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Envisioning the Future: Science Fiction and the Next Millennium, edited by Marleen S. Barr. Wesleyan University Press. 2003. 240 pages. Paperback.
Check price/buy book.Fiction and the Future: Gripes, Gibes, and Conjectures
Science fiction helps us find our place in the world of tomorrow.
Reviewed by Lane Jennings
Envisioning the Future is an intriguing compilation of science fiction stories and critical essays. In her introduction, ardent feminist and literary scholar Marleen Barr proclaims, "I discuss millenniums in terms of me." With few exceptions, the 12 other contributors also place their personal identities and ideologies front and center as they consider the role of science fiction in effecting real-world change.
Sometimes, the result is flat, unconvincing narrative with a numbingly narrow focus or an academic prose style that only a fellow specialist could deconstruct for meaning. But more often, these writers' frankly admitted biases free them to create imaginative visions or produce insightful commentary unrestrained by any effort to be "fair to all points of view" or pose as neutral observers.
Whether we like it or not, strong emotions frequently outweigh cold logic in determining how people imagine the future and in deciding how much effort and resources they will invest to promote one possible future or prevent another. The colors black and white may not exist in the natural spectrum, but moral absolutes do exist in the human mind and must be reckoned with.
Taken out of context, "Envisioning the Future" is a somewhat misleading title for this book. The writers involved are less concerned with describing possibilities than with questioning and illustrating some of the many ways in which fiction can--or could--contribute to whatever the future may be.
Harlan Ellison satirically chronicles one man's quest for enlightenment, which ends in a spiritual fast-food restaurant at the top of the world. James Gunn describes one future-that-might-have-been: a millennium's end apocalypse party held atop the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Kim Stanley Robinson offers a brief look back on a thousand years of science from the vantage point of the year 3000.
The most poignant fiction comes from Pamela Sargent (Nebula Award winner in 1992), whose story "Utmost Bones" reveals the plight of the last woman on Earth. In this future, most human beings, weary of physical existence, have abandoned their bodies for a ghostly immortality as computer simulations. Drawing on their access to all the accumulated knowledge of human history, these beings interact with each other as memories and dreams. The only physical humans who remain are a few scattered individuals and groups who have voluntarily cut their links to the Net and now eke out a meager and ultimately doomed existence scavenging among the ruins of Earth's abandoned material civilization. The story compels us to ask ourselves which group we would choose to join if given the choice.
Marxist literary scholar Darko Suvin reinterprets the classic science-fiction novel We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Written in 1924, this nightmare vision of a collectivist society in which the very concept of individual identity has been suppressed takes on a whole new meaning for readers in the early twenty-first century--a time when individual isolation and helplessness appear far more threatening than the efforts of people to act together to achieve a common purpose. In place of Zamyatin's brutal dictatorship, Suvin warns that the real enemy today is the opposite of collectivism: a widespread lack of community that leaves people alienated and powerless--docile consumers "democratically free to be physically and psychologically hungry while chewing abundant junk food."
Social critic Neil Postman argues convincingly that we can find "ideas that offer a humane direction for the future" by looking back into the past. Specifically, Postman urges us to learn more about the aims and attitudes that guided creative thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe and America, during the era we now call "the Enlightenment." The examples he offers include recognizing that precise use of language is vital for effective planning and communication; insisting that scientific research and technological innovation only be pursued with the aim of practical human betterment; and cultivating the ability to weigh benefits and drawbacks before initiating any proposed change and not blindly assuming that novelty is progress. "What else is history for," Postman asks, "if not to remind us of our better dreams?"
Eric S. Rabkin, professor of English at the University of Michigan, adds a delightfully witty and stimulating "review" that contrasts two histories of science fiction, both supposedly produced in the year 2999. One work makes use of every available advance in multimedia technology to demonstrate how much humanity has achieved in a thousand years by realizing the visions that were once exclusively the realm of science fiction. The other work takes a radically different approach: By confining itself to the presentation possibilities of print on paper--with no sound, sight, smell, or hyperlinks to supplement the silent reading experience--this work enables citizens of the late third millennium to experience firsthand the loneliness and uncertainty their ancestors took for granted throughout most of recorded history. In Rabkin's own double-meaning phrase: "To live the anxieties imposed by staring into the face of implacable and pervasive human-made uncertainty . . . [you] must read Science Fiction."
But the highlight of this book is poet and novelist Marge Piercy's contribution, "Love and Sex in the Year 3000." She writes, "It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there." And the imaginings of her remarkable mind in this essay ably combine the features of fiction and speculative scholarly prose. Without academic jargon or contrived melodrama, Piercy reviews the weaknesses of present-day notions of courtship and family structure and suggests a range of innovations and evolutions that could lead, if not to universal perfection, at least to greater happiness for greater numbers of men, women, and children than Earth has ever known.
Some works of science fiction embody our dreams or nightmares, others may be no more than caricatures or thinly disguised reflections of life today, with all its faults and dangers. But weaving together stimulating fiction and sober reflection offers a way to bring the multiverse of future possibilities more sharply into focus. I hope we will see many more collaborations between speculative thinkers and creative artists focused on the future.
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