of Europe.
On this basis, Wells
concluded that we have evidence available to us in the present that can help us
to reconstruct the past, and that we also have information available to
us now to help us predict how humanity’s future will unfold on a large scale. He
was very conscious of human origins in deep time, and with that in mind he placed
a special emphasis on humanity’s long-term destiny, the deep future of our
species:
We
look back through countless millions of years and see the will to live struggling
out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to
power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling
generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness
of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself
anew; we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating
itself, pursuing its relentless, inconceivable purpose, until at last it
reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries, throbs and
thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities, sings in our music, and
flowers in our art. And when, from that retrospect, we turn again toward the
future, surely any thought of finality, any millennial settlement of cultured
persons, has vanished from our minds.
This
fact that man is not final is the great unmanageable, disturbing fact that
arises upon us in the scientific discovery of the future, and to my mind, at
any rate, the question what is to come after man is the most persistently
fascinating and the most insoluble question in the whole world. (“The Discovery
of the Future”, 1902)
In “The Discovery of the
Future”, Wells repudiated any idea of a static human society, even as part of some
utopian blueprint:
In
the past century there was more change in the conditions of human life than
there had been in the previous thousand years. A hundred years ago inventors
and investigators were rare scattered men, and now invention and inquiry are
the work of an unorganized army. This century will see changes that will dwarf
those of the nineteenth century, as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of the
eighteenth. […] Human society never has been quite static, and it will
presently cease to attempt to be static.
Wells made certain
predictions about the nearer future, before our species is eventually
superseded, such as the emergence, perhaps not for hundreds of years, or even for
“a thousand or so” years, of a great world state. Toward the end of his lecture,
he granted that humanity might be destroyed by a cataclysm of some kind, if not
by the eventual death of the Sun itself, but he expressed his fundamental rejection
of these outcomes and his belief in what he called “the greatness of human
destiny”. He claimed to have no illusions about human failings, but he saw a
path of ascent from the deep past to the deep future:
Small
as our vanity and carnality make us, there has been a day of still smaller
things. It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair. We
know now that all the blood and passion of our life were represented in the
Carboniferous time by something – something, perhaps, cold-blooded and with a
clammy skin, that lurked between air and water, and fled before the giant
amphibia of those days.
For
all the folly, blindness, and pain of our lives, we have come some way from
that. And the distance we have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we
have yet to go.
He concluded “The
Discovery of the Future” with a radically optimistic sentiment that later found
expression in much twentieth-century science fiction, and, I venture to add, in
much current thought from transhumanists and similar thinkers about the human
future:
It
is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning,
and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is
possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but
the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see,
what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of
the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring,
that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know
ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future
that defeats our eyes.
All
this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come,
one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now
latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as
one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the
stars.
VI.
Let’s return, in
conclusion, to one of Wells’s key questions in “The Discovery of the Future”: “How
far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions about the future of man?” I
conspicuously have not provided an answer, although I’ve reported Wells’s claim
that we have considerable ability to predict the broad outlines, if not the
detail, of humanity’s future. Wells certainly did not think that the future for
individuals was predictable – alas! – but it was possible, he thought, to work
out the future’s broad outlines for very large numbers of people, including
humanity as a whole.
This idea seems to have
been accepted, in large part, by the science fiction writers of the following
several decades. You can find something like the same idea in Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation series, begun in 1942, with its science of psychohistory developed
by the main protagonist, Hari Seldon. Asimov even grapples with the impact of a
truly remarkable human being – a kind of super-Napoleon – in the person of the
Mule, a mutant with the extraordinary power to bend others’ emotions to his
wishes. During the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, from the late 1930s
to the end of the 1940s, something of a consensus picture of the long-term
human future seems to have been shared by Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and
others. They embraced a vision, much like that offered by Wells in “The
Discovery of the Future”, of a destiny in the stars for humanity and whatever
beings might descend from us.
However, this vision has
become considerably less popular in genre science fiction since the 1950s, and
it might now be disputed by many professional SF writers. Also, there is an
obvious alternative to this way of thinking about science fiction. The
alternative is that the point is not to reveal the actual human future, or even
an approximation of it, so much as to investigate many possible futures. In
short, science fiction is not predictive. On this approach, we could think of
the future not as something determinate, but as something that could, at least
as far as our practical knowledge ever extends, take many forms or go down many
paths. If science fiction is a lens into this sort of future, it is a
way for us to probe a dimension of possibilities, and to consider their
implications. Science fiction can help us prepare for the real future by portraying
possibilities. It is a lens into an indeterminate, but multiply imaginable, future.
Another approach, perhaps
the dominant one in the tradition of scientific romance – that is, once again,
in science fiction narratives outside of, and parallel to, genre SF – is to
view imagined futures as most relevant and compelling when they are distorted
pictures of the present, or its trends, created for the purpose of social
commentary. If we think of it in this way, science fiction is not so much a
lens into the future as a narrative form that uses imaginative pictures of the future
to provide a lens into the present.
When we consider these
models of science fiction and how it approaches the future, we might ponder
H.G. Wells’s own enormous contribution to SF. Wells made some impressive
predictions, not least about armoured military vehicles, the importance of
aviation for future warfare, and, in The World Set Free (1914), the
development of massively destructive atomic bombs (admittedly rather different
in operation from those that were dropped on Japanese cities three decades
later). Did Wells offer “trustworthy inductions” about humanity’s future? Perhaps
he did to some extent, though by 1945, the year before his death, he’d become
despairing about the future’s predictability. Was his science fiction a lens
into the future in some sense, or even into the present, or into our world and
the human situation in some other way?
This, I hope, gives us
plenty to talk about, so let’s open up the discussion about science fiction and
the future of our species.
Russell Blackford is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He is the author of numerous books, including Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (co-authored with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, 1999) and Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics (2017).
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